Judith Weingarten at her blog:

Why is Human Rights Watch petitioning King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to halt the execution by beheading of a witch who in 2006 was convicted of “witchcraft, recourse to jinn [supernatural beings], and slaughter of animals”? Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali is currently languishing in Quraiyat Prison having exhausted her appeals against the sentence. The illiterate defendant was arrested back in 2005, and allegedly beaten and obliged to fingerprint a confession that she couldn’t read.

More here.

Sokol: The word “pessimism” fits Schopenhauer, or today perhaps Mary Midgley, who preaches that man must reconcile himself with the world as it is and simply abandon responsibility for society and for the future. This is at best a sort of comfortable, and – forgive me – “Buddhist” way. But this is certainly not Nietzsche’s case. Wherever he attacks or assaults, it is always in the secret hope that somewhere he will find somebody who will bravely stand up for all those values and prove that they are not dead. Therefore, he was most depressed by those adherents, who rode after him and parroted his attacks, but without his deep anguish. For him, that is the worst expression of nihilism: Alles ist wert zu Grunde gehen, everything deserves to perish. Certainly Nietzsche considered the state of the world to be bad, but he never came to terms with this even slightly, and when his hopes were not fulfilled he fell into despair, and finally he broke down.

more from Eurozine here.

The iconic L.A. writer John Rechy has just published a memoir, “About My Life and the Kept Woman,” and he wants to make clear right away that he made stuff up.

“I consider writers a hierarchy of liars,” Rechy said on a recent afternoon, “and the autobiographer is the biggest liar of all.”

He was sitting in the dining room of the Beachwood Canyon home he shares with Michael Snyder, a movie producer and his partner of more than 20 years, surrounded by luminous black-and-white portraits of Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Now 76, Rechy remains best known for the 1963 novel “City of Night,” a semiautobiographical window into the world of gay street hustling that has influenced artists as diverse as Jim Morrison, David Hockney and Gus Van Sant, who has long wanted to make it into a movie. (“Maybe I should talk to John about that again,” Van Sant wrote in an e-mail, calling the book “an American masterpiece.”)

more from the LA Times here.

On July 4, 1965, Jane Fonda and her husband-to-be, Roger Vadim, had a party in their oceanfront home in Malibu and brought together, probably for the first time, old Hollywood and what would come to be known as the new Hollywood. Henry Fonda roasted a pig on one side of the house while the Byrds, hired by his son, Peter, played on the other. The guest list ran from William Wyler and Sam Spiegel to the then barely employed Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper. Lucky attendees might have glimpsed Sidney Poitier and Gene Kelly instructing Vadim’s little girl in tap-dancing, or Darryl Zanuck and George Cukor staring dumbstruck at a barefoot hippie nursing her baby.

The surreal wonder of American culture at such a pivot point permeates Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood,” which focuses on the nominees for the Academy Award for best picture of 1967: “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “In the Heat of the Night” (the eventual winner) and “Doctor Dolittle.” Yes, you read that last title correctly. For Harris, a columnist at Entertainment Weekly, that array is not just a historical “collage of the American psyche” but also well beyond diverse, “almost self-contradictory”; a movie like “The Graduate” was seemingly designed to demolish the values on display in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” The generational divide could not have been starker, and the central issue was what an American movie was supposed to be.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

..
A Display of Mackerel
Mark Doty
 
They lie in parallel rows, 

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

……..

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

……

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soap-bubble sphere,

……

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

……

distinguished from the other

–nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

……

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfillment

……

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

……

at this enameling, the jewelers

made uncountable examples

each as intricate

……

in its oily fabulation

as the one before;

a cosmos of champleve.

……

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

……

of shimmer–would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

……

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even on ice

……

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

……

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

……

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

……

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

..

From Time:

Pops. Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo. He had perfect pitch and perfect rhythm. His improvised melodies and singing could be as lofty as a moon flight or as low-down as the blood drops of a street thug dying in the gutter. Like most of the great innovators in jazz, he was a small man. But the extent of his influence across jazz, across American music and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.

