Ladan Boroumand in Dissent:

In a clumsy remake of an old-time Stalinist show trial, a pale and underfed individual with a distraught gaze recites more or less convincingly a story whose plot is ever the same: A self-told tale of (highly improbable) contacts with American or Israeli agents is put forward as “evidence” of the hapless defendant’s nefarious desire to topple the Islamic Republic.

This treatment is not reserved for oppositionists alone. On the contrary, prosecutors have administered it liberally over the years to former mid- or even high-ranking regime cadres who made the mistake of daring to question some higher-up’s wisdom or claim to command. On April 23, 1982, for instance, the confession of former IRI foreign minister and broadcasting chief Sadeq Ghotbzadeh aired on Iranian state television. He accused himself of plotting a military coup against Ayatollah Khomeini, an alleged crime for which he would be shot that September. A few days later, the highest-ranking Shi’a ayatollah, Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, was given a text to read on television “proving” his connivance with Ghotbzadeh. Shariatmadari’s real “crime” was his disapproval of political rule by the clergy, but the trumped-up confession gave the IRI the legal fig leaf that it needed to silence the ayatollah and keep him under house arrest until his death in 1986.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I've always been suspicious of the birds. Maybe it's because they are always spying on us from above. The ancients understood that the birds were in cahoots with powerful forces. They poked about in bird entrails trying to find messages from the heavens, omens from hell. They wondered whom the birds were working for. Poor Prometheus was punished for the simple and humane act of giving fire to mankind. It is no accident that he was punished with the torture of an eagle eternally feasting on his liver. The birds will always sell us out for a pittance.

Our latest humiliation at the hands of our feathery friends comes in the unexpected realm of art criticism. The birds, it seems, enter any arena if there is the chance of making us look like fools.

Here's what happened. Shigeru Watanabe (a psychologist at Keio University in Tokyo and possibly a man in league with the birds) set up a nefarious experiment. Watanabe showed children's paintings to pigeons; a panel of adults had deemed each work either good or bad. He trained the pigeons to distinguish between them with a system of tasty rewards. When the pigeons pecked correctly, he gave them some seed. Later, he presented 10 paintings to the birds they had never seen. Five of these paintings had been deemed good by humans, five bad. The pigeons recognized the good paintings as “good” twice as often as they recognized the “bad” paintings. In short, they came off as pretty good critics. There are those (names withheld) writing for major publications who might do markedly less well. Given these results, Watanabe claims, “pigeons are capable of learning the concept of a stimulus class that humans name 'good' pictures.”

More Leave a comment

September 22, 2009, NOTE: The winners have been announced here.

September 11, 2009, NOTE: The list of nine finalists can be seen here.

September 8, 2009, NOTE: The list of twenty semifinalists can be seen here.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

In May of this year we announced that we would start awarding four prizes every year for the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature. We awarded the science prizes, judged by Professor Steven Pinker, on June 21st. We have decided to do the prize in philosophy next, and here's how it will work: we are now accepting nominations for the best blog post in philosophy. After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this period, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add upto three wildcard entries of their choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Professor Daniel C. Dennett, who, we are very pleased, has agreed to be the final judge. Professor Dennett will also write a short comment on each of the winning entries.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.

* * *

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.

* * *

The winners of the philosophy prize will be announced on September 22, 2009. Here's the schedule:

Today:

• The nominating process is hereby declared open. Please nominate your favorite blog entry in the field of philosophy by placing the URL for the blogpost (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old from today. In other words, it must have been written after August 23, 2008.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, of course!

August 31, 2009

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date, so there is only a week to submit nominations.
• The public voting will be opened immediately afterwards.

September 7, 2009

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

September 22, 2009

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Graham Little. Untitled. 2005.

Colored pencil and gouache on paper.

More here and here.

