Scott Thomas in The New Republic:

That is how war works: It degrades every part of you, and your sense of humor is no exception.

I know another private who really only enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over. He took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market, and his favorite target: dogs. Occasionally, the brave ones would chase the Bradleys, barking at them like they bark at trash trucks in America–providing him with the perfect opportunity to suddenly swerve and catch a leg or a tail in the vehicle’s tracks. He kept a tally of his kills in a little green notebook that sat on the dashboard of the driver’s hatch. One particular day, he killed three dogs. He slowed the Bradley down to lure the first kill in, and, as the diesel engine grew quieter, the dog walked close enough for him to jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks. The leg caught, and he dragged the dog for a little while, until it disengaged and lay twitching in the road. A roar of laughter broke out over the radio. Another notch for the book. The second kill was a straight shot: A dog that was lying in the street and bathing in the sun didn’t have enough time to get up and run away from the speeding Bradley. Its front half was completely severed from its rear, which was twitching wildly, and its head was still raised and smiling at the sun as if nothing had happened at all.

I didn’t see the third kill, but I heard about it over the radio. Everyone was laughing, nearly rolling with laughter. I approached the private after the mission and asked him about it.
“So, you killed a few dogs today,” I said skeptically.
“Hell yeah, I did. It’s like hunting in Iraq!” he said, shaking with laughter.
“Did you run over dogs before the war, back in Indiana?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied, and looked at me curiously. Almost as if the question itself was in poor taste.

More here.

From Edge:

The main question that I’m asking myself is, what is the meaning of technology in our lives?  What place does technology have in the universe? What place does it have in the human condition? And what place should it play in my own personal life?  Technology as a whole system, or what I call the technium, seems to be a dominant force in the culture.

There is a common sense that each novel technology brings us many new problems as well as new solutions — that it offers many things that we desire as well as many things that we want to eliminate. What we don’t have is a good framework for responding to this ceaseless generation of novelty, or even a framework for understanding whether technology is something that we should, or even can, respond to.  Or, for that matter, whether we should manage our technology by not creating it in the first place.  And how we might possibly “not create.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

It is The New Penguin History of the World by JM Roberts and it’s the history book that has everything. It is an amazing synthesis of knowledge and interpretation that carries you along not with stylistic bravura but a lucid presentation of themes other writers
struggle to explain. It’s so restrained in language, so measured in argument it might be mistaken for a textbook except it’s shot through by strong untextbooklike opinions such as the confident assertion that Cordoba’s Great Mosque is the most beautiful building in the world.

The author JM Roberts was an eminent British historian who died in 2003, and this is the final edition of a book he first published in 1976. By hideous good luck, Roberts was finalising the 2002 edition when the planes struck the Twin Towers, so it is a book of our era that deals with September 11 and the reaction it provoked. It’s worth reading this great book now, because when the current edition goes “out of date” there will be presumably be no other.

More here.

If there is a theme running through William Trevor’s brilliant new collection, it is reticence. Again and again, lives are altered, or ruined – or, less often, saved – by things that are left unsaid. Such silence goes against the grain of a culture obsessed by disclosure and personal revelation, but that is not to say that Trevor is old-fashioned, much less squeamish. Within these twelve stories are many crimes: the murder of a prostitute, a child hit by a car whose driver does not stop, a youth beaten to death in a suburban garden. Terrible things happen, or threaten to happen. Two nine-year-old boys push a dog out to sea on a lilo; a paedophile takes a young girl – ‘her bare, pale legs were like twigs stripped of their bark’ – for a walk by a canal; a tramp blackmails an innocent priest.

more from Literary Review here.

