In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called “What is the Good of Criticism?” This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, “passion . . . raises reason to new heights.” A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge” a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire’s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us “to love wisely what we before loved well.”

By “pleasure” and “love” Baudelaire and Fuller didn’t mean that critics should write only about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that a critic’s emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, is the sine qua non of criticism, and it usually, therefore, determines the critic’s choice of subject. Who can doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literature—and that, to him, it simply mattered more than most other things in life?

more from Boston Review here.

Sometimes we think we know something, but we know it only in the most abstract way, which means we may not know it at all.

I can’t say it better than one of Daniel Mendelsohn’s travelling companions does toward the end of this powerful work of investigative empathy: “The Holocaust is so big, the scale of it is so gigantic, so enormous, that it becomes easy to think of it as something mechanical. Anonymous. But everything that happened, happened because someone made a decision. To pull a trigger, to flip a switch, to close a cattle car door, to hide, to betray.”

Others have grappled with this problem: how do you tell the story of the Holocaust in a way that encompasses both its vast geopolitical and its intimately personal dimensions? On the one hand, for instance, there is “The Destruction of the European Jews,” Raul Hilberg’s portrait of the continentwide project of genocide, which includes everything from railway schedulers to Zyklon B gas manufacturers. And there is “The War Against the Jews,” Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s invaluable account of the origins of the extermination in the perpetrators’ ideology. On the other hand there are the memoirs of survivors like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, along with numerous less well-known but no less affecting personal accounts. There is also an entire “second generation” literature, both memoirs and novels by children of victims who testify to the enduring questions the Holocaust has left behind, questions about the nature of human nature and the perplexities of theodicy — the relationship of God to the evil visited upon the innocent. There are novels about attempting a new life in the aftermath, like Isaac Bashevis Singer’s icy masterpiece, “Shadows on the Hudson,” and jarring, unconventional works like Art Spiegelman’s “Maus.”

more from the NY Times here.

From the Daily Times of Pakistan:

The coveted Sword of Honour for best all-round performance was claimed by Aviation Cadet Saira Amin, who made history by being the first woman pilot to have won the Sword of Honour in any defence academy of Pakistan.

The passing out parade of the 117th GD (P) course, which includes the second batch of three women pilots, was held at the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) Academy, Risalpur Air Chief Marshal Tanvir Mahmood Ahmed, PAF chief of air staff, was the chief guest. The trophy for best performance in general service training and the Chief of Air Staff Trophy for best performance in flying were lifted by Aviation Cadet Squadron Under Officer Nadir Ali. The Asghar Hussain Trophy for best performance in academics was achieved by Aviation Cadet Saira Amin. Squadron No 3 received the Quaid-e-Azam Banner for being the champion squadron.

Also in Boston Review, Michael J. Piore and Andrew Schrank on how a labor inspection system can ease dislocations and other human costs of free markets.

The operation of the labor market affects workers concretely and immediately, and hence is a flashpoint for clashes between social forces and economic exigencies. While many of the policies promoted by the Washington Consensus are only now beginning to encounter determined resistance, Polanyi’s second movement has been underway for some time in the labor market—and labor-law reform therefore constitutes something of a Waterloo for the forces of neo-liberalism. In fact, the labor-law reforms anticipated by proponents of the Washington Consensus have not only been “limited to a few countries,” according to Eduardo Lora and Ugo Panizza of the Inter-American Development Bank, but have arguably been more likely to expand than to curtail the scope of worker protection. For example, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic have rededicated themselves to labor-law enforcement in recent years. And potentially more fundamental reforms are underway from Argentina, where they are motivated by domestic party politics, to Central America, where they are a product of transnational pressures emanating from the campaign for a U.S.–Central America Free Trade Agreement.

The results are neither trivial nor cosmetic. In the 1990s the Chileans hired new inspectors and thereby doubled the size of their enforcement division. And the Dominicans not only tripled the size of their own enforcement division but simultaneously adopted new hiring criteria—including legal credentials and competitive examinations—as well as wage and employment guarantees. By the early 21st century, therefore, one of the Dominican Republic’s least reputable regulatory agencies had been transformed into a model of administrative reform, and the island nation’s inspectors were fanning out across the region to impart their lessons to their neighbors.