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Penne For Your Thought
2. 3 Quarks Daily: The Temporal Prospects of Humanity
3. Another Heidegger Blog: Interview with Jeffery Malpas
4. Biophilia: Altruism Through Genocide
5. Biophilia: Holy Gibberish!
6. Blog & ~Blog: Graham Priest’s Theory of Change
7. Brain Hammer: Bandwidth and Storage in the Human Biocomputer
8. Cognition and Culture: Descarte’s Skull
9. Der Wille Zur Macht und Sprachspiele: Nietzsche’s Causal Essentialism
10. Duck Rabbit: Can words be used incorrectly?
11. Engage: Conversations in Philosophy: Empathy, Equity, and the Wise Latina Judge: Sotomayor and the Supreme Court Oath of Office
12. Evolving Thoughts: Aristotle on the Mayfly
13. Evolving Thoughts: “Class” War
14. Evolving Thoughts: Darwin, Atheism, and the Catholic Church
15. Evolving Thoughts: Darwin, God and Chance
16. Evolving Thoughts: Darwin thought evolution relied on accidents and chance
17. Evolving Thoughts: Definitions of Atheism
18. Evolving Thoughts: How to derive an ontology in biology
19. Evolving Thoughts: Information and Metaphysics
20. Evolving Thoughts: Laws, Theories and Models
21. Evolving Thoughts: Phenomena
22. Evolving Thoughts: Philosophy and Evolution
23. Evolving Thoughts: The Doctrine of Double Truth
24. Grundlegung: Philosophy as Bildung
25. How Not to Win A War: Light ’em up, Baber!
26. How Not to Win A War: On Ideology
27. Hyper Tiling: Unheimlich Realism (and Zombies)
28. In Living Color: Can you be blamed for forgetting?
29. In Search of Enlightenment: The Availability Heuristic and the Inborn Aging Process
30. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: The Fundamentals of Gelastics
31. Larval Subjects: Object-Oriented Ontology and Scientific Naturalism
32. Larval Subjects: Speculative Realism and the Unheimlich
33. Let Us Philosophize: Against Much Erudition
34. Matters of Substance: How Many Regions of Spacetime Actually Exist?
35. Methods of Projection: Wittgenwanker
36. Minerva’s Howl: On Retrospective Prophecy
37. MSU Philosophy Club: Philosophy and Video Games: Idealism and Closure
38. Object-Oriented Philosophy: English Stylists and Related Matters
39. PEA Soup: Constraints: Agent-Focused or Victim-Focused
40. PEA Soup: Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame
41. Perverse Egalitarianism: Early Heidegger: Fundamental Ontology
42. Philosophy, et cetera: Reflecting on Relativism
43. Philosophy Sucks!: The Contestability of (P & ~Q)
44. Philosophy Sucks!: Reflections on Zoombies and Shombies Or: After the Showdown at the APA
45. Possibly Philosophy: Uncertainty in the Many Worlds Theory
46. Public Reason: On Public Reason and Justificatory Liberalism
47. Specter of Reason: Discovery, Demonstration, and Naturalism
48. Specter of Reason: The Language of Consciousness
49. Specter of Reason: Wise on Intelligent Design in the Classroom
50. Strange Doctrines: Third-World Zombies and (Ana) Qualiac Reference
51. The Edge of the American West: Part 1, All noble things are as difficult as they are rare
52. The Edge of the American West: Part 2, The Best of All Possible Worlds
53. The Edge of the American West: Part 3, Why should we be loyal to reason if it pushes us into the abyss?
54. The Garden of Forking Paths: Defining Determinism and Such
55. The Garden of Forking Paths: To Hell With the TNR Principle
56. The Immanent Frame: Immanent Spirituality
57. The Prosblogion: An Opinionated Play-by-Play of the Plantinga-Dennett Exchange
58. The Space of Reasons: A Counterexample to Setiya
59. The Space of Reasons: Dilworth’s Functional Consonance
60. Tomkow: Blackburn, Truth and other Hot Topics
61. Tomkow: The Good, The Bad and Peter Singer
62. Underverse: Refuting “It,” Thus
63. Wide Scope: Emotions and Moral Skepticism
64. Yeah, OK, But Still: An Ethics of Honor

To vote, click here.

Shandana Minhas in Pakistan's The News:

I would like to begin by asking when Ramzan or Ramazan officially became Ramadan? It is the month the natural born Pakistani's intrinsic need to feel holier than thou — a necessary if trying counterpoint to the self loathing we traditionally embody– manifests itself to an alarming degree.

Celebrities begin their yearly plummet off the cliffs of prudishness at the onset of the month, like lemmings but without the charisma. Chiffon clad women wrap themselves in an extra layer of piety as they harangue their Hindu maids. Those who imbibe swear off the stuff for the duration, as if it isn't haram all year around.

Mosque loudspeakers' volumes are raised an extra notch, a crude but effective way to ensure all in their immediate vicinity bridge the class divide by being equally susceptible to inner ear damage. And salespeople ringing up midday food purchases do so with such a contemptuous superiority it is a wonder they are able to stay seated and not inadvertently levitate straight to heaven, bottoms up. And should the topic of inappropriate sanctimonious be brought up in conversation with, say, a person who has broken a red light in their rush to get home for Iftar and nearly totaled your car in the process, do you know what you are likely to get in response? I cannot possibly eat humble pie: I am fasting.

