Nicolas Pelham in MIL:

Like many students of the Middle East, I am still haunted by Edward Said 41 years after he wrote “Orientalism”. The seminal book argued that Western academics, writers, artists and journalists had been agents of European soft power for over two centuries, constructing an image of the East that was exotic and therefore in need of taming. Orientalists’ art, literature, maps and artefacts reinforced the superior mindset of colonialists and whetted the appetite of Western governments to invade and possess Eastern nations, according to Said. His ideas shook up coverage of the Middle East years before I began working as a journalist in the region, but I wrote racked with guilt. On one of my first assignments in Egypt, the British embassy in Cairo flew me with the then British prime minister, John Major, to visit the war cemeteries that Britain tends for soldiers killed fighting in the deserts of El Alamein during the second world war. It was a privilege rarely afforded to a young reporter and they expected a puff piece. I returned with a report about irate locals demanding Britain give up control of a site commemorating battles between two invading European armies on Egyptian soil. I titled it “Egypt for the Egyptians”.

Since the publication of “Orientalism” in 1978 many museums and art galleries have hidden away their collections of desert landscapes, desolate ancient ruins and other memorabilia from 19th-century tours of the Orient. A new exhibition at the British Museum attempts to cast off the guilt and shame. Its neutral title – “Inspired by the East: how the Islamic world influenced Western art” – seems to strip art of political baggage. “We’re hoping to move beyond Said,” explains a curator. The exhibition hopes to highlight the quality of Orientalist art, presenting it as a more sincere – and surprising – cultural exchange.

The curators are right that Orientalism is more complex and blurred than Said believed.

More here.

Abha Bhattarai in The Washington Post:

At Least

Adam Shatz in The New Yorker:

Twice a month, when my daughter, Ella, spends the weekend with me, my apartment turns into a cooking school. Ella is thirteen and started to make cookies and scones a few years ago. She moved on to tarts, fresh tagliatelle, and, lately, croissants. Early on Saturdays, before heading to our local green market, we have impassioned conversations about her dinner plans. Pork adobo with citrus and coriander, she asks me, or red lentils simmered Ethiopian-style, with fresh tomatoes and berbere? And then she’s sure to ask if she can bake. I’m already thinking of the scabs of flour I’ll be scraping off my counter on Monday morning, and of how much pâtisserie I’ll have consumed, but I give in. I love watching the skill and authority of her fingers in a bowl of flour, eggs, butter, and chocolate; her intensity as she pipes ganache from a pastry bag or dusts éclairs with finely ground pistachios.

When she’s not cooking, she often watches shows like “Chef’s Table,” the sumptuously produced Netflix series featuring sombre, admiring portraits of culinary stars. With painterly cinematography and introspective voice-overs, “Chef’s Table” pays professional cooks the kind of homage once reserved for artists. Most of the dishes are impossible to replicate in a home kitchen—who has the time to make Enrique Olvera’s thousand-day mole, or even find all the ingredients?—but Ella doesn’t watch the show for recipes. She watches it for the spectacle of mastery, much as other teens hang out on YouTube watching Lionel Messi’s greatest goals or Yuja Wang playing “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

The show’s self-serious musings on the mysteries of food make me cringe a bit, but I was once fluent in that idiom. From the time I was nine until well into my teens, I was determined to be a chef. I ran a catering business out of my parents’ house, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and did apprenticeships with notable chefs.

More here.

Aaron Timms in The New Republic:

Did he change, or did we? For weeks now, Nate Silver has been morphing before our eyes into exactly the kind of bloviator he made his name mocking. Tired perhaps of the slow and predictable business of prognostication—the elections so far apart from each other, the long months of waiting and lousy web traffic in between—the founder of data journalism outlet FiveThirtyEight has transformed his Twitter account into a font of provocatively bad opinions. Some of Nate’s Takes have touched on his speciality in data-based political forecasting: He has told us, for instance, not to get too excited about Democratic candidates’ (read: Bernie’s) fundraising numbers because polls, rather than cash, are the best predictor of electoral success, whereas a year ago he was saying just the opposite. But he has also wandered into more exotic territory, offering up a mix of bad policy ideas (elite colleges should admit as many legacy students and children of rich donors as they want) and sanctimonious tone policing (liberals should feel ashamed of themselves for not allowing the president to revel in the murder of ISIS’s chief lieutenant) with the unyielding, over-the-spectacles glare of an imaginary Concerned of Brooklyn Heights.

