Christian Perring reviews the book, edited by Jon Elster and Ole-Jorgen Skog, in Metapsychology:

While there has been a huge amount of research into addiction, most of that research is at empirical social studies, rat behavior, genetics, and neurophysiology. Some of the most important aspects of the research, i.e., how to integrate these different sources of information, and what the implications are for morality, policy, and our self-understanding, have gone remarkably neglected, especially by philosophers and ethicists.

But there are signs of change. This may be largely due to the work of one person. Jon Elster has for a long time been one of the more thoughtful social scientists discussing human self-defeating behavior, and is especially well known for his work on forms of self control based on Ulysses and the Sirens. He has recently published a book on the rationality and emotion, Alchemies of the Mind, and another book on emotion and addiction, Strong Feelings. He has also co-edited a book with Ole-Jorgen Skog on rationality and addiction, titled Getting Hooked. This collection of 10 articles derives from the meetings of a group that met annually from 1992-1997. The contributors include three psychiatrists, a political scientist, a philosopher, two economists and two sociologists.

More here.  [Photo shows Elster.]

Patricia Cohen in the New York Times:

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

More here.

Felice Frankel in American Scientist:

I thought Sightings readers would be interested in an example of what has become for me an obvious, but too-often ignored, transformative exercise: clarifying and learning science by thinking about how to visually represent an idea, a process or a structure in science, for the purpose of explaining it.

My Harvard colleague and coauthor George Whitesides, with whom I am working on the book No Small Matter, forthcoming in 2009 from Harvard University Press, asked that I make an interesting representation of nanotubes. I am a science photographer, not an illustrator, so my first course of action is usually to think photographically. The obvious, making a scanning electron micrograph of a nanotube, was not an option. Others have done that, probably much better than I would have. I decided to photographically simulate a nanotube structure.

Here’s what I did. First I printed a black hexagonal pattern, representing a standard carbon lattice, on an 8×10 piece of transparent acetate (a). I then began to roll the acetate to make a tube. Immediately, something wonderful happened: I couldn’t make a decision about how to longitudinally connect the edges of the paper. I was faced with a few choices. The literature informed me that there were indeed various possible configurations for carbon nanotubes, and that the ultimate configuration was significant in determining the electrical properties of the nanotube.

For this image, I decided (for no particular reason other than aesthetic) to adopt what’s called the “zigzag” configuration and not to attempt to show the endcaps that tie up the dangling carbon bonds in a nanotube. I secured the edges of the acetate with a couple of pieces of tape and placed the tube on my flatbed scanner.  [Below left] is the image I came up with (b). Nothing terribly compelling. I then “inverted” the nanotube in Adobe Photoshop and combined a few “layers” of the same image to make multiple layers with varying degrees of transparency, resulting in (c). For the final composite image at left, I went a little further in nudging the image using various filters and additional inversions.

More here.

The right of faiths to run their own affairs and regulate their adherents’ lives has recently become controversial—because of fear of Islam.

From The Economist:

Among family-law buffs, the case is seen as a key example of the messy ways in which religious and civil law can get entangled. It concerns an Italian couple who wed in a Catholic church in 1962. After 25 years of less-than-blissful union, she got a legal separation from a civil court, which told him to make monthly maintenance payments. But he had other ideas: he convinced an ecclesiastical court that their union had never been valid, because they were close blood relations.

After vain appeals to various civil and religious courts in Italy (to which she complained that she never got a chance to tell her story), she turned to the European Court of Human Rights, which in 2001 ruled in her favour and made a modest compensation award. The European judges in Strasbourg had no jurisdiction over church courts—but they did find that Italy’s civil judges failed to assess the religious courts’ work or note the deficiencies.

In every democratic and more-or-less secular country, similar questions arise about the precise extent to which religious sub-cultures should be allowed to live by their own rules and “laws”. One set of questions emerges when believers demand, and often get, an opt-out from the law of the land. Sikhs in British Columbia can ride motorcycles without helmets; some are campaigning for the right not to wear hard hats on building sites. Muslims and Jews slaughter animals in ways that others might consider cruel; Catholic doctors and nurses refuse to have anything to do with abortion or euthanasia.

More here.

