Until she was in her 50s, Louise Bourgeois, who has died aged 98 after a heart attack, was known to the New York glitterati merely as the charming French lady who appeared at private views on the arm of her American husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater. There had been a few decently received shows of Bourgeois’s own work in the 1940s and early 50s, but then the abstract expressionists swept the decks clean. Nothing could withstand the sheer artistic elan and commercial drive of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, and the backing of Clement Greenberg, a critic whose thumbs up or down meant life or death. It was not until the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) gave Bourgeois a retrospective in 1982, when she was already 70, that she at last took her place as queen of New York, one of the most inventive and disturbing sculptors of the century and, later, the first artist to to tackle a commission for a temporary work to command the vast spaces of the turbine hall of the new Tate Modern, in London.

more from Michael McNay at The Guardian here.

About halfway through the Putin presidency, a funny thing started happening to Russian novelists: They all started writing dystopias. In 2006, Vladimir Sorokin, the legendary deconstructionist novelist, published a traditional dystopian satire about the secret services, A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik; that same year, the literary novelist Olga Slavnikova won the Russian Booker with 2017, and the prodigiously prolific and overweight man of letters Dmitry Bykov published ZhD, set in a future where Russia is at war with a Western force called the ZhDs, who are winning because of their discovery of “phlogiston,” a remarkable substance that has replaced oil as the West’s fuel of choice and rendered Russia nearly obsolete. This strange literary outburst was related, I think, to the political stagnation of the Putin years. That he was bringing back authoritarianism in some form no one doubted; but in just what form, and how brutally, how totally, it was hard to tell. The present seemed to make no impression. A novelist who described this present would at some level simply be wrong. As far as the eye could see, nothing was happening. In order to create a meaning, in order to make sense of this present, you had to project current tendencies some years into the future. Looking at American fiction of the same time, you see something like the exact opposite phenomenon.

more from Keith Gessen at Bookforum here.

Since James Joyce’s Ulysses made rewriting the Odyssey the foundational gesture of modernism, there have been innumerable rather trivial contemporary engagements with Homer, which, even when they are as engaging as Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, have rarely been more than a one-trick pony. Derek Walcott’s Omeros, in verse, is the outstanding exception. The thought of yet another slim, self-conscious volume of modernist prose, this time a first novel by a Californian computer scientist, whose PhD was on a “computational corpus-based metaphor extraction system”, does not sound promising – although the idea of a system to extract metaphors from texts might be a good modernist joke: a terrifying totalitarian world where metaphor-cleansing was an industrialized process. The Lost Books of the Odyssey certainly proclaims its modernist status. It has forty-four very short chapters – the longest is only nine generously laid out pages, the shortest a bare single page – each of which is a fragmentary narrative, a calque on the Odyssey.

more from Simon Goldhill at the TLS here.

Sean Patrick Cooper in The Millions:

While the methods by which we now acquire our music have had an impact, to a degree, on our experience of music listening, they have remained markedly less influential than the evolutions in the design and application of what we use to listen to our music. In 2008 and 2009, close to 100 million iPods were purchased globally. The widespread use of personal mp3 players and, more importantly, the headphones attached to those players, have gone on to facilitate for a significant percentage of the population a kind of relationship that has never before occurred between music listener and music.

Join the public space and look around: It takes only a brief moment to locate an individual plugged in and headphoned up. Like using an umbrella, headphones serve a particular function, shielding us from the nuisances of the world. Hop on any form of public transportation, plug in, and no longer must you suffer the coughing, sneezing, dry throat clearing, cell phone texting, loud speaker announcing, sneaker squeaking, nervous leg tapping, neighbor yawning, Doritos eating, water bottle dropping and newspaper shuffling that is the shuttle, train, or bus around you. Step off and into the street and headphones continue to serve you well. Why subject yourself to the car honking, police whistle blowing and sidewalk chattering of the urban space when you don’t have to?

More here.

In the NYT:

Mr. Voznesensky and poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvensky burst onto the stage in the cultural thaw that followed Stalin’s death in 1953 and rose to stardom in the 1960s, filling stadiums for poetry readings and attracting worldwide attention as creators of powerful verse and symbols of youthful defiance.

Mr. Voznesensky traveled the world to read his poetry, serving as a sort of unofficial Kremlin cultural envoy, even though he was a critic of rough-handed Soviet policies like the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He seemed to provide a propaganda boost at times to Moscow in its yearning search for approval at home and abroad. His independent voice seemed to represent the Communist leadership’s degree of tolerance for criticism, encouraging some foes of totalitarianism to believe that the system could be reformed.