I'm generally not so negative but this year things got off to a bad start for me thanks to the pick up truck that parked outside the apartment complex I live in during the wee hours of the first night and proceeded to harangue all inmates with demands for charity over a megaphone, which is never a nice thing to do to anyone in bed.

Then, reeling from both sleep deprivation and the knowledge of my own helplessness in the face of wanton, unprovoked wailing, I read about the directive issued by the Ministry of Religious Affairs to all provincial governments directing them to ensure full implementation of the Ehteram-e-Ramadan Ordinance. The ordinance, promulgated in 1981 under Zia-ul-Haq, makes it illegal for anyone – young, old, infirm, pregnant, lapsed – to eat, drink or smoke in public and applies across the board to Muslims and non-Muslims. In other words, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in The Liberal:

TRY sipping this single sentence and then rolling it around your tongue and palate for a while:

If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too.

Well, I am being paid to parse and ponder that statement and I don’t understand it, either. Does it intend to say that liberals loved Hitler but drew the line at his invasion of the Soviet Union? Should it, rather, be interpreted as meaning that liberals were in love with Stalin but jumped ship when he was attacked by Hitler? It is remarkable to find so much intellectual and syntactical chaos in an assertion that contains no more than fifteen words.

But then, I have the distinct feeling that people do not buy Ann Coulter’s creed-screeds and speed-reads in order to enhance their knowledge of history or their command of syllogism. She has emerged as a persona because she has mastered the politics of resentment, and because she can combine the ideology of Human Events (the obscure ‘Joe McCarthy was right’ magazine) with the demand of the chat-show bookers for a tall blonde with a very rapid delivery on a wide range of subjects. The cover of this book – which follows the success of its forerunners Treason and Slander: titles that require little elucidation – shows her in a low-cut black dress with a prominent crucifix dangling over a modest cleavage. The needs of showbiz notwithstanding, I cannot fathom the reason for this slight come-hitherishness. Miss Coulter is not married and ought therefore, by her own loudly-proclaimed standards, to be a virgin and to remain so until further notice.

More here.

Domestic Economics

Sudden silence, the refrigerator motor
cycling off. The psht of water filling

ice maker, half-moon cubes transparent
and white—fingernails whose color doesn’t

vary much body to body. Your dark fingers
swizzle ice in whiskey; you say slaves made

Aristotle possible. Chinese girls, twelve
to a factory dorm room, make my

sneakers possible. I never learned to sew,
the black wheel of my grandmother’s Singer

large as a steam locomotive, the needle a silver
blur as my sister’s fingers fed kelly green cloth

into its stabbing path. You dodge ghosts
on the road, grief squeezing your lungs: children

stacked in a ditch, flaming thatch, your aunt
cradling her head in her lap—I thought

it all so primitive. Thought Hutsul my mother’s
maiden name, not a tribe. Their village stripped even

of seed grain; like rats and grasshoppers, the dead
eaten without ritual. Ruthenian, Ukrainian, Russian:

language a sticky binding, the egg my mother
mixed with leftover mashed potatoes, molded

into patties, fried a filigree brown. It’s an accident
of birth, what we consume. This side-by-side model

with its glass shelves, vegetable and meat drawers—
I have more food than it can hold.

by Mary Petrosky

From The Washington Post:

When Bernie Madoff was a sophomore in high school, he stood up in English class and lied.

Madoff and his classmates were each supposed to read a book and make an oral report in class, but Bernie, an average student at New York City's Far Rockaway High in the early 1950s, hadn't gotten around to it. So when the teacher called on him, Bernie announced that he would cover “Hunting and Fishing” by Peter Gunn and proceeded to fabricate a detailed account of the nonexistent book. When asked to produce the book, Madoff turned deceit into virtue. He didn't have it, he explained — he'd already returned it to the library.

More here.

It is sly, knowing and often downright nasty. Politicians and celebrities are its prey. And it attacks, under the guise of wit, without proof or reason. David Denby goes on the hunt for snark, which is invading all modern discourse from gossip sites to newspapers.

From The Guardian:

What is snark? Abuse in a public forum of a particular kind – personal, low, teasing, rug-pulling, finger-pointing, snide, obvious, and knowing.

