Why turn to the Enlightenment? There is no better option. Rejections of the Enlightenment result in premodern nostalgia or postmodern suspicion; where Enlightenment is at issue, modernity is at stake. A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you are committed to understanding the world in order to improve it. Twenty-first century Enlightenment must extend the work of the 18th by pointing out new dangers to freedom of thought within our own culture as well as without it, and extend social justice by expanding older attacks on injustice. These are crucial commitments, but they are also formal ones, like the tolerance and scepticism often cited as crucial to the Enlightenment core. Scepticism and tolerance will not take us very far; while it’s possible they may prevent harm, it’s unlikely that they can inspire anyone to do good. Reclaiming the Enlightenment must entail reexamining other values that derive from it, and these must include at least four. One of them is the idea that human beings have equal rights to happiness on earth. Earlier ages viewed disease as a sign of divine disfavour, or poverty a condition to be remedied in heaven; only Enlightenment thinking allowed us to view them as things human beings might overcome. A second Enlightenment value is the commitment to reason – not as opposed to passion, which was as riotous during the 18th century as at any other period, but as opposed to blind authority and superstition.

more from Susan Neiman at the New Humanist here.

A growing body of experimental evidence suggests that, on the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. This lack of knowledge extends far beyond embarrassing game-show fodder – we’re often completely wrong about their likes and dislikes, their political beliefs, their tastes, their cherished values. We lowball the ethics of our co-workers; we overestimate how happy our husbands or wives are. “Our friends will surprise us much more than we would imagine,” says David Dunning, a psychology professor at Cornell University who has done influential research on how we perceive ourselves and others. Although such blind spots might at first seem like a comment on the atomization of modern life, the shallowness of human connection in the age of bowling alone, psychologists say that these gaps might simply be an unavoidable product of the way human beings forge personal bonds. Even in close relationships, there are holes in what we know about each other, and we fill them with our own assumptions.

more from Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe here.

Jacob Gershman in New York Magazine:

Back in April, when the debate over torture was roaring, Jon Stewart invited Cliff May, a national-security hawk and former spokesman for the Republican Party, to come on The Daily Show and defend waterboarding. May was hesitant. He thought Stewart would paint him as a crazy extremist. The audience would jeer. It would be a disaster. “I was apprehensive about going on, even though I've been on TV for a dozen years,” says May. “A lot of my friends told me: 'Don't do it. You're meat going into the sausage factory.'”

But May had a change of heart after soliciting advice from his friend Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. “Kristol told me: 'You'll be pleasantly surprised. He doesn't take cheap shots. Jon is smart. You'll do just fine.'” Kristol proved to be right. Stewart's interview of May — a crackling, lengthy debate about where to draw the line between freedom and security — produced one of the most clarifying discussions about torture on television. “Literally, this is the best conversation I've had on this subject anywhere,” May told Stewart.

“There is genuine intellectual curiosity,” May told New York. “He's a staunch liberal, but he's a thoughtful liberal, and I respect that.” May isn't the only conservative gushing about Stewart.

More here.

Raja Shehadeh in The Guardian:

For the last 12 years of his life, Mahmoud Darwish was my neighbour. He was a shy, private man who was rarely ever seen in public events unless he was reading his poetry. I served with him on the board of the literary magazine, Karmil, which he edited. Except for these work meetings, I rarely saw Darwish. Sometimes I would come across him taking a walk around the hills of Ramallah; sometimes at the house of mutual friends, but never in public places, restaurants or cafes. The opportunity to find out more about my neighbour came when we were both under curfew during the invasion of Ramallah by the Israeli army in 2002. It was then that I got a call from the aptly named Bomb magazine in the US to conduct an interview with Darwish. I readily accepted hoping that through an intimate one-to-one discussion I would get to know my famous neighbour better.