“By the end of the nineteenth century, the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost”: so writes Giorgio Agamben in his 1992 essay, “Notes on Gesture.” The early years of the twentieth century were marked, the philosopher contends, by a frantic effort to reconstitute the vanished realm of meaningful movements: hence the exaggerated articulations of silent film and the mad leaps of modern dance. Certain “invisible powers”—the economic forces responsible for the simultaneous loosening and mechanization of the social sphere—had rendered daily life, for many, almost indecipherable. It’s a complaint that has echoed through the decades since, as subsequent generations have been characterized as increasingly shambling, ataxic, and slack, but also regimented, uniform, somehow less than human. The gestures of the (racial, national, or generational) other appear both random and programmed, meaningless and mechanical. Why, the gestural conservative wonders, do they keep doing that thing with their hands, arms, shoulders, crotches?

more from Cabinet here.

Sauri must be the luckiest village in Africa. The maize is taller, the water cleaner, and the schoolchildren better fed than almost anywhere else south of the ­Sahara.

Just two years ago, Sauri was an ordinary Kenyan village where poverty, hunger, and illness were facts of everyday life. Now it is an experiment, a prototype “Millennium Village.” The idea is simple: Every year for five years, invest roughly $100 for each of the village’s 5,000 inhabitants, and see what ­happens.

The Millennium Villages Project is the brainchild of economist Jeffrey Sachs, the principal architect of the transition from ­state-­owned to market economies in Poland and Russia. His critics and supporters disagree about the success of those efforts, often referred to as “shock therapy,” but his role in radical economic reform in the two countries vaulted him to fame. Now he has a new mission: to end poverty in ­Africa.

more from The Wilson Quarterly here.

Malise Ruthven on In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons from the Life of Muhammad and three other books by Tariq Ramadan, in the New York Review of Books:

Tariq Ramadan is a Swiss-born academic and a prolific writer on Islam who has achieved fame—and notoriety —on both sides of the Atlantic for his engagement with the issues that concern the millions of Muslims now living in Western countries. In France, especially, he has been depicted as an Islamist wolf in sheep’s clothing. Strip off the wool, say his critics, and you will find a hard-line fundamentalist hostile to the values of freedom and democracy he claims to espouse. Two causes célèbres have been, first, the fierce polemics arising from Ramadan’s claim that leading French intellectuals including Bernard-Henri Levy, Daniel Gluckstein, and Bernard Kouchner put their commitments to Israel before their humanitarian concern for Palestinians; and, second, the famous encounter with Nicolas Sarkozy in 2003, before six million French television viewers, when Ramadan at first refused to condemn outright the penalty of stoning for adulterers, but called for a “moratorium” while the Muslim world engaged in “debating” this issue along with other harsh punishments. He went on to say that “we should stop” the practice. But this has not satisfied his critics.

More here.

Dubbed ’nectar of the gods,’ 90-year-old spirit now worth $7,000 per bottle.

From MSNBC:

Villagers unearthed the first case of 15 bottles about 15 years ago. Since then, digs have yielded several cognac caches, usually of about two dozen bottles each. Some have been found by farmers plowing fields, and at least two batches came to light after a glint in the sand of an old trench caught a villager’s eye.

The old-fashioned cognac bottles can fetch up to nearly $7,000 from collectors, according to Mihail Petkov, professor of viticulture and oenology at Skopje University.

“I never had a chance to taste something like that,” he said. “What the villagers drank was probably a cognac, not a wine. The wines were intended to be consumed immediately … and not to last for a long period of time.”

“But with cognac the situation is different,” Petkov said. “The older, the better.”

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Also in Dissent, an interview with political philosopher Seyla Benhabib on Turkey, mosque and state, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

[Daniele Castellani Perelli]: Ayaan Hirsi Ali has recently written about Turkey in the Los Angeles Times. She writes: “The proponents of Islam in government, such as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and their Justice and Development Party, have exploited the fact that you can use democratic means to erode democracy. After an initial attempt at Islamic revolution failed in 1997, when the military engineered a ‘soft coup’ against elected Islamists, Erdogan and his party understood that gradualism would yield more lasting power. They surely realize that Islamicizing Turkey entirely is possible only if they gain control of the army and the constitutional court. Well-meaning but naive European leaders were manipulated by the ruling Islamists into saying that Turkey’s army should be placed under civil control, like all armies in EU member states. The army and the constitutional court are also, and maybe even more importantly, designed to protect Turkish democracy from Islam.”