From CNN:

Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chinese leader Mao Zedong made what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States.

“You know, China is a very poor country,” Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department’s historian office.

“We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands.”

A few minutes later, Mao circled back to the offer. “Do you want our Chinese women?” he asked. “We can give you 10 million.”

After Kissinger noted Mao was “improving his offer,” the chairman said, “We have too many women. … They give birth to children and our children are too many.”

“It is such a novel proposition,” Kissinger replied in his discussion with Mao in Beijing. “We will have to study it.”

We’ve talked about it here, but there’s something very creepy about the tone of a lot of Hillary Clinton bashing. (This is not to say I’m voting–or not voting–for HRC.) Robin Morgan over at The Women’s Media Center:

During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .” But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities—joint conscience-keepers of this country—been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.

Goodbye to the double  standard . . .

—Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s  emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.

—She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains?)—When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.

—Young political Kennedys—Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.—all endorsed Hillary. Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)

Goodbye to the toxic  viciousness  . . .

Carl Bernstein’s disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.”  Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters). John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?” with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For  shame.

In the NY Sun, Graeme Wood review Randall Collins’ Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory:

Sociologist and amateur martial artist Randall Collins starts his wonderful, rambling book, “Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory” (Princeton University Press, 584 pages, $45), by pointing out that violence baffles us, and that it rarely resembles our imaginations, or what we see in films. Between individuals, combat often looks goofy and undignified, more slappy flailing than solid punches. For group violence, the saloon brawls in Westerns have taught us to expect bystanders to join in and smash chairs over each other’s backs; but in real life, bar patrons tend to back off from the melee, staring inertly.

If Mr. Collins is right — and let us hope he is — this reluctance to fight is natural, common, and underestimated. Humans abhor violence, he tells us, and they require acute overdoses of fear and tension to overcome that abhorrence and get physically mean. Violence simply does not happen as readily as we suppose, he says, and because it is so exceptional, many of our guesses about its origins and nature have missed their marks.

Previous approaches tried to identify “violent individuals,” and to discover whether a blend of, say, poverty and desperation and broken home life made them violent. Mr. Collins argues that this broad sociological approach won’t explain anything, because the most important factor — the overwhelmingly most important factor — that determines whether one resorts to violence is not one’s past but one’s present.

Oliver Sacks at the NYT blog Migraines:

In my own migraine auras, I would sometimes see — vividly with closed eyes, more faintly and transparently if I kept my eyes open — tiny branching lines, like twigs, or geometrical structures covering the entire visual field: lattices, checkerboards, cobwebs, and honeycombs. Sometimes there were more elaborate patterns, like Turkish carpets or complex mosaics; sometimes I saw scrolls and spirals, swirls and eddies; sometimes three-dimensional shapes like tiny pine cones or sea urchins.

Such patterns, I found, were not peculiar to me, and years later, when I worked in a migraine clinic, I discovered that many of my patients habitually saw such patterns. And when I looked back on historical accounts, I found that Sir John Herschel, the astronomer, had given detailed descriptions of his own visual migraines in the 1850s. He wrote to his fellow astronomer and fellow migraineur, George Airy, quoting his own notes: “The fortification pattern twice in my eyes today …. Also a sort of chequer work filling in, in rectangular patches, and a carpet-work pattern over the rest of the visual area.” Herschel wondered whether there might be “a kaleidoscopic power in the sensorium to form regular patterns by the symmetrical combination of casual elements,” a power “working within our own organization [but] distinct from that of our own personality.”

For this Valentine’s Day:

In 1966, a small group of Moroccan poets, artists, and intellectuals launched Souffles, a quarterly review that would over time become at once a vehicle for cultural renewal and an instigator of efforts to promote social justice in the Maghreb. From its very first issue, Souffles was a unique experiment, a Moroccan and Maghrebi effort to liberate the country’s intellectual framework from fetid provincialism and lingering colonial complexes. It was a cri de coeur, a rebellion against the artistic status quo, a manifesto for a new aesthetics, even a new worldview. Its trademark cover, emblazoned with an intense black sun, radiated rebellion.

