In closing, I direct your attention to a perfect sentence. Yes, they exist. One of the pleasures of my profession is discovering these elusive unicorns in the books sent for my review. I read half a score of books each week; I am a fast reader, and generally underwhelmed by what passes for good writing these days. But once in a while, among the gaudy offerings, I come across one of those luminous sentences that make the soul vibrate. I share with you a recent find:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

More from Harper's here.

Israel’s military attack on the Gaza Strip, home to a million and a half Palestinians, was launched on December 28, 2008, the last day of Hanukkah, the “Festival of Lights.” Hanukkah tells the story of how the ancient Hebrews, led by Judah Maccabee, in the second century BCE rose up against Antiochus IV Epiphanus. During the rededication of the Holy Temple, when the Maccabee revolt had succeeded in liberating it from Antiochus, legend has it that there was only enough oil to light the menorah for one night but that it had burned for eight instead! In launching its attack on Gaza, the Israeli military command knew the resonances this timing would have on the Israeli public: once more, it is the story of resistance against an enemy of the Jewish people. The threat to collective survival is heroically defeated by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the new Judah Maccabee! These potent memories of Jewish survival and resistance, together with the post-Holocaust determination that ‘Never again will the Jewish people be subject to destruction,’ provide the emotional well-springs of collective sentiment into which Israel’s leaders tap whenever it is under attack. Yet the strategic and Realpolitik considerations of the present Gaza military action are clear enough: no state, it is said, can accept that its citizens would be subject to continuous and unpredictable rocket attacks and is obliged to defend its borders and inhabitants! Those who dig a little deeper, however, point out that the Gaza operation is attempting to restore Israel’s seeming military invulnerability, lost in the wake of the 2006 Lebanon War. Furthermore, general elections will be held in Israel and in the Palestinian territories in the coming months and the current Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni from the Kadima Party, as well as the current Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, from the Labor Party, are candidates for the position of Prime Minister. None of this though accounts for the ferocity and disproportional brutality of the Israeli action, its violation of international humanitarian law, and possible engagement in war crimes. Why?

more from Reset here.

But it would be a disservice to the blanket-with-sleeves to explain its appeal rationally. Despite comparisons to the all-purpose Thneed in Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax — both are multicolored, amorphous and overhyped — the Snuggie is the opposite: no-purpose. None of the products competing for the blanket-mobility niche close in the back, and all measure far longer than a human body, making it impossible to do anything in them but sit, or recline, and veg out. (I refuse to believe the infomercial’s claims to the contrary; it depicts one Snuggie-clad model standing in the kitchen, but doesn’t show the audience how long it took her to get there from the couch.) And this, of course, is the point: they’re selling leisure and solitude, not fabric. In a high-pace world where very few people feel at liberty to “take time off,” it says something to wrap oneself in a blanket and declare, “I’m not getting off this couch.” And the fact that it looks ridiculous is part of the point: no one else needs to see, anyway.

more from Culture 11 here.

From CNN:

Israeli military action in Gaza is comparable to that of German soldiers during the Holocaust, a Jewish UK lawmaker whose family suffered at the hands of the Nazis has claimed.

Gerald Kaufman, a member of the UK's ruling Labour Party, also called for an arms embargo on Israel, currently fighting militant Palestinian group Hamas, during the debate in the British parliament Thursday.

“My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed,” said Kaufman, who added that he had friends and family in Israel and had been there “more times than I can count.”

“My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.”

More here.

///
Waiting for Lumber
Mark Turpin

Somehow none of us knew exactly
what time it was supposed to come.
So there we were, all of us, five men
at how much an hour given to picking
at blades of grass, tossing pebbles
at the curb, with nothing in the space
between the two red cones, and no distant
downshift of a roaring truck grinding
steadily towards us uphill. Someone thought
maybe one of us should go back to town
to call, but no one did, and no one gave
the order to. It was as if each to himself
had called a kind of strike, brought a halt,
locked out any impulse back to work.
What was work in our lives anyway?
No one recalled a moment of saying yes
to hammer and saw, or anything else.
Each looked to the others for some defining
move—the way at lunch without a word
all would start to rise when the foreman
closed the lid of his lunchbox—but
none came. The senior of us leaned
against a peach tree marked for demolition,
seemed almost careful not to give a sign.
And I, as I am likely to do—and who
knows, but maybe we all were—beginning
to notice the others there, and ourselves
among them, as if we could be strangers suddenly,
like those few evenings we had chosen to meet
at some bar and appeared to each other
in our street clothes—that was the sense—
of a glass over another creature's fate.
A hundred feet above our stillness
on the ground we could hear a breeze
that seemed to blow the moment past,
trifling with the leaves; we watched
a ranging hawk float past. It was the time
of morning when housewives return
alone from morning errands. Something
we had all witnessed a hundred times before,
but this time with new interest. And all of us
felt the slight loosening of the way things were,
as if working or not working were a matter
of choice, and who we were didn't
matter, if not always, at least for that hour.
///

