Regis Debray in the New Left Review:

Consider the debt owed by socialist writing to the epistolary art: Marx and Engels worked out half their theories in letters, and virtually all their political activity had to pass through a pillarbox; the First International was conceived by Marx as a central correspondence bureau of the working class. Nowadays the militants socialize more and know less of each other’s ideas. More conversation means less controversy. The telephone destroyed the art of correspondence, and in the process diminished the moral stature of attempts at rational systematization; email has not restored it. Rarely do we pick up the phone to impart a complex sequence of principles and themes: we use it to chat. The general discourse has become indexed to the trappings of intimacy and private life. The cellphone, internet, laptop and plane are good for internationalization, but they render solidarity less organic—lethal for internationalism. They enlarge the sphere of individual relations but privatize them at the same time; they particularize even as they globalize. The cellphone is a permanent one-to-one. It drives the universal from our heads.

The crisis for socialism, then, is that even if it can resume its founding principles it cannot return to its founding cultural logic, its circuits of thought-production and dissemination. The collapse of the graphosphere has forced it to pack up its weapons and join the videosphere, whose thought-networks are fatal for its culture. A practical example: to find out what is going on one has to watch tv, and so stay at home. A bourgeois house arrest, for beneath ‘a man’s home is his castle’ there always lurks, ‘every man for himself’. The demobilization of the citizen begins with the physical immobilization of the spectator.

Sarah Coakley in the Harvard Divinity Bullentin:

What then are the three problems that confront us when we try to see a coherent relation between a good, providential deity and the unfolding created process? First, there is the issue of how we should understand the relation of God’s providence to prehuman dimensions of creation and their development. Second, there is the issue of how God’s providence can relate to the specific arena of human freedom and creativity. Then third, there is the problem of evil, the question of why what happens in the first two realms manifests so much destructiveness, suffering, and outright evil, if God is indeed omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent.

Why does modern evolutionary theory intensify these problems? They were, after all, already confronted and tackled with some sophistication in classical Greek philosophy and in early Christian thought, and refined further in the much-ramified discussions of high scholastic medieval theology. But modern Darwinian evolutionary theory appears: (a) to underscore the contingency or randomness of evolutionary “mutation” and “selection,” and thus to render newly problematic the possibility of a coherent divine guidance of precultural revolution; (b) to bring further into question the compatibility of divine providence with the human “freedom” of the “cultural evolution” stage, given the deterministic and reductive assumptions of much evolutionary theory, bolstered more recently by genetic accompaniments to the original Darwinian vision (“freedom” now looks little more than an “elbow room” within a predetermined nexus—so Daniel Dennett; yet, paradoxically, one represented in much modern thought as straining toward an autonomous “will to power” that would precisely compete with, and cancel, an undergirding divine impetus); and thus (c) modern evolutionary theory appears to intensify the problem of evil intolerably. If God is, after all, the author and “sustainer” of the destructive mess and detritus of both precultural and cultural evolutionary processes, why is she so incompetent and/or sadistic as not to prevent such tragic accompaniments to her master plan? If intervention is an option for God, why has he not exercised it?

What is God like? Is he merciful, just, loving, vengeful, jealous? Is he a bodiless force, a cool watchmaker, or a hot interventionist, a doer with big opinions, a busy chap up in Heaven? Does he, for instance, approve of charity and disapprove of adultery? Or are these attributes instead like glass baubles that we throw against the statue of his invisibility, inevitably shattering into mere words? The medieval Jewish thinker Maimonides thought that it was futile to belittle God by giving him human attributes; to do so was to commit what later philosophers would call a category mistake. We cannot describe his essence; better to worship in reverent silence. “Silence is praise to thee,” Maimonides wrote, quoting from the second verse of Psalm 65.

Whatever one thinks of Maimonides’ chilly rigor, it is cannily paradoxical that even as he advises silence he quotes from the noisiest book in the Hebrew Bible. And, not only that, but from the very book that dramatizes, again and again, the gap between our language and the indescribable God, between our certainty that God is with us and our anxiety that he has abandoned us, between his cosmic proportions and our comic littleness.

more from The New Yorker here.

In 1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The critic-subject responded with modest evasiveness, and then a proviso: ‘I will express only one opinion: effigy absolutely full-face – do you agree?’ Signac did not agree. Five months later, the best-known image of Fénéon emerged: in left profile, holding top hat and cane, presenting a lily to an off-canvas recipient (homage to an artist? love-gift to a woman?) against a circusy pinwheel of dashing pointillist colour. Fénéon, whether from vanity or critic’s pique at the artist’s disobedience, strongly disliked the image, commenting that ‘the portraitist and the portrayed had done one another a cruel disservice.’ He accepted the picture, however, and kept it on his walls until Signac died some 45 years later. But neither that event, nor the passing of time, mellowed his judgment: in 1943 he told his friend and future literary executor, the critic Jean Paulhan, that it was ‘the least successful work painted by Signac’.

more from the LRB here.

