Jesse Jarnow in Paste Magazine (illustration by Meg Hunt):

Once this birthday passes, I’m sure I’ll be fine. I’m not usually susceptible to believing wild generalizations, but preparing to turn 30 will have that effect on a dude. Recently, I fell for two in one week.

The first generalization—reading that a man reaches midlife crisis when he realizes he will never read Proust—was a throwaway line in an article I’ve since been unable to Google, an insignificant aside lodged like a popcorn kernel between the teeth. The second—Chuck Klosterman’s concern that, by not reading Harry Potter now, he was dooming himself to eventual cultural obscurity—suggested that I should fear the J.K. Rowling-weaned generation like a robot army.

The rest of this project came down to math. I’m 29, equal distance between high school and 40. There are seven volumes in each set, providing three months of potential beach/subway reading. A distant latch seemed to click: a plan to simultaneously stave off obsolescence and depression by reading 7,202 pages, alternating volumes, in a couple months’ time. But at the end, what? Preparation for my 30s? Transformation? Some sort of silky chrysalis sack for my roommates to clean up?

The first thing I learn is that it’s impossible to read Marcel Proust while listening to baseball on the radio. Since my dream of chipping away 50 pages every day revolves around digging Proust in the cool of the evening during a ballgame broadcast (a slow, pleasant rhythm that usually doesn’t prevent me from reading), this gets us off on the wrong foot, Marcel and me. His sentences are just too long—often half a page or more—and too easily tangled with the early-summer trials of a beleaguered bullpen.

Chris Lehmann's funny review of Power Ambition Glory: The Stunning Parallels between Great Leaders of the Ancient World and Today…and the Lessons You Can Learn by Steve Forbes and John Prevas over at The Awl:

There’s a well-established cottage industry in American publishing, whereby latter-day lords of commerce and finance plunder the annals of the past for nuggets of motivational business wisdom. The genre arguably began with ad man Bruce Barton’s 1920s bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, which deployed a series of extremely selective New Testament quotations to make the case that Jesus, in addition to his still quite impressive spiritual significance, was also a champion businessman. The intervening years have seen all sorts of amusing follow-on offerings, such as John Man’s The Leadership Secrets of Ghengis Khan and neocon toady Michael Ledeen’s Machiavelli on Modern Leadership. But as those entries show, there’s a staggering degree of self-involvement in these putative historical studies. No matter how far-flung or seemingly unsuited these Great Men (and yes, as business titan-role models, they are all capital-d Dudes) might otherwise seem, they all come bearing the same comforting lessons from their untended mausoleums: The greatness we embodied maps perfectly on the demands of modern-day success! Just heed our examples, oh wayward moderns, and prosper!

And so it came to pass that Steve Forbes was prowling a bookstore in Naples, Florida a few years back looking “for something interesting to read.” Forbes’ employees must live in dread that at such moments their maximum leader will stumble onto Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own or Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking; but happily for them, the quarry this time was Hannibal Crosses the Alps by John Prevas. And boy, did it ever get our correspondent thinking. First, he published a review of the book—well past its publication date–in his eponymous magazine, and thereby embodied a first principle of leadership: executive vanity will always trump timely coverage.

He also realized that Prevas’ popular history of that world-vanquishing moment posed—wait for it—critical lessons for today! “The financial crisis and America's recent foreign policy setbacks can be traced directly to a failure of leadership. But where do we turn for leadership, and what do we want in our leaders? History is one place to look. The past is filled with leaders who possessed extraordinary capabilities, enjoyed tremendous success, and directed societies that experienced problems similar to our own.”

[H/t: Misha Lepetic]

Lindsay Beyerstein over at her blog dissects Goldberg’s claims of corruption at HRW:

A non-profit calling itself NGO Monitor picked up on the story nearly two months ago in a post entitled, “HRW Raises Funds in Saudia Arabia by Demonizing Israel.” The author was incensed by the following passage in the Arab News story:

Human Rights Watch provided the international community with evidence of Israel using white phosphorus and launching systematic destructive attacks on civilian targets. Pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations have strongly resisted the report and tried to discredit it,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division. [AN]

That’s exactly what happened. HRW presented evidence that Israel was exploding white phosphorous shells in heavily populated areas of Gaza and inflicting hideous burns on civilians. Pro-Israel pressure groups absolutely freaked out about the HRW report and did their best to discredit it. HRW defended its work.

