Helmut Merker in Tagesspiegel (in signandsight):

Pankaj Mishra in the NYT:

///
“A Drop in the Bucket”
Don Share

My mother, not quoting Coleridge: Water, water
everywhere, not a single drop to drink.
“Nor” was not her style, nor was her addition
of “single” or dropping of “and” singular.
She added many a word to what my father
failed to say, or said. This was the rule in her
extempore kingdom of sentences and kitchen sink.
She was well-spoken … unlike my father, dryly brilliant
scientist who seldom said more than he meant—
nothing token, quotable, or extravagant.
Words, to Dad, were data, nothing to be spoken;
to Mom, syllables strung together, each a token.
My mother wanted to be remembered and quoted;
her magisterium was full-bore, lachrymose, full-throated.
///

From Bill Moyers Journal:

Following Bill Moyers' reflections on the events in Gaza on the JOURNAL last week, Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman sent him this letter:

Mr. Moyers,

In less than a thousand words, you managed to fit into your January 9 commentary: (1) moral equivalency between Hamas, a radical Islamic terrorist group whose anti-Semitic charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and perhaps America’s greatest ally in the world; (2) historical revisionism, asserting that Canaanites were Arabs; (3) anti-Semitism, declaring that Jews are “genetically coded” for violence; (4) ignorance of the terrorist threat against Israel, claiming that checkpoints, the security fence, and the Gaza operation are tactics of humiliation rather than counter-terrorism; and (5) promotion of an individual, the Norwegian doctor in Gaza, who has publicly expressed support for the September 11 attacks.

I have seen and read serious critiques of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and I have disagreed with many of them. Your commentary, however, is different, consisting mostly of intellectually and morally faulty claims that do a great disservice to the PBS audience. It invites not disagreement, but rebuke.

On one point you are correct – “America has officially chosen sides.” And rightly so. Fortunately for our nation, very few of our citizens engage in the same moral equivalency, racism, historical revisionism, and indifference to terrorism as you. If the reverse held, it would not be a country that any decent person would want to live in.

Sincerely,

Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Anti-Defamation League

In response, Bill Moyers sent Mr. Foxman the following message:

Dear Mr. Foxman:

You made several errors in your letter to me of January 13 and I am writing to correct them.

First, to call someone a racist for lamenting the slaughter of civilians by the Israeli military offensive in Gaza is a slur unworthy of the tragedy unfolding there. Your resort to such a tactic is reprehensible.

Earlier this week it was widely reported that the International Red Cross “was so outraged it broke its usual silence over an attack in which the Israeli army herded a Palestinian family into a building and then shelled it, killing 30 people and leaving the surviving children clinging to the bodies of their dead mothers. The army prevented rescuers from reaching the survivors for four days.”

More here.

From the BBC:

Ilham Anas, 34, is already a celebrity in Jakarta, where Mr Obama once lived, but his fame is spreading.

He has appeared on Indonesia's premier TV talk show, done an advertisement as Mr Obama, and received other marketing offers from companies in the region.

The real Barack Obama went to school in Jakarta in the late 1960s, when his classmates knew him as Barry.

Mr Anas told Reuters news agency: “I was in the airport in Malaysia in transit and a man approached me and asked: 'Are you Obama?'. I was very surprised when he asked to take a picture together and bought me a meal.”

Mr Anas's increasing popularity arose after his colleagues, at a local teenage magazine, asked him to pose with a suit, tie and American flag, following Mr Obama's election victory in November.

Soon, they were taking photos and sending them to friends. “The pictures spread very quickly on the internet. It was phenomenal. Then TV stations and an advertising agency got in touch with me,” he said.

More here.

RUSSELL SHORTO in The New York Times:

THE INVENTION OF AIR: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America By Steven Johnson

The Age of Categories is dead. Strangely, it never went by that name, or any name. Also curious is the fact that its boundaries are unclear: it overlapped the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason and some others, but succumbed to the atomizing atmosphere of the Information Age. Knowledge, it held, went hand in hand with nomenclature and delineation. As science developed, branches formed. Elemental to the college and university were academic departments, each of which came surrounded by high walls. A datum was deemed to fit within the confines of chemistry or sociology or the history of spoons or whatever, and that was more or less that.

Now we perceive the limitations of those old categories and scoff; we value multidisciplinarianism and genre-bending. The life of the mind is more chaotic, but also more exhilarating.

