Tim Parks in the NYRB blog:

The final saw Holland playing Spain, two European colonizers on African territory. Before the game Nelson Mandela’s grandson complained that FIFA had put “extreme pressure” on the elderly hero to attend, despite the fact that he was in mourning for the loss of a great-granddaughter. “Their focus is on having this world icon in the stadium, yet not really paying attention to our customs and traditions as a people and as a family.” The miracle is that anyone ever imagined that FIFA might behave otherwise.

In the event, the grand finale was a disgrace; it also offered another pathetic “English” performance in the shape of the referee, Howard Webb. Having seen German youth outclassed by Spanish skills, the Dutch decided for spoiling tactics. That is fair enough, but their harrying and pressing came with a systematic intimidatory violence that amounted to the worst possible advertisement for football. A “filthfest,” the Guardian’s commentator called it. Webb showed plenty of yellow cards but didn’t have the courage to send a man off until the last minutes of extra time. The moment when Nigel De Jong lifted his leg high to kick his studs into Xabi Alonso’s chest and then was not shown a red card was emblematic of the mentality that FIFA has created in players and officials.

The Dutch team knew that Webb would not want to be responsible for ruining a TV spectacle with a dismissal, so they ruined the game themselves in the hope of grabbing a goal from the shambles they had created. Andres Iniesta’s wonderful strike just five minutes away from a penalty shoot-out was the tournament’s only moment of poetic justice and FIFA’s only fig leaf. On this ugly showing 2014 is rather too soon for a repeat performance.

Michel Rocard in Project Syndicate:

The size of France’s political crisis seems to be out of proportion with the country’s real situation. To be sure, France has been severely hit by the global financial crisis and economic downturn. But the consequences have been somewhat less dramatic than in many other European countries.

Two of the three Baltic countries and Greece are in deep financial distress. Much the same is true of Portugal, Spain, Hungary, and Iceland. Ireland, Belgium, Italy, and the United Kingdom are still under threat, owing to large public debts or current-account deficits. But the Netherlands, and Austria – and, to a lesser extent, Germany and France – are faring slightly better.

In the short term, the situation in Germany is less severe than in France. Its trade balance is positive, and total public debt is not as high as it is in other countries. Despite high unemployment and low growth, Germany does not face a short-term threat to macroeconomic stability, though the country’s population is declining and aging, implying huge challenges in the decades ahead.

The short-term situation for France is more worrying. The fiscal deficit is higher than 6% of GDP, the trade balance is negative, and public debt – albeit lower than in all other European countries except Germany and the Netherlands – is nonetheless 80% of GDP. France urgently needs structural reforms – and thus a strong government.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in New Humanist:

The sudden appearance of the Prophet Muhammad’s alleged footprint in the sleepy village of Dharabi near Chakwal has sent a wave of religious excitement across Pakistan. At a three-hour drive from Islamabad, Dharabi is now attracting tens of thousands of visitors from Swat to Karachi. They seek blessings, spiritual enlightenment, miracle cures and relief from life’s other stresses. A road that is sparsely travelled in normal times is now clogged with traffic, vendors of food and drink are having a field day, new businesses selling pictures and holy paraphernalia have sprouted, and a permanent shrine is under construction. The village could not have hoped for better.

My encounter with this phenomenon was accidental and preceded the heavy rush that came in subsequent weeks. While on the way to Chakwal, I became curious about the heavy police presence. Upon inquiring, I was told of a recent momentous event – a giant footprint was said to have suddenly appeared, which the local Muslim scholars promptly declared to belong to the Holy Prophet. But this had ignited a fierce war of words between various religious factions in the larger Chakwal area. Some believers insist that the Prophet had left the earthly world once and for ever, while others contend that he revisits it periodically to remind followers of his presence. The police had been called to prevent physical violence.

Several weeks later the story hit the national press. And when I spoke villagers I had met in Dharabi I discovered that new embellishments and inventions are being added to the original narration of events. Village sceptics, on the other hand, are being silenced and speak only on condition of anonymity.

Samuel R. Delany in The Boston Review:

Barbara said, “That’s a lot of trouble.”

“Ain’t no trouble at all,” Jay said. “It’s nice out on Gilead. Next time you get a day off, we should take you both. Cook hamburgers and hotdogs on the back deck. Bring that boyfriend of yours, Mr. Bodin, out, if y’all can stand us for an afternoon.”

