Savas L. Tsohatzidis reviews John Searle's Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

This book will be useful to readers familiar with Searle's work in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, but unacquainted with, and curious to learn about, the 'philosophy of society' that he has been busy building since the mid-nineties. Such readers are offered a lengthy exposition (Chapters 1, 3, 5) of an updated version of the account of institutional facts that was the main theme of Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (1995), as well as shorter discussions (mostly drawing on material already presented in two subsequent books, 2001 and 2007) of what Searle perceives as the implications of his account of institutions on issues pertaining to rational action, free will, political power, and human rights (Chapters 6, 7, 8). The book will also be useful to readers who have developed an interest in Searle's account of institutional reality while lacking sufficient exposure to his philosophies of mind and language, since it includes brief overviews (Chapters 2, 4) of his extensive work in these fields, which he presents as providing the foundations of his account of society. Readers already familiar with Searle's major works on mind, language, and society will probably be mainly interested in considering whether the account of institutional facts he currently adopts differs significantly from the one he had originally proposed, and, if so, whether it places him in a better position than before to attain his stated goals.

Common to Searle's old and new accounts is a conception of institutional facts according to which such a fact (a) cannot exist unless a community collectively accepts it as existing; (b) requires the assignment to an entity of a “status function” (that is, of a function that an entity can only have by virtue of collective recognition, and not merely by virtue of whatever properties it might have prior to such recognition); and (c) characteristically generates, once in existence, “deontic powers” (in particular, rights and obligations) within the community whose behaviour brings it to existence.

One difference between Searle's old and new accounts is that the generation of “deontic powers” is now taken to be a universal consequence, and not merely, as was previously the case, a nearly universal consequence, of an institutional fact's creation (24). But the main difference between the old and new accounts has to do with the way in which Searle proposes to combine theses (a) and (b) above in providing an explanation of an institutional fact's creation. On the old account, the creation of institutional facts was invariably supposed to be the immediate result of the collective acceptance, within a community, of linguistically expressible “constitutive rules” that specify conditions under which status functions of various sorts are assignable to entities of various sorts.

In Eurozine:

370 Riverside Drive, New York 25, N.Y.53[53]

Jerusalem-Katamon,

4 Hamaapilim St.

7/3/63

Dear Hannah Arendt,

The bond between us has been broken or has petered out – whatever you want to call it, and for my part I haven't done anything to re-establish it. Now your articles are forcing me – I'm almost tempted to say against my better judgment – to ask you a question. So far, I've read only 4 articles, I haven't got hold of the 5th one yet, but it is a matter of days only and it won't in principle provide anything new, just the conclusions from all the previous material. I don't want here to give you a description of the impression your attacks and portrayals are making here – I'm sure that – if you're not informed of this – you will probably be able to imagine this yourself. Nor do I want to give you my opinion, analysis, general and personal reactions – I don't know how far you're interested in that, and there's not really space for that in a letter. Nor do I want to go into your presentation of the Scandinavian events in general, and the Danish ones in particular – although I could say a great deal about this.

As I've said, I'd like to ask you a question: what was or is your own innermost intention that you were pursuing? Whom do you think you are serving in this way: Historical truth? Justice? The present or the future of the German or the Jewish people? Or do you wish to prove specifically to the latter that it isn't worthy or doesn't have the right to exist as a nation among the nations? I am asking you seriously, not polemically, I just don't understand.

Paul Berman reviews Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, in Slate:

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a philosopher at Princeton, and, in his new book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, he cites two large and indisputable examples of this strangest and most majestic of historical phenomena. A handful of Quakers organized the earliest anti-slavery committees in America and Britain late in the 18th century. The likelihood of doing away with slavery seemed pretty small, given that plantation slavery in the western hemisphere was proving to be, for entire industries in America and Britain both, an economic bonanza. The slave laborers were suffering horribly, but a lot of other people, not just the plantation owners, were benefiting.