Terry Eagleton at The Guardian:

Other intriguing details abound. When Notre Dame was being built in medieval Paris, a collective of prostitutes offered to pay for one of its windows and dedicate it to the Virgin Mary. Followers of Satan around the same time were obliged to suck on the tongue of a giant toad and lick the anus of a black cat. Galileo had a craving for celebrity and was an inveterate social climber. Yet, though the book is full of such titbits, there is a seriousness at its heart. Holland argues that all “western” moral and social norms are the product of the Christian revolution. He is haunted by St Paul’s claim that God chose the weak and foolish things of the world to shame the strong, and to drive the point home he might have looked at the beginning of Luke’s gospel. We encounter there an obscure young Jewish woman called Mary who is pregnant with Jesus, and Luke puts into her mouth a cry of praise that some scholars believe is a Zealot chant. It speaks of how you will know who God is when you see the poor coming to power and the rich sent empty away. It is this which must be weighed in the balance against the killing fields of Christendom.

more here.

Andrew Marzoni at The Baffler:

Adorno was known for his skill at anticipating apparent contradictions, gymnastically reframing objections to his theses as their necessary conclusions, and he would not have been shocked by the cultural capital afforded his byline any more than the ongoing devaluation of the art he held above all else. An insufferable elitist who championed art for refusing to conform to the standards of public consumption, his bad takes on jazz—attributing its popularity to sadomasochism, comparing the jitterbug to St. Vitus’s dance—are lamented, and sometimes excused for their ignorance: the only jazz Adorno knew, which he pronounced more like “yatz,” was the kind played by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and increasingly derivative (mostly Caucasian) dance bands that entertained the Weimar bourgeoisie. As Stuart Jeffries notes in Verso’s Grand Hotel Abyss, Adorno spent the 1940s only a few miles from the clubs on Central Avenue where Dexter Gordon, Eric Dolphy, and Charles Mingus inaugurated a bop renaissance on the West Coast, but there’s no record of the critic going anywhere near them. According to New Yorker critic Alex Ross, Adorno “shows no sympathy for the African-American experience, which was finding a new platform through jazz and popular song. The writing is polemical, and not remotely dialectical.”

more here.

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

Agnès Varda’s film “Varda by Agnès,” which is being released posthumously, on Friday (she died in March, at the age of ninety), is her retrospective of her own career, punctuated by deep dives into her personal life and newly filmed sidebars of interviews and self-displaying theatrics. Yet it’s more than just Varda’s last movie; it’s the last scene of her last act, the capper to a twenty-year span of work that includes some of her most original and significant films. At the same time, this period in her career and her life coincides with a shift in the history of cinema that she helped to define and that she responded to with a practical inspiration that is a mark of her historic art. That very story is one that she tells in “Varda by Agnès.”

Varda relies on a pair of public discussions to structure the overview of her career. The first hour leaps around, juxtaposing her films from different decades and circumstances by way of her insightful thematic connections, and ends at a crucial waypoint in her life: her last dramatic feature, which she made in the mid-nineteen-nineties.

more here.

Hannah Giorgis in The Atlantic:

Hala, the new film from the writer-director Minhal Baig, is a study in contrasts. The coming-of-age story follows its titular protagonist, a Pakistani American teenager played by Geraldine Viswanathan, as she navigates the confusion of adolescence in the United States. The divides she encounters are apparent almost immediately: parents versus classmates; Pakistan versus America; Islamic tenets versus romantic freedom. Hala skateboards to school and writes poetry. She also clashes with her strict mother and father, who chide her relentlessly for any number of activities her white friends speak about with casual disregard.

Movies about teens fighting with their parents are nothing new. But in examining the binaries that 17-year-old Hala confronts, Baig’s film joins a growing group of films and TV shows centered on young Muslim characters in America. Like some prior productions, including Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series Master of None and Kumail Nanjiani’s romantic comedy The Big Sick, Hala has received criticism for featuring yet another protagonist who has a fraught relationship with Islam and who sees her white love interest as one key to self-actualization. Capturing an entire community’s relationship to their religion is a staggering mandate, one that’s impossible for any one production (or two or three) to achieve. As a result, Hala is sharpest when viewed on its own terms—that is, in the way many coming-of-age films about white teens are. The film stands out most for its deft character work with Hala and her parents, especially when it doesn’t treat the trio as case studies for sweeping ideas about Muslim identity.

More here.

Aaron Kheriaty in The Scientist:

On June 9, 2016, a law permitting physician-assisted suicide went into effect in California. The same day, Dr. Lonny Shavelson, an emergency medicine physician, opened the Bay Area End of Life Options clinic to provide the newly legal service. A longtime activist for the cause, Shavelson’s interest began in adolescence. In an interview last year, he describes how, when he was fourteen, his severely depressed mother “enrolled me in pacts for her death.” Despite acknowledging that her request was “pathological,” he eventually chose to become a doctor “not only to help her in her illness but also to help her die.” In his 1995 book A Chosen Death, Shavelson recounted underground assisted suicides he witnessed. In one case, “Sarah,” the leader of a local advocacy group, took an especially active role when “Gene,” an elderly, partially paralyzed alcoholic man, asked for help with ending his life. But things did not go as planned, when Gene jolted awake in the middle of the process:

“It’s cold,” he screamed, and his good hand flew up to tear off the plastic bag. Sarah’s hand caught Gene’s at the wrist and held it. His body thrust upwards. She pulled his arm away and lay across Gene’s shoulders. Sarah rocked back and forth, pinning him down, her fingers twisting the bag to seal it tight at his neck as she repeated, “The light, Gene, go toward the light.” Gene’s body pushed against Sarah’s. Then he stopped moving.