Sami Abdel-Shafi in The Guardian:

Sami Abdel-Shafi: We who live in the shadow of death under the Israeli onslaught veer hour by hour from defiance to despair:

I never imagined I would, but now I know what it feels like to be stalked by death. Last week, I had just arrived for an engagement at a media building in Gaza City only to find the studio crew huddled in fear and peering out of the window. An Israeli rocket had just landed, killing four pedestrians close to where the car that drove me had turned just minutes prior. On Thursday night, media offices in that same building were rocketed by Israel's air force. Later the same evening, I called on relatives who live about 100m from our house. On my way back, one of Israel's angry jets, which have covered Gaza's skies for more than 20 days now, seemed to release a bomb. Suddenly panicking, I let go of my torch and, unable to see anything in the dark, crouched on the sidewalk – even though I knew that would be no protection from an F-16's bomb if it landed nearby. I was lucky; the bomb never came – it was just my anxiety.

But for ordinary Gazans, this is a real fear; it is hard to take seriously Israel's claims that it is not deliberately targeting civilians. I am still alive, but I feel I am losing hope. How can we rebuild the Gaza Strip once this all ends when we fear even to raise ours heads? Our business and commerce had already been destroyed by the long blockade. Now, Gaza's public sector and civil institutions, as well as a hospital and several clinics and schools, have been reduced to rubble. Gaza's civilian population is left without any safety net or feasible means of subsistence.

While the world witnesses from afar the tragic destruction, death and injury visited on Gaza, with grim effects on its civilians, the international community is deliberately shielded from how it is carried out by Israel's refusal to admit foreign media to Gaza. It has been incredibly traumatising for ordinary people here to be subjected repeatedly to massive and simultaneous attacks from air, sea and land, in assaults that seem to target large areas at once. For the people of Gaza, it is a process of psychological torture – like being in prison and hearing a guard beating an inmate in the cell next door.

More here.

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times:

For most of the last eight years, and indeed for much of the last three decades, American liberals have been on the defensive — so much so that many have renamed themselves “progressives” as if to ward off the taint of their beleaguered past. Political books from the left have flourished since 2001, but almost all of them have been critiques of the Bush administration, interrupted briefly and halfheartedly by the Kerry campaign of 2004. But with astonishing speed during the 2008 campaign, and largely in response to the rise of Barack Obama, the liberal-progressives have begun to mount a full-throated revival.

In the absence so far of an actual Democratic presidency, hopeful liberals have focused on the extraordinary success of Obama’s campaign and on a highly optimistic interpretation of his rhetoric. Three of the books discussed in this review were written and published (with great speed) before or just after the election, and the other is a recently republished agenda for liberals that first appeared shortly after the 2006 Congressional elections. Together, they offer a portrait of how liberals have come prospectively to envision the Obama presidency as a transformative moment in American history.

For sheer speed and competence, the most impressive of these recent books is Evan Thomas’s “ ‘Long Time Coming,’ ” compiled from the reporting of the political writers of Newsweek (a magazine for which I occasionally write). A perceptive, smoothly written and generally fair-­minded account of both presidential campaigns, it is, nevertheless, a contribution to the creation of the superhero image that has surrounded Obama over the last six months. In describing his important speech on race in March 2008, for example, the Newsweek writers (who are far from alone) describe a “tour de force,” the “sort of speech that only Barack Obama could give.” Afterward, “he found everyone in tears — his wife, his friends, hardened campaign aides. Only Obama seemed cool and detached.”

More here.

Michael J. Disney reviews The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It by Robert Zimmerman, in American Scientist:

Consider but a tiny selection of all the exciting observations Hubble has made or helped to make. We now know that stars are commonly born surrounded by rings of dust and gas out of which planets can form, that most galaxies have super-massive black holes in their cores, that quasars are colliding galaxies that feed one another’s black holes, that neighboring galaxies have puzzlingly diverse histories, and that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. What more could we have hoped for from this marvellous machine, whose life in space now hangs by a thread and must certainly come to an end by 2015?