Often a new boundary-crossing perspective comes simply from going back to original sources — to the time before categories hardened. Study the famous late correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Steven Johnson notes, and you find only five references to Benjamin Franklin and three to George Washington, but 52 to Joseph Priestley, the scientist/theologian who is often credited with the discovery of oxygen.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Modern science has introduced the world to plenty of strange ideas, but surely one of the strangest is the fate of a massive star that has reached the end of its life. Having exhausted the fuel that sustained it for millions of years, the star is no longer able to hold itself up under its own weight, and it starts collapsing catastrophically. Modest stars like the sun also collapse, but they stabilize again at a smaller size. Whereas if a star is massive enough, its gravity overwhelms all the forces that might halt the collapse. From a size of millions of kilometers across, the star crumples to a pinprick smaller than the dot on an “i.”

Most physicists and astronomers think the result is a black hole, a body with such intense gravity that nothing can escape from its immediate vicinity. A black hole has two parts. At its core is a singularity, the infinitesimal point into which all the matter of the star gets crushed. Surrounding the singularity is the region of space from which escape is impossible, the perimeter of which is called the event horizon. Once something enters the event horizon, it loses all hope of exiting. Whatever light the falling body gives off is trapped, too, so an outside observer never sees it again. It ultimately crashes into the singularity.

But is this picture really true?

More here.

Anna Lena Phillips in American Scientist:

Chris Sangwin researches applied mathematics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He is the author, most recently, of How Round Is Your Circle? Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet (Princeton University Press, 2008), which he cowrote with John Bryant. He is also author, with Chris Budd, of Mathematics Galore! Masterclasses, Workshops and Team Projects in Mathematics and Its Applications (Oxford University Press, 2001). His homepage and GeoGebra page offer videos and animations of applied mathematics in action.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?
I'm currently a lecturer in the School of Mathematics at the University of Birmingham. I grew up in Salisbury before going to Oxford and then Bath as a graduate student. I graduated and moved to Birmingham in 2000. At present my research work is in applied mathematics and also on computer-aided assessment. My hobbies include mountaineering and beekeeping. I've always been interested in the outdoors, so mountaineering was a natural choice. I took up beekeeping recently and am having a huge amount of fun, making some delicious honey and appreciating much more how important food production really is!

What books are you currently reading (or have you just finished reading) for your work or for pleasure? Why did you choose them, and what do you think of them?
I've just finished a very interesting biography of Léon Foucault (as in Foucault's pendulum)— The Life and Science of Léon Foucault: The Man Who Proved the Earth Rotates, by William Tobin (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and am in the middle of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632).

More here.

Thirty years ago, American film audiences pressed low in their seats as a massive white wedge of machine parts passed overhead. With the release of George Lucas’s Star Wars, the smooth, silvery flying saucers that had dominated postwar sci-fi became embarrassing reminders of an obsolete vision of the future. Lucas envisioned a World of Tomorrow dominated by black, white, and gray; hard-edged, massive, and inorganic forms, covered with a salty acne of apparatus. The film’s visual program was a departure from the saucers and occasional capsules writ large that sci-fi audiences had grown accustomed to, but its colorless symmetrical ships should have been recognizable to at least a small portion of its audience—those familiar with contemporary art. In a 1967 essay on minimalism, Clement Greenberg, America’s most influential critic, could have been describing Star Wars: “Everything is rigorously rectilinear or spherical. Development within a given piece is usually repetition of the same modular shape, which may or may not be varied in size.”

more from Triple Canopy here.

You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled “R.I.P.” Or, hold on, maybe the newspaper isn’t quite dead yet. At its funeral, wild-eyed mourners spy signs of life. The newspaper stirs! The last time the American newspaper business got this gothic was 1765, just after the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto,” was published, in London, and, in an unrelated development, Parliament decided to levy on the colonies a new tax, requiring government-issued stamps on pages of printed paper—everything from indenture agreements to bills of credit to playing cards. The tax hit printers hard, at a time when printers were also the editors of newspapers, and sometimes their chief writers, too. The Stamp Act—the “fatal Black-Act,” one printer called it—was set to go into effect on November 1, 1765. Beginning that day, printers were to affix stamps to their pages and to pay tax collectors a halfpenny for every half sheet—amounting, ordinarily, to a penny for every copy of every issue of every newspaper—and a two-shilling tax on every advertisement. Printers insisted that they could not bear this cost. It would spell the death of the newspaper.

more from The New Yorker here.

In his study of Ottoman poetry, what struck Gibb from the outset was how distant written Ottoman Turkish, both literary and non-literary, was from the spoken language and from the early language of thirteenth-century Asia Minor and Central Asia. After leaving university and devoting himself entirely to the study of Persian and Turkish, he began publishing translations of Turkish prose and poetry. Any student of Turkish soon realizes how much Turkish has changed in the last 150, and particularly in the last eighty, years. In Western works, the changes are referred to as the language reforms – revolution would be more accurate. No sooner were the Ottomans masters of Constantinople than they began to produce literature; at first poetry and eventually prose. The prose, like the poetry, looked to Persia not only for models but for its vocabulary and indeed whole phrases. The following is a portion of Turkish prose from the sixteenth century. The Turkish elements (in italics) are drowning in a mass of Persian and Arabic:

Çun sani’-i sana’i’-i beda’i’-i umur-i kulliyat ve mudevvir-i deva’ir eflaki tibak-i seb’a-i semavat ve kassam-i erzak-i murtezikat-i mevcudat, suradikat-i kibab-i gayb ve seraperde-i mukaddere-i la-reybden bir vaz’- i pesendide vu ma’kul ve bir eser-i sayeste vu makbul zuhura geturub

more from Eurozine here.