Even so, in England during the 1820s and '30s, enormous crowds of earnest and indignant citizens took to attending marathon anti-slavery meetings and affixing their signatures to petitions. Parliament bestirred itself. And, as a matter of law, in 1833 slavery was duly abolished almost everywhere in the worldwide British Empire—one of the hugest, speediest, most peaceful and consequential moral revolutions ever to occur.

Something vaguely similar took place in China in the decades around 1900. For 1,000 years, upper-crust Chinese and not-so-upper-crust Chinese had followed the custom of painfully binding the feet of little girls, and even toddlers, such that when the girls became women, their hobbled feet might turn out to be the size of a man's thumb. A small group of reformers launched a campaign against the horrible practice. And although Chinese tradition was more than weighty, and although some people found an erotic appeal in deformed feet (Appiah supplies details on the exotic erotica of “the golden lotus,” or the broken and bound feminine foot), the millennial custom descended into obloquy with amazing speed. And then, poof!, it was gone.

Appiah recounts these episodes with a cheerful verve, but he also applies himself, in his capacity as philosopher, to seeking out the hidden mechanisms of persuasion that, in his estimation, drove the campaigns forward. His search leads him to inquire into still another remarkable reform movement from the early 19th century, whose history, as he interprets it, sheds a useful light on the question of moral revolutions as a whole. This was the campaign in England to suppress the aristocratic custom of dueling with pistols.

A National Book Award–winning writer pays tribute to a Yale roommate who killed himself last year.

Andrew Solomon in Yale Alumni Magazine:

In February 1982, in the middle of my freshman year, I was invited to a party by the most glamorous sophomore I had ever met (now one of my closest friends), and I was wildly excited about it. It was in that perfect proportion for a social event: a third of the people were people I actually knew; a third were people I had seen around and wished I knew; a third were people I had never seen because they inhabited a stratosphere too exalted to have been visible to me, some of them even juniors and seniors. The party was in a dorm room in Pierson. Spandau Ballet, Pat Benatar, the Human League singing “Don’t You Want Me Baby,” which nowadays feel to me as sweetly nostalgic as “Dixie,” were at that time fresh as the morning dew. People were dressed in clothing that might in 2010 be coming back into fashion for the fifth time, but that was then just coming into fashion for the first time—even though much of it had been cleverly selected at the Salvation Army. In those days, the drinking age was still 18, and so there were drinks, and there were some people doing cocaine in the bathroom, because it was, after all, the 1980s. I would not have been more thrilled and dazzled to have been invited to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer one year earlier. People were witty and funny, having a truly good time, dancing well, laughing. Some were sitting around in the disco half-light of the room itself, others in the glaring fluorescence of the stairway, and some in little knots in the moon-drenched courtyard. I had hated high school and had always felt marginal there, and now here I was with all these amazing people, and I was having one of the best times of my life. It’s hard to remember the full cast of that party, but I tried it as an exercise recently and realized that I am still good friends with more than 20 of the people who were there, and am Facebook friends with at least another 25. I always say that Yale was the beginning of the self that I have been ever since, that I was someone else in elementary and high school, someone I barely remember, but that at Yale, I started to be me, and that party has always stuck in my mind as the moment when the shift became official.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

I think Jon Stewart is one of the most incisive and effective commentators in the country, and he reaches an audience that would otherwise be politically disengaged. I don't have any objection if he really wants to hold a rally in favor of rhetorical moderation, and it's also fine if, as seems to be the case, he's eager to target rhetorical excesses on both the left and right in order to demonstrate his non-ideological centrism. But the example he chose to prove that the left is guilty, too — the proposition that Bush is a “war criminal” — is an extremely poor one given that the General in charge of formally investigating detainee abuse (not exactly someone with a history of Leftist advocacy) has declared this to be the case, and core Nuremberg principles compel the same conclusion.

Leave aside the fact that, as Steve Benen correctly notes, Stewart's examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn't born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP, while his examples of left-wing excesses (Code Pink and 9/11 Truthers) have no currency (for better or worse) in the Democratic Party. The claim that Bush is “a war criminal” has ample basis, and it's deeply irresponsible to try to declare this discussion off-limits, or lump it in with a whole slew of baseless right-wing accusatory rhetoric, in order to establish one's centrist bona fides.