Armstrong was born Aug. 4, 1901 in New Orleans. He grew up at the bottom, hustling and hustling, trying to bring something home to eat, sometimes searching garbage cans for food that might still be suitable for supper. The spirit of Armstrong’s world, however, was not dominated by the deprivation of poverty and the dangers of wild living. He had some knucklehead in his soul too. While a genial fountain of joy, Armstrong was a street boy, and he had a dirty mouth. It was his shooting off a pistol on New Year’s Eve that got him thrown into the Colored Waifs’ Home, an institution bent on refining ruffians. It was there that young Louis first put his lips to the mouthpiece of a cornet. Like any American boy, no matter his point of social origin, he had his dreams. At night he used to lie in bed, hearing the masterly Freddie Keppard out in the streets blowing that golden horn, and hope that he too would someday have command of a clarion sound.

The sound developed very quickly, and he was soon known around New Orleans as formidable. The places he played and the people he knew were sweet and innocent at one end of the spectrum and rough at the other. When he was called to New York City in 1924 by the big-time bandleader Fletcher Henderson, Armstrong looked exactly like what he was, a young man who was not to be fooled around with and might slap the taste out of your mouth if you went too far. His improvisations set the city on its head.

The melodic and rhythmic vistas Armstrong opened up solved the mind-body problem as the world witnessed how the brain and the muscles could work in perfect coordination on the aesthetic spot. Apollo and Dionysus met in the sweating container of a genius from New Orleans whose sensitivity and passion were epic in completely new terms. In his radical reinterpretations, Armstrong bent and twisted popular songs with his horn and his voice until they were shorn of sentimentality and elevated to serious art. He brought the change agent of swing to the world, the most revolutionary rhythm of his century. He learned how to dress and became a fashion plate. His slang was the lingua franca. Oh, he was something. Louis Armstrong was so much, in fact, that the big bands sounded like him, their featured improvisers took direction from him, and every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted the basics of the idiom — swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms. While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. His freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and his irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow and the wages of death give his music a perpetual position in the wave of the future that is the station of all great art.

Armstrong traveled the world constantly. One example of his charming brashness revealed itself when he concertized before the King of England in 1932 and introduced a number by saying, “This one’s for you, Rex: I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.” He had a great love for children, was always willing to help out fellow musicians and passed out laxatives to royalty and heads of state. However well he was received in Europe, the large public celebrations with which West Africans welcomed him during a tour in the late ’50s were far more appropriate for this sequoia of 20th century music.

He usually accepted human life as it came, and he shaped it his way. But he didn’t accept everything. By the middle ’50s, Armstrong had been dismissed by younger Negro musicians as some sort of minstrel figure, an embarrassment, too jovial and hot in a time when cool disdain was the new order. He was, they said, holding Negroes back because he smiled too much and wasn’t demanding a certain level of respect from white folks. But when Armstrong called out President Eisenhower for not standing behind those black children as school integration began in Little Rock, Ark., 40 years ago, there was not a peep heard from anyone else in the jazz world. His heroism remained singular. Such is the way of the truly great: they do what they do in conjunction or all by themselves. They get the job done. Louis Daniel Armstrong was that kind.

From The New York Times:

Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela by Bill Keller.

“I have witnessed countless election campaigns in the United States,” writes Keller, who traveled with Mandela and covered his historic 1994 run for president. “Although the exercise of democracy always moves me, the political campaigns often feel phony. Candidates try to avoid controversial positions. Slick television ads take the place of real debate. Most voters don’t even bother to show up and cast their ballot. South Africa’s first free election, by comparison, was thrilling. … I often felt that the entire frustrated history of black South Africa was exploding before my eyes.”

With its striking layout, bright graphics and photographs on almost every page, Keller’s biography of Mandela vibrates with the feeling of history come alive.

