Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books:

[T]he problem with Mad Men is that it suffers from a hypocrisy of its own. As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust and hourglass hips, as it languorously follows the swirls of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, as the clinking of ice in the glass of someone’s midday Canadian Club is lovingly enhanced, you can’t help thinking that the creators of this show are indulging in a kind of dramatic having your cake and eating it, too: even as it invites us to be shocked by what it’s showing us (a scene people love to talk about is one in which a hugely pregnant Betty lights up a cigarette in a car), it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us, too. For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us anything of real substance about the world it depicts.

Most of the show’s flaws can, in fact, be attributed to the way it waves certain flags in your face and leaves things at that, without serious thought about dramatic appropriateness or textured characterization. (The writers don’t really want you to think about what Betty might be thinking; they just want you to know that she’s one of those clueless 1960s mothers who smoked during pregnancy.) The writers like to trigger “issue”-related subplots by parachuting some new character or event into the action, often an element that has no relation to anything that’s come before. Although much has been made of the show’s treatment of race, the “treatment” is usually little more than a lazy allusion—race never really makes anything happen in the show.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Some dictators don’t know how to talk. They know how to speak, of course. They are able to use language. They utter words, but they don’t say anything. Hosni Mubarak, the current president of Egypt (at least at the time of this writing) recently made a speech in an attempt to quell the street protests and demands for an end to his despotic regime.

You might say it was an airy speech, draped in the finery of general principles, wafting lightly on the breeze of abstraction. He uttered sentences such as, “There is a fine line between freedom and chaos and I lean toward freedom for the people in expressing their opinions as much as I hold on to the need to maintain Egypt's safety and stability.” That's a truly amazing sentence. My favorite part is when Mubarak lets us in on his own deepest feelings and commitments. Mubarak “leans toward” freedom for the people. But wait. He leans toward the freedom of the people only as much as he “holds onto” the need to curtail that freedom in the name of safety and stability. In fact, the sentence ends up denying the very thing it started to affirm. It cancels itself. We know nothing, at the end of the sentence, about what Mubarak intends to do. We don't even really understand where he draws the line between freedom and chaos. He gives no opinion on accusations that he runs a corrupt and despotic regime. The people of Egypt have accused Mubarak of failing them and he responds with thin abstractions about the nature of freedom and chaos. Rarely, in fact, did Mubarak directly address the people of Egypt at all in his speech. It was a speech ejected over the heads of the people, launched from the room of an interior ministry somewhere, to be immediately filed away in a drawer labeled “Speeches to Suppress Civil Discontent and Remind the People of the Glorious Future, 2011.”

The tin ear and woolly mouth of this dictator is rather amusing given the fact that the very word “dictator” comes from the Latin verb “dicere,” meaning “to speak.”

More here.

As the 1948 war which led to the creation of Israel was in full gear, a campaign was under way to steal Palestinians’ cultural patrimony. Israeli forces entered vacant Palestinian homes and removed over seventy thousand books, newspapers, and manuscripts which ultimately led to the premature death of a Palestinian literary and cultural movement. When Benny Brunner, a Dutch-Israeli filmmaker, discovered this hidden chapter of history and its implications, he decided the story must be told, the books a heritage that must be returned. In a war which led to the creation of seven hundred and fifty thousand refugees and a simmering conflict running for over sixty years, stolen books may seem like a trifle compared to other kinds of loss—lost homes, lost lives. But books, as the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges illustrated so well in his stories, almost literally contain the world. Brunner’s film The Great Book Robbery is the latest in a line of documentaries in which he challenges the Zionist narrative, a narrative he sees as dangerous and counterproductive. Where better to find a counter-narrative if not in the lost books of Palestine?

more from Benny Brunner at Guernica here.