A decade earlier, the French protectorate of Morocco had managed to secure its independence as a kingdom while Paris concentrated on retaining neighboring Algeria, where a war of independence was just beginning. Muhammad V, Morocco’s new king and former sultan, and the unlikely hero of the nationalist movement, began to consolidate political power against the backdrop of the Cold War. Leftists battled conservatives for control of the nationalist movement, while Crown Prince Hassan maneuvered to position himself as the ultimate political arbiter of the young country.

more from Bidoun here (via Rachel Donadio at Paper Cuts).

‘I Know a Man’ seems like a good introduction to the vast opus Creeley, who died in 2005, left behind: thousands of poems, dozens of essays and interviews, a bitter novel, a book of short stories, and hundreds of pages of hard-to-classify prose. Yet ‘I Know a Man’ also leaves out much of what made Creeley notable in each of the three phases of his career: his early focus on lust and shame, the diary-like verse-and-prose books of the 1970s, and the quiet achievements in his late poems of retrospect and solitude. We recognise Creeley’s poems first by what they leave out: he uses few long or rare words, no regular metres and almost no metaphors. The young Creeley aspired to write in Basic English: ‘he very nearly does,’ his friend Cid Corman wrote, except for the slang. Creeley kept for five decades a way of writing whose markers include parsimonious diction, strong enjambment, two to four-line stanzas and occasional rhyme. What changed over his career was not his language but the use he made of it, the attitudes and goals around which the small, clear crystals of his verse might form.

more from the LRB here.

When Charles Lamb heard, in the summer of 1814, that his old friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been asked to translate Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dark masterwork Faust into English, he could hardly contain his horror. “I counsel thee”, Lamb wrote to Coleridge on August 23, “to let it alone . . . how canst thou translate the language of cat-monkeys? Fie on such fantasies!” To Lamb, the surreal banter between Faust and the mob of half-human meerkats he meets in the “Witch’s Kitchen” was a metaphor for the meaninglessness of Goethe’s work. For nearly two centuries, the literary world has believed that Lamb’s intervention was decisive, or at least that it coincided with Coleridge’s own resolution not to pursue the project. “I need not tell you”, Coleridge wrote twenty years later in his Table Talk, “that I never put pen to paper as a translator of Faust.”

Romantic scholars have long puzzled over the contradiction between Coleridge’s insistence that he “never put pen to paper” and Goethe’s own conviction that the troubled author of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was in fact hard at work on the project.

more from the TLS here.

Nineteen years ago today, Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous death sentence against Salman Rushdie, which sent him into hiding. I met him at one of his first public appearances after that and he joked that it was nice to hang out with someone who wasn’t continually saying things like “Come in, Hudson Commander,” into his sleeve! Though the Iranian government has sensibly lifted the fatwa since then, Rushdie remains in danger (two of his translators have been murdered), and each year I try to remind readers of his plight and the dangers of extremism for art, and free speech in general.

This is from Emory Wheel:

Salman Rushdie, Emory distinguished writer-in-residence, kicked off the second of his five extended visits to Emory with a lecture addressing the overlapping social and literary trends in the reading of literature.

The lecture, titled “Autobiography and the Novel,” was held Sunday evening and examined the intermingling of writers’ lives with their texts.

Rushdie began his lecture by discussing three 18th century novels that were published anonymously: Robinson Crusoe, Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travels. But these texts were still lauded as exceptional literature by their contemporaries despite the lack of knowledge about the authors’ personal life, Rushdie said.

“The personality and life story of the author was deemed not to be of any relevance to his work,” Rushdie argued. “Fiction was fiction. Life was life. Two hundred and fifty years ago people knew these were different things. This is no longer the case.”

More here. And this is from the British Sunday Times:

After hiding for more than a decade with a price on his head, the author Sir Salman Rushdie could be forgiven for objecting to a portrait that actually shows his face.

Instead of attending a conventional sitting, he submitted to a psychological test conducted at his New York apartment with a couple of Californian conceptual artists.

The result depicts Rushdie, 60, a slightly donnish, bearded figure, as a purple lobster floating before a fiery red planet, surrounded by snowflakes.

Alternatively, it provides a psychological profile of the novelist during the collapse of his marriage to his fourth wife, the model and food writer Padma Lakshmi, 37.