The author — now the executive editor of The New York Times — describes how he arrived in Johannesburg as bureau chief for the newspaper in 1992, just in time to witness the complete transformation of a society. The Mandela motorcade “would roll onto a barren soccer field surrounded by rickety bleachers, and the township would erupt in delirium. The throngs hung from lampposts and clung to the tops of fences. They filled the bleachers with a blaze of brightly colored sun umbrellas.”

More here.

..
Shapeshifter Poems
Lucille Clifton

1

the legend is whispered
in the women’s tent
how the moon when she rises
full
follows some men into themselves
and changes them there
the season is short
but dreadful shapeshifters
they wear strange hands
they walk through the houses
at night their daughters
do not know them

2

who is there to protect her
from the hands of the father
not the windows which see and
say nothing not the moon
that awful eye not the woman
she will become with her
scarred tongue who who who the owl
laments into the evening who
will protect her this prettylittlegirl

3

if the little girl lies
still enough
shut enough
hard enough
shapeshifter may not
walk tonight
the full moon may not
find him here
the hair on him
bristling
rising
up

4

the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow the one
she cannot tell the one
there is no one to hear this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world

..

From The Washington Post:

There are some things only the dead can get away with saying, and some deaths speak more powerfully than anything the living can write. This book, finished just before its author was assassinated in Pakistan in December, sends out an urgent warning to her fellow Muslims and to Western democratic powers — a warning one hopes may now find greater resonance with both audiences.

Benazir Bhutto, the elegant former Pakistani prime minister, hoped to return democratic rule to her native country and knew she stood a good chance of being killed in the process. She was rushing to complete “Reconciliation” when she was slain at a political rally, her death transforming this manifesto into a cry from the grave to save her faith, her homeland and East-West relations from looming catastrophe.

Her book argues that Islam is not incompatible with democracy, but that its credo of tolerance and freedom has been hijacked by purveyors of terror. The real “clash of civilizations” lies within Islam, she asserted, and the West should seek to bolster its moderate center as the best means of countering the radical extremes.

A poised public figure given to flowery speeches and cagey ambiguity, Bhutto wrote the book with uncharacteristic bluntness, suggesting an awareness that both she and her country had little time left. Pointing fingers and naming names — especially those of several chiefs of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service — she blamed a combination of autocratic rulers, manipulative religious leaders and meddling Western governments for sabotaging democracy’s chances in Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world, and for pushing Islam in ever more radical directions.

“Islam was sent as a message of liberation. The challenge for modern-day Muslims is to rescue this message from the fanatics, the bigots, and the forces of dictatorship,” she wrote. Describing Pakistan as “ground zero” in the battle for the soul of Islam, she warned that unless religious extremism there is curbed, the consequences of having “the only nuclear-armed Muslim nation fall into chaos would be catastrophic.”

More here.

From PBS:

In writing INVISIBLE MAN in the late 1940s, Ralph Ellison brought onto the scene a new kind of black protagonist, one at odds with the characters of the leading black novelist at the time, Richard Wright. If Wright’s characters were angry, uneducated, and inarticulate — the consequences of a society that oppressed them — Ellison’s Invisible Man was educated, articulate, and self-aware. Ellison’s view was that the African-American culture and sensibility was far from the downtrodden, unsophisticated picture presented by writers, sociologists and politicians, both black and white. He posited instead that blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity. When the protagonist in INVISIBLE MAN comes upon a yam seller (named Petie Wheatstraw, after the black folklore figure) on the streets of Harlem and remembers his childhood in a flood of emotion, his proclamation “I yam what I yam!” is Ellison’s expression of embracing one’s culture as the way to freedom.

(Picture above: The Ralph Ellison memorial on Riverside Drive at 150th Street, which was dedicated on May 1, 2004).