The term ‘secular’ and its conceptual affiliates are doing a lot of work in misrepresenting the uprising in Egypt. ‘Secular’ politics has been taken to mean ‘good’ politics (limited democratization, stability, and support for the peace treaty with Israel), and ‘Islamic’ politics is being translated as ‘bad’ politics (the myriad dangers allegedly posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies). Accounts of the current situation in Egypt are handicapped by an inability to read politics in Egypt and Muslim-majority societies outside of this overly simplistic and politically distorting lens. The indiscriminate association of the secular with good governance stabilizes an understanding of Islam as that which is not secular. It also, and perhaps even more dangerously, perpetuates the idea of the secular as the natural domain of rational self-interest and universalist ethics. Secular politics comes to stand as the opposite of Muslim politics and as the natural counterpart to all other dimensions of politics that don’t fit comfortably within the categories of rational self-interest or universalist ethics. This is a powerful and capacious category. Beyond securing itself in distinction to Islam, the secular thereby comes to ground and secure a place for the good, rational, and universal, which is opposed to any number of irrational particularisms, aberrations, and variations.

more from Elizabeth Shakman Hurd at Immanent Frame here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

One thing that religions typically do — although certainly not the only one — is to make claims about how the world works. How important are those claims to what religion really is, and how we should think about it?

PZ Myers has posted a very interesting letter from Stephen Asma that talks about this issue. Asma earlier wrote a critique of New Atheism in the Chronicle of Higher Education, to which PZ responded, but I think the new letter is more interesting than the previous salvos. Russell Blackford has also chimed in.

This is a very healthy discussion to be having — moving a bit beyond the caricatures of atheism by believers, and of religion by atheists. Much of what Asma says I find quite persuasive. The crux is something like this:

My argument is that religion helps people, rightly or wrongly, manage their emotional lives. And while it doesn’t do very much for me and other skeptics (I prefer art), I would be very inattentive if I failed to notice how much relief and comfort it gave to other people.

Asma wants to consider the aspects of religion that are closer to those of art or literature than those of science. There’s no question that religions have beneficial effects along with their bad ones. If we’re being rational about it, we should try to understand how those effects work, even if our only agenda is to find some sort of acceptable substitute.

More here.

Scott Atran in the New York Times:

Ever since its founding in 1928 as a rival to Western-inspired nationalist movements that had failed to free Egypt from foreign powers, the Muslim Brotherhood has tried to revive Islamic power. Yet in 83 years it has botched every opportunity. In Egypt today, the Brotherhood counts perhaps some 100,000 adherents out of a population of over 80 million. And its failure to support the initial uprising in Cairo on Jan. 25 has made it marginal to the spirit of revolt now spreading through the Arab world.

This error was compounded when the Brotherhood threw in its lot with Mohamed ElBaradei, the former diplomat and Nobel Prize winner. A Brotherhood spokesman, Dr. Essam el-Erian, told Al Jazeera, “Political groups support ElBaradei to negotiate with the regime.” But when Mr. ElBaradei strode into Tahrir Square, many ignored him and few rallied to his side despite the enormous publicity he was receiving in the Western press. The Brotherhood realized that in addition to being late, it might be backing the wrong horse. On Tuesday, Dr. Erian told me, “It’s too early to even discuss whether ElBaradei should lead a transitional government or whether we will join him.” This kind of flip-flopping makes many Egyptians scoff.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

From EmersonKent.com:

Mr. President and Gentlemen:

It would in some measure relieve my embarrassment if I could, even in a slight degree, feel myself worthy of the great honor which you do me today. Why you have called me from the Black Belt of the South, from among my humble people, to share in the honors of this occasion, is not for me to explain; and yet it may not be inappropriate for me to suggest that it seems to me that one of the most vital questions that touch our American life, is how to bring the strong, wealthy and learned into helpful touch with the poorest, most ignorant, and humble and at the same time, make the one appreciate the vitalizing, strengthening influence of the other. How shall we make the mansions on yon Beacon street feel and see the need of the spirits in the lowliest cabin in Alabama cotton fields or Louisiana sugar bottoms? This problem Harvard University is solving, not by bringing itself down, but by bringing the masses up. If through me, an humble representative, seven millions of my people in the South might be permitted to send a message to Harvard — Harvard that offered up on death's altar, young Shaw, and Russell, and Lowell and scores of others, that we might have a free and united country, that message would be, Tell them that the sacrifice was not in vain.