The IDF stopped using white phosphorus in the middle of the occupation after media reports revealed its effects on civilians. Yesterday, HRW published accounts of Israeli soldiers who admit using white phosphorous indescriminately in Gaza under unprecedently loose rules of engagement. HRW, FTW.

Predicatably, Israeli officials denounced HRW for its latest report.

Would it surprise you to learn that NGO Monitor is a pro-Israeli pressure group? According to his official bio, the group’s founder and executive director, Professor Gerald Steinberg is a consultant for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and serves on a steering committee sponsored by the office of the Israeli Prime Minister.

From The Boston Globe:

Last February, the town of Shapleigh, Maine, population 2,326, passed an unusual ordinance. Like nearby towns, Shapleigh sought to protect its aquifers from the Nestle Corporation, which draws heavily on the region for its Poland Spring bottled water. Some Maine towns had acquiesced, others had protested, and one was locked in a protracted legal battle. Shapleigh tried something new – a move at once humble in its method and audacious in its ambition. At a town meeting, residents voted, 114-66, to endow all of the town’s natural assets with legal rights: “Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable and fundamental rights to exist, flourish and naturally evolve within the Town of Shapleigh.” It further decreed that any town resident had “standing” to seek relief for damages caused to nature – permitting, for example, a lawsuit on behalf of a stream.

Shapleigh is one of about a dozen US municipalities to have passed measures declaring that nature itself has rights under the law. And in 2008, when Ecuador adopted a new constitution, it recognized nature’s “right to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate its own vital cycles, structure, functions and its evolutionary processes.” A campaign is also underway in Europe for a UN Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights, which would attempt to enshrine such principles in international law, following the model of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

The landmark book in the firm’s early life was Nabokov’s Lolita, which had been published originally in Paris. Graham Greene called it one of the three best books of 1955; the Sunday Express condemned it as “sheer unrestrained pornography”. Which was it? Pornography or a literary masterpiece? Nicolson, by then a Tory MP, was shocked by it, but proposed the printing of a few sample copies. One was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, daring him, as it were, to prosecute.

If the authorities had chosen to sue the book as obscene, as other publishers feared, Weidenfeld & Nicolson would have been bankrupted, but word reached Weidenfeld in a telephone call at the Ritz, where the firm was toasting the book’s publication, that the Conservative government would not prosecute. Lolita was the firm’s first bestseller, selling more than 200,000 copies in hardback. Fiction, however, was not the mainspring of the firm’s output, although when George Orwell’s widow Sonia joined the staff she attracted two leading American authors, Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy. In a rich period in the early Seventies, Edna O’Brien arrived (and is still published by the firm) and in successive years there were two Booker winners: John Berger’s G and J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur.

More here.

Thing

We love our cat

for her self

regard is assiduous

and bland,

for she sits in the small

patch of sun on our rug

and licks her claws

from all angles

and it is far

superior

to “balanced reporting”

though, of course,

it is also

the very same thing.

by Rae Armantrout

from Beard of Bees, #15, Chicago, June 2004

Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker:

Men are now on average seventeen pounds heavier than they were in the late seventies, and for women that figure is even higher: nineteen pounds. The proportion of overweight children, age six to eleven, has more than doubled, while the proportion of overweight adolescents, age twelve to nineteen, has more than tripled. (According to the standards of the United States military, forty per cent of young women and twenty-five per cent of young men weigh too much to enlist.) As the average person became heavier, the very heavy became heavier still; more than twelve million Americans now have a body-mass index greater than forty, which, for someone who is five feet nine, entails weighing more than two hundred and seventy pounds. Hospitals have had to buy special wheelchairs and operating tables to accommodate the obese, and revolving doors have had to be widened—the typical door went from about ten feet to about twelve feet across. An Indiana company called Goliath Casket has begun offering triple-wide coffins with reinforced hinges that can hold up to eleven hundred pounds. It has been estimated that Americans’ extra bulk costs the airlines a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of jet fuel annually.