If Wright’s protest literature was a natural outcome of a brutal childhood spent in the deep South, Ellison’s more affirming approach came out of a very different background in Oklahoma. A “frontier” state with no legacy of slavery, Oklahoma in the 1910s created the possibility of exploring a fluidity between the races not possible even in the North. Although a contemporary recalled that the Ellisons were “among the poorest” in Oklahoma City, Ralph still had the mobility to go to a good school, and the motivation to find mentors, both black and white, from among the most accomplished people in the city. Ellison would later say that as a child he observed that there were two kinds of people, those “who wore their everyday clothes on Sunday, and those who wore their Sunday clothes every day. I wanted to wear Sunday clothes every day.”

Ellison’s life-long receptivity to the variegated culture that surrounded him, beginning in Oklahoma City, served him well in creating a new take on literary modernism in INVISIBLE MAN. The novel references African-American folktales, songs, the blues, jazz, and black traditions like playing the dozens — much as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce had referenced classical Western and Eastern civilization in THE WASTELAND and ULYSSES. An added difference for Ellison was that his modernist narrative was also a vehicle for inscribing his own and the black identity — as well as a roadmap for anyone experiencing themselves as “invisible,” unseen. “Time” magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt would say: “Ralph Ellison taught me what it is to be an American.”

For Ellison, unlike the protest writers and later black separatists, America did offer a context for discovering authentic personal identity; it also created a space for African-Americans to invent their own culture. And in Ellison’s view, black and white culture were inextricably linked, with almost every facet of American life influenced and impacted by the African-American presence — including music, language, folk mythology, clothing styles and sports. Moreover, he felt that the task of the writer is to “tell us about the unity of American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race, of religion.” In this Ellison was ahead of his time and out of step with the literary and political climates of both black and white America; his views would not gain full currency until the 1980s.

In his own life, Ellison’s interests were as far ranging as his “integrative” imagination. He was expert at fishing, hunting, repairing car engines, and assembling radios and stereo systems. His haberdasher in New York said that he “knew more about textiles than anyone I’ve ever met,” and his friend Saul Bellow called him a “thoroughgoing expert on the raising of African violets.” He was also an accomplished sculptor, musician, and photographer. The scope of Ellison’s mind and vision may have contributed to the growing unwieldiness of his much-awaited second novel, which he toiled over for forty years. He planned it as three books, a saga that would encompass the entire American experience. The book was still unfinished when Ellison died in New York in 1994 at the age of eighty.

INVISIBLE MAN and the essays in SHADOW AND ACT and GOING TO THE TERRITORY were transformative in our thinking about race, identity, and what it means to be American. On the power of three books, Ellison both accelerated America’s literary project and helped define and clarify arguments about race in this country. Ellison’s outlook was universal: he saw the predicament of blacks in America as a metaphor for the universal human challenge of finding a viable identity in a chaotic and sometimes indifferent world. The universality and accomplishment of Ellison’s writing can be seen in the breadth of his continuing influence on other writers, from Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson to Kurt Vonnegut and the late Joseph Heller. Fifty years after the publishing of INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison’s voice continues to speak to all of us.

Saul Austerlitz in the Moscow Times:

Szilard — a Hungarian refugee and “inventor of all things” who wrote science fiction and sketched out plans for electrified barbers’ chairs and magnetized stockings in his spare time — stood in confrontational counterpoint to warrior-scientists like Edward Teller and Herman Kahn, who sought to weaponize atomic research. Szilard advocated fruitlessly for the United States to restrict itself to an atomic-bomb demonstration in order to frighten Japan into submission in 1945, and was suitably horrified by misleading pronouncements like that in the 1951 public-information film “Atomic Alert” that “the chance of your being hurt by an atomic bomb is slight.” Unchecked by the ramifications of their research, scientists pressed on to the next generations of superweaponry — the hydrogen bomb and the proposed cobalt bomb, which would create a radioactive cloud potentially powerful enough to end all human life. “Gentlemen: You are mad!” shouted the title of an incendiary essay by the historian Lewis Mumford, but at the time, the righteous outrage of a Mumford or a Bertrand Russell seemed positively feeble next to the careful, calculating sophistry of Kahn, who proclaimed that nuclear war was winnable, or of Teller, who argued that “radiological warfare could be used in a humane manner.”