“Oh, Mom—come on! I’m seventeen, now. I wanna go out there. Today—tonight! Please?”

Jay said, “He ain’t got to be back at work with Dynamite on the garbage run till Tuesday. The boy can come on out and see the place. We ain’t gonna let him stay up all night, believe me. We’re up and movin’ by four-thirty—we’ll have him back here when you get in for your shift. And we’ll give you a call.”

Twenty feet away, below the shingle, the sea made the sound of something rushing off somewhere, even while late-summer waves moved in toward grass, sand, and rock. At the world’s rim, an elongated gray-green scab crossed part of the horizon, one end thicker than the other: Gilead Island.

Barbara started up the steps, a sack hanging from each hand by twine handles. She looked back. “All right. You can go. Thank you, Jay, Mex—really, that’s nice of you two. I mean it’s something for Eric to do besides sitting around at Dynamite’s all afternoon.”

“Oh, Mom—thanks!”

“You thank Mr. MacAmon—and Mex.” She managed to open the door and went in.

“We’ll phone you,” Jay said. “We won’t let him forget.”

So, among anticipations of new orgies and excesses, with the two boatmen Eric wandered down dusty Front Street to the wooden gate of the Gilead Boat Dock, joking and relating his recent adventures on the garbage run with Dynamite and Morgan, while Jay swaggered and laughed and fumed in disbelief, and, with his blasted face, barefoot Mex looked about the silent autumn and western light gilded the glass and made white enameled window frames near platinum on the evening street.

From Guernica:

It is no surprise that Marie Ponsot’s latest poetry collection, Easy, should feature a poem titled “Language Acquisition.” Ponsot’s engagement with sound, as both a poet and a mother, is insistent; she seeks poems, she says, that use “whatever we can find in our language to catch the world and offer it to each other.” How ironic, then, that mere months after the book was published, Ponsot suffered a stroke, from which she is now recovering, that partially impaired her speech and memory. For the woman who wrote “The delicious tongue we speak with speaks us,” the resulting loss of language and syntax must have been terrifyingly dislocating. Yet she has managed to find humor in it: laughingly observing, in a subsequent interview with the New York Times, that some people have mistaken her newfound confusion of gendered pronouns for sociopolitical commentary.

Laughing at mortality, Marie Ponsot’s accomplishments are legion; among her many fellowships and prizes is a National Book Critics Circle Award for her 1998 collection, The Bird Catcher, and her recent election to the Academy of American Poets. She is also a translator and a beloved teacher. A professor of English at Queens college until 1991—during which time she co-authored with Rosemary Deen two books on writing fundamentals, Beat Not the Poor Desk and The Common Sense—she has since taught creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and the 92nd Street Y, among other institutions. And lest we forget triumphs closer to home, Ponsot will remind us of her seven children, sixteen grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.

More here.

From The New York Times:

On a clear and mild March day in 1993, the Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry spoke at a rally in southern Florida against abortion. “We’ve found the weak link is the doctor,” he told the crowd. “We’re going to expose them. We’re going to humiliate them.” A few days later, Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider, was shot and killed outside his clinic in Pensacola, Fla., about 500 miles away. It was the first of eight such murders, the extreme edge of what has become an anti-abortion strategy of confrontation.

Terry understood that focusing on abortion providers was possible because they had become increasingly isolated from mainstream medicine. That was not what physicians themselves anticipated after the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. An open letter signed by 100 professors of obstetrics and gynecology predicted that free-standing clinics would be unnecessary if half of the 20,000 obstetricians in the country would do abortions for their patients, and if hospitals would handle “their proportionate share.” OB-GYNs at the time emphasized that abortion was a surgical procedure and fell under their purview.

More here.