Zimmerman’s book is a blow-by-blow account of how the Large Space Telescope, as it was originally called, got built—and a cracking good read it makes. Like most massive projects built in a democracy, Hubble has a messy story. As visionaries, astronomers, managers, engineers, politicians and budgets clashed, there was rarely certainty as to the outcome. If the rationale for the telescope hadn’t been so compelling, it would surely have been cancelled (it was scaled back) somewhere along its rocky road.

More here.

Jory John in the New York Times:

We asked our students — not just those in San Francisco, but ones in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Boston; Chicago; Los Angeles; New York; and Seattle — to offer their thoughts, hopes and advice to Mr. Obama in handwritten letters (many of which came with drawings). Here is the result of their work; some letters have been edited for space:

Dear Sir Obama,

These are the first 10 things you should do as president:

1. Make everyone read books.
2. Don’t let teachers give kids hard homework.
3. Make a law where kids only get one page of homework per week.
4. Kids can go visit you whenever they want.
5. Make volunteer tutors get paid.
6. Let the tutors do all the thinking.
7. Make universities free.
8. Make students get extra credit for everything.
9. Give teachers raises.
10. If No. 4 is approved, let kids visit the Oval Office, but don’t make it boring.

— Mireya Perez, age 8, San Francisco

More here.

Roger Cohen in the New York Review of Books:

I had a dream: Israeli Arab students, enraged by the war in Gaza, were protesting at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A counterdemonstration by Jewish students erupted. When the head of university security, a Holocaust survivor, tried to intervene, the Arab students called him a Nazi.

Actually, I didn't dream this. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at the university, related the incident, which occurred in the first days after Israel began its Gaza war on December 27. But dreams cut to the quick. There's no point denying that a line of sorts runs from the forty-three people killed by Israeli fire near a United Nations school in Gaza on January 6 back to the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 and to Berlin, 1945.

History is relentless. Sometimes its destructive gyre gets overcome: France and Germany freed themselves after 1945 from war's cycle. So, even more remarkably, did Poland and Germany. China and Japan scarcely love each other but do business. Only in the Middle East do the dead rule. As Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet, once observed, the dead vote in Jerusalem. Their demand for blood is, it seems, inexhaustible. Their graves will not be quieted. Since 1948 and Israel's creation, retribution has reigned between the Jewish and Palestinian national movements.

I have never previously felt so despondent about Israel, so shamed by its actions, so despairing of any peace that might terminate the dominion of the dead in favor of opportunity for the living.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic:

I have a small wish of my own in this season of public and private Utopias. It is that the emergence—or should I say ascendance?—of Barack Hussein Obama will allow the reentry into circulation of an old linguistic coinage. Exploited perhaps to greatest effect by James Baldwin, the word I have in mind is cat. Some of you will be old enough to remember it in real time, before the lugubrious and nerve-racking days when people never knew from one moment to the next what expression would put them in the wrong: the days of Negro and colored and black and African American and people of color. After all of this strenuous and heated and boring discourse, does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool? A “cat” also, in jazz vernacular, can be a white person, just as Obama, in some non–Plessy v. Ferguson ways, can be. I think it might be rather nice to have a feline for president, even if only after enduring so many dogs. (Think, for one thing, of the kitten-like grace of those daughters.) The metaphor also puts us in mind of a useful cliché, which is that cats have nine lives—and an ability to land noiselessly and painlessly on their feet.

More here.

Dangling from a paraglider with a propeller on his back, photographer George Steinmetz gets a new perspective on Africa.

Abigail Tucker in Smithsonian Magazine:

“Most aerial photographers work from helicopters or little planes, but he goes up on this crazy little thing,” says Ruth Eichhorn, director of photography for the German edition of GEO, one of many magazines, including Smithsonian, that has published Steinmetz's work. “He can go very low, so he can photograph people in the landscape, and he will go to places that nobody else will go. It's very, very dangerous work, but I think it's worth it.”

Steinmetz's aircraft—he calls it “a flying lawn chair”—consists of a nylon paraglider, a harness and a backpack-mounted motor with a large propeller that looks like an industrial fan. “I am the fuselage,” he explains. To lift off, he spreads the glider on the ground, cranks up the motor and runs a few steps when the right gust of wind comes along. Then, traveling 30 miles per hour, he can dip into craters and get close enough to thousands of sunbathing fur seals to smell their fishy breath.