More here.

Christian Perring reviews the book, edited by Jon Elster and Ole-Jorgen Skog, in Metapsychology:

While there has been a huge amount of research into addiction, most of that research is at empirical social studies, rat behavior, genetics, and neurophysiology. Some of the most important aspects of the research, i.e., how to integrate these different sources of information, and what the implications are for morality, policy, and our self-understanding, have gone remarkably neglected, especially by philosophers and ethicists.

But there are signs of change. This may be largely due to the work of one person. Jon Elster has for a long time been one of the more thoughtful social scientists discussing human self-defeating behavior, and is especially well known for his work on forms of self control based on Ulysses and the Sirens. He has recently published a book on the rationality and emotion, Alchemies of the Mind, and another book on emotion and addiction, Strong Feelings. He has also co-edited a book with Ole-Jorgen Skog on rationality and addiction, titled Getting Hooked. This collection of 10 articles derives from the meetings of a group that met annually from 1992-1997. The contributors include three psychiatrists, a political scientist, a philosopher, two economists and two sociologists.

More here.  [Photo shows Elster.]

Patricia Cohen in the New York Times:

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

More here.

Felice Frankel in American Scientist:

I thought Sightings readers would be interested in an example of what has become for me an obvious, but too-often ignored, transformative exercise: clarifying and learning science by thinking about how to visually represent an idea, a process or a structure in science, for the purpose of explaining it.

My Harvard colleague and coauthor George Whitesides, with whom I am working on the book No Small Matter, forthcoming in 2009 from Harvard University Press, asked that I make an interesting representation of nanotubes. I am a science photographer, not an illustrator, so my first course of action is usually to think photographically. The obvious, making a scanning electron micrograph of a nanotube, was not an option. Others have done that, probably much better than I would have. I decided to photographically simulate a nanotube structure.

Here’s what I did. First I printed a black hexagonal pattern, representing a standard carbon lattice, on an 8×10 piece of transparent acetate (a). I then began to roll the acetate to make a tube. Immediately, something wonderful happened: I couldn’t make a decision about how to longitudinally connect the edges of the paper. I was faced with a few choices. The literature informed me that there were indeed various possible configurations for carbon nanotubes, and that the ultimate configuration was significant in determining the electrical properties of the nanotube.

For this image, I decided (for no particular reason other than aesthetic) to adopt what’s called the “zigzag” configuration and not to attempt to show the endcaps that tie up the dangling carbon bonds in a nanotube. I secured the edges of the acetate with a couple of pieces of tape and placed the tube on my flatbed scanner.  [Below left] is the image I came up with (b). Nothing terribly compelling. I then “inverted” the nanotube in Adobe Photoshop and combined a few “layers” of the same image to make multiple layers with varying degrees of transparency, resulting in (c). For the final composite image at left, I went a little further in nudging the image using various filters and additional inversions.

More here.

The right of faiths to run their own affairs and regulate their adherents’ lives has recently become controversial—because of fear of Islam.

From The Economist:

Among family-law buffs, the case is seen as a key example of the messy ways in which religious and civil law can get entangled. It concerns an Italian couple who wed in a Catholic church in 1962. After 25 years of less-than-blissful union, she got a legal separation from a civil court, which told him to make monthly maintenance payments. But he had other ideas: he convinced an ecclesiastical court that their union had never been valid, because they were close blood relations.

After vain appeals to various civil and religious courts in Italy (to which she complained that she never got a chance to tell her story), she turned to the European Court of Human Rights, which in 2001 ruled in her favour and made a modest compensation award. The European judges in Strasbourg had no jurisdiction over church courts—but they did find that Italy’s civil judges failed to assess the religious courts’ work or note the deficiencies.