Tell them that by the way of the shop, the field, the skilled hand, habits of thrift and economy, by way of industrial school and college, we are coming. We are crawling up, working up, yea, bursting up. Often through oppression, unjust discrimination and prejudice, but through them all we are coming up, and with proper habits, intelligence and property, there is no power on earth that can permanently stay our progress.”

More here.

Amitava Kumar in The Caravan:

If you type the words “Gujarat riots” into Google Images, the photographs that pop up include the following: Narendra Modi, burnt children, houses on fire, men armed with swords, and the face of a young woman I had met, during the months following the 2002 riots, in the Darya Khan Gumbat relief camp in Ahmedabad.

Her name was Noorjehan. When I saw her in the camp I recognised her from a photograph I had seen in the papers, the same photograph that was now appearing on my screen. When I asked what had happened to her, she said that her pets were killed on the first day of the riots. Then, she began to speak about herself. She said that when the crowd came there were about seven or eight hundred of them, filling the streets. She had been watering the plants in her garden. Noorjehan used the English word “flowers.” She was watering her flowers when several men entered her house, hit her on the head with a sword, and then gang-raped her. Later, a young niece had to pull Noorjehan from the fire set by her assailants before they left her.

I came across Noorjehan’s photograph again the other night because I had written a short piece for The Indian Express, about an Urdu poet in Gujarat, and I was looking for an image to accompany my article. I had written about the Urdu poet, whose poems about the riots offered a testimony of survival. But the sight of Noorjehan’s face made my stomach turn. I suddenly remembered what the little girls at the Shah-e-Alam camp had told the six female members of a fact-finding team when asked if they understood the meaning of the word balatkaar (rape). A nine-year-old gave this reply to the visiting women: “Mein bataoon Didi? Balatkar ka matlab jab aurat ko nanga karte hain aur phir use jala dete hain.” (“Shall I tell you, Didi? Rape is when a woman is stripped naked and then burnt”.)

And it was in this mood, then, that I settled back in my chair and looked at the picture of Narendra Modi on my monitor.

More here.

John Protevi interviews Justin Smith at the APPS blog:

Today's interview is with Justin E. H. Smith, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ from January through June 2011. His new book, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life has just appeared with Princeton University Press (2011). His website is here.

John Protevi: Thanks very much for doing this interview with us, Justin. Your book is subtitled “Leibniz and the Sciences and Life,” yet in the Introduction you also write that you will look at Leibniz in relation to “what we would now call 'biology'.” Why the scare quotes on “biology”?

Justin Smith: I don't take those as scare quotes so much as marks signaling a use-mention distinction. One of my guiding principles in the book was, to the extent possible, to respect actors' categories, to avoid using names for concepts, practices, or entities that would not have been familiar to the people I was writing about; and 'biology', for example, makes its first appearance only in the late 18th century.

JP: fair enough. What is at stake in this use-mention distinction for you in writing in the genre of history of philosophy? (If that is indeed the genre in which you would place your work.)

JS: This is not just terminological quibbling: it is rather a necessary part of working one's way back into the problems that early modern philosophers faced, rather than allowing ourselves to update their problems so that they come out as more familiar to our own world of concerns than they in fact are. I certainly take this task to be a necessary and incontrovertible part of history-of-philosophy scholarship. The branch of philosophy that interests me is what was called at the time 'natural philosophy', which would later be sliced off and partitioned into biology, chemistry and other concrete 'sciences'. If we take actors' categories seriously, then, when we do the history of biology or chemistry we are willy-nilly doing the history of philosophy.

More here.