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

In the year 1755, a black slave named Mark Codman plotted to kill his abusive master. A God-fearing man, Codman had resolved to use poison, reasoning that if he could kill without shedding blood, it would be no sin. Arsenic in hand, he and two female slaves poisoned the tea and porridge of John Codman repeatedly. The plan worked — but like so many stories of slave rebellion, this one ended in brutal death for the slaves as well. After a trial by jury, Mark Codman was hanged, tarred, and then suspended in a metal gibbet on the main road to town, where his body remained for more than 20 years.

It sounds like a classic account of Southern slavery. But Codman’s body didn’t hang in Savannah, Ga.; it hung in present-day Somerville, Mass. And the reason we know just how long Mark the slave was left on view is that Paul Revere passed it on his midnight ride. In a fleeting mention from Revere’s account, the horseman described galloping past “Charlestown Neck, and got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains.” When it comes to slavery, the story that New England has long told itself goes like this: Slavery happened in the South, and it ended thanks to the North. Maybe we had a little slavery, early on. But it wasn’t real slavery. We never had many slaves, and the ones we did have were practically family. We let them marry, we taught them to read, and soon enough, we freed them. New England is the home of abolitionists and underground railroads. In the story of slavery — and by extension, the story of race and racism in modern-day America — we’re the heroes. Aren’t we?

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

In 1981, early in her career at Harvard, Ellen Langer and her colleagues piled two groups of men in their seventies and eighties into vans, drove them two hours north to a sprawling old monastery in New Hampshire, and dropped them off 22 years earlier, in 1959. The group who went first stayed for one week and were asked to pretend they were young men, once again living in the 1950s. The second group, who arrived the week afterward, were told to stay in the present and simply reminisce about that era. Both groups were surrounded by mid-century mementos—1950s issues of Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, a black-and-white television, a vintage radio—and they discussed the events of the time: the launch of the first U.S. satellite, Castro’s victory ride into Havana, Nikita Khrushchev and the need for bomb shelters. There was entertainment (a screening of the 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder with Jimmy Stewart) and spirited discussions of such 1950s sports greats as Mickey Mantle and Floyd Patterson. One night, the men sat glued to the radio, listening as Royal Orbit won the 1959 Preakness. For the second group it brought back a flood of memories; for the other group, it was a race being run for the first time. As a young professor of psychology, Langer hoped to document through these men what she had long suspected: that our fixed ideas, internalized in childhood, can affect the way we age.

…

What she found, however, surprised even her own team of researchers. Before and after the experiment, both groups of men took a battery of cognitive and physical tests, and after just one week, there were dramatic positive changes across the board. Both groups were stronger and more flexible. Height, weight, gait, posture, hearing, vision—even their performance on intelligence tests had improved. Their joints were more flexible, their shoulders wider, their fingers not only more agile, but longer and less gnarled by arthritis. But the men who had acted as if they were actually back in 1959 showed significantly more improvement. Those who had impersonated younger men seemed to have bodies that actually were younger.

More here.

More here. [Thanks to Quinn O'Neill.]

Over at Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN:…We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s go first to Oxford to Professor Ramadan. Why do you feel—and it might surprise many, the op-ed piece that you wrote—that the community center should not be built near Ground Zero?

TARIQ RAMADAN: Look, first, of course I’m aware of all the discussions, and I’m supporting anything which has to do with the rights of Muslims and American Muslims living in the States. I think that this is clear even in the op-ed that I wrote for the Washington Post.

My position is that in this situation, where we are struggling with something which is now built—is instrumentalized by, you know, political forces in the state and trying just to make it a symbol, I would say that the Muslims should think about, you know, the overall picture of their struggle for their rights and respect in the country. So, in my position, if this is a symbol—and we have to listen to this collective sensitivity of the Americans after what happened in September the 11th—is to say, look, on that, we can understand. We are not accepting anything which has to do with, you know, a free Muslim zone, but we should listen to what is said and what is felt. But at the same time, it was—should be quite clear that our struggle for our rights—you know, there are twenty mosques that are now facing problems in the local areas, because people are rejecting. It’s a very huge struggle. But sometime, we have to think about the symbol. And my position is, if this is possible, Muslims should think about, you know, not being instrumentalized in the whole process by political forces, but, say, understanding the collective sensitivity and to go for the struggle and saying we are not going to accept America becoming a country which is—has something which is an institutionalized discrimination and racism.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Bayoumi, your response?

MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI: Well, I certainly—excuse me, I certainly understand the desire to lower the temperature today on this hot-button issue, but I really think that we have to ask ourselves, you know, what kind of society do we want to live in? Are we going to be a society that’s ruled by our passions or by our principles? And I feel that if we adopt the view that we are willing to trade away the mosque to another location, then we’re also willing to trade away the principle of the free exercise of religion for Muslim Americans. And that’s true not just then for Muslim Americans, but really for all Americans. I feel that, by now, the issue has become so important that it has to be something that we understand as being a central question around our rights as a collective, as a nation. And I feel that there’s something at stake here that is missed if we’re only looking at being sensitive to what is a controversy that is fueled by outside forces.

Stephen Bayley in More Intelligent Life:

Last June I shared a cab with Grayson Perry, one of Britain’s best-known artists. He had just returned from the Basel art fair, where he had been struck by something. “Everything is now happening all at once,” he told me with a roll of the eyes. There was no longer a ruling style or taste, no common agreement on what is avant-garde and what is retrograde. Today the happening thing is just what is happening. We have reached the end of “isms”.

Minimalism was the last, and most curious, ism of all. The late 20th and early 21st centuries were peculiarly receptive to its poetics of purity—in architecture, in art, in food, in design. This autumn it receives what might be either its coronation or its obituary. “Plain Space” is the title of both an exhibition at the Design Museum in London, and a book by its subject, John Pawson—the elegant Old Etonian architect who, more than anyone, turned a cerebral art-world cult into a deluxe style for the stratum of society where fastidious aestheticism meets high net worth.

The exhibition is not, Pawson insists, a retrospective, but an account of work-in-progress. Still, when estate agents are touting properties as “minimalist-style”, you suspect that the vitality of this ism may have left the building. Was minimalism the last absurd, exhausted spasm of neophilia, the cult of the new that so defined modern taste? Or is it still, and will it remain, the ultimate refinement of aesthetic sensibility: the place we go when we have been everywhere else? The answer to both questions is yes.

In one sense, minimalism had a beginning and end as (nearly) precise as the beginning and end of, say, baroque or pre-Raphaelitism. German architects first used the term “Existenzminimum”—referring to low-cost social housing—in the mid-1920s. The term “minimal art” first appeared circa 1965. Journalists writing about interior design began mentioning minimalism in the mid-1980s. But, unlike baroque or the pre-Raphaelites, the minimal aesthetic has been a continuous element in European culture. It’s been with us in some form since the fifth century BC, when Socrates declared that a well-made dung bucket was better than a poorly made gold shield.

James Grant in The WSJ:

The Dow Jones Industrials spent 25 years in the wilderness after the 1929 Crash. Not until 1954 did the disgraced 30-stock average regain its Sept. 3, 1929, high. And then, its penance complete, it soared. In March 1955, the U.S. Senate Banking and Currency Committee, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, presiding, opened hearings to determine what dangers lurked in this new bull market. Was it 1929 all over again?

One of the witnesses, John Kenneth Galbraith, a 46-year-old Harvard economics professor, seemed especially well-credentialed. His new history of the event that still transfixed America, “The Great Crash, 1929” was on its way to the bookstores and to what would prove to be a commercial triumph. An alumnus of Ontario Agricultural College and the holder of a doctorate in agricultural economics from the University of California at Berkeley, Galbraith had written articles for Fortune magazine and speeches for Adlai Stevenson, the defeated 1952 Democratic presidential candidate. He was a World War II price controller and the author of “American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power.” When he stepped into a crowded elevator, strangers tried not to stare: he stood 6 feet 8 inches tall.