In the Boston Review, Henry Farrell on what “netroots” can mean for American democracy.

The “netroots”—an Internet grass roots that has set out to change the Democratic Party—are often maligned. These progressive bloggers and their readers, who emerged as an influential group during Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, are increasingly depicted as a sinister movement under the dictatorial control of Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder of the prominent political blog Daily Kos. The New York Times columnist David Brooks writes that Kos “fires up his Web site . . . and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way.” The New Republic senior editor Lee Siegel (now suspended) warns portentously of the dangers of “blogofascism,” a movement bearing worrying similarities to the Fascist forces that transformed post–World War I Europe into a “madhouse of deracinated ambition.” When the netroots aren’t Nazis, they’re proto-Stalinists: Jonathan Chait sees them as heirs of the “McGovernite New Left,” possessed of the same “paranoid, Manichean worldview” and “humorless rage” as extreme-left radicalism.

These claims are hysterical to the point of near-incoherence. They’re also wrong. The netroots are becoming a power in the Democratic Party, but they aren’t under the control of any one person or clique. And while many netroots bloggers describe themselves as progressive, they are generally not leftists in the conventional sense. Certainly they aren’t committed to any program of fundamental political and economic reform. As Benjamin Wallace-Wells and Bill McKibben have both documented, the netroots aren’t complaining that the Democratic Party isn’t radical enough; they’re complaining that it’s losing elections. Netroots bloggers don’t share a common ideology. If they are united by anything, it is their harsh criticism of the Republican Party, their shared anger at the Democratic Party’s failures, and their rough analysis of how it could do better.

Brad DeLong takes exception to Duncan Foley’s new book, Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology.

It must be a theology book, for Duncan Foley has worked a miracle, a dark miracle. He has created in me–me! J. Bradford DeLong!!–something that I thought would never happen: the desire to say something good about Jean-Baptiste Say.

Foley has done this with a book that claims that Adam Smith holds to a:

P. 3: moral fallacy… urges us to accept direct and concrete evil in order that indirect and abstract good may come of it… [while] neither Smith nor any of his successors has been able to demonstrate rigorously and robustly [how]…. Smith’s rationalization… requires… wholesale denial of the real costs of capitalist development…

Let’s get this clear. Foley thinks that it is immoral to weigh “indirect and abstract” goods that come from capitalist development against “direct and concrete costs”: that doing so is “wholesale denial of the real costs of capitalist development.” That is what Foley calls “Adam[ Smith]’s Fallacy.”

Amitava Kumar was to introduce Salman Rushdie at a lecture Rushdie delivered to Vassar’s freshman class. But Rushdie insisted that he’d cancel or that he’s not share the stage if that happened. Amitava on the affair, and his never delivered introduction, over at his blog:

Salman Rushdie came to Vassar College earlier this week to deliver a lecture to the Class of 2010–but he made it clear to the organizers that he would cancel if I was involved in his visit. I had earlier been asked to introduce him, and then, well, I was disinvited. Mr Rushdie and I have never met, although I have heard him speak several times. I presume his dislike of me has to do with essays like this that I have written about him in the past. I cannot say whether he has read my Passport Photos but it’d be fair to say that the book takes its cues from Rushdie. It was from him that we really learned to show some attitude. When I say “we” I’m talking of many contemporary Indian writers in English. But we have also sought our own paths, and in doing so we’ve also sometimes sought to renounce our past, the past in which Mr Rushdie looms so monumentally. I don’t know whether I could’ve usefully involved the freshmen at Vassar in a public discussion of any writer’s troubled relationship with his or her forbears; nor am I certain how much they (or, for that matter, our honored guest) would’ve valued a dissection of the ways in which criticism must survive in the world. But despite those uncertainties, I very much feel that an opportunity has been lost. In any case, here’s a part of what I had intended to say in my introduction…

Rushdie responds in the comments.