Trevor Butterworth in the Financial Times:

I get writers to sign their books,” says Louis Auchincloss, reaching up to a shelf of immaculate first editions. Just shy of his 90th birthday, he is now the “grand old man” of American letters – older than Norman Mailer (84), Gore Vidal (82), Tom Wolfe (77), John Updike (75) and Philip Roth (74) – and in rude health, apart from his hips, the only act of betrayal wrought by age. He is alone – his wife Adele, an artist and a commissioner of New York’s public parks, died in 1991. Their three sons are grown up, and he has a granddaughter just starting at Yale.

He is confined to his apartment atop a solid 14-storey building on 90th and Park Avenue, one of the red-brick repository boxes of old money and old New York. The Upper East Side, the golden mile of American power and privilege, is to his south and west. It is this world, the locus of power and privilege for much of America’s history, that he has chronicled and dissected for 60 years, and now he is shut off from it until after his surgery. Bored, and decidedly irritated by his confinement, he turns energetically to the past.

“There’s the Bonfire,” he says, taking down Wolfe’s tumultuous novel of financial decadence and racial tension in 1980s New York, and opening the cover to reveal a dedication as outsize as the dandified author – a florid script of copperplate curls and Gothic abutments written with a nib the size of a small paintbrush. “It’s a marvellous book,” Auchincloss says in a patrician accent of broad “a”s and reedy “r”s that in its natural, inherited form has all but disappeared from America, “but not everyone thinks so.”

More here.

Matthew Bunn in American Scientist:

William Langewiesche has the reputation of being one of America’s best investigative reporters. Unfortunately, he has written a very bad book on nuclear proliferation. Although The Atomic Bazaar does include some useful reporting, it is marred by substantive errors and misjudgments. There are no footnotes, and almost all the quoted sources are anonymous, making it difficult for the reader to judge the credibility of Langewiesche’s conclusions and of his interlocutors’ statements. Worse, if policy makers were to accept his major theme—that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable and there is little hope in trying to stop it—they would not take the actions needed to make the world a safer place.

The Atomic Bazaar is a modest elaboration on three articles by Langewiesche that appeared this past winter in The Atlantic Monthly. If you have read the articles—which discuss nuclear terrorism and outline A. Q. Khan’s role in building Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and in leading a global black-market network that supplied dangerous nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea—you will not gain a great deal from the book.

More here.

Ruchira Paul at Accidental Blogger:

We are familiar with the evolution vs creationism (masquerading as Intelligent Design) debate that has plagued several school districts, resulting in the Kansas School Board injecting ID in the science curriculum and Dover, PA succeeding in keeping it out by taking the school board to court. What we may not know are the behind the scenes shenanigans mounted by creationists to push their religious agenda down the throats of an unwitting public. Dr. Forrest has worked tirelessly to fend off the efforts by religious extremists to corrupt science education in her own state of Louisiana and elsewhere. She appeared as an expert witness for the prosecution in the Dover, PA ID ( Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District) case where a group of parents took the school board to court to keep it from introducing religion based creationism in the science curriculum. The outcome happily was a verdict for sanity and against obscurantism. Dr. Forrest was recently honored with the American Society of Cell Biology’s Public Service award for her work in support of science education and biomedical research.

More here.

David Margolick in Vanity Fair:

During the historic 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, 26-year-old journalist Will Counts took a photograph that gave an iconic face to the passions at the center of the civil-rights movement—two faces, actually: those of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on her first day of school, and her most recognizable tormentor, Hazel Bryan. The story of how these two women struggled to reconcile and move on from the event is a remarkable journey through the last half-century of race relations in America.

More here.  [Thanks to Beajerry.]

Jeff Strabone in his eponymous blog:

A lot of obvious arguments have been rolled out against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University yesterday: that he’s a hatemonger, a Holocaust denier, a homophobe, and so on. These are all valid criticisms of the man, for he is all those things. He certainly did his credibility no help yesterday with these remarks, reported by the BBC:

‘Asked about executions of homosexuals in Iran, Mr Ahmadinejad replied: “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”

Reacting to laughter and jeers from the audience he added: “In Iran we don’t have this phenomenon, I don’t know who you told this.”‘

Universities have a special place in public life. They are the one place where intellectual freedom is taken most seriously. That is not to say that universities ought to invite rude individuals with bad ideas to speak, but it is understandable that they sometimes do.