Rushdie faced death threats from Muslims after a fatwa was imposed on him by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s spiritual leader, in 1989, for his controversial book The Satanic Verses.

His knighthood, announced last June, prompted riots in Pakistan, and his separation from Lakshmi followed in July.

More here. And this is from All American Patriots:

Random House will publish Salman Rushdie’s new novel, THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE, a dazzling historical novel set in Renaissance Florence and the court of the great Mughal Empire.

“This new novel marks a bold departure for Salman Rushdie in terms of setting and subject matter,” comments Will Murphy, Rushdie’s editor at Random House. “It is an amazing display of his gifts as a storyteller and will undoubtedly draw many new readers to his already wide audience.”

Drawing on more than seven years of research, THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role. A virtuoso feat of storytelling that mixes political intrigue and high drama, romance and magic, Rushdie’s novel also reflects on the dangers that come when fantasy and reality grow too interwined.

More here.

..

Accordéoniste
Woody Rudin

When you’re born with the name
Hakim Matabuki,
you naturally pick up something
in childhood
for self-defense.

Some say he played with sewing kit
buttons because the boys shunned him.
Some say he fell in love
with the four buttons
on his mother’s dress,
that he used to finger
for hours on end.

I knew him when his mother
gifted him with a collection of buttons
and keys on which to play love notes,
his own talisman of sound.

When he pumped the bellows for low notes,
I pictured him gliding through a sunken ship
holding breath for minutes on end.
Soprano notes were high wire aerials,
played in the frequency of rumor
that held my ear for hours.

The boy accordéoniste,
who found that love
could reside within buttons
if you offered them
just the right touch.

..

Civil rights activist. Born July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi. After growing up in a Mississippi farming family, Medgar Evers enlisted in the United States Army in 1943. He fought in both France and Germany during World War II before receiving an honorable discharge in 1946. In 1948, he entered Alcorn Agricutural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University) in Lorman, Mississippi. During his senior year, Evers married a fellow student, Myrlie Beasley; they later had three children: Darrell, Reena, and James. Upon graduation from college in 1952, Evers moved to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he began working as an insurance salesman. He and his older brother, Charles Evers, also worked on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organizing local affiliates in Philadelphia. In 1954, the year of the momentous Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which purportedly ended segregation of schools, Medgar quit the insurance business; he subsequently applied and was denied admission to the University of Mississippi Law School. His unsuccessful effort to integrate the state’s oldest public educational institution attracted the attention of the NAACP’s national office. Later that year, Evers moved to the state capital of Jackson and became the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. As state field secretary, Evers recruited members throughout Mississippi and organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations, and economic boycotts of white-owned companies that practiced discrimination. He also worked to investigate crimes perpetrated against blacks, most notably the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy who had allegedly been killed for talking to a white woman. As early as 1955, Evers’ activism made him the most visible civil rights leader in the state of Missisippi. As a result, he and his family were subjected to numerous threats and violent actions over the years, including a firebombing of their house in May 1963. At 12:40 a.m. on June 12, 1963, Evers was shot in the back in the driveway of his home in Jackson. He died less than a hour later at a nearby hospital. Evers was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, and the NAACP posthumously awarded him their 1963 Spingarn Medal. The national outrage over Evers’ murder increased support for legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Immediately after Evers’ death, the NAACP appointed his brother Charles to his position. Charles Evers went on to become a major political figure in the state; in 1969, he was elected the mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, becoming the first African-American mayor of a racially mixed Southern town since the Reconstruction. A police and FBI investigation of the murder quickly unearthed a prime suspect—Byron De La Beckwith, a white segregationist and founding member of Mississippi’s White Citizens Council. Despite mounting evidence against him—a rifle found near the crime scene was registered to Beckwith and had his fingerprints on the scope, and several witnesses placed him in the area—Beckwith denied shooting Evers. He maintained that the gun had been stolen, and produced several witnesses to testify that he was elsewhere on the night of the murder.   The bitter conflict over segregation surrounded the two trials that followed. Beckwith received the support of some of Mississippi’s most prominent citizens, including then-Governor Ross Barnett, who appeared at Beckwith’s first trial to shake hands with the defendant in full view of the jury. In 1964, Beckwith was set free after two all-white juries deadlocked. After Beckwith’s second trial, Myrlie Evers moved with her children to California, where she earned a degree from Pomona College and was later named to the Los Angeles Commission of Public Works. Convinced that her husband’s killer had not been brought to justice, she continued to search for new evidence in the case. In 1989, the question of Beckwith’s guilt was again raised when a Jackson newspaper published accounts of the files of the now-defunct Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, an organization that existed during the 1950s to help raise popular support for the maintenance of segregation. The accounts showed that the commission had helped lawyers for Beckwith screen potential jurors during the first two trials. A review by the Hinds County District Attorney’s office found no evidence of such jury tampering, but it did locate a number of new witnesses, including several individuals who would eventually testify that Beckwith had bragged to them about the murder. In December 1990, Beckwith was again indicted for the murder of Medgar Evers. After a number of appeals, the Mississippi Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of a third trial in April 1993. Ten months later, testimony began before a racially mixed jury of eight blacks and four whites. In February 1994, nearly 31 years after Evers’ death, Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died in January 2001 at the age of 80. In 1995, Myrlie Evers-Williams (she is now remarried and lives in Oregon) was elected chairwoman of the board of directors of the NAACP. She is currently a member of the board’s executive committee.