On the one hand, Galbraith observed, the stock market was not so speculatively charged in 1955 as it had been in 1929 On the other, he insisted, there were worrying signs of excess. Stocks were not so cheap as they had been in the slack and demoralized market of 1953 (though, at 4%, they still outyielded corporate bonds). “The relation of share prices to book value is showing some of the same tendencies as in 1929,” Galbraith went on. “And while it would be a gross exaggeration to say that there has been the same escape from reality that there was in 1929, it does seem to me that enough has happened to indicate that we haven't yet lost our capacity for speculative self-delusion.”

Christopher Nolan’s recent £125m blockbuster film Inception concludes with a 45-minute setpiece in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s team of brain-hopping idea thieves descends through nested dreams, in each of which time runs more slowly than in the previous layer. Any graphic novel fans in the audience would have watched this complex sequence with nods of recognition. But perhaps with sighs of exasperation, too: the film’s showpiece effect – creating the illusion of relative time, of events happening simultaneously but being experienced at different paces – is difficult to achieve in the linear medium of cinema but easily suggested in comics and graphic novels. Inception is rigid with explanatory dialogue to help the viewer interpret the final hour: a kind of endless tutorial leading up to a deft but soulless showpiece. When it comes to the medium of graphic novels, however, years of experimentation, combined with certain defining features of the form, have resulted in a complex medium that excels at portraying multiple time schemes and shifting conceptions of reality.

more from Tim Martin at the FT here.

One of the sadder consequences of the near decade of war and violence that has followed the attacks of 9/11 is that so many people are convinced that we are in a clash of civilizations divided along religious fault lines. The concept was popularized by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in the mid-1990s, but he didn’t invent the idea; he gave it a name. Until 9/11, however, it was both debated and debatable. Since then, it has become a mainstream view in both the Western world and the Muslim world. The recent furor over the proposed Muslim center in Lower Manhattan, the rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Europe and the continued attraction of radical antinomian Islam in parts of the Muslim world attest to this situation. But Graham Fuller offers a forceful, erudite reminder that neither Islam nor religious fervor adequately explains the animosity between parts of the Muslim world and the United States. In fact, he posits that the fissures that currently exist might well have existed even if Islam never had, and he offers a wide-ranging, at times digressive but always illuminating look at the past centuries to support that contention.

more from Zachary Karabell at the LAT here.

In December of 1874, when Serge ­Diaghilev was 2 years old, he stood in the drawing room of his home in St. Petersburg, belly thrust out, and took in the spectacle of the family Christmas tree. He “gravely inspected the tree with its glittering lights,” his stepmother recalled in her memoirs, “glanced at the toys placed around it and said quietly, ‘Not bad. . . .’ ” Thirty-eight years later, at the premiere of the Nijinsky ballet “Le Sacre du Prin­temps,” a riot broke out at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. As Stravinsky’s dissonant score pulsed, as the dancers of the Ballets Russes darted and scuttered, whispers in the audience gave way to agitated shouts and screams. Stravinsky himself, according to one account, “dashed out like a madman.” At a restaurant afterward, celebrating with his collaborators, a contented Diaghilev declared, “Exactly what I wanted.”

more from Jennifer B. McDonald at the NYT here.

Michael Wood in LRB:

If you had asked me a month ago I would have said I didn’t believe in heroes. I realise now that there have been people in my life – Edward, the above-mentioned Fred Dupee, my Cambridge teacher and friend Peter Stern, and my father – who represented ideal forms of what a person could be. They were, variously, models of intelligence, persistence, courage, delicacy, honour, depth of argument, decency, kindness, much else. One can speak to such models mentally even though they are dead, and one can imagine their responses. One can write sentences, even books, for them, and benefit from the memory of the risk and rigour of their thought. But there is still something desolate about their absence from the world. For one thing, they won’t make new arguments or comments; for another, no one younger will get to know them, learn of the exemplary possibilities these people proposed.