It might be easy to dismiss him as a real-life Icarus, the winged rogue of Greek myth who soared too near the sun. But Steinmetz flies to get closer to the earth; his Africa pictures convey a kind of intimacy that comes only with a certain distance. His perspective is lofty but not detached, and it's informed by his love of geophysics, which he studied as an undergraduate at Stanford University.

More here.

Clay Risen in The Morning News:

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis a little after 6 p.m., Central Standard Time, on April 4, 1968. As the news spread around the country, angry and grieving inner-city residents poured into the streets. In many places, marches and protests broke out; in some, the crowds turned violent. Scores of shops and restaurants along Washington’s 14th Street were looted that night, and several were set on fire, some only a few minutes’ drive from the White House.

Over the following few days, more than 100 cities would experience significant civil disturbance. In many cases it took National Guard troops to bring peace, and in three—Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington—it took thousands of active Army and Marine units. Strangely, however, New York City almost completely avoided violence, despite widespread expectation during the previous year that the city was due for a massive riot. This is the story of how the city avoided conflagration on that first, tense night. (The following is excerpted from Clay Risen's new book, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination—ed.)

More here.

Prince Hassan of Jordan in Prospect Magazine:

The tragic stalemate between Israel and Palestine should have ended long ago. It has involved 60 years of bitter conflict, including numerous international wars and the displacement of refugees following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Israeli occupation of Palestine after 1967. The struggle seems never-ending. It is a woeful tale of missed opportunities, broken promises, moments of hope shattered by renewed acts of aggression and an entrenchment of polarised positions.

Even prior to the current escalation, the Israeli blockade was having a calamitous impact on the population of Gaza. In the immediate weeks and months ahead, crisis management will be required to halt the violence on both sides, but temporary ceasefires are not a solution. Nor do international resolutions appear to be effective. At the same time, neither condemnation nor ad hoc aid can heal these festering wounds. This is a conflict with far-reaching implications, first and foremost for the people of Palestine, but also for the stability of the region and beyond. Yet it is also a conflict within which practical measures may be suggested, and attempted.

To halt the apparently growing disconnect within the region, both the Organisation of Islamic Conference and the League of Arab States must present a clear statement of their positions, whilst the Arab Peace Initiative needs to inject new momentum into its proposals, regaining traction amongst the parties and international partners. Survival in these harsh, but staggeringly beautiful lands requires cooperation over scarce resources, on the provision of employment for our youth, and on regional trade agreements. To be enduring, any meaningful peace initiative must address the region as a whole, inclusive of Iran, Israel and Turkey.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Princess Sarvath)

This is a truly moving editorial written by slain newspaper editor Lasantha Wickramatunga to be published in the case of his assassination. Please read the whole thing below. Here is an introduction by Emily Wax in the Washington Post:

Across South Asia, it has become known as the letter from the grave.

Anticipating his own slaying, Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga, 52, a fierce critic of his country's government, wrote an editorial called “And Then They Came for Me,” a dramatic essay to be printed in the event of his assassination.

On Jan. 8, the father of three was shot in the head and chest on his way to work by two men on motorcycles. The editorial, published the following Sunday, has highlighted how dangerous reporting in Sri Lanka has become. Critics cite a growing pattern of intimidation by the government, especially during a recent push to wipe out the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, in a war that has persisted for more than two decades, one of the world's longest-running conflicts.

More here. And here is Lasantha Wickramatunga's actual editorial from Sri Lanka's The Sunday Leader:

And Then They Came For Me

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader's 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Why then do we do it? I often wonder that. After all, I too am a husband, and the father of three wonderful children. I too have responsibilities and obligations that transcend my profession, be it the law or journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many people tell me it is not. Friends tell me to revert to the bar, and goodness knows it offers a better and safer livelihood. Others, including political leaders on both sides, have at various times sought to induce me to take to politics, going so far as to offer me ministries of my choice. Diplomats, recognising the risk journalists face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe passage and the right of residence in their countries. Whatever else I may have been stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice.

But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.

More here. Read more about the man here.