From The New York Times:

Now, just in time for the midterm elections, the collected columns of two passionate Bush critics, Lewis H. Lapham and Sidney Blumenthal, are landing in bookstores. Both, to varying degrees, suffer from a distorting case of Bush-phobia. Lapham’s “Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration” is by far the more trying of the two. The editor emeritus of Harper’s Magazine and its Notebook columnist for more than 25 years, Lapham compares the Bush administration to a “criminal syndicate” and Condoleezza Rice to a “capo.” He likens the United States to “a well-ordered police state” and the policies of its Air Force to those of Torquemada and Osama bin Laden. He calls Bush “a liar,” “a televangelist,” “a wastrel” and (ultimately) “a criminal — known to be armed and shown to be dangerous.”

More here.

From Science:

The still life on the cover of this week’s issue of Science is not a photograph but a computer-generated rendering of five famous mathematical surfaces. The result, created by Richard Palais of the University of California, Irvine, and graphic artist Luc Benard, is a virtuoso display of modern computer-graphics technology. (Notice how the glassy surfaces are reflected in one another and in the glass-covered, wood-grained tabletop.)

The image is the first-place winner in the illustration category of the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. As Benard and Palais wrote in their application, “Mathematicians have always needed to ‘see’ the complex concepts they work with in order to reason with them effectively. In the past, they conjured up mental images as best they could, but the wonders of computer graphics provide them with far more detailed pictures to think with.”

More here.

“Oh it’s terrible,” Cunningham says – and laughs. “I would like to dance.” He really means it. But, at 87, he is sitting in a wheelchair, his expressive hands are creased with the marks of age, and his body – once so erect and graceful – seems to have folded in on itself. However, his hair still falls in exotic curls, his eyes are steady, and his gentle voice is clear and sure. Each day, after rising and making little pencil drawings of animals (“a wonderful way of getting out of your own head, nothing to do with art”), he takes rehearsals at his company’s studio in New York – for over half a century perhaps the most important modern dance company in the world. Three simple but revolutionary ideas helped forge Cunningham’s methods: first, that dance need not be made “to” the music, but could have a separate existence; second, that dance need not signify or refer to anything else, but could simply “be itself”; third, Cunningham along with Cage pioneered the use of chance procedures in making work – the I Ching (the ancient Chinese book of divination), or, for example, throws of the dice, which might be used to determine the sequence of a set of movements.

more from Guardian Unlimited here.

The rabble loves cruelty. One of the witnesses in Shimon Redlich’s book describes Poles murdering Ukrainians, grabbing children by their feet and throwing them against a wall or cutting the throat of an Orthodox priest with a saw. As Mendelsohn writes, the notion that it is harder to kill those whom you know than it is to kill a total stranger may be too optimistic. We’ve recently seen that to be the case in former Yugoslavia, where neighbors murdered neighbors with whom they had lived in harmony for decades. Where does the idea of collective guilt, which excuses any crime, derive from? Is it religion that is the culprit, nationalism, ethnocentrism, all of which have constant need for enemies, or just simple malice? I suspect it is all of these. Human indifference to suffering and the pleasure of inflicting it are common; the only surprise is that we have no convincing explanation for it. Mendelsohn agrees. Why some people choose to do evil, while others follow their conscience, is something for which no one has a good answer. Of course, there’s also a third category of people, the silent majority, who close their eyes and listen to the birds sing while the children of their neighbors are having their heads bashed in.

more from Charles Simic at the New York Review of Books here.

In Slate, a look at the various national versions of Ricky Gervais’ The Office and what the fact of so many variants tells us about humor.

According to legend, in Denmark during World War II, border guards would screen homecoming Danes by making them say aloud the name of the Danish dessert rødgrød med fløde—berry pudding with cream. (To approximate the sound of these words, say them while gargling and whistling.) Apparently, even the craftiest Danish-seeming German infiltrator could not pass this simple test. The Danish ear recognized its own.

I was reminded of this shibboleth recently while watching two foreign sitcoms patterned on the exultantly depressing hit BBC comedy The Office—a mockumentary chronicle of the drudgery, rivalries, and wan romances in an office headed by a blowhard slacker boss. The show, which was created in 2001 by Ricky Gervais (who plays the boss, David Brent) and Stephen Merchant, has been exported to 80 countries (as-is or dubbed) and has proved popular in most of them, including this one, where it ran on BBC America.