Despite all of that, Columbia was wrong to allow Ahmadinejad on its campus, and it’s not because he hates Jews, gays, and men with stylish haircuts. There are surely members of the Columbia community—faculty and students alike—who hold these and other prejudices. And it’s not because he has blood on his hands. If that were the rule, it would be hard to find an important figure in world politics who qualified. Besides that, we might not agree on which international bloodletters were terrorists and which were freedom fighters. No, there is an even more fundamental reason than that: Ahmadinejad is the enemy of universities.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

Having assumed the title of this very slight novel to be drawn from the famous stage direction in Hamlet, I was quite braced for some Rothian reflections on the Oedipal, with plenty of reluctant and dutiful visits to wheezed-out Jewish fathers in the wilderness of postindustrial New Jersey, and to the grisly wives and mothers who had drained them dry and made them into husks. But the reference is actually to another sort of father figure: a dead and almost-forgotten writer called E. I. Lonoff, who had been a hero and mentor to the young Nathan Zuckerman. According to Lonoff’s relict, a terminal brain-cancer patient named Amy Bellette, the great man had once instructed her to take down the following aperçu: “Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era.”

By the time that he encounters this rather ordinary valediction, which occurs in the second half of the book, Zuckerman has been revealed as highly disposed to hear it. He has been stuck on the top of a Massachusetts mountain for 11 years, seeing almost nobody and ignoring the news and, by the sound of it, not getting much work done. His prostate has turned against him in a big way, forcing him to wear Pampers and to endure the regular humiliation of feeling sodden. Returning to New York in the hope of an operation to repair his urinary arrangements (a hope that proves vain), he is geezerishly astonished by the prevalence of cell phones and by the general cultural barbarity. But this feeling of nausea and alienation is by no means enough to quell his excitement when he notices one of those apartment-swap ads in the New York Review of Books, and sees that some young couple wants a place just like his in the rural fastnesses.

Am I by any chance boring you? I promise that I have done my best to put a light skip into this summary of a weary trudge. Roth’s own method of alleviation we can see coming a mile off: The female half of the want-ad couple will turn out to be a fox, offering the ghost of a chance that Zuckerman’s flaccid and piss-soaked member can be revived. And so it proves.

More here.

From Nature:

It’s not easy making a human. Getting from a fertilized egg to a full-grown adult involves a near-miracle of orchestration, with replicating cells acquiring specialized functions in just the right places at the right times. So you’d think that, having done the job once, our bodies would replace cells when required by the simplest means possible. Oddly, they don’t. Our tissues don’t renew themselves by mere copying, with old skin cells dividing into new skin cells and so forth. Instead, they keep repeating the laborious process of starting each cell from scratch. Now scientists think they know why: it could be nature’s way of making sure that we don’t evolve as we grow older¹.

Evolution is usually thought of as something that happens to whole organisms. But there’s no fundamental reason why, for multicelled organisms, it shouldn’t happen within a single organism too. In a colony of single-celled bacteria, researchers can watch evolution in action. As the cells divide, mutants appear; and under stress, there is a selective pressure that favours some mutants over others, spreading advantageous genetic changes through the population. In principle, precisely the same thing could occur throughout our bodies. Our cells are constantly being replaced in vast numbers: the human body typically contains about a hundred trillion cells, and many billions are shed and replaced every day. If this happened simply by replication of the various specialized cells in each tissue, our tissues would evolve: mutations would arise, and some would spread. In particular, mutant cells that don’t do their specialized job so well tend to replicate more quickly than non-mutants, and so gain a competitive advantage, freeloading off the others. In such a case, our wonderfully wrought bodies could grind to a halt.

More here.

Bob Lane in Metapsychology:

Since the Dover trial [Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District] in 2005 there has been an enormous interest in the conflict between the religious right and the science of biology. The entire transcript of that landmark trial is available from the ACLU website.  That trial was to have been the endgame for the Intelligent Design effort to get creationism into the biology classrooms of the USA by re-describing creationism and dressing it up as science. The effort failed very publicly in that trial and the transcript is well worth reading to get a real sense of the conflict and of the fact that no matter how the ID folks dress their  product it is definitely not science. About that the Judge was clear.

The best way to give readers a sense of the book under review is to list the ten chapters which are bracketed by an introduction and an afterword:

1. Survival of the Fittest
2. It’s Just a Theory
3. The Ladder of Progress
4. The Missing Link
5. Evolution is Random
6. People Come From Monkeys
7. Nature’s Perfect Balance
8. Creationism Disproves Evolution
9. Intelligent Design is Science
10. Evolution is Immoral

Each chapter provides, in a clear and intelligent manner, the arguments for and against the idea or claim of the chapter title.