Whatever Mr. Voznesensky’s political opinions, his skill, experimentation and depth as a poet won respect around the world. He was also remembered as a magnificent reader of his poetry. He once appeared in London on the same bill as Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield and more than held his own.

“I Am Goya,” one of Mr. Voznesensky’s earliest and best-known poems, expressed the fear of war he experienced in childhood. It was inspired by a volume of Goya’s etchings given to him by his father and reads in part (as translated by the American poet Stanley Kunitz):

I am Goya
of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged
till the craters of my eyes gape
I am grief
I am the tongue
of war, the embers of cities
on the snows of the year 1941
I am hunger
I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya

The poem creates its impressions of war and horror through a series of images and interrelated variations on the name of the painter, which echo throughout in a series of striking sound metaphors, in Russian: Goya, glaz (eyes), gore (grief), golos (voice), gorod (cities), golod (hunger), gorlo (gullet).

Andrew F. March and Paul Berman debate Berman in Dissent. March:

PAUL BERMAN has written an odd book. It is not intellectual history–he rightly does not claim for himself any expertise in Islamic legal, theological and political thought, and he makes no effort to fully explicate Ramadan’s own doctrines in light of those traditions. It is not political biography–he is not telling Ramadan’s personal story except in select snippets. It is not quite political argument–he is not giving an analysis of the social and cultural situation of Muslims in the West and telling us What is to Be Done. It is not even a plea for vigilance–he insists in numerous places that Ramadan is not an Islamist extremist and certainly no threat to anyone.

What is Berman’s book about, in the end? It is an attempt to arrive at a judgment about a very important public intellectual while admonishing educated Westerners about how we treat Muslim dissidents. In doing so, the book discusses Ramadan’s thought and the wider phenomenon of Islamic militancy, but it takes a skipping-stone approach to the subject: glancing off many various surfaces and edges rather than patiently probing the depths. Berman is aiming at a profile-cum-exposé of Ramadan, but he is entangled in an awkward set of questions which he thinks need to be raised about Muslim intellectuals: Should we trust him? Should we like him? Should we praise him? Should we support him? Berman never explicitly discusses what kind of judgment we need to make about a figure like Ramadan, but my feeling (a standard Berman uses often in his own appraisal of Ramadan) is that Berman wishes he could prove to us that we shouldn’t trust him and that we are permitted to condemn him, but since he can’t prove that, he has to settle with showing us that we should not like him.

Berman responds:

MY SKEPTICAL eye alights upon Andrew F. March’s fourth paragraph, where he explains that, in The Flight of the Intellectuals, I spend 100 pages recounting “the often stomach-churning history of Arab and Islamic attitudes towards Israel, Jews, Hitler, and the Holocaust.” He suggests that I have slandered Ramadan by family association with the stomach-churning history. But March devotes not one sentence to describing or summarizing what is said in those hundred pages.

Tariq Ramadan’s grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood was the original expression of the political movement known as Islamism, which, in its different versions, has gone into bloom in many parts of the world. In the hundred pages that Andrew F. March abstains from discussing, I explain that Tariq Ramadan has written a book largely devoted to Hassan al-Banna, called Aux Sources du Renouveau Musulman, which I translate as The Roots of the Muslim Renewal. The book emphasizes that Ramadan is, in fact, al-Banna’s grandson—a fact that is announced in the book’s opening dedicatory words: “To my mother, the eldest daughter of Hassan al-Banna.” But what chiefly matters is of course Ramadan’s intellectual filiation from al-Banna and his place within al-Banna’s current of fundamentalist theological interpretation, which is called “salafi reformism.” I judge The Roots of the Muslim Renewal to be Ramadan’s finest book, from a strictly literary standpoint. It expresses Ramadan’s philosophical ideas and heritage more clearly than any of his other books. I also judge the book to be gravely and even deliberately misleading about his grandfather.

Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker on Ayaan Hirsi, Tariq Ramadan, and Paul Berman:

Berman deftly summarizes a revisionist history that emphasizes “centuries of Muslim cruelty toward the Jews,” challenging the conventional view that European-style anti-Semitism was unknown under the Ottoman Empire. But he misses an opportunity to enrich his genealogy of hate by setting it within the modern history of the Middle East and Asia. For instance, he makes a passing reference to Rashid Rida, a prominent Islamist thinker at the turn of the twentieth century and al-Banna’s revered teacher, expressing curiosity about his praise for early Zionist settlers, but doesn’t explore the matter further. Although, ultimately, Rida turned against Zionism as Jewish immigration to Palestine surged in the wake of the Balfour Declaration, he had been an outspoken critic of European anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus trial and made early attempts, including an exchange with Chaim Weizmann, regarding an agreement between “the Arabs and their Hebrew cousins.” Berman rightly points out that the mufti of Jerusalem showed an obscene eagerness to help extend the Final Solution to the Middle East, and hatred of British colonialists and Zionist settlers certainly provoked Naziphilia among many Arabs of the nineteen-thirties and forties. But it is worth noting that, by 1941, when the mufti sidled up to Hitler and, soon afterward, began to air his anti-Semitic rants on the radio, reactionary pan-Islamists like him had to contend with overlapping groups of liberal Westernizers, Marxists, and secular Arab nationalists; far from being representative of the larger Arab world, the mufti was a fast-diminishing figure even in his own small sphere of influence—forced out of Palestine by the British in 1937 and blamed for a series of political debacles there. Berman himself relates that Arabs comprehensively failed to respond to the mufti’s exhortations to kill the Jews.

What you wouldn’t guess from Berman’s account is how common it was for anti-colonialist leaders to stumble into such unlikely alliances. In the nineteen-twenties, Mahatma Gandhi, a devout Hindu and pacifist, vigorously campaigned for the restoration of the caliphate. And in 1941 an old colleague of his, Subhas Chandra Bose, travelled to Berlin and enlisted Indian P.O.W.s who later fought in the Waffen S.S. The expedient notion that my enemy’s enemy is my friend even motivated the Jewish militant leader Avraham Stern to try, in 1940, to enlist Nazi support against the British rulers of Palestine. Bose, who went on to collaborate with Japanese militarists against the British in the Japanese invasion of India, remains a great nationalist icon, while Winston Churchill, the resolute anti-Fascist so admired in the West, is reviled as a crudely racist imperialist who delayed Indian independence as long as he could and inflicted death on millions with his callous policies during the Great Famine of Bengal, in 1943. These Janus reputations should remind us that what Berman casts as an epic moral struggle between liberalism and Fascism in the West has been experienced and remembered very differently in the East.

…In light of these alternative histories, “The Flight of the Intellectuals” seems to be laboring merely to underline the obvious: that a Muslim with a political subjectivity shaped by decades of imperial conquest, humiliation, and postcolonial failure does not share the world view of a liberal from Brooklyn. Yet there has long been such a chasm between Western intellectuals and their counterparts in formerly subordinate countries, an incompatibility of historical memories. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the war on terror have hardened prejudice and suspicion on all sides; now more than ever it is necessary for Western intellectuals to find real interlocutors among Muslim thinkers and activists. Tariq Ramadan may not be ideal, but the impulse to engage with him seems to exemplify the best kind of liberalism—unself-righteous and aware of its own inadequacies.

My Father's Loveletters

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
Close his eyes, & ask me to write
The same letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than a man. He'd beg her
Return & promised to never
Beat her again. I was almost happy
She was gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in something bad.
His carpenter's apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Holstered in a loop at his side
& extension cords coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under
The pressure of my ballpoint:
Love, Baby, Honey, Please.
We lingered in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . . the heartless
Gleam of a two pound wedge
On the concrete floor,
A sunset in the doorway
Of the tool shed.
I wondered if she'd laugh
As she held them over a flame.
My father could only sign
His name, but he'd look at blueprints
& tell you how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, stood there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word,
Opened like a fresh wound, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

by Yusef Komunyakaa
from New American Poets of the '90s
David R. Godine, Publisher, 1991

Hello,

The period for nominating entries is over.

To see a full list of the nominees and then vote, go here.

To see details of the prize, go here.

Good luck to all!

The voting round closes on Monday, June 7, 2010, at 11:59 pm NYC time.

From Science:

Millions of people worldwide use acupuncture to ease a variety of painful conditions, but it’s still not clear how the ancient treatment works. Now a new study of mice shows that insertion of an acupuncture needle activates nearby pain-suppressing receptors. What’s more, a compound that boosts the response of those receptors increases pain relief—a finding that could one day lead to drugs that enhance the effectiveness of acupuncture in people.