///
A Riff for Sidney Bechet
Stanley Moss

That night in Florence,
forty-five years ago,
I heard him play
like “honey on a razor,”
he could get maple syrup
out of a white pine,
out of a sycamore,
out of an old copper beech.
I remember that summer
Michelangelo's marble
naked woman's breasts,
reclining Dawn's nipples—
exactly like the flesh I ached for.
How could Dawn behind her clouds hurt me?
The sunrise bitch was never mine.
He brought her down. In twelve bars of burnt sugar,
she was his if he wanted her.

Novelist Bapsi Sidhwa recalls the events of the past and looks for answers to our present dilemmas in The Deccan Herald:

One cannot look in upon events in 2008 without reflecting on the fateful moments that held Pakistan hostage to a horrendous roller-coaster ride through 2007. The turmoil that spilled over from Afghanistan into the lawless maze of mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan intensified, and suicide bombers, not on our radars before, exploded like grotesque fire-crackers in the northern areas and in major cities, including Lahore, killing thousands. The radicalisation of the peaceful Swat Valley by the Taliban and their dire edicts was another development: “If any ‘nai’ shaves or trims a beard, his shop will be blown up!” What could the poor barbers do but obey?

A new girl’s school built by DIL, a voluntary organisation for the development of literacy, was burnt down in the Valley.

On the heels of this turmoil came waves of protest by lawyers and politicians demanding General Pervaiz Musharraf’s resignation and calling for the reinstatement of the Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. The Supreme Court Justice was ousted by the general for challenging the validity of a case that would have permitted him to remain in power after elections. Like his predecessors who had come to power with some popular support, General Musharraf continued to overstay his welcome.

The processions and their acts of minor vandalism — burning buses and tires on streets — though disruptive, ironically brought respite from suicide bombing.

More here.

Daniel Kennefick reviews Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture by Peter L. Galison and Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber, in American Scientist:

Those writers asked to grapple with the subject of Einstein and the arts were faced with a profound conundrum. Although Einstein lived through, and made his greatest contributions to culture during, a period of great ferment and change in the arts, he expressed, as far as we know, little or no interest in the literature, music or visual arts of his own period. Yet most of us somehow instinctively feel that Einstein, as the leading figure in the revolution of modern physics that occurred in the first half of the 20th century, can be viewed as part of a historical movement that also encompasses Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Arnold Schoenberg. How can one seriously address a subject that cries out for large statements and yet provides the most meager of foundations on which to rest them?

Happily, the authors address themselves soberly to the question of Einstein's artistic legacy. Leon Botstein, writing on Einstein and music, is particularly thoughtful. His balanced account of Einstein's abilities as a violinist is of interest to those of us who have read much about Einstein's love of music without ever finding out much about his abilities as a musician. Many have speculated that Einstein's love of music somehow contributed to his scientific genius, and Botstein correctly quotes the great man himself pouring cold water on the notion that his scientific thought was in any way influenced by his love of music. Botstein notes that Einstein's taste was quite conservative and that he lacked any appreciation of the modernist music of his own day. In those respects, he was typical of many 20th-century scientists.

More here.

From The Magnes Zionist:

Now that the artillery has ceased firing, we are seeing a few Israelis speak out against the horrors of this so-called war, a war whose main goal was not to stop the rocket fire, which could have been done without a single death, but rather to wreak havoc on a defenseless civilian population. (That statement, of course, is not at all controversial, since even defenders of the war concede that the purpose of wreaking havoc was to weaken Hamas, and to show them that “the boss went crazy.”)

Tom Segev, who wrote eloquently against the unnecessary and immoral war from the outset, has published a piece about the scandal of Israeli apathy. I hope his “History Lesson: The History of [Israeli] Self-Righteousness” is translated into English.

The history of Israeli self-righteousness is rich with condemnations and expressions of regret over injuring civilians. Israel's self-image is based on the assumption that the IDF is better than other armies. “We at least try not to injure civilians.” That wasn't true even before the destruction and the death that the IDF sowed in Gaza in recent weeks. But this time it seems that many fewer Israelis than in the past feel that what happened there – should not have happened.