[Seyla Benhabib]: Miss Ayaan Hirsi Ali has now assumed a public role of exaggerating and driving Islam and everything related to Islam into the corner of fascism or a kind of theocracy. Her statement is simply uninformed. It is not a statement that can be taken seriously by anybody who is a democrat. First of all, there is no danger of Islamic theocracy in Turkey. I can assure you there will be a civil war in Turkey before there will be a theocracy.

Anyway, I don’t think that the AK Party wants a theocracy. They are carrying out an incredible experiment and it is unusual for some one who is a democratic socialist like myself to be supporting, and watching very carefully, a party like them. But we are all watching carefully because they also represent a kind of pluralism in civil society which is absolutely essential for Turkey.

In Sam Anderson’s blogged account of his reading the new Harry Potter novel, we see a descent into madness reminiscent of Yevgeny’s in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman.

Saturday, 12:45 p.m. Page 231. Harry and the gang are so deep in Mission Impossible–style reconnaissance (the plan is to break into the Ministry of Magic) that I take a nap.

Saturday, 3:35 p.m. Page 286. The plot has been washed away on a hormonal tsunami of teen angst. Things are getting Blair Witch–ish: endless bickering on a never-ending camping trip. Hermione tells Ron to kindly insert his wand into his anus. They keep saying “effing” and “hell.” Some entertaining idiomatic wizard cursing: “Merlin’s pants!” and “what in the name of Merlin’s most baggy Y Fronts” and “why in the name of Merlin’s saggy left—” (I’m thinking “wizard-teat”).

Saturday, 6:02 p.m. Page 434. I smell terrible and am eating peanut butter directly out of the jar and fighting off another nap. Reading this novel apparently creates the same symptoms as major depression and agoraphobia.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

Via Crooked Timber, Johann Hari reviews Nick Cohen’s What’s Left for Dissent, posted over at his website.

This book appears to have been written as Cohen hit a personal tipping-point. At times, he presents himself as the last true left-winger, but at other moments, he appears to be abandoning the left in disgust. A passage where he complains that the benefits system “provides a perverse incentive for single motherhood”, says that “the liberal professionals of the welfare state were aggravating the poverty and racism they said they opposed”, and rants about “the two-faced civil liberties lawyer”, sounds like Norman Podhoretz circa 1968, and an admission that Cohen is sliding into full-blown neoconservatism.

After this, there are even worse moments, when his views disintegrate into a drizzle of dismaying right-wing talking points. He describes the Spanish people’s democratic decision to elect a Socialist government after the Madrid train bombings as a victory for al Queda. So the Spanish people should have voted for a right-wing government to prove they were left-wing? That’s the ludicrous and contorted position Cohen has ended up in. Out of nowhere, he accuses Edward Said – a man who took Palestinian teenagers to Auschwitz to educate them about the horrors of Jew-hatred – of anti-Semitism and “pardoning” the 9/11 hijackers. In one column, he has suggested that the British government should be sanguine about sending suspected Islamists to countries where they will be tortured, because the sole criterion should be Britain’s “national interests.” This is an abandonment of the universalist language of the left for a parochial conservative agenda.

Mohsin Hamid in The Washington Post:

Recently, I found myself in Dallas, a place I’d never been before. As a Muslim writer, I felt about going there pretty much the way an American writer might have felt about heading to the tribal areas of Pakistan: nervous, with the distinct suspicion that the locals carried guns and weren! ‘t too fond of folks who look like me.

So I was surprised by the extraordinary hospitality I encountered on my trip. And I still remember the politeness with which one elderly gentleman addressed me in a bookshop. He held a copy of my latest novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” and examined the face on its cover, comparing it to mine. Then he said, nodding once as if to dip the brim of an imaginary hat: “So tell me, sir. Why do they hate us?”