How does snark work? Snark is hazing on the page. It prides itself on wit, but it's closer to a leg stuck out in a school corridor that sends some kid flying. It pretends to be all in fun, and anyone who's annoyed by it will be greeted with the retort, “How can you take this seriously? What's wrong with you?” – which has the doubly aggressive effect of putting the victim on the defensive. No one wants to argue with a joke, so this is shrewd as far as it goes. But some of these funsters are mean little toughs. Snark seizes on any vulnerability or weakness it can find – a slip of the tongue, a sentence not quite up to date, a bit of flab, an exposed boob, a blotch, a blemish, a wrinkle, an open fly, an open mouth, a closed mouth. It exploits – slyly, teasingly – race and gender prejudice. When there are no vulnerabilities, it makes them up. Snark razzes pomp, but it razzes certain kinds of strength, too – people who are unaffectedly serious. Snarky writers can't bear being outclassed by anyone, and snark becomes the vehicle of their resentment and contempt.

Actual comedy is hard work – harder than dying, according to the actor Sir Donald Wolfit, who remarkably announced this truth while lying on his deathbed. But snark, eschewing work, adopts the mere manner of wit, as if manner were enough.

How does snark operate these days? Let me count the ways.

More here.

Akbar Ganji in the Boston Review:

We, intellectuals, political activists, and defenders of democratic rights and liberties beseech you to heed the widespread protests of the Iranian people and to take immediate and urgent action by:

1) Forming an international truth-finding commission to examine the electoral process, vote counting and the fraudulent manipulation of the people’s vote in Iran;

2) Pressuring the government in Iran to annul fraudulent election results and hold democratic, competitive and fair elections under the auspices of the UN;

3) Pressuring the government of the Islamic Republic to release all those detained in the course of recent protests;

4) Pressuring the government of the Islamic Republic to free the media that have been banned in recent days and to recognize and respect the right of the people to free expression of ideas and the nonviolent protesting the results of the recent elections;

5) Pressuring the government of the Islamic Republic to stop its harsh and barbaric treatment of the people of Iran;

6) Refuse to recognize Ahmadinejad’s illegitimate government that has staged an electoral coup, and curtailing any and all forms of cooperation with it from all nations and international organizations.

Sincerely,

1. Akbar Ganji, journalist
2. Jürgen Habermas, J.W.Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt
3. Noam Chomsky, MIT
4. Charles Taylor, McGill University
5. Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago
6. José Ramos-Horta, Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, 1996
7. Orhan Pamuk, Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2006
8. Nadine Gordimer, Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1991
9. Mario Vargas Llosa, Novelist
10. Robert N. Bellah, UC-Berkeley
11. Seyla Benhabib, Yale University
12. Cornel West, Princeton University
13. Hilary Putnam, Harvard University
14. Benjamin Barber, Senior Fellow, Demos
15. Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council
16. Howard Zinn, Boston University
17. John Esposito, Georgetown University
18. Michael Walzer, Princeton University
19. Adam Michnik, essayist, Poland
20. Ahmed Rashid, journalist, Pakistan

More here.

Over at the Immanent Frame, “Nathan Schneider, scholar of religion and law Winnifred Fallers Sullivan …[discuss] the failure of the courts to grapple with lived religion, the crisis of prisons in the United States, and why, in some sense at least, we are all religious now.”:

The problems with defining religion play a central role in the argument that you’ve been developing over your last two books. Why can’t we—as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography—simply know it when we see it?

The word “religion” comes out of a particular history. There are various ways of telling that history, but one could say, from the perspective of someone like me who is interested in church/state issues, that the notion that religion is a discrete, bounded aspect of human culture and society is something that emerged in the early modern period, parallel with the emergence of the modern state. With the secularization of the state and the differentiation of socio-cultural formations within society, religion gets reinvented as something separate. But the context in which that happens shapes what religion means. Politically, it comes to serve the modern state by providing a location in which modern citizens are trained to be moral, functioning members of society. This is a very particular understanding of religion, rooted in a particular kind of Protestant Christianity. Naturally, once modern societies try to expand that role beyond Protestant Christianity, they begin bumping up against different understandings of where religion ought to fit.

So this project is primarily located in the situation of a religiously diverse society?

I regard all societies as diverse. This is especially so in light of a global shift of religious responsibility toward individuals and an acknowledgment, even if it’s not politically realized everywhere, of the right of each individual to religious freedom. Then, religious diversity becomes a social fact virtually everywhere, within traditions as well as among traditions.