More here.

Four years ago today one of the brightest lights of the intellectual and moral realms was extinguished. Here’s an homage by Mahmoud Darwish writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in 2005:

New York. Edward awakes while dawn slumbers on. He plays an air by Mozart. Tennis on the university court. He reflects on thought’s ability to transcend borders and barriers. Thumbs through the New York Times. Writes his spirited column. Curses an orientalist who guides a general to the weak spot in an eastern woman’s heart. Showers. Drinks his white coffee. Picks out a suit with a dandy’s elegance and calls on the dawn to stop dawdling!

He walks on the wind. And, in the wind, he knows himself. No four walls hem in the wind. And the wind is a compass for the north in a foreign land.

He says: I come from that place. I come from here, and I am neither here nor there. I have two names that come together but pull apart. I have two languages, but I have forgotten which is the language of my dreams. I have the English language with its accommodating vocabulary to write in. And another tongue drawn from celestial conversations with Jerusalem. It has a silvery resonance, but rebels against my imagination.

And your identity? Said I.

His response: Self-defence . . . Conferred on us at birth, in the end it is we who fashion our identity, it is not hereditary. I am manifold . . . Within me, my outer self renewed. But I belong to the victim’s interrogation.

Were I not from that place, I would have trained my heart to raise metonymy’s gazelle there . . .

More here. And see also brilliant remembrances of Edward Said at 3QD by Akeel Bilgrami here and Asad Raza here. My own post on the first anniversary of Edward’s death is here, and contains links to tributes by many others.

And this is David Price in CounterPunch:

How the FBI Spied on Edward Said

In response to my request under the Freedom of Information Act, filed on behalf of CounterPunch, the FBI recently released 147 of Said’s 238-page FBI file. There are some unusual gaps in the released records, and it is possible that the FBI still holds far more files on Professor Said than they acknowledge. Some of these gaps may exist because new Patriot Act and National Security exemptions allow the FBI to deny the existence of records; however, the released file provides enough information to examine the FBI’s interest in Edward Said who mixed artistic appreciations, social theory, and political activism in powerful and unique ways.

Most of Said’s file documents FBI surveillance campaigns of his legal, public work with American-based Palestinian political or pro-Arab organizations, while other portions of the file document the FBI’s ongoing investigations of Said as it monitored his contacts with other Palestinian-Americans. That the FBI should monitor the legal political activities and intellectual forays of such a man elucidates not only the FBI’s role in suppressing democratic solutions to the Israeli and Palestinian problems, it also demonstrates a continuity with the FBI’s historical efforts to monitor and harass American peace activists.

More here.

Helmut in Phronesisiacal:

Today is the great William Faulkner‘s birthday. Born on this date in 1897, he died in 1962.

Years ago, I was browsing an antique store in the small Texas town of Bryan. I have an interest in rare books and first editions. Antique stores are sometimes good places to find them because their books are often priced for a general market based on the factor of being old, rather than priced for the specialized market of the rare books world. In the Texas antique store, I came across a first edition of Nobel laureate Faulkner’s late novel A Fable. I bought it for a dollar or two and was pleased with the find – Faulkner is one of my favorite American writers.

After buying it along with some other books I noticed that the letter in it, which I had taken to be a simple bookmark, was postmarked from Oxford, Mississippi. June 25th, 1956. Faulkner was raised in Oxford and made it his home town until the end of his life (Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County).

I opened the envelope and read the letter (below). The letter itself, dated June 20th, is mostly rather banal. One Mrs. Owens (I don’t know who she is/was) writes to Faulkner asking for the source of the quote, “…but that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead.” The quote itself is fairly famous, at least for its influence on other writers, and is worth examining in its own right for its embedded moral claim about moral boundaries.

More here.

Tony Karon in Time:

New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, had criticized Columbia for hosting Ahmadinejad, warning that “All he will do on that stage … is spew more hatred and more venom out there to the world.” Not quite. Despite the harsh words of his host, Bollinger, Ahmadinejad stayed on message, appearing relaxed, reasonable, open, even charismatic. Whether or not American TV audiences are seduced is beside the point, because Ahmadinejad’s primary audience is not American. The provocations of his New York visit are an integral part of his domestic political strategy, which depends on his ability to hold America’s national attention with an unapologetically nationalist message about Iran’s nuclear rights, lecturing them about God and their aim to run the world.

It was pure political ju-jitsu, using the momentum of your adversaries to your own advantage. The protestors got him on TV, and he used the platform to grandstand for the folks back home.