Such a broad social development seems to require an explanation on the same scale. Something big must have changed in America to cause so many people to gain so much weight so quickly. But what, exactly, is unclear—a mystery batter-dipped in an enigma.

More here.

Jamais Cascio in The Atlantic:

Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.

But here’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.

Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way. In fact, it’s happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It’s visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity. So far, these augmentations have largely been outside of our bodies, but they’re very much part of who we are today: they’re physically separate from us, but we and they are becoming cognitively inseparable. And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.”

More here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

One frustrating aspect of our discussion about the compatibility of science and religion was the amount of effort expended arguing about definitions, rather than substance. When I use words like “God” or “religion,” I try to use them in senses that are consistent with how they have been understood (at least in the Western world) through history, by the large majority of contemporary believers, and according to definitions as you would encounter them in a dictionary. It seems clear to me that, by those standards, religious belief typically involves various claims about things that happen in the world — for example, the virgin birth or ultimate resurrection of Jesus. Those claims can be judged by science, and are found wanting.

Some people would prefer to define “religion” so that religious beliefs entail nothing whatsoever about what happens in the world. And that’s fine; definitions are not correct or incorrect, they are simply useful or useless, where usefulness is judged by the clarity of one’s attempts at communication. Personally, I think using “religion” in that way is not very clear. Most Christians would disagree with the claim that Jesus came about because Joseph and Mary had sex and his sperm fertilized her ovum and things proceeded conventionally from there, or that Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, or that God did not create the universe. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints, whose job it is to judge whether a candidate for canonization has really performed the required number of miracles and so forth, would probably not agree that miracles don’t occur. Francis Collins, recently nominated to direct the NIH, argues that some sort of God hypothesis helps explain the values of the fundamental constants of nature, just like a good Grand Unified Theory would. These views are by no means outliers, even without delving into the more extreme varieties of Biblical literalism.

More here.

In “100%” (Vertigo: 256 pp., $39.99), Paul Pope depicts a New York punctuated with bits of technological wizardry but still wholly recognizable — a city in which characters cower in fear from what might be lurking in the shadows, fall in love, eat sushi, drink too much and watch bad performance art. (“A naked woman smashing eggs,” one character observes. “What is the world coming to?”) The Gotham of this graphic novel, published serially in 2002 and 2003, is nestled somewhere between its incarnations in Thomas M. Disch’s beaten-down “334” and Martin Scorsese’s antic nightmare “After Hours.” With a palette dominated by stark black and white, “100%” would be your typical round-the-corner dystopia if everything didn’t feel so weirdly alive. Three couples, loosely linked, circulate in this grim nocturnal city of a few decades hence — there has been some sort of catastrophic war in India, the impact of which is left tantalizingly unclear. (For good measure, the upcoming 2050 World Cup will feature humans vs. mutants.) Here they make love or art while trying to figure out the necessary trick of how to get by. The jittery Kim (white) and capable Strel (black) are friends; Strel manages dancers at a state-of-the-art club called the Catshack, which (a quote-happy Zagat’s-like guide tells us) is “dead set in the center of Manhattan’s ‘revitalized Urbanista downtown’. . . . The food is ‘robust’ and ‘decent,’ but it’s ‘to be seen and seem’ that the clientele shows up.”

more from Ed Park at the LA Times here.

Shirin Sadeghi in The Huffington Post:

One by one, the faces of protest are providing an essential yearbook of the individuals who comprise the protest masses, and a catalogue of the Iranian government's treatment of political activists.

On Friday June 19, a large group of mourners gathered at the Ghoba mosque in Tehran to await a speech about the martyrs of the post-election protests by presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. According to one Iranian blog, 28-year-old Taraneh Mousavi was one of a group of people that was arrested by plainclothesed security forces for attending the gathering.