Brodsky’s poetry is both addictive and exasperating. Addictive because, never satisfied, the reader keeps going back for more; exasperating because it eludes every attempt to pin it down. What was he saying? Russians like to remind you that the October Revolution was no sudden break with a feudal past, that the previous twenty years had seen significant changes: a new liberalism, industrial advance and so on. Culturally, of course, these years saw extraordinary achievements in music, art and literature that hardly need enumerating. The poets of the ‘Silver Age’ are read, both there and here, more widely than ever before, now that everything is available: Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva (a great favourite with Brodsky). There’s a continuity here, a renewal of the tradition. It was Mandelstam who spoke of a ‘nostalgia for world culture’. Brodsky (1940-96), raised in some of the hardest times, shared this nostalgia. When the thaw came, with the worst constraints removed, he was somewhere else. He too was a provincial, or so he claimed, in search of world culture, hence all those poems set abroad (Rome, Paris, London). He insists on his provincialism: ‘I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland.’

more from Derek Mahon at Literary Review here.

This is the subtext behind the schemes of Dennis Chamberland and all the aspiring Atlantians throughout history. The reason to build new colonies undersea or in space or other terra incognita is not because we can, not even because we must, but because this is the next logical step in advancing civilization. Contrary to what some might believe, Utopians, broadly speaking (and this goes for both Chamberland and Donnelly), like civilization. They like technology. They don’t see civilization as fundamentally flawed, either continually improving as it goes or so flawed that it will one day, mercifully, end forever. Utopians love civilization but they think it gets banged up and needs to be remade every so often. Civilization is like a favorite wig — nice until it doesn’t sit right anymore and then you’ve got to toss it out and get a fresh one. It’s no mistake either that the Atlantis story, as it is now understood, sounds so much like the story of Noah’s Ark (Atlantis = Antediluvian World), or that Donnelly and Chamberland look at the ocean as a powerful entity that is fundamental to civilization and yet also has the power to renew it by first destroying it. Chamberland never talks about the destruction of Earth. On the contrary, he wants his undersea colonists to be Americans, to live under U.S. rules. It makes perfect sense. The secret whispers of redemption and renewal in Chamberland’s efforts are right in line with all the American idealists that have come before him. “We are not running away from anything,” he writes, “but instead are running toward the new dominion of man.” It could have been written by Donnelly himself, but also by the Shakers, or Thoreau, or any number of the founding fathers. Perhaps if we understand “Why?” and “How?” there’s only question left: “When?”

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Pentimenti

“Pentimenti of an earlier position of the
arm may be seen.”—Frick Museum

It's not simply
that the top image
wears off or
goes translucent;
things underneath
come back up
having enjoyed the
advantages of rest.
That's the hardest
part to bear, how
the decided–against
fattens one layer down,
free of the tests
applied to final choices.
In this painting,
for instance, see how
a third arm––
long ago repented
by the artist­­––
is revealed,
working a flap
into the surface
through which
who knows what
exiled cat or
extra child
might steal.

by Kay Ryan
from The Best Of It
Grove Press, 2010

From Science:

While continuing to teach and do research in physical organic chemistry, our native field, we — the authors of this Perspective — independently began to investigate the discipline’s history. By the 1980s, this avocation became a professional commitment. Given the coincidence of our interests and backgrounds, we went in search of a topic we could collaborate on. Meanwhile, one of us (Weininger) had become a chemistry editor of the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, writing an entry on Paul Bartlett, America’s premier 20th century physical organic chemist (and Gortler’s Ph.D. supervisor). In the course of examining Bartlett’s papers in the Harvard University Archives, Weininger came across a file for Lawrence Knox, a name familiar to decades of students studying organic reaction mechanisms. Knox was the graduate student co-author of a 1938 paper (access may require a site license or ACS membership), with Bartlett, that immediately became a classic. What Knox’s file revealed — and what hardly any of the readers of his paper knew — was that Knox was African American. We had found our topic.

As we delved into the life and career of Larry Knox (as he was universally known), we learned that his older brother. William Knox Jr., had received a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1935, 5 years before Larry received his in organic chemistry from Harvard. (Another Knox, Clinton, received a Ph.D. in history in 1940. He was William and Larry’s younger brother.) William and Larry were two of about 30 African Americans earning Ph.D.s in all branches of chemistry between 1916 and 1940. Elijah Knox, the brothers’ grandfather, was born a slave in North Carolina and became a skilled carpenter. He bought his freedom in 1846 and then moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had a long-established community of “Black Yankees.” One of his sons, William Knox Sr., started the drive for education that led to the astonishing rise of Elijah’s grandsons. A high school graduate, William Sr. earned the highest score in the 1903 New Bedford Civil Service Examination and became a post office accounts clerk. (William Sr. and his wife, Estella Briggs, also had two daughters; they were not given the same educational opportunities as the sons, although they both had postsecondary educations.)