Shavelson watched, frozen with ambivalence at whether to intervene. He did not.

Shavelson seems to have taken away from this event a sense of the dire need for reliable methods for ending life. Ignorance of these methods, he argued in last year’s interview, was much of what motivated doctors to oppose assisted suicide:

Everybody I talked to said we don’t know how to do this. So we don’t agree with it. And over time, what’s wonderful to watch is how patients have been the leading force…. As [hospices] started getting patient requests, they couldn’t just keep saying no. Hospices are fundamentally a loving and caring and responsive organization.

He and his colleagues have thus made themselves “ambassadors,” training physicians around the state on proper suicide methods to meet patient demand. As of last November, Dr. Shavelson and his staff had been at the bedside of 114 people whose suicides they assisted.

More here.

Kunitzieform

Did you know T. S. Eliot wore eye shadow
sometimes, I asked Stanley, and he chuckled—one
gurgle in the bubble chamber
of the spirit level—and his eyes had that sensual
brightness, and his big, fleshless, elegant
hand lifted, and soared over, and dropped,
a couple of times, on the back of my hand, like
being patted by matter. I didn’t
know that, he musicalled up.
Someone said he’d dust his lids
with green, so someone would say, “Are you
okay, Tom,” and Stanley said,
It’s a hard way to go about doing that,
and I rubbed the heel of my hand over the rough
nest-material of Stanley’s tweed
sleeve, and said, You have a generous heart, I
sometimes laugh at Eliot for that, like some
kind of revenge on his politics—
what about you, Stanley, what were your
feelings about him? And Stanley
drew on time, and space, he drew on
his powers, and their sleep, and their dreams, he worked,
like God not resting on the sixth day,
and then, when his thought was done, he turned his
long, loping engine toward the task
of telling it, word by word. He said, I was,
and paused—I love to pause with him, on the
long boat, our hands trailing in the
water of a hundred years—I was,
pause, pause, we breathe in,
Read more »

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

I have recently been informed that I am “outside of the sociology” of academic philosophy. (The person who said this of me is someone I like and admire, and whose presence on the scene I value, very much.) I think this means, for one thing, that I do not display a number of the shibboleths that are commonly used by members of the clan to identify other members, like Vikings with their brooches. Sometimes this is because I refuse to display them, and sometimes this is because I am unaware that they exist.

One of the most common shibboleths, of which I have been aware since grad school, is that one must ostentatiously grumble about all those times when strangers, for example seat neighbors on airplanes, innocently ask “what [your] philosophy is”. One is supposed to complain to fellow clan members that hoi polloi do not even know that a true philosopher does not “have a philosophy”, all while delicately avoiding use of a term like “hoi polloi” that might make explicit the class-based nature of this disdain.

Here’s the thing though: I do have a philosophy, and I like being asked what it is. So this is two strikes against me in my already contested petition for residence within the sociology of philosophy (a residence I had too casually assumed permanent when I got my Ph.D. and went out into the world and just kept doing philosophy). But when I explain what my philosophy is, rather than simply acknowledging that I have one, that’s when I really risk being taken for an outsider. Here we are not talking about a mere shibboleth or vocational tic, but about which of the historical legacies of philosophy we wish to see carried over into the future.

More here.

Helen Thomson in New Scientist:

The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma – such as a gunshot or stab wound – and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that they would normally survive.

EPR involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15°C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body – which would otherwise be classified as dead – is moved to the operating theatre.

A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted.

More here.

Arundhati Roy in The Nation:

In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves. An accurate description runs the risk of sounding like hyperbole. And so, for the sake of credibility and good manners, we groom the creature that has sunk its teeth into us—we comb out its hair and wipe its dripping jaw to make it more personable in polite company. India isn’t by any means the worst, or most dangerous, place in the world—at least not yet—but perhaps the divergence between what it could have been and what it has become makes it the most tragic.

Right now, 7 million people in the valley of Kashmir, overwhelming numbers of whom do not wish to be citizens of India and have fought for decades for their right to self-determination, are locked down under a digital siege and the densest military occupation in the world. Simultaneously, in the eastern state of Assam, almost two million people who long to belong to India have found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and risk being declared stateless.

More here.