Taraneh, whose first name is Persian for “song”, disappeared into arrest.

Weeks later, according to the blog, her mother received an anonymous call from a government agent saying that her daughter has been hospitalized in Imam Khomeini Hospital in the city of Karaj, just north of Tehran — hospitalized for “rupturing of her womb and anus in… an unfortunate accident”.

When Taraneh's family went to the hospital to find her, they were told she was not there.

More here.

In the BBC:

One of the few 20th Century eastern European thinkers to gain international renown, he spent almost half of his life in exile from his native country.

He argued that the cruelties of Stalinism were not an aberration, but the logical conclusion of Marxism.

MPs in Warsaw observed a minute's silence to remember his contribution to a free and democratic Poland.

Leszek Kolakowski was born in Radom, Poland, 12 years before the outbreak of the World War II.

Under the Nazi occupation of Poland school classes were banned so he taught himself foreign languages and literature.

Kolakowski's “How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist”:

Motto: “Please step forward to the rear!” This is an approximate translation of a request I once heard on a tram-car in Warsaw. I propose it as a slogan for the mighty International that will never exist.A Conservative Believes:

1. That in human life there never have been and never will be improvements that are not paid for with deteriorations and evils; thus, in considering each project of reform and amelioration, its price has to be assessed. Put another way, innumerable evils are compatible (i.e. we can suffer them comprehensively and simultaneously); but many goods limit or cancel each other, and therefore we will never enjoy them fully at the same time. A society in which there is no equality and no liberty of any kind is perfectly possible, yet a social order combining total equality and freedom is not. The same applies to the compatibility of planning and the principle of autonomy, to security and technical progress. Put yet another way, there is no happy ending in human history.

[H/t: Karen Ballentine]

Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim in the Los Angeles Times:

A sermon by powerful cleric and opposition supporter Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani reignited Iran's simmering protest movement Friday, heartening thousands of supporters who braved tear gas and club-wielding militiamen to march and chant slogans across Tehran.

In a highly anticipated speech, Rafsanjani slammed the hard-line camp supporting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, criticized the June 12 election results and promoted several key opposition demands. Analysts said his description of the unrest as an ongoing “crisis” was a signal to keep the pressure on Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

His speech, as well as the ensuing pitched clashes between security forces and supporters of opposition figure Mir-Hossein Mousavi, suggested that the political firestorm surrounding the marred vote would continue and that the movement it had inspired remained strong.

Reformist websites estimated that more than 1 million people participated. That number could not be confirmed, though even supporters of the hard-line camp who attended the prayer session to show support for Khamenei acknowledged that the crowds were huge.

More here.

Comic by Stephen Collins. Click image to enlarge:

Hamid Dabashi in Al-Ahram:

In his most recent posting, AbuKhalil has this to say about Iran: “For the most reliable coverage of the Iran story, I strongly recommend the New York Times. I mean, they have Michael Slackman in Cairo and Nazila Fathi in Toronto, and they have ‘independent observers’ in Tehran. What else do you want? If you want more, the station of King Fahd’s brother-in-law (Al-Arabiya) has a correspondent in Dubai to cover Iran. And according to a report that just aired, Mousavi received 91 per cent of the vote in ‘an elite neighbourhood’. I kid you not. They just said that.” The Iranians have no reporters, no journalists, no analysts, no pollsters, no economists, no sociologists, no political scientist, no newspaper editorials, no magazines, no blogs, and no websites? If AbuKhalil has this bizarre obsession with the American or Saudi media that he loves to hate, does that psychological fixation ipso facto deprive an entire nation of their defiance against tyranny, their agency in changing their own destiny?