More here.

From Science:

This column is intended for the edification of the uninitiated, those youngest science trainees who have not yet learned the truth about seminars and about so much else in scientific life — those who still think earning a Ph.D. takes only 4 years, that being 17th author on a paper is exciting, and that an experiment will work tomorrow simply because it worked today. In the idyllic vision of the uninitiated, a seminar tells a story, starting with a clear description of a problem, then outlining a series of steps taken to address that problem, and ending with a special reward: a glistening kernel of new knowledge. The speaker tells the story using vocabulary accessible to anyone with a similar breadth, though not necessarily depth, of scientific knowledge so that all in attendance can bask in the final, glorious revelation.

In reality, scientific seminars usually consist of quasi-related PowerPoint slides cobbled together from prior seminars and lab meetings, thoroughly and precariously dependent on an impossible quantity of specialized terms, assembled in a hotel room at 2:00 a.m. or covertly in the back of the lecture hall during the previous seminar. (At international meetings, I've often marveled at the number of speakers whose only audience members appear to be working on their own talks. It's like going to a restaurant and ordering lunch that you never eat because you're busy preparing dinner.)

More here.

James Forman, Jr. in the Boston Review:

America’s incarcerated population has grown immensely larger and darker over the past 40 years—500 percent since the early 1970s. This extraordinary growth is partly the result of surging rates of incarceration among African Americans. The odds that a black man of my generation (born in the late 1960s) will land in prison at some point in his life are twice as great as for a black man born in the 1940s.

Among activists and scholars of race and crime, there is a consensus that our growing penal system, with its black tinge, constitutes a profound racial injustice. Some go further and claim that mass incarceration is nothing less than a new form of Jim Crow. Two important new books—by historian Robert Perkinson and civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander, respectively—make the best case to date for the Jim Crow analogy.

But while these authors show that the analogy has much to recommend it, is it entirely accurate? And if it’s wrong or incomplete, what does that mean for how we think about—and think about challenging—mass incarceration?

More here.

From The Guardian:

What cannot but strike the eye in the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt is the conspicuous absence of Muslim fundamentalism. In the best secular democratic tradition, people simply revolted against an oppressive regime, its corruption and poverty, and demanded freedom and economic hope. The cynical wisdom of western liberals, according to which, in Arab countries, genuine democratic sense is limited to narrow liberal elites while the vast majority can only be mobilised through religious fundamentalism or nationalism, has been proven wrong. The big question is what will happen next? Who will emerge as the political winner?

More here.

Rob Eshman in Jewish Journal:

Israelis and their supporters are wondering whether the uprising in Egypt is good for Israel. They want to know: Will it bring a radical Muslim government to power? Will outgoing strongman Hosni Mubarak’s replacement stick by the country’s treaties with Israel? Will a new Egypt keep supplying Israel with natural gas? Will a new Egypt cooperate to stop Hamas terrorists in Gaza from attacking Israel?

The fearmongerers and fatalists are already at the megaphones. Pro-Israel Web sites are full of well-recycled gotcha quotes from Mohammed El Baradei, Egypt’s apparent next leader, “proving” that he has it in for Israel. Overnight, the same people who have long pointed to the cold peace with Egypt as Exhibit A for why Israel shouldn’t cede an inch of land to any Arab government are now rushing to defend Mubarak as a stalwart ally.

Meanwhile, Israel’s official response has been first silence, then a strident call for stability, which can easily be understood to mean support for the current regime.

What’s going on? A massive, heartfelt liberation sweeps through the most populous Arab country in the world, with the prospect of rescuing future generations from drowning in oppression and stagnation. The Arab street cries freedom, and what do we cry? Oy!

More here. [Thanks to Zara Houshmand.]