Beans with Tabasco for Breakfast

I sat down to drink an espresso
on a morning of dry desert winds
and near me sat a well-known poet
less famous than I am though
and he was speaking with an intellectual or a man from the TV or the radio
they were speaking about ars poetica
about ethos pathos and epos
and science and education and
the mixing of cultures and the integration of cultures
in a very western language
and I asked myself
what the hell are these people eating for breakfast,
red beans with tabasco?
And I consoled myself that I don’t have this kind of friends.
Anyway
they completely spoiled
the taste of the coffee.

by Mois Benarroch
translation by author
from Bilingual Poems
publisher: Moben, Jerusalem, 2005

It’s all Thoreau’s fault. In the whirring, churning American imagination, that vast and lovely virtual world — fed by books and stories — with territory one can still “light out” for, Thoreau is the guy who showed it was possible to get off the merry-go-round, the constant forward movement, and still walk into town from time to time. Plant yourself within spitting distance of civilization, refuse to participate in the orgy of commercialism, refuse to pay taxes if you don’t agree with how they’re spent. You don’t need everything they tell you that you need. You can do more for yourself than they tell you that you can. The message was political, spiritual, practical and environmental. It contained a fine amount of humor, a pinch of self-doubt and a smidgeon of hypocrisy. Today we would call Thoreau’s move to the banks of Walden Pond going off the grid. Although books about carving out your own piece of the pie have been written ever since the Transcendentalists took issue with the direction that American democracy was taking, never before have I seen the current deluge of books on how to escape the American Dream. I grew up in New York City in an apartment full of them — my mother spent her short life trying to get out of Dodge and into the hills, though the schools she attended surely did not teach survival skills. I’ve chosen seven new tomes that represent various approaches, or should I say escape routes, but there are at least a dozen more. Why? Why now?

more from Susan Salter Reynolds at the LAT here.

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth is the one whose performance history is notoriously strewn with disasters. But, as Dominic Dromgoole, whose new production of Henry IV, Parts One and Two, has just come to the Globe, may have discovered, the Scottish Play is a cakewalk compared with the Henrys. Unlike the other much-performed histories, they don’t have one big theme and one big royal hero or villain to hold them together. But there is, of course, an outsize figure in the Henrys. Sir John Falstaff, the fat knight and leader-astray of the Prince of Wales, is the most immense of all Shakespeare’s creations, his girth matched by his wit, his appetite by his cleverness. And there is a big theme too: the journey of Hal, the Prince, from dissipated lay-about to upright royal pragmatist. Nothing in the Henrys is simple, though. We see Falstaff lie, rob, cheat, celebrate drunkenness, exploit pitiful soldiers, fleece an honest widow and, in his dotage, grope a whore. And yet we give him our heart. We see Hal throw off a life of idle loutishness and accept the mantle of sovereignty, and he turns our blood cold. The end of Part Two, in which Hal becomes Henry V and repudiates his old companion in crime, is more shattering than any denouement of Shakespeare’s tragedies. At the end of Hamlet, Lear or Antony and Cleopatra the stage is littered with bodies. At the end of Henry IV Part Two, all we have is the broken heart of the fat old knight and it is much worse. On coronation day, he gets his crushing put-down. “I know thee not,” lies the new king, and Falstaff, before our eyes, begins to deflate and die.

more from Simon Schama at the FT here.

By 1900, nearly everyone agreed that there was something special about the Germans. Their philosophy was more profound — to a fault. So was their music. Their scientists and engineers were clearly the best. Their soldiers were unmatched. Did this German superiority bode well or ill for the new century? Some foreigners served up dire warnings, but others were rapt admirers. Richard Wagner’s English son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, even wrote a weighty tome arguing that the Germans were the only true heirs of classical Greece and Rome. Many Germans were happy to agree. After world war broke out in 1914, German intellectuals rallied in indignant defense of a superior culture besieged by barbarians. Thomas Mann, for one, was anything but a flaming nationalist, but he wrote at length about the need to defend Germany’s unique cultural profundity. Mann came to regret his fulminations long before 1933, when a more noxious band of German chauvinists drove him into exile. And in early 1945, in California, he read Joseph Goebbels’s defiant proclamation that the Germans’ national greatness was the reason an envious world had united against them. Mann was honest enough to confess to his diary that this was “more or less what I wrote 30 years ago.”

more from Brian Ladd at the NYT here.

Jesse Bering in Scientific American:

I’ve never seen anything quite like the canines of Sofia, Bulgaria, from where I’ve just returned after a week of teaching at a cognitive science summer school and from listening to a surfeit of long-forgotten, uplifting '80s pop music, which the weary and unshaven Bulgarian taxi drivers seem to adore to no end. Some recent work by University of Florida psychologist Monique Udell and her colleagues suggests that it’s not just my imagination that stray dogs are special—rather, strays in general may be vastly more different from our pet dogs than we assumed, particularly in their social cognitive functioning.