Researchers have developed two hypotheses for how acupuncture relieves pain. One holds that the needle stimulates pain-sensing nerves, which trigger the brain to release opiumlike compounds called endorphins that circulate in the body. The other holds that acupuncture works through a placebo effect, in which the patient's thinking releases endorphins. Neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York state was skeptical about both hypotheses because acupuncture doesn’t hurt and often works only when needles are inserted near the sore site. Nedergaard instead suspected that when acupuncturists insert and rotate needles, they cause minor damage to the tissue, which releases a compound called adenosine that acts as a local pain reliever.

More here.

From Nature:

Freeloading crows start to contribute to group efforts when hardworking birds become handicapped, a study shows. Carrion crows (Corvus corone) form stable groups that share the responsibilities of breeding and caring for the young. Dominant breeders rely on helpers to feed chicks, but they also tolerate individuals that don't seem to help at all. Puzzled about the reasons for this leniency, scientists have suggested that dominants may indirectly benefit from the survival and future reproduction of lazy relatives, and that larger groups — even those filled with dallying birds — may have a lower risk of predation or be more efficient at foraging. Evolutionary biologist Vittorio Baglione at the University of Valladolid in Palencia, Spain, and colleagues now reveal an unexpected role for the laziest members of the group. They report their findings today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The research team used camouflaged video cameras to collect data on how often 61 wild crows from 17 social groups in northern Spain fed chicks. They recorded for 12 hours across three days, then trapped and clipped the wings of one breeding bird from each group and repeated the data collection. When clipped crows reduced their chick feeding by about 30%, only non-breeders intensified their care-giving efforts. What's more, the laziest birds increased their helping behaviour the most. Five out of eight crows that had previously refused to visit the nest suddenly began feeding the chicks.

More here.

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on June 8, 2010. Winners of the contest, as decided by Richard Dawkins, will be announced on June 21, 2010.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

Cheers,

Abbas

P.S. If you notice any problems, such as, a nominee is missing from the list below, please leave a comment on this page. Thanks.

BEWARE: We have various independent ways of keeping track of attempts at voting multiple times, which I am deliberately not revealing publicly. Any attempts at fraud will be thoroughly investigated, and anyone caught trying to vote multiple times will be instantly disqualified.