We just had a few hours in the morning when the Israeli army lifted the curfew to allow people to shop. I asked Mahmoud to come to my house for the interview and he agreed. As always, he was immaculately dressed but, like all of us, he looked tense and concerned that we finish on time so that he could make it back to his house. We ended up spending three hours together, where I was able to find out how he was managing to write under these conditions. He described to me his poem State of Siege, which he wrote in response to the Israeli invasion. It was “a poet's journal that deals with resisting the occupation through searching for beauty in poetics and beauty in nature. It was a way of resisting military violence through poetry. The victory of the permanent, the everlasting, the eternal, over the siege and the violence.” Hearing him speak, I realised how fortunate I was to have found a kindred soul who was struggling with the same difficult issues I was having in my attempts to write about the invasion.

He was adamant that Palestinians “cannot be defined by our relationship, positive or negative, to Israel. We have our own identity.” In his diaries, A River Dies of Thirst, just out from Saqi, under the entry entitled “If We Want” Darwish writes: “We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying, 'Our country is loftier and more beautiful.'”

More here.

From The New York Times:

One spring when I was a graduate student, I would go each Monday down into the bowels of the entomology building. There I would meet Prof. Jack Franclemont, an elderly gentleman always with little dog in tow, to be tutored in the ordering and naming of life — the science of taxonomy.

Professor Franclemont, a famed moth specialist, was perfectly old school, wearing coat and tie to give the day’s lecture even though I was the only member of the audience. Quaintly distracted, he never quite got my name right, sometimes calling me Miss Loon or Miss Voon. After the talk, I would identify moths using a guide written in 1923, in silence or listening to stories of his dog’s latest antics. I enjoyed the meditative pleasure of those hours, despite the fact that as the lone (and not terribly proficient) student of an aging teacher, I could not help feeling that taxonomy might be dying, which, in fact, it is.

Despite the field’s now blatant modernity, with practitioners using DNA sequences, sophisticated evolutionary theory and supercomputers to order and name all of life, jobs for taxonomists continue to be in steady decline. The natural history collections crucial to the work are closeted or tossed.

More here.

Ma Han. Plan of the Ants White No5.
Fiberglass, rice, auto paint.

More here and here.

I.

When I fall asleep in a coffin posture, supine, with my feet tenting beneath the covers and my nose tracing a line up toward the wobbling ceiling fan, I frequently wake up a committed if unwilling Cartesian.

Like anyone else in R.E.M. sleep, as soon I slip under my brain starts sending hormonal relaxants to my muscles that anesthetize and effectively paralyze them. Problem is, when I wake up from R.E.M. only a fraction of me pops awake sometimes. It’s not a split between the left and right sides of my body, like a stroke patient, nor a top-bottom paraplegic split. And it’s nothing like a foot or hand falling asleep, then dethawing with that achy tingle. Mine is an old-fashioned, cogito-ergo mind-body bifurcation. Mentally, “I” pop right awake, and as a natural course of being awake this “I” sends signals for my legs and arms and mouth and eyes to yawn, or stretch, or see what time it is and whether I have to go to the bathroom. Those signals echo, ignored. My mind casts the spell again, but it turns out I cannot twiddle a toe or even flex a nostril, no matter how much I strain. Within seconds of the failure, I’m agonizingly aware of the discrepancy. It’s not a dream (there’s nothing fantastical happening), more like a huge karmic blunder, what being reincarnated as a park statue would feel like.

This rigor mortis is actually easy to shrug off, as long as—and here’s the philosophically troubling bit—the outside world intervenes. I can still sense my environment, like some sort of amoeba or slug—that’s a passive act—but the universe must change somehow. I’m powerless to effect change myself and will remain locked up, alone. A sudden alarm clock will unchain me, but not any noises that were already mewing when I “woke” up. A dramatic unmasking of a window might do it, but not the slow creep of the sun. The slightest nudge from my girlfriend will budge me (I suppose it’s the opposite of those little jerks she makes whenever she falls asleep), but the heat of an arm already draped across me is useless.

Read more »

Paul Krugman in the NYT Book Review:

Last October, Alan Greenspan — who had spent years assuring investors that all was well with the American financial system — declared himself to be in a state of “shocked disbelief.” After all, the best and brightest had assured him our financial system was sound: “In recent decades, a vast risk management and pricing system has evolved, combining the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts supported by major advances in computer and communications technology. . . . The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”

Justin Fox’s “Myth of the Rational Market” brilliantly tells the story of how that edifice was built — and why so few were willing to acknowledge that it was a house built on sand.