Now, the stray dog situation in Sofia is notoriously problematic. You know you’ve got a problem when a pack of strays breaks into the deer exhibit at your local zoo and “ruthlessly dismembers” almost the entire collection, as happened earlier this year. And given the general sentiment that an organized roundup and euthanasia is out of the question for moral reasons it’s also a very prickly issue among the people living there. (Stray cats are a problem too, but they appear to be kept in check by a lot of very hungry dogs.)

More here.

John F. Burns in the New York Times:

There was a time when the discreet men in blazers who run Lord’s cricket ground in London would have considered it an abomination to equate baseball with cricket in any fashion. Yet, there it is, an exhibition behind the famed Lord’s pavilion, cricket’s holy of holies, celebrating the similarities — and, in case anybody thought cricket’s traditionalists had run up the white flag, the differences — between cricket and baseball.

In witness of how much has changed in English attitudes toward America’s national game, the exhibition is being jointly hosted by the Marylebone Cricket Club, for more than 200 years the rule maker in worldwide cricket, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. The Hall of Fame will host the exhibit beginning next April, representing baseball’s own start on coming to terms with a game that many baseball enthusiasts have long loved to disparage.

More here.

John Lopez in Vanity Fair:

Over the past few days, Radar online has been leaking tape after tape of Mel Gibson's phone tirades with his erstwhile partner, and mother of his child, Oksana Grigorieva—for whom Gibson left his wife Robyn of 25 years. So far, they've released about 20 minutes of unparalleled verbal abuse and there are promises of more to come, which has many asking if Gibson, as a public persona, can ever recover from this. Gibson was dropped by his agency William Morris Endeavor a day before the death of his longtime agent, Ed Limato; the futures of his film projects, among them a Viking epic with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jodie Foster's upcoming film The Beaver, have been called into doubt; and it looks like the tapes will play a crucial role in the criminal investigation into charges of domestic violence. Finally, the resounding silence of his Hollywood colleagues' refusal to comment tolls like a bell for Mel Gibson's career.

Inevitably, there have been those who say given time and public amnesia, Gibson will one day have a career again. However, the collective damage of Gibson's public sins—anti-Semitic remarks, drunk driving, defense of his father's controversial views on the Holocaust—has built up like toxins in the liver of a life-long alcoholic. One can't help but wonder if the whole organ will just finally collapse under massive abuse. Yet, what's most frightening about the tapes is that the insouciant, manic charm which has always marked Gibson's screen persona is all too recongizable in his poisonously sarcastic verbal rage and breathless hurt.

More here.

Thomas Bender in Transformations of the Public Sphere:

The experience of the past few decades has prompted the worry by many historians and social scientists that academic intellect has turned inward, cutting itself off from a role in public life. This is particularly significant for historians. Most of the social sciences claim “expertise” relevant to policy, which is delivered in a variety of non-public settings or distinct “audiences,” mostly governmental or corporate, as opposed to a public. Historians, however, do not claim that type of knowledge, and they generally lack such audiences or clients. Their narratives and interpretations, which are heavily weighted with contingencies and interdependent rather than dependent variables, are somewhat unwieldy and harder to package as “expertise.” Rather than finely tuned expertise for specific audiences, historians offer broad interpretations, often at a macro level, to a diverse public.

The chronic shortage of academic positions since the 1970s has stimulated a search for a more focused public role, and many historians have taken the title of “public historian.” They work outside of academe, and speak from museums, historical societies, national parks, and various community organizations. In a sense the designation “public” before “historian” or “intellectuals” is redundant.[1] As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation. That this linguistic and definitional problem confusion is rarely noticed may be an indicator of the narrowing of professional aspiration and responsibility among historians as well as a sense of isolation, feeling of impotence, and, perhaps, irrelevance. Such was not the case in the beginning.

More here.

From NPR:

Human life expectancy increases at a rate of about two years per decade — or roughly five hours a day. Some scientists think it's possible to live for 500 or even 1,000 years. But if we could live that long, would we want to? In his book, Long For This World, Jonathan Weiner, 56, explores the possibilities for immortality. He tells NPR's Neal Conan that many gerontologists — specialists who study aging — hate the word immortality. “It suggests this kind of supernatural aura that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve,” he says. Still, Weiner says many mainstream gerontologists are talking about work that's essentially the same as those on the fringe who embrace the term. “From where I sit, it's very similar,” he says.