That stopped me cold.

Yet even here, let me attempt a rescue which goes beyond the realm of conscious intentions. What will be the effect of Grass’s belated revelation? As he approaches the end of his life, as the memories of Nazism fade, as the activities of his SS-Frundsberg division become the object of weekend leisure war games in the United States[9] , Grass suddenly demolishes his own statue— not as a writer of fiction, but as a moral authority on frank and timely facing up to the Nazi past—and leaves its ruins lying, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, as a warning beside the roadside. Nothing he could say or write on this subject would be half so effective as the personal example that he has now left us. For sixty years even Günter Grass could not come clean about being a member of the Waffen-SS! Look, stranger, and tremble.

When I was starting to think about this mystery, I discussed it with a German friend, just a couple of years younger than the novelist but with a very different wartime biography. “You know, I have a theory about that,” he said. “I think Grass never was in the Waffen-SS. He’s just convinced himself that he was.” I’m sure my friend didn’t mean this literally. Rather, I understood his remark as a kind of poetic insight into the tortured and labyrin-thine quality of German memory. “But don’t write it,” he added. “Otherwise Grass will sue you for claiming he was not in the Waffen-SS.”

more from the NYRB here.

This, of course, is the summer of the Sergeant. The glossy British pop monthly MOJO has issued “Sgt. Pepper: With a Little Help from His Friends,” a multi-artist re-creation of the Beatles’ psychedelic apotheosis, which turned 40 in June. In addition, BBC Radio 2 broadcast an all-star Pepper extravaganza last month, with the likes of Bryan Adams, the Kaiser Chiefs, and Oasis re-recording the album at Abbey Road Studios. Next year is certain to bring epic revisions of the double “White Album”; and the year after, “Abbey Road Redux.”

But only the weakest tributes are predicated on the happenstance of an anniversary. The best seem to come from the musician’s faith that the song hides something — a truth, a realization, a key to her own desires and drives — that only she can find and make visible. The result is not a revisiting of familiar terrain but the opening of a new landscape, where the signs remain readable but now point to different destinations.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Beryl Cook: a homely, round name for a woman we imagine is also round and jolly and homely. Her art depresses me. I thought I would be able to summon some sort of enthusiasm for its Englishness, its playfulness, its sauciness. But I can’t. The best that can be said is that Cook celebrates ordinariness – large women with large appetites, broad-shouldered men, hen parties, booze-ups, dances, dinners, shopping, sunbathing, a bit of slap and tickle. At least ordinariness in Cook’s art is more various than one might think: the bloke next door is a shoe fetishist, and even Saga members like a bit of kinky sex. All the girls, and some of the boys, like a sailor. Cook’s is an art without any pretentions other than to please.

more from The Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

Between reading recent news reports about altruistic behavior in rats and watching the slickly adorable antics of Remy the culinary rodent in this summer’s animated blockbuster, “Ratatouille,” I’ve had a change of heart. My normal feeling of extreme revulsion toward rats has softened considerably, into something resembling … a less extreme form of revulsion.

And though rats have yet to produce an Albert Camus or design a better mouse trap, a host of new behavioral studies makes plain that the similarities between us and Rattus extend far beyond gross anatomy. They’re surprisingly self-aware. They laugh when tickled, especially when they’re young, and they have ticklish spots; tickle the nape of a rat pup’s neck and it will squeal ultrasonically in a soundgram pattern like that of a human giggle. Rats dream as we dream, in epic narratives of navigation and thwarted efforts at escape: When scientists at MIT tracked the neuronal activity of rats in REM sleep, the researchers saw the same firing patterns they had seen in wakeful rats wending their way through those notorious rat mazes.

Rats can learn to crave the same drugs that we do — alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, amphetamine — and they, like us, will sometimes indulge themselves to death. They’re sociable, curious and love to be touched — nicely, that is. If a rat has been trained to associate a certain sound with a mild shock to its tail, and the bell tolls but the shock doesn’t come, the rat will inhale deeply with what can only be called a sigh of relief.