In France, however, the dubbed version sank like a lead ballon when it aired two years ago. But when a BBC-licensed French remake, Le Bureau, debuted on French television last month—starring the sly, puffy-faced French comedian François Berléand as the useless Gilles Triquet—critics hailed it as a succès fou. Meanwhile, a German imitator, Stromberg, in which the boss is a high-strung, homophobic alcoholic, won the German Comedy Prize’s best actor award last winter for its director and star, Christoph Maria Herbst.

Ron,

I’m a longtime admirer of your work and am thrilled that you have written a book about Shakespeare. Why don’t we dive right in?

The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups is a conversion narrative. Once you were a young literary intellectual whose preference was for the poetry of John Donne. Then, you saw Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and your life, as you report it, changed. That night in 1970, you write that you “felt as if [you] were imbibing the pure distilled essence of exhilaration.” You soon add, “And I did fall in love that night” and still later: “One night in Stratford, England, something strange happened to me watching Peter Brook’s Dream. Something I haven’t recovered from.” Your book, however, is not one long, ecstatic valentine to Shakespeare. Your conversion led you to believe in Shakespeare’s “bottomlessness,” as you put it, his unique ability to repay infinite rereadings; but it also led you, of all things, to scholarship—to the arcane textual controversies that have animated Shakespeare studies for hundreds of years. On the one hand, then, your book is a joyous appreciation; but on the other, it is a fine piece of reportage on the scholarly infighting behind the scenes in Shakespeare studies.

more of the disucssion from Slate here.

There was once supposed to have been a city, located not far from Niagara Falls, where 60 million people lived in 24,000 apartment buildings, each 25 stories tall. In Metropolis, as the city was named, the apartment buildings were arranged in a regular pattern and served as the central hubs or cogs around which life there revolved. Short, neatly landscaped walkways connected the buildings together and led to wider and longer avenues that crisscrossed through the city. Schools, recreation and amusement centers, flower conservatories, parks as ample as they were well-planted, and buildings for food production and storage clustered around every apartment building, each of which accommodated about 2,500 people in comfort and high style. According to the city’s creator, “the most magnificent modern hotel in New York could not compare in beauty of its rooms and liberality of its service with any one of these thousands of buildings of Metropolis.” … Metropolis never did exist, however, except in the elaborate and detailed pages of The Human Drift, an 1894 utopian tract by King Camp Gillette.

more from Cabinet here.

Recognized as a brilliant political analyst, beginning with his work in the nineteen-sixties for Reuters and then for the New York Herald Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor, and, finally, as a Time correspondent for eleven years, Pham Xuan An seemed to do his best work swapping stories with colleagues in Givral’s café, on the old Rue Catinat. Here he presided every afternoon as the best news source in Saigon. He was called “Dean of the Vietnamese Press Corps” and “Voice of Radio Catinat”—the rumor mill. With self-deprecating humor, he preferred other titles for himself, such as “docteur de sexologie,” “professeur coup d’état,” “Commander of Military Dog Training” (a reference to the German shepherd that always accompanied him), “Ph.D. in revolutions,” or, simply, General Givral.

We now know that this is only half the work An did as a reporter, and not the better half. An sent the North Vietnamese a steady stream of secret military documents and messages written in invisible ink, but it was his typed dispatches, now locked in Vietnam’s intelligence archives and known to us only through secondhand reports, which will undoubtedly rank as his chef d’oeuvre. Using a Hermes typewriter bought specially for him by the North Vietnamese intelligence service, An wrote his dispatches, some as long as a hundred pages, at night. Photographed and transported as undeveloped rolls of film, An’s reports were run by courier out to the Cu Chi tunnel network that served as the Communists’ underground headquarters.

more form the amazing story in The New Yorker from last year here.
ABC bio, obit here.