More here.  [Thanks to Saifedean Ammous.]

Short video:

Full transcript of talk:

REMARKS BY PRESIDENT OF IRAN MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD

MODERATOR: JOHN COATSWORTH, ACTING DEAN, SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, COLUMBIA, UNIVERSITY INTRODUCTION BY LEE BOLLINGER, PRESIDENT, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

1:50 P.M. EDT, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2007

(Note: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comments are through interpreter.)

MR. BOLLINGER: I would like to begin by thanking Dean John Coatsworth and Professor Richard Bulliet for their work in organizing this event and for their commitment to the School of International and Public Affairs and its role — (interrupted by cheers, applause) — and for its role in training future leaders in world affairs. If today proves anything, it will be that there is an enormous amount of work ahead of us. This is just one of many events on Iran that will run throughout the academic year, all to help us better understand this critical and complex nation in today’s geopolitics.

My longtime mentor and friend Akeel Bilgrami is a brilliant lecturer and I highly recommend attending his upcoming talk:

Tuesday, 2nd October 2007 8:00 pm
New York Academy of Medicine 1216 Fifth Avenue (at 103rd Street)

“Unconscious mental conflict and our democratic culture”

Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University:

Freud’s notion of the unconscious presupposes as a “conceptual prior”, the idea of a divided or conflicted mind to account for our irrational behaviour and our  neuroses and anxieties. That one of the conflicted segments of the mind should be unconscious, and that indeed the internal mental conflict itself should be unconscious, is a further empirical hypothesis of Freud’s, as are the various specific claims about the unconscious sexual aetiology of our neuroses and anxieties and irrational behaviour.

A primary and sustained interest of Abram Kardiner was to apply psychoanalytic ideas to the study of culture and society and politics. In this lecture, bearing his name, I will present an analysis of the religiosity of the heartland in contemporary America in terms of the idea of a divided mind and of an unconscious internal mental conflict in ordinary people to cope with the pervasive disenchantment of American modernity; and through this analysis I will  explore the scope and the nature of our democratic culture.

Akeel Bilgrami received his first degree in English literature at Bombay University and then went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he got a B.A in philosophy, politics, and economics. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago, where he wrote a dissertation on the indeterminacy of translation. He is currently Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and the Director of Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities. He is the author of Belief and Meaning: The Unity and Locality of Mental Content (Blackwell 1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard University Press, 2006), Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity (forthcoming 2007, Harvard University Press), and is presently writing a book on Gandhi’s philosophy. Professor Bilgrami has also written over fifty articles on subjects ranging from the philosophy of language and mind to politics, culture and moral psychology.

If “The Mathematician’s Brain” does not answer the questions it poses, this is because no other book has answered these questions either. The book’s value lies in Mr. Ruelle’s description of the curious inner life of mathematicians. Their subject is very difficult. It requires unusual gifts. Physicists may disguise the triviality of their results by bustling about in large research groups. Mathematicians work alone. They are professionally naked.

As a result, many mathematicians have unstable personalities. Alexandre Grothendieck is an extreme example. His is hardly a household name, especially in the English-speaking world. Yet for the 15 years between 1958 and 1973, Mr. Grothendieck dominated the field of algebraic geometry and ruled like a prince over a court comprising some of the most talented mathematicians in the world. His immense treatise on algebraic geometry is, as Mr. Ruelle observes, the last great mathematical oeuvre written in the French language.

more from the NY Sun here.

The Greeks may have written wonderfully about desire, but Catullus was the first classical poet to write about the joy and heartbreak of relationships. And Ovid left us a detailed, scandalous, hilarious, cynical, explicit and still user-friendly handbook on how to go about finding, and keeping, the man or woman of our dreams.

This fabulous poem, the Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love, was first published around the time that Jesus Christ was teething. And it’s still up to the job better than the stuff in the self-help section of the local bookshop.

more from The Guardian here.

“We used to have a system in which we forgot things easily and had to invest energy in remembering,” says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Now we’re switching to a system in which we remember everything and have to invest energy in order to forget. That’s an enormous transformation.”

Jorge Luis Borges envisioned the risks of perfect memory in his famous story “Funes the Memorious,” about a man gifted with unlimited recall, and paralyzed by it. Perhaps not even Borges, however, could have imagined our present capacity to accumulate and preserve memory in digital form – or the powerful impact it is already having on individual lives, as temporary indiscretions become part of the permanent record. “What you do online is potentially there forever,” says Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “Delete if you want; ask Google to take down that one unflattering photo – but it’s still saved, archived, somewhere.”

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.