More here.

Martin Munkacsi. Lovely Autumn: The Last Warm Rays of Sunshine. c 1929.

Gelatin silver print.

Current San Francisco MoMA exhibition here and more here.

Michael Ruhlman in his eponymous blog:

Ratatouille does get the ethos of the kitchen and the strange strivings of the cook exactly right (mainly embodied and described by Colette).  There’s a single error that I can see, one noted in an email to me by bob del grosso: the little rat chef reveals himself as a talented cook not just by fixing a soup completely ruined by the main human character, Linguini, but by making it somehow ethereal.  An impossibility as any cook knows, especially as over salting appears to have been one of the problems.  But that single glitch aside, the movie is a paean to passionate cooking and a moving description of the professional kitchen…

[Anthony] Bourdain was sequestered in a darkened theater a couple years ago and grilled for insider dope on the cook’s life, for which he was paid a few hundred bucks.  He saw it [Ratatouille] last week:

“I think it’s quite simply the best food movie ever made,” Tony wrote today in an email.  “The best restaurant movie ever made–the best chef movie.  The tiny details are astonishing: The faded burns on the cooks’ wrists. The “personal histories” of the cooks…the attention paid to the food…And the Anton Ego ratatouille epiphany hit me like a punch in the chest–literally breathtaking. I saw it in a theater entirely full with adults–and the reaction to that moment was what movie making was once–a long time ago–all about: Audible surprise, delight, awe and even a measure of enlightenment. I am hugely and disproportionately proud that my miniscule contribution (if any) early early in the project’s development led to a “thank you” in the credits.  Amazing how much they got “right.”

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]  And here’s a bonus video:

Toure in the New York Times Book Review:

From the start of their professional tennis careers, Venus and Serena Williams seemed totally certain they were champions; they marched through the tennis world with the ferocity of the young Mike Tyson. James Blake was No. 9 in the world at the conclusion of Wimbledon this month; late last year he was No. 4. But only twice in his career has he reached a Grand Slam quarterfinal, and many have long sensed that his potential has been limited because he doesn’t truly believe he belongs in big-time tennis. He’s cursed with the unsureness of Dave Chappelle. Blake confirms this in his memoir, “Breaking Back” (written with Andrew Friedman), when, early in his career, he drops a winnable match to the great Patrick Rafter. “After the match, as we shook hands at the net, he leaned in close, the zinc oxide he smeared under his eyes like war paint runny with sweat: ‘You could have beaten me today,’ he said, surprising me, ‘but I had the sense that maybe you didn’t believe it yourself.’ He paused, then said, ‘Now do you believe?’ … He perceived something about me that I wasn’t even admitting to myself: I didn’t really believe that I belonged out there with the best players in the world. I didn’t feel like I deserved to win.”

More here.

Simon Rich in The New Yorker:

What I imagined the people around me were saying when I was . . .

Eleven:

“Oh, man, I can’t believe that kid Simon missed that ground ball! How pathetic!”
“Wait. He’s staring at his baseball glove with a confused expression on his face. Maybe there’s something wrong with his glove and that’s why he messed up.”
“Yeah, that’s probably what happened.”

                    ————

Twelve:

“Did that kid sitting behind us on the bus just get an erection?”
“I don’t know. For a while, I thought that was the case, but now that he’s holding a book on his lap it’s impossible to tell.”
“I guess we’ll never know what the situation was.”

                    ————

Thirteen:

“Hey, look, that thirteen-year-old is walking around with his mom!”
“Where?”
“There—in front of the supermarket!”
“Oh, my God! That kid is way too old to be hanging out with his mom. Even though I’ve never met him, I can tell he’s a complete loser.”
“Wait a minute. He’s scowling at her and rolling his eyes.”
“Oh, yeah . . . and I think I just heard him curse at her, for no reason.”
“I guess he’s cool after all.”

More here.