In Nature:

Imagine that five American nurses and a British doctor have been detained and tortured in a Libyan prison since 1999, and that a Libyan prosecutor called at the end of August for their execution by firing squad on trumped-up charges of deliberately contaminating more than 400 children with HIV in 1998. Meanwhile, the international community and its leaders sit by, spectators of a farce of a trial, leaving a handful of dedicated volunteer humanitarian lawyers and scientists to try to secure their release.

Implausible? That scenario, with the medics enduring prison conditions reminiscent of the film Midnight Express, is currently playing out in a Tripoli court, except that the nationalities of the medics are different. The nurses are from Bulgaria and the doctor is Palestinian.

For back ground on the case, see here.

Mukhtar Mai writes a blog for women’s justice in Pakistan (in Urdu). From the BBC, some excerpts in English:

1 July 2006

I came back to my village, Mirwala, (after a trip to Poland) and was devastated to hear what had happened in a nearby village, Wadowala.

A nine-year-old girl, Naseem Bibi, had been abused. Not just that, but another girl had been promised to be handed over to settle the dispute arising over the incident.

I was devastated to hear this.

Here I was talking about women’s rights abroad but what about my own neighbourhood?

I was really disappointed and worried. How long will this continue?

But then I thought, oppression of women has to end. Instead of losing heart, I need to keep fighting.

(Here, you can find the blog in Urdu.)

In Scientific American:

Fans of hip hop music are likely to have had more sexual partners in the last five years while many of those who prefer classical strains will have tried cannabis, according to a study released on Thursday.

Psychologist Adrian North from the University of Leicester surveyed 2,500 Britons to find out how their musical tastes related to their lifestyles and interests.

He said the results showed said it was possible to discover clues about what people were like simply from the music they liked.

Almost 38 percent of hip hop devotees and 29 percent of dance music fans were more likely to have had more than one sexual partner in the last five years compared to just 1.5 percent of country music fans.

[Hat tip: Steven Balis.]

From Time:

Last week, many Muslims in India, like their counterparts around the world, gathered on the streets to burn effigies of the Pope and shout slogans denouncing him for his remarks on Islam and violence. Even before that fully died out, however, a new controversy erupted — one that has turned Muslim ire against some of their own local clerics.

India’s “cash-for-fatwas” scandal broke out last weekend when a TV channel broadcast a sting operation that showed several Indian Muslim clerics allegedly taking, or demanding, bribes in return for issuing fatwas, or religious edicts. The bribes, some of which were as low as $60, were offered by undercover reporters wearing hidden cameras over a period of six weeks. In return for the cash, the clerics appear to hand out fatwas written in Urdu, the language used by many Muslims in Pakistan and India, on subjects requested by the reporters. Among the decrees issued by the fatwas: that Muslims are not allowed to use credit cards, double beds, or camera-equipped cell phones, and should not act in films, donate their organs, or teach their children English. One cleric issued a fatwa against watching TV; another issued a fatwa in support of watching TV.

Adding to the shock in India, home to the world’s third-largest Muslim population (approximately 150 million), is that some of the clerics apparently caught in the sting operation teach at important institutions — one belongs to India’s most famous Islamic seminary, the Darul Uloom at Deoband.

More here.

From MSNBC:

After a long day spent socializing or learning who to flirt with, scientists say fruit flies need to sleep longer, shedding light on what sleep may actually do for humans. Sleep remains a mystery. To delve into why people need to sleep, neurogeneticist Indrani Ganguly-Fitzgerald at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, Calif., and her colleagues Paul Shaw and Jeff Donlea at Washington University in St. Louis experimented with fruit fly genetics and behavior.

“Flies do most things that humans do—they eat, they sleep, they fight, they mate, they forage for food,” Ganguly-Fitzgerald told LiveScience. Just as is often the case with humans, flies sleep a lot as young ones, sleep little as they get older, and “stay awake more after being fed caffeine and become sleepy in response to anti-histamine compounds,” she said.

One idea scientists have about sleep is that our brains require it to process what we experienced during the day. The researchers found normal fruit flies that were allowed to socialize took hour-long daytime naps, compared to 15-minute catnaps taken by the isolated insects.

Their need for sleep grew with the size of the group they socialized with.

More here.