From Scientific American:

Genetic material once dismissed as mere “junk” may in fact be responsible to the evolution of simple invertebrates into more complex organisms sporting backbones, according to a new study. Tiny snippets of the genome known as microRNA were long thought to be genomic refuse because they were transcribed from so-called “junk DNA,” sections of the genome that do not carry information for making proteins responsible for various cellular functions. Evidence has been building since 1993, however, that microRNA is anything but genetic bric-a-brac. Quite the contrary, scientists say that it actually plays a crucial role in switching protein-coding genes on or off and regulating the amount of protein those genes produce.

(Picture: The lamprey, the jawless fish that represents one of the earliest vertebrates, has several more microRNAs than the proto-vertebrate sea squirt).

Now, researchers from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and the University of Bristol in England report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that these tiny genetic segments could be responsible for the evolution of animals with backbones, noting that they found a surfeit of microRNA in the genomes of the earliest vertebrates, such as lampreys (jawless fish), when compared with invertebrates like sea squirts.

More here.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, John Allen Paulos has sent us the following expanded excerpt from his new book Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up:

I found myself at loose ends in a beach town in Thailand on Christmas morning, 2006. Away from my family in Philadelphia, I was visiting a friend who was planning an early retirement in Southeast Asia. While wandering near the edge of town, I spotted a spirit house, a sort of miniature temple mounted on a pedestal like a bird house. Although irreligious, I noted the fruit offerings strewn around it and was attracted to its makeshift beauty.

Pausing at the shrine, I saw a small Internet café just beyond it, empty except for three nubile young women who were giggling and periodically running up to one or another of the many computers in the room. The desire for my morning Diet Coke, the need to check my email, and the palpable mirth bubbling out of the women drew me into the place.

Despite the goings-on, I first took care of my caffeine and correspondence demands. Soon, however, I noticed there were Webcams on all the computers. It was obvious that the young women were multi-tasking, sending instant messages and occasional pictures in quick succession to nine farangs (Thai for Western foreigners) scattered around the world.

Feeling unmoored and a bit voyeuristic, I eavesdropped and soon gleaned that the girls had met the men on their earlier trips to Thailand. (Perhaps sexist-sounding, “girls” nevertheless seems the more apt term for them.) I noted with amusement that when new pictures of their admirers appeared on the various monitors, the girls would chortle, and the English “expert” among them would write something endearing. The three girls would then quickly move on to the samey (Thai for boyfriend or husband) of another of the girls. Each girl seemed to have three.

Seeing my obvious interest, the girls started to ask me what certain words in the e-mails meant. “Sawatee (hello), Mr. Diet Coke, what ‘pine for you’ mean?” I explained that “pine for you” meant “miss you very much,” that “obsessed with you” meant “think about you all the time,” and so on. The men seemed strangely oblivious to the girls’ limited English vocabulary. They also seemed lovesick, lonely, and mooning over their “true loves” at Christmas.