From The Guardian:

When they made a film of Vikas Swarup's bestseller, they gave it an extreme makeover. But can I get the author to say anything critical about Danny Boyle's hit adaptation of his debut novel, about a penniless orphan who wins India's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Not a chance. Swarup, you see, is a diplomat. And not just any diplomat: his sumptuous business card, embossed with three golden lions, tells me he is minister and deputy high commissioner of India, based in Pretoria.

They changed the title from Q&A to Slumdog Millionaire. (“That made a lot of sense,” says Swarup.) They changed the ending. (“Danny thought the hero should be arrested on suspicion of cheating on the penultimate question, not after he wins as I had it. That was a successful idea.”) They made friends into brothers, axed Bollywood stars and Mumbai hoodlums and left thrilling subplots on the cutting-room floor. Crucially, they changed the lead character's name from Ram Mohammad Thomas to Jamal Malik, thereby losing Swarup's notion that his hero would be an Indian everyman, one who sounded as though he was Hindu, Muslim and Christian. Instead, they made Jamal a Muslim whose mother is killed by a Hindu mob. (“It's more dramatically focused as a result, perhaps more politically correct.”) “I was forewarned of the changes by Simon Beaufoy, the screenwriter,” Swarup says. And he's still happy. “The film is beautiful. The plot is riveting. The child actors are breathtaking.”

Swarup has one niggle. He worries how that scene of Hindu mobs murdering Muslims will play when the film opens in India next week. “People in India are sensitive about how they're portrayed, so there will be criticisms. But a Bollywood director recently told me Slumdog Millionaire's failing was that it wasn't extreme enough to be truly Indian. India has a genius for recycling its contradictions.” Swarup rewards my sceptical frown with an endearing smile.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

Tom Friedman, one of the nation's leading propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel's wars, has a column today in The New York Times explaining and praising the Israeli attack on Gaza. For the sake of robust and diverse debate (for which our Liberal Media is so well known), Friedman's column today appears alongside an Op-Ed from The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the nation's leading (and most deceitful) propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel's wars, who explains that Hamas is incorrigibly hateful and radical and cannot be negotiated with. One can hardly imagine a more compelling exhibit demonstrating the complete lack of accountability in the “journalism” profession — at least for those who are loyal establishment spokespeople who reflexively cheer on wars — than a leading Op-Ed page presenting these two war advocates, of all people, as experts, of all things, on the joys and glories of the latest Middle East war.

In any event, Friedman's column today is uncharacteristically and refreshingly honest. He explains that the 2006 Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon was, contrary to conventional wisdom, a great success. To make this case, Friedman acknowledges that the deaths of innocent Lebanese civilians was not an unfortunate and undesirable by-product of that war, but rather, was a vital aspect of the Israeli strategy — the centerpiece, actually, of teaching Lebanese civilians a lesson they would not soon forget:

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: “What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?”

Friedman says that he is “unsure” whether the current Israeli attack on Gaza is similiarly designed to teach Palestinians the same lesson by inflicting “heavy pain” on civilians, but he hopes it is:

In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims.

Much more here.

From Science:

It's taken 5 years, but planetary scientists are finally confident that they have detected methane on Mars. At a press conference today at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in a paper published online today in Science, researchers announced that all the painstaking observations, analysis, and reanalysis now reveal summertime plumes of the gas from three regions on the planet. On Earth, methane is a byproduct of living bacteria, but whether that's what's producing the gas on Mars is anyone's guess. The first news of martian methane claims came in 2004 (Science, 26 March 2004, p. 1953). But the early data–from spacecraft and ground-based telescopes–were controversial. Spacecraft were not detecting all of the spectroscopic signatures of the gas, for example, and ground-based observers had to contend with interference from methane and other trace gases in Earth's atmosphere.

At today's press conference, astronomer Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, declared success. “We've eliminated most of the gremlins that were bothering us,” he said. The biggest problem was working out how to reliably remove terrestrial contamination from the team's spectra. “We've done a lot of work that makes the current results robust,” Mumma says. Planetary scientist Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, agrees. Measuring martian methane “is really at the ragged edge of things,” he says, but “I think the detection is pretty solid.” Beyond detection, the observations reveal that the methane averages 33 parts per billion in the summer but essentially disappears afterward. About 0.6 kilograms of methane emerge each second in the summer, Mumma said, which is comparable to the emissions from a natural oil seep near Santa Barbara, California. Perhaps, he said, the martian methane is continually produced beneath the surface but only released when summer warming breaks an icy seal on the surface.

The source? No one can say.

More here.