This operation stands out not only in its cruelty, but mainly because it did not succeed in drawing Israelis out of their apathy. This apathy is chiling and is no less shameful than the actions themselves.

Haaretz, in an editorial, has called for a governmental inquiry into war crimes. Even a wimpy Labor party liberal like philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel has written a powerful accusation against Israel's conduct of the war.

More here.

From The Guardian:

At this late hour of the world's history books are to be found in every room of the house – in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. And in some houses they have collected so that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, valuable books in leather, cheap books in paper – one stops sometimes before them and asks in a transient amazement what is the pleasure I get, or the good I create, from passing my eyes up and down these innumerable lines of print? Reading is a very complex art – the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it.

One should begin by sitting in the dock with the criminal, not by mounting the bench to sit among the Judges. One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something. And our first duty as readers is to try and understand what the writer is making from the first word with which he builds his first sentence to the last with which he ends his book. We must not impose our design upon him; we must not try to make him conform his will to ours. We must allow Defoe to be Defoe and Jane Austen to be Jane Austen as freely as we allow the tiger to have his fur and the tortoise to have his shell. And this is very difficult. For it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings Heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.

The great writers thus often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly.

More here.

Canadian troops are doing their best to fight by the rules in Afghanistan, even as the death toll rises and they are forced to cede territory to the Taliban. Graeme Wood reports from Kandahar’s Zhari district.

From The National:

Over the last three years, the Canadian military and Afghan security forces have fought the Taliban to a bloody stalemate. The Afghan police and army routinely drive over roadside bombs on Highway One, Zhari’s main road, which is bumpy with filled-in craters. In Zhari’s villages (there is no settlement larger than a cluster of a few war-demolished mud buildings), insurgents mount ambushes nearly every day. The Canadians, for their part, have tried to fight the war cleanly, with at times absurd levels of attention to law and rules of engagement. And despite being a modern and impressive fighting force, with armoured vehicles and innovative counterinsurgency tactics, they have died at a rate alarming even for a war zone – over 100 since 2001, in a force of only 2,500 (many of whom are not in combat roles). That death rate exceeds not only the US death rate in Afghanistan, but also the US death rate in Iraq.

The Canadians and their Afghan collaborators have maintained the initiative, says Brig Gen Denis Thompson, the top-ranking Canadian soldier in Afghanistan. But they have had to concede ground – including Singesar itself, the birthplace of the Taliban. In May 2008, the Canadian and Afghan base in Singesar closed after just months in service. To resupply the base, Thompson says, required a battalion-level operation once per month. And on each mission the supply vehicles took fire. “The calculation is: ‘How much of this ground can we physically hold?’” Thompson says. The base could have remained open as long as the Canadians chose. But considering the demands it placed on resources, and the greater effect the same resources could have elsewhere, it had to be shuttered. Nevertheless, the closing was almost certainly a propaganda victory for the Taliban.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The tragedy of the Palestinian people is that their suffering, somehow, by some horrible underlying logic, does not rate as equal.

The more I've come to see the dilemma in this light, the more the footage of carnage in Gaza has become impossibly heartrending to watch. A terrible dialectic is at play. As the Palestinians are battered to bits they rush, with camera in hand, to the scenes of devastation and to the hospitals where the wounded are being carried. They want to show the world. “Look,” they are saying, “we are human beings, just like everyone else. If you prick us, do we not bleed?” But the footage they capture gets perverted as it is conveyed. We see it on the other side as a chaos of bodies and activity that, while upsetting, is almost too kinetic. More tragically, the people sticking cameras into the scenes of injured children and families begin to look lewd. “Well,” we say, secretly in the dark whisperings of our private thoughts, “that's no way to act.” The very attempt by everyday Palestinians to express their common humanity, to show their essential vulnerability, begins to look to us like opportunism, like the uncouth acts of a people fundamentally different from us. Barbarians.

Most people of good conscience don't dispute the essential point: Israel is in the wrong for having pursued a strategy of occupation in the first place and for having forced the Palestinian people into prison-like camps and ghettos over which the Israeli Army has complete control. Nothing good comes of such an occupation and it constitutes a decades-long crime against humanity. The recent and ongoing tragedy in Gaza is but another episode in this longstanding evil. This in no way implies support of Hamas, which, for all its vaunted humanitarian works in Gaza, is a fundamentally despicable organization that only adds to Palestinian misery.

But the Palestinians are at a fundamental disadvantage because they are not as comfortable with the rules of humanity-showing as the West has defined them over the last couple of millennia. They do not, in our eyes, play the victim right. There is nothing, in principle, that should make the Palestinian struggle for autonomy and self-rule any less legitimate than the struggle to end apartheid, the American civil rights struggle, Gandhi's fight to end English colonialism in India, or any number of other struggles that were ultimately recognized as struggles of a common humanity.

More here.