In every democratic and more-or-less secular country, similar questions arise about the precise extent to which religious sub-cultures should be allowed to live by their own rules and “laws”. One set of questions emerges when believers demand, and often get, an opt-out from the law of the land. Sikhs in British Columbia can ride motorcycles without helmets; some are campaigning for the right not to wear hard hats on building sites. Muslims and Jews slaughter animals in ways that others might consider cruel; Catholic doctors and nurses refuse to have anything to do with abortion or euthanasia.

More here.

From CNN:

Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chinese leader Mao Zedong made what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States.

“You know, China is a very poor country,” Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department’s historian office.

“We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands.”

A few minutes later, Mao circled back to the offer. “Do you want our Chinese women?” he asked. “We can give you 10 million.”

After Kissinger noted Mao was “improving his offer,” the chairman said, “We have too many women. … They give birth to children and our children are too many.”

“It is such a novel proposition,” Kissinger replied in his discussion with Mao in Beijing. “We will have to study it.”

We’ve talked about it here, but there’s something very creepy about the tone of a lot of Hillary Clinton bashing. (This is not to say I’m voting–or not voting–for HRC.) Robin Morgan over at The Women’s Media Center:

During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .” But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities—joint conscience-keepers of this country—been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.

Goodbye to the double  standard . . .

—Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s  emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.

—She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains?)—When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.

—Young political Kennedys—Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.—all endorsed Hillary. Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)

Goodbye to the toxic  viciousness  . . .

Carl Bernstein’s disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.”  Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters). John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?” with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For  shame.

In the NY Sun, Graeme Wood review Randall Collins’ Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory:

Sociologist and amateur martial artist Randall Collins starts his wonderful, rambling book, “Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory” (Princeton University Press, 584 pages, $45), by pointing out that violence baffles us, and that it rarely resembles our imaginations, or what we see in films. Between individuals, combat often looks goofy and undignified, more slappy flailing than solid punches. For group violence, the saloon brawls in Westerns have taught us to expect bystanders to join in and smash chairs over each other’s backs; but in real life, bar patrons tend to back off from the melee, staring inertly.

If Mr. Collins is right — and let us hope he is — this reluctance to fight is natural, common, and underestimated. Humans abhor violence, he tells us, and they require acute overdoses of fear and tension to overcome that abhorrence and get physically mean. Violence simply does not happen as readily as we suppose, he says, and because it is so exceptional, many of our guesses about its origins and nature have missed their marks.

Previous approaches tried to identify “violent individuals,” and to discover whether a blend of, say, poverty and desperation and broken home life made them violent. Mr. Collins argues that this broad sociological approach won’t explain anything, because the most important factor — the overwhelmingly most important factor — that determines whether one resorts to violence is not one’s past but one’s present.

Oliver Sacks at the NYT blog Migraines:

In my own migraine auras, I would sometimes see — vividly with closed eyes, more faintly and transparently if I kept my eyes open — tiny branching lines, like twigs, or geometrical structures covering the entire visual field: lattices, checkerboards, cobwebs, and honeycombs. Sometimes there were more elaborate patterns, like Turkish carpets or complex mosaics; sometimes I saw scrolls and spirals, swirls and eddies; sometimes three-dimensional shapes like tiny pine cones or sea urchins.

Such patterns, I found, were not peculiar to me, and years later, when I worked in a migraine clinic, I discovered that many of my patients habitually saw such patterns. And when I looked back on historical accounts, I found that Sir John Herschel, the astronomer, had given detailed descriptions of his own visual migraines in the 1850s. He wrote to his fellow astronomer and fellow migraineur, George Airy, quoting his own notes: “The fortification pattern twice in my eyes today …. Also a sort of chequer work filling in, in rectangular patches, and a carpet-work pattern over the rest of the visual area.” Herschel wondered whether there might be “a kaleidoscopic power in the sensorium to form regular patterns by the symmetrical combination of casual elements,” a power “working within our own organization [but] distinct from that of our own personality.”