Do we really need yet another book about the financial crisis? Yes, we do — because this one is different. Instead of focusing on the errors and abuses of the bankers, Fox, the business and economics columnist for Time magazine, tells the story of the professors who enabled those abuses under the banner of the financial theory known as the efficient-market hypothesis. Fox’s book is not an idle exercise in intellectual history, which makes it a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the mess we’re in. Wall Street bought the ideas of the efficient-market theorists, in many cases literally: professors were lavishly paid to design complex financial strategies. And these strategies played a crucial role in the catastrophe that has now overtaken the world economy.

This journey to disaster began with a beautiful idea.

Germaine Greer in the Guardian:

At Camp Quest, the five-day “atheist summer camp” for children that ended on Friday, campers were challenged to prove that unicorns do not exist. It is to be hoped that the children did not spend too much time on a logical impossibility. It is much easier to prove that God cannot exist because He is a contradiction in terms. However, both God and the unicorn exist as ideas, and ideas, whether muddled or not, are real. The imagination of a child who was utterly unfamiliar with either God or the unicorn would be cruelly impoverished.

A clever child might argue that the unicorn could exist because it is no more absurd than the narwhal whale. The twisted tusk of the narwhal is what was supposed to grow from the head of the horse known as the unicorn. The centrepiece of a 15th-century Flemish mille-fleurs tapestry in the Victoria and Albert Museum is a unicorn, with a horn exactly like that: a narwhal tusk projects from its forehead, and a heavy tail with flukes, like a whale’s, flourishes above its back. The background is studded with symmetrically placed flowering plants, plus the odd exotic game bird. I would give much to know what the tapestried picture means. Are all the featured creatures imaginary? Is the invented world of human fantasy here presented as superior to reality? Without knowing more about the idea of the unicorn, there is no way I can know what I am looking at.

Paul La Farge in Bookforum:

What seemed like tragedy in The Crying of Lot 49 returns here as farce, and there’s something tragic about the transformation. You could say Pynchon is losing his edge, that his paranoid sensibility is not so keen at seventy-two (his present age) as it was in 1969, when he was only thirty-two, living in the LA area, and working on his magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). You could even suspect him of nostalgia. But the other possibility—with Pynchon, there’s always another possibility—is that he has written a book about losing it, about memory and, more to the point, forgetting. Beneath Inherent Vice’s riffs and twists and red (or are they green?) herrings, there’s a deep sadness, a despair of ever making anything out clearly. Here’s Sportello looking at some photographs:

“Doc got out his lens and gazed into each image till one by one they began to float apart into little blobs of color. It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn’t have to be. Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho’s colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice.”

If there’s a secret shimmering in the novel’s fog, it’s that the limit of what can be known is imposed not by any nefarious organization, but by memory itself.

Ex-Pedophile Shares Tips On How To Make Your Kids Less Attractive

The Right Words

After months in the far north
they return, like snow buntings,
in a blizzard of wings. I did not
think they could thrive in icy climes
but here they are, searching the wrackline
for drifted seed. When they turned pale,
fell between a rock

and a barren place, they lay
deep in a corrie in a nest lined
with sheep’s wool, fur
from a mountain hare.
And down from a ptarmigan
conferring resilience
its chameleon gift.

by Kathryn Daszkiewicz

From Lensculture:

David Lynch is endlessly creative, and his artistic output is usually quite bizarre and surreal. Lynch's latest project is as a photographer and collaborator with musician, artist and producer Danger Mouse. Together, they've created a multimedia installation that is now on display in Los Angeles.

Fifty of Lynch’s photographs are mounted on aluminum panels that seem to float on the gallery walls, converging with the moody rhythms of the music from Danger Mouse's latest album, Dark Night of the Soul.