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Mesothelioma as Metaphor
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Sigmund Freud – “A Dream of Undying Fame”
3. 3 Quarks Daily: The [Non-] Theory of Psychological Testing
4. A Primate of Modern Aspect: So… Did knuckle walking evolve twice?
5. Anecdotal Economics: Slouching Toward Despotism
6. Archive Fire: Breakdown, Or a Degree of Difference
7. A Schooner of Science: Chemistry of Kissing
8. Bad Astronomy: A lunar illusion you’ll flip over
9. Cocktail Party Physics: All in the Family
10. Code for Life: GMOs and the plants we eat: neither are “natural”
11. Code for Life: The Inheritance of Face Recognition
12. Cognition and Culture: camphor – ammonia = anniseed X peppermint
13. Cosmic Variance: Free Energy and the Meaning of Life
14. Cosmic Variance: Non-Normalizable Probability Measures for Fun and Profit
15. Daylight Atheism: A Sense of Kinship
16. Denim and Tweed: Dethroning the Red Queen?
17. EcoTone: Fire ant decapitating flies take hold in Florida, one head at a time
18. Evolving Thoughts: Apes and Evolution in the News
19. Evolving Thoughts: Social dominance hierarchies
20. Facto Diem: Prime Years of Life
21. Gene Expression: Experiments in cultural transmission and human cultural evolution
22. Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP: The World is Digital
23. Health Net Navigation: Reflections of Med 2.0 Conference
24. In the Dark: The Academic Journal Racket
25. Mad in America: A Schizophrenia Mystery Solved
26. Mental Floss: Everybody Hurts (Even Crabs)
27. My Growing Passion: The Evolution of Chloroplasts
28. NeuroDojo: The princess and the perfume, a hermit crab fairy tale
29. Neuron Culture: Does depression have an upside? It’s complicated
30. Neurotopia: The Hyena Mating Game
31. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Caterpillars use bacteria to produce green islands in yellowing leaves
32. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria
33. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Pigeons outperform humans at the Monty Hall Dilemma
34. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Power breeds hypocrisy
35. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Raptorex shows that T. Rex body plan evolved at 100th the size
36. Not Exactly Rocket Science: The evolution of the past tense – how verbs change over time
37. Observations of a Nerd: Ancient Sex Scandals: Did We Get It On With Neanderthals?
38. Observations of a Nerd: Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs
39. Observations of a Nerd: Evolution: Watching Speciation Occur
40. Oscillator: Knowledge is Power
41. Pharyngula: It’s ALIVE!
42. Postcards from an intellectual odyssey: The mysterious love child of geology and biology: Hydrothermal Vents – Part 2
43. Professor Astronomy: In Defense of Wasteful Science
44. Ramblings: The Neotony Hypothesis – How did human intelligence evolve?
45. Rangle: The Science Education with makeshift equipment
46. Sandwalk: Human Y Chromosome Mutation Rates
47. SarahAskew: A blast from a black hole’s past
48. Science Cheerleader: The Lightning Grief
49. Science Life: Slot Machines: Neuroscience in Action
50. Scientific Blogging: MSL: Mars Action Hero
51. Scientific Chick: Cell phones: Curing brain diseases since 2010
52. Scientific Chick: To panic or not to panic: An interview with the Swine Flu
53. Skepsisfera: A New Dark Age
54. Small Things Considered: Paleovirology
55. Southern Fried Science: Are sandbar sharks more like bowhead whales or cod?
56. Southern Fried Science: The Cove, Dolphins, and Mercury
57. Southern Fried Science: The Menhaden of History
58. Surprising Science: The World’s Strangest Scientific Names
59. The Artful Amoeba: Killer Yeast from South America
60. The Artful Amoeba: The Seafaring Killer Bacterium
61. The Astronomist: Dark Matter Confronts Observations
62. The Atavism: Nucleotide diversity – what two new African genomes mean
63. The Chicken or the Egg: The complicated genetics of human eye color inheritance
64. The Language of Bad Physics: The Language of Science – it’s “just a theory”
65. The Loom: Linux Versus E. coli
66. The Loom: Skullcaps and Genomes
67. The Loom: The X-Woman’s Fingerbone
68. The Loom: Why Madagascar’s Tapeworms Matter–To You
69. The Primate Diaries: Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play to Reaping an Unjust Reward
70. The Science Essayist: On Seeing Yourself
71. The South Asian Idea Weblog: The World Is Too Big to Fail But…
72. The Thoughtful Animal: Does oral sex confer an evolutionary advantage? Evidence from bats
73. The Thoughtful Animal: Path Integration in the Desert Ant
74. The Thoughtful Animal: The Russian Fox Study
75. Tom Paine’s Ghost: Swimming in Ethanol’s Ethos
76. University of Oxford Science Blog: Oxford and the Royal Society’s Origins
77. Unruled Notebook: Laminar Flow Reversibility: Why Does the Blob Rewind?
78. Virology Blog: Influenza Virus in the Toilet
79. Weird Things: Why we’re stuck with dark energy
80. Why Evolution Is True: The Evolutionary Calculus of Depression

To vote, click here.

Of all the challenges Conan O’Brien faces on his nationwide “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” tour (translating his talk-show aesthetic into a live comedy performance; avoiding coming off as a sore loser), the biggest challenge might be self-inflicted: having to step onstage every night in the wake of his opening act, Reggie Watts. Watts, a star of New York’s alt-comedy scene, is the kind of comedian who tends to close shows. His sets are loud, disorienting bouts of improvised anti-comedy. He is, in many ways, the opposite of O’Brien, as both a performer and a being. O’Brien is gangly and pale; Watts is chubby and dark. O’Brien has an ironic post–Tonight Show beard and that signature little flip of orange hair; Watts has a huge asymmetrical Afro that blends into a beard as thick and dark as good-quality garden loam. O’Brien approaches comedy, famously, as a writer, spending hours preparing each moment onstage. Watts improvises his act so thoroughly that, if a hard-core fan were ever to request a favorite old bit, Watts would probably have no idea what he was talking about. Over the past seventeen years, Conan has established himself as one of America’s most stable comic voices. Watts builds his comedy out of radical instability: He switches so fluidly among different accents and personae (soprano, baritone, Californian, Cockney) that it’s hard to tell what the real person even sounds like. Conan, in other words, is a recognizable type of comedian: a subspecies of the genus Letterman. Watts is like a character Conan might have invented—half-man, half-astral-funk Muppet.

more from Sam Anderson at New York Magazine here.

The geologic record as we know it thus suggests that climate is a profoundly grander thing than energy. Energy procurement is a matter of engineering and keeping the lights on under circumstances that are likely to get more difficult as time progresses. Climate change, by contrast, is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself. The earth doesn’t include the potentially catastrophic effects on civilization in its planning. Far from being responsible for damaging the earth’s climate, civilization might not be able to forestall any of these terrible changes once the earth has decided to make them. Were the earth determined to freeze Canada again, for example, it’s difficult to imagine doing anything except selling your real estate in Canada. If it decides to melt Greenland, it might be best to unload your property in Bangladesh. The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we’re gazing into the energy future, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s beyond our power to control.

more from Robert B. Laughlin at The American Scholar here.