Richard Dawkins in the Times (UK):

Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally “respected”.

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context — which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word “evolution” systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into “change over time”. Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing Islamic presence in the classroom — abetted by the official commitment to “multiculturalism” and the terror of being thought racist.

Neelima Mahajan-Bansal and Udit Misra in Forbes:

Is there really a way to measure justice?

The question that you are asking–is there more injustice or less injustice. That’s an excellent question. The answer isn’t 37 as opposed to 51. That ranking is the basis of measurement we have known for at least a hundred years. The basic measure to look at is a ranking. Then everything else follows from it. And it’s the ranking that justice is concerned with, not a numerical measure, I think. The debates are all about rankings.

Take the issue of land acquisitions in SEZs. There are several stakeholders. A villager would feel it’s unjust to take his land. A company would feel their taking the land is justified because it would add to economic activity. Are there mechanisms to deal with issues like that?

I wasn’t so much saying that justice means different things to different people. There are different ways of looking at justice. Sometimes the same person can take different views. In the flute case, I think I can give an argument for all three of them and I see merit in each of them.

[Note: In the book, Sen describes a problem of divergent views on justice in which you have one flute and three children who want it. One child wants the flute because she knows how to play it, the second one wants it because he is poor and doesn’t have toys, and the third one says she made the flute, so she should get it. Who do you give it to?]

The main point is that there can be different reasonable positions not that different people must have different positions. It’s not related to difference between persons. It’s related to difference between arguments and reasoning.

Art and the government make such strange bedfellows, as the new head of the National Endowment for the Arts recently demonstrated. In an interview with The New York Times, Rocco Landesman — the Broadway producer appointed to the post by President Obama — rose to defend his ward against the constant criticism of NEA funding: “The arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.” Clearly not a fan of subtexts, Landesman is a frank leader of the nation’s art budget, especially when it comes to which parts of the nation should get a piece of the NEA’s financial pie. “I don’t know if there’s a theater in Peoria, but I would bet that it’s not as good as [Chicago’s] Steppenwolf or the Goodman,” Landesman told the Times. “There is going to be some push-back from me about democratizing arts grants to the point where you really have to answer some questions about artistic merit.” You can imagine how that played in Peoria.

more from Jesse Smith at The Smart Set here.

Idaho features in a famous palindrome: O had I nine more hero-men in Idaho! A palindrome is a word or sentence that is entirely reversible. Palindromic words include: kayak, sees, toot, rotavator (the longest), gig, level, mum and refer. Palindromic sentences are difficult to create without the sentence becoming nonsensical or non-grammatical. Good examples include: Stressed? Desserts! and Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam. But my favourite (because it tells a whole story) is: A man, a plan, a canal: Panama! Panama was the birthplace of Senator John Sidney McCain III (b. 1936), the 2008 Presidential nominee of the Republican Party. He was born at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone at a time when the Panama Canal was under American control. His choice of running mate for the Vice Presidency is, of course, Sarah Palin. She is not a relative of Monty Python comedian and world-travelling programme-maker Michael Palin but they may share a common ancestry as the name allegedly originates in Pavilly, Normandy and has been recorded as far back as 1066. It is also a Latin word. The term ‘palindrome’ was coined by English writer Ben Jonson in the 1600s from the Latin dromos (meaning ‘direction’) and palin (meaning ‘back’ or ‘backwards’). Sarah Palin (b. 1964) is the current governor of Alaska and was…

more from Stevyn Colgan at the London Times here.

When she set out to write about the crow — the black sheep of the avian world — the naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt didn’t relish the task. “I never meant to watch crows especially,” she admits in her curiously personal and thought-provoking meditation, “Crow Planet.” “Whenever I ask someone about chickadees or robins or flickers or other common birds . . . the response is almost always lackluster, noncommittal or at best blandly cheerful.” Crows, however, sometimes elicit raves (“They are so intelligent! And beautiful!”), but far more often insults (“loud,” “poopy,” “evil,” “menacingly bold,” “harbingers of death”). Haupt knew the dark history that fed this distaste. During the plague years in medieval Europe, crows “scavenged the bodies lying uncovered in the streets.” In 1666, she writes, after the great fire of London, so many crows descended on the victims that Charles II ordered a campaign against them to calm a horrified populace. And yet, as she trained her binoculars on the familiar but spooky creatures in her yard, Haupt found aspects of the corvid family that argued for more respect.

more from Liesl Schillinger at the NYT here.