Edward was a dapper dresser, and he liked people to pay attention to such things – for their own sake, and because he liked the idea of style. I think perhaps the first conversation we ever had – this would have been some time in the autumn of 1964, I had just arrived at Columbia and Edward had started there the year before – was about a smart jacket (or jackets) he had bought downtown, maybe at Barney’s but probably somewhere posher. He insisted I go and get one of these items because the price was so fantastic, and he asked me every day whether I’d been yet. I didn’t need (and couldn’t afford) a jacket, but I couldn’t withstand the force of Edward’s solicitude, and finally went and bought one. Black. Cashmere. Very nice. I wore it for ages. Edward’s affection enveloped you like a roar, like a cure – even when he became the one who was ill. You felt better every time you saw him. Or rather, you felt you could be better than you were, and you thought the world was a larger place than it had seemed before.

More here. (Note: This post is also in honor of Professor Edward Said's seventh death anniversary today)

From The New York Times:

Human rights have come to dominate international discourse, but while this fact is often portrayed as the culmination of a centuries-old tradition, Samuel Moyn, a professor of history at Columbia University, takes a different view. The modern concept of human rights, he says in “The Last Utopia,” differs radically from older claims of rights, like those that arose out of the American and French Revolutions. According to Moyn, human rights in their current form — applicable to all and internationally protected — can be traced not to the Enlightenment, nor to the humanitarian impulses of the 19th century nor to the impact of the Holocaust after World War II. Instead, he sees them as dating from the 1970s, exemplified by President Jimmy Carter’s effort to make human rights a pillar of United States foreign policy.

Today’s human rights movement emerged “seemingly from nowhere,” Moyn says, as a depoliticized, moral response to disillusionment with revolutionary political projects, specifically the anticolonial independence struggles of the 1950s and ’60s. Moyn credibly juxtaposes the hopes placed in a new internationalist “utopia” of human rights against the failure of national self-determination to guarantee human dignity.

More here.

Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

–Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

by Elizabeth Bishop

As my eye fell on the calendar this morning, I thought immediately of Edward Said. It is seven years to the day since his death. I dug out from under a stack of books H. Aram Veeser's Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism (where I am sorry to say, Aram, it had been languishing due to an unusual busyness in my life lately) and started reading it, and found myself predictably saddened by the thought that he really is irreplaceable: no one has emerged since Edward's death with even a remote chance of occupying his colossal role as a public intellectual, as an academic engaged with the world, as the most eloquent voice of his people. Here is an excerpt from the book:

Said felt he had to transform every situation he entered. Any less would be passivity, and he was phobic about letting things happen to him: it smacked of victimage. It was customary at this epoch for radical students to liberate college classes. The professor of a liberated class was expected to stand aside and accept the verdict of History. I don’t think anyone tried this on Said, who had once used his umbrella to brush aside two friends of mine, who were kissing on the Hamilton Hall stairwell. On one occasion I recall, he addressed the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, who were very big on liberating classrooms and even whole buildings. Students, visiting radicals, Harlem residents, and street people had pressed into Hewitt Lounge, in the student center. Imagine a group who had the political moderation of Robespierre and the sartorial verve of the Hell’s Angels, and you’ll have a pretty fair grasp of the scene. Several of my fellow “Freshman Cabalists” affirmed that Said was indeed expected to speak, and pretty soon he arrived.

What followed was a series of tiny collisions and Gestalt readjustments. He was, for instance, punctilious in his dress: a black cashmere blazer over a bespoke, wide-striped English tailored shirt. French cuffs were a rarity in our group, and he had them. As he entered Hewitt Lounge, a ripple went through the assembled company, and the person speaking—who happened to be the society heiress and declared radical action freak, Josie Biddle Duke—interrupted herself and announced that Said had arrived.

More here. And you can read a review of the book here. And see also 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.

Ethan Siegel in Starts With A Bang:

Every once in a while, a star in our own galaxy can do something to surprise us. Over in the constellation of the Unicorn lived a quiet, run-of-the-mill star named V838 Monocerotis. But in early 2002, it brightened incredibly rapidly, and the before-and-after pictures were rather astonishing.

What was initially thought to be a nova turned out to be much, much more fascinating by time the Hubble Space telescope got around to looking at it in May of 2002.

Warning: what you're about to see may shock you!

More here.