The collaboration began when Danger Mouse, who has been a fan of Lynch’s for many years, approached the filmmaker about a possible project. The artists worked together and were inspired by each other— Lynch making photographs influenced by the original songs that Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse were creating.

More here.

From The City Journal:

In the summer of 2008, wheat and corn prices shot up across the globe. Pundits provided seemingly convincing explanations: grain was becoming scarce and thus more expensive because mainland Chinese were changing their eating habits and needed lots of it to feed their cattle—or perhaps because fear of oil shortages, combined with ecological fads, was leading consumers to adopt corn-based ethanol. Yet one year later, the Chinese are eating basically the same food as last year (feeding habits change very slowly), ethanol production is more or less at the same level, but the price of grain and corn on the Chicago market is back down again. How to explain the volatility of prices when production levels remain essentially the same?

The reason: grain or corn prices may at any point in time be driven more by speculation than by actual harvests. The rule applies to all transactions on financial markets, including oil, stocks, and derivatives. This is one of many examples that Rama Cont offers to describe how the real economy and the financial markets follow different rationales. In the short term—which can mean several years, in practice—the connection can be tenuous at best and difficult to model. If the connection were closer, Cont would know: he is at the forefront of the new science of financial modeling.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who's Counting column at ABC News:

When a modern Western country whose economy is based on science and technology adopts an absurdly medieval law, one would think that this would be a news story of at least moderate size.

Oddly though, almost no attention has been paid in the United Stares to the passing last month of a bill establishing a crime of blasphemy in Ireland.

Approved by the Irish parliament, it states: “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding 25,000 euro.”

Furthermore, “a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.”

Even if I weren't the author of a book entitled “Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up,” I would find this bill abysmally wrong-headed.

More here.

The first rule of Breakfast Club is that you totally talk about Breakfast Club. And then you shout some about Breakfast Club, and do some truly awful dancing about Breakfast Club, and then you cry. But mostly you talk. In 1985, when The Breakfast Club was originally released, this was a fairly radical notion. Throughout the early 1980s, in movies like Porky’s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and dozens of similar knock-offs, Hollywood depicted teens as raging hedonists devoted to the pleasures of the body. They practiced oral sex on carrots, they hired hookers, they got stoned before class, they drank themselves into happy oblivion. Even in John Hughes’ sweet-as-frosting Sixteen Candles, debauchery hovers in the margins. In The Breakfast Club, however, he broke completely with contemporary standards. Sure, there’s a scene where everyone gets stoned, and a couple of chaste kisses at the end, but the pursuit of pleasure is no longer the narrative engine driving this movie. Nor is romance, nor even the desire to assume grown-up responsibilities. Generous humanist that he was, Hughes was that rare adult who took teenagers just as seriously as they take themselves, and the result was a movie in which the five main characters – the brain, the jock, the princess, the criminal, and the basket case — pursue nothing more compelling than self-awareness and the public revelation of thoughts and feelings once consigned to diaries and psychologist offices.

more from The Smart Set writers (including myself) here.

“My country is my family,” writes Ricky Rice as he concludes his apologia pro vita sua — a.k.a Victor LaValle’s massive, heroically strange new novel, “Big Machine” (Spiegel & Grau: 378 pp., $25). “I like America.” There’s something both dissonant and grin-tuggingly candid in his plainspoken admission. Ricky, after all, is an ex-(more or less) heroin addict; a onetime cash mule; an itinerant janitor who’s cleaned the toilets in several of upstate New York’s less-than-glamorous train stations; a now-chaste former serial impregnator of women; and one of the few child escapees of the charismatic religious cult led by three (weird) sisters called the Washerwomen. Not to mention all the bizarreness and violence that pack these pages. Yet, even as we’d half-expect any patriotic sentiment of his to be along the lines of, say, Allen Ginsberg’s “America” — “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing” — his proclamation seems just right. That “like” is perfect — a modest verb in place of the chest-thumping “love.” For a book with a dazzling array of flashy moving parts — secret societies, backstories toggled for maximum effect, angels and demons, suicide squads recruited from among the homeless — the language is more effective for being low key.

more from Ed Park at the LA Times here.