After I proved myself as a translator, the girls asked me what else they could say. I suggested that they write how lonely the beach was without their boyfriends and helped them a bit with their spelling. My lines elicited good responses from their sameys, causing them to laugh uproariously. They pumped me for more good lines, which I happily provided. The girl who had distractedly taken my money for the Diet Coke now offered me another one gratis as well as various coconut candies, which I accepted, and some fried insects, which I declined.

Christopher Moore, A Bangkok-based novelist whose compelling mysteries are set in Thailand, once jokingly remarked to me that Thai has no common word or phrase to describe integrity of a rigid, abstract type, but many frequently used terms for “fun.” And great fun it was helping the girls dupe farangs on three continents out of their money via the Western Union office in town. (Perhaps “dupe” is the wrong word since I think the bargain was a fair one and inexpensive at that: a Yuletide fantasy for a few dollars.)

Read more »

Cosma Shalizi and Brad DeLong share some thoughts on appropriate professorial attire. Cosma:

I have just had one Prof. Erik M. Jensen’s op-ed “A Call for Professional Attire” referred to me by multiple sources (none especially pointedly, thanks), and I find myself greatly irritated.  Jensen says that contemporary American academics generally fail to dress up, in the modes that are supposed to reflect seriousness and status, and spends about 2000 words bemoaning this; longing for a lost “golden age” (his phrase); and trying to ridicule, brow-beat, and shame his audience into complying with his wishes.  The closest he comes, in all of this, to present an actual reason for doing so is saying this: “People generally act better when they’re dressed right. If a professor is sending a signal of seriousness, of civility, students will pick it up.”  This is backed up by a casual, second-hand reflection on how “in DiMaggio’s day … [t]he men wore white shirts and ties under coats and hats, the proper attire in public, even at a ball game.”

This is a style of cultural commentary which drives me up the wall, so I try to avoid it.  It is not that hard to think of an actual rationale for what Jensen wants; it would go something like this.

DeLong:

A professor’s clothes–supposed to lie somewhere on the spectrum between total nudity and the purple-red dress of a Byzantine emperor–need to serve four purposes:

1. To make the appropriate people envy, in an appropriate way, the professor’s (actual or counterfactual) spouse.
2. To make the professor comfortable.
3. To make the students more willing and eager to learn.
4. To take a particular stand on the great debate between the courtier Lord Chesterfield on the one hand and the intellectual Samuel Johnson on the other, summed up in Johnson’s remark that Chesterfield’s fashion-centered advice to his illegitimate son taught the boy “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master.”

I will pass over (1) as requiring a knowledge of evolutionary biology and a working aesthetic sense–which disqualifies me on both counts. I will pass over (2) as requiring a knowledge of biological thermodynamics which I do not have, save to observe that the traditional tweedy professor male academic clothes are, from a thermodynamic point of view, appropriate only for some British or New England campus without effective central heating.

Tina Beattie in openDemocracy:

Nowhere in the lecture does Williams call for the implementation of sharia law – though this has become the default assumption underlying the febrile controversy the talk and its accompanying media coverage almost instantly generated. Rather, he asks how it might be possible for the civil law to accommodate some of the legal procedures by which Muslim communities in Britain have traditionally regulated their relationships and financial affairs, while safeguarding the equality and human rights afforded by modern law for vulnerable inidividuals (particularly women) within those communities. He reiterates several times that it would be important to ensure that “no ‘supplementary’ jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights.” He also points out that there is already provision in English law for Jewish and Christian communities to have some autonomy over the governance of their religious affairs, without thereby putting themselves outside the law.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

[N]ow the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has cited the Beth Din [Jewish arbitration courts] as one of his reasons for believing that sharia, or Islamic law, can and should become a part of what he called “plural jurisdiction” in Britain. His reasoning, if one may call it that, is clear: Other faiths already have their own legal authorities, so why not the Muslims, too? What could be more tolerant and diverse? This same argument has been used already, and will be used again, to demand that laws governing “blasphemy,” originally written to protect only Christians from being upset, should now, in a nondiscriminatory way, be amended to cover Muslims as well. The alternative—don’t have any blasphemy laws and let religious people’s feelings be hurt, just as the feelings of the secular are regularly offended by religion—doesn’t occur to the archbishop and people who think like him.