…

Why do our bodies stop renewing themselves after about the age of 12? Weiner says the answer to that question lies in evolutionary biology. “It was important for us to build sturdy bodies that will last until we reach the age of reproduction,” he says. According to Weiner, you're on the upswing until about the age of 20. After that, once you pass the age of reproduction and young parenthood, he says, “evolution by natural selection really ignores you. You're disposable, in some sense, because you've passed on your genes.” Weiner says that's why “we aren't built to last.” So, what is possible? In the foreseeable future Weiner says we could gain extra decades — good decades — of life without disease and infirmity. Weiner says that many people around his age are starting to consider what to do with all that extra time. “Since we have a longer lifespan, and a longer healthy life expectancy,” he says, “maybe we can add another chapter.” According to Weiner, that attitude is bound to get more popular as life expectancies increase.

Excerpt: 'Long For This World' here.

From MSNBC:

The quest for immortality goes back to Adam and Eve, but now some smart people are getting serious about actually bringing it within their grasp. And they're getting more attention as well. Let's take Aubrey de Grey, for example: The British gerontologist has been beating the drum for anti-aging therapies for years. He plays a prominent role in a recently published book on the immortality quest titled “Long for this World,” a new documentary called “To Age or Not to Age” and a just-published commentary on the science of aging. In this week's issue of Science Translational Medicine, de Grey and nine other co-authors urge the United States and other nations to set up a Project Apollo-scale initiative to avert the coming “global aging crisis.” The experts' prescription includes a campaign to raise the general public's awareness about lifestyle changes that can lead to longer and healthier lives; a lab-based effort to develop anti-aging medicines; and a push for new techniques to repair, restore or replace the cellular and molecular damage done by age.

“There is this misunderstanding that aging is something that just happens to you, like the weather, and cannot be influenced,” another co-author, Jan Vijg of Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said in a news release. “The big surprise of the last decades is that, in many different animals, we can increase healthy life span in various ways.” When it comes to translating anti-aging research into real life, however, the experts face at least three types of challenges: First, the basic lifestyle advice is pretty pedestrian: Eat wisely and exercise moderately. Some folks might wonder what the big deal is all about. “To enjoy the fantastic voyage, stay with the tried and true,” Jonathan Weiner writes in “Long for this World.”

More here.

ONE night in April 1952 near Darwin, a strange, shy man, 60 years old, with a cultured voice and intense pale blue eyes, climbed aboard a raft he had constructed from aircraft drop tanks, and shoved off into the Timor Sea. He carried a sack of dried bread to last 10 days and a compass. Within minutes the waves slapped up between the planks. A week or so later, after search planes gave him up for dead, the obituary of Ian Fairweather appeared in newspapers in Britain and Australia. To Australians at least, his story is as familiar as a slouch hat. He was British, the youngest son of a distinguished surgeon-general in the Indian army, and had grown up on Jersey in a large house with a butler. A prize-winning student at the Slade, he had known Augustus John, Somerset Maugham and Antarctic explorer Robert Scott, whose brother was engaged to his sister Queenie. He had shared a successful exhibition with Walter Sickert in London and one of his paintings was hung in the Tate. Until the moment of his disappearance, he was living in Gauguinesque squalor in the stern half of a derelict patrol boat. Locals in Darwin referred to him, not without derision, as “Rear Admiral”. “If he had died on that raft, as he nearly did,” says Murray Bail, whose updated edition of Fairweather (Murdoch Books, 280pp, $125) is the fruit of almost four decades of sleuthing, “he’d be a pleasant sort of minor footnote; a post-impressionist, with a Chinese flavour, of what he called his tourist pictures.” But Fairweather did not die.

more from Nicholas Shakespeare at The Australian here.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was one of those great intellectual figures, whose lives and writings have taught to all of us that we can understand each other, learn from each other and live in peace with each other independently of our ethnic and religious diversities. Furthermore, his outstanding and unparalleled research on the teaching of the holy texts beyond the literal meaning of words written in the cultural context of centuries ago, has demonstrated that religions never are an obstacle to the recognition of the fundamental rights of each human being and therefore to the basic solidarity among us upon which peace can be built. We will miss him, but his principles will remain with us and will give vision and strength to our unchanged commitment on behalf of the dialogue among civilizations.

more from Giuliano Amato and others at Reset here.