William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, famously asked why the devil should have all the best tunes, and proceeded to plunder them for his own missionary purposes. In his stimulating new book, Terry Eagleton seems to have asked himself why theologians should have all the best metaphors, and has proceeded to plunder them in his campaign to bring greater realism to an understanding of contemporary politics. Without repudiating the possibility of a supernatural dimension to Christian doctrine, his purpose in this book is to demonstrate how it can be used to express and interpret the human condition. Using technical theological language, his book could be described as an exercise in realised eschatology: ‘while there could no more be anyone “in” hell than there could be anyone in a material location called debt or love or despair’, hell is real enough, he says – and it’s not just other people. Central to Eagleton’s use of theology in this book is the doctrine of original sin, the only doctrine for which there is an abundance of empirical evidence. Christian anthropology, properly understood, is neither pessimistic nor optimistic – it is realistic; and in that triangulation, which is very important to Eagleton, there are the makings of a whole political philosophy. The human is a tragic animal, aware of the complexity of its own condition, yet never in complete control of it. Claiming to be free, we also know that our choices in life are largely determined by circumstances we had no part in creating.

more from Richard Holloway at Literary Review here.

Gabriel Winant in Salon:

It's never easy to make guesses about what will happen in Middle East politics. But I think we're blowing the event out of proportion — not in its moral gravity, but in its likely immediate political consequences.

First of all, the most crucial relationship Israel has is with the United States, and there isn't much indication yet of that this will alter that relationship. The hard consensus at the elite level in favor of tolerating whatever Israel wants to do rests on a soft consensus in American public opinion. Both are likely to survive this in some slightly diminished form, as they've survived the two Lebanon wars (complete with thoroughly unprovoked massacres), the small Gaza war and the formation of an Israeli government including a quasi-fascist foreign minister.

• Continue reading

Plus, even though Israeli commandos Israel boarded the ships as part of a broad, explicit, and indefensible effort to keep basic supplies out of a desperately needy Gaza, Israel's supporters are aggressively pushing a blame-the-victims counternarrative. There were clubs and knives on board the aid ships, they note, and there's now video of passengers chasing and attacking soldiers. This is likely to muddy the waters enough to keep Americans from reacting with outrage.

American conservatives are already doubling down on their attacks on the ship passengers.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The bestselling Swedish author Henning Mankell was on board a convoy of Gaza-bound aid boats stormed by Israeli forces today, resulting in the deaths of at least 10 activists and injuries to dozens of others. With the ships out of communication since the attack early this morning, it is not yet known whether he is among the injured. Mankell had decided to join the aid-delivering flotilla – also believed to include Nobel peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire – in a gesture of solidarity towards Palestinians currently living under the Israeli blockade. The Free Gaza Movement and a coalition of activist groups have been attempting to circumvent import restrictions imposed by the country since 2008.

A spokesperson for Ship to Gaza-Sweden said he had last spoken to someone on board Mankell's ship just before 5am Swedish time (4am BST). “They were telling us then about the Israeli soldiers climbing into the neighbouring ship, and they heard shooting aboard it. I was not speaking to Henning but to one of his friends. The Swedish ship was attacked a bit later, 10-15 minutes later. The whole attack was done between 4-5 o'clock Swedish time,” said Mikael Löfgren.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

When J. Craig Venter announced at a news conference the other day that he and his co-workers had created the first “synthetic cell,” he displayed the savvy graciousness of an actor accepting an Academy Award. Dr. Venter, the renowned genome wrassler and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, praised his two dozen team members and described the long years of struggle that preceded their moment of triumph. He called out important figures in the audience: his editor, his literary agent, the celebrity diet doctor Dean Ornish. And he acknowledged that none of his group’s work would have been possible without a lot of help from the parents — Mother Nature and Father Time.

After all, that stalwart pair was responsible for designing and gradually refining the real cells that brought the Venter team’s synthetic constructs to life. There is, as yet, no escaping the cell. Every past and present lodger on the twisted bristlecone tree of life is built of cells, every cell is a microcosm of life, and neither the Venter team nor anybody else has come close to recreating the cell from scratch. If anything, the new report underscores how dependent biologists remain on its encapsulated power.

More here.

The Rarest Thyme