What a terrible state of mind to be in! AbuKhalil has so utterly lost hope in us — us Arabs, Iranians, Muslims, South Asians, Africans, Latin Americans — that it does not even occur to him that maybe, just maybe, if we take our votes seriously the US and Israel may not have anything to do with it. He fancies himself opposing the US and Israel. But he has such a deeply colonised mind that he thinks nothing of us, of our will to fight imperial intervention, colonial occupation of our homelands, and domestic tyranny at one and the same time. He believes if we do it then Americans and the Saudis must have put us up to it. He is so utterly lost in his own moral desolation and intellectual despair that in his estimation only Americans can instigate a mass revolt of the sort that has unfolded in front of his eyes. What an utterly frightful state for an intellectual to be in: no trust, no courage, no imagination and no hope. That we, as a people, as a nation, as a collective will, have fought for over 200 years for our constitutional rights has never occurred to AbuKhalil. What gives a man the authority to speak so cavalierly about another nation, of whom he knows nothing?

From Salon:

In the '20s, a parenting guide cautioned Mom that a sitter might trundle her tender charge out on the town, so she could flirt on street corners. In the '40s, Newsweek reported that one veteran and his wife had hired a girl who turned out to be a dance-crazed “bobby-soxer” inviting friends over to party, while the toddler in her care teethed on marbles. Since then, the bad baby sitter's renown has only grown, as she's come to play a prominent role in urban legends, horror movies, pornography and even pop music, according to Miriam Forman-Brunell's new book “Babysitter: An American History.”

The bad baby sitter's a teenage girl, often dressed inappropriately, who is an unreliable scatterbrain, more interested in doing her nails or texting than the kids. When she's not glued to the TV, she's gabbing on the phone all night while eating Mom and Dad out of house and home. Or maybe she's sneaking her boyfriend in after the kids are asleep, or batting her eyelashes suggestively at Dad on the drive home. The bad baby sitter can be a threat not only to the children left in her care, but also to the very marriage of the parents she's working for. But as historian Forman-Brunell's research reveals, the archetype of the bad baby sitter has more to do with adults' fears about the changing nature of girlhood today — whether today is in 1945 or 1995 — than it does with the reality of girls caring for younger kids for pay.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page. Richard Holmes, the pre-eminent biographer of the Romantic generation and the author of intensely intimate lives of Shelley and Coleridge, now turns his attention to what Coleridge called the “second scientific revolution,” when British scientists circa 1800 made electrifying discoveries to rival those of Newton and Galileo. In Holmes’s view, “wonder”-driven figures like the astronomer William Herschel, the chemist Humphry Davy and the explorer Joseph Banks brought “a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work” and “produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science.”

A major theme of Holmes’s intricately plotted “relay race of scientific stories” is the double-edged promise of science, the sublime “beauty and terror” of his subtitle. Both played a role in the great balloon craze that swept across Europe after 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers sent a sheep, a duck and a rooster over the rooftops of Versailles, held aloft by nothing more substantial than “a cloud in a paper bag.” “What’s the use of a balloon?” someone asked Benjamin Franklin, who witnessed the launching from the window of his carriage. “What’s the use of a newborn baby?” he replied. The Gothic novelist Horace Walpole was less enthusiastic, fearing that balloons would be “converted into new engines of destruction to the human race — as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science.”

More here.

From The Telegraph:

The British cover to Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help – about the experiences of black maids in Mississippi in the early 1960s – is a period photograph of a little white girl in a pushchair flanked by two black women in starched white uniforms – the 'help’ of the book’s title. The photograph, which was found in the National Congress archives, was deemed too controversial to be used on the American cover. The spectre of racism in the South is still raw and political correctness works overtime. When Stockett was first shown the photograph, which was inscribed Port Gibson, Mississippi, she sent it to a friend of hers, who, in turn, forwarded it to his mother. Back came the reply, 'Why, that’s just little Jane Crisler Wince on the corner of Church Street – she had two maids – her family owns the local paper…’ Stockett was thrilled with this information. 'That the whole South is just one small town, and we pass each other in the grocery store every day is a myth I love to perpetuate,’ she says.

The Help took five years to write, got at least 45 rejection letters from agents, and when finally published went straight into the American bestseller lists. It has sold a quarter of a million copies so far in the US, and is still selling briskly.

More here.