Douglas Martin in the New York Times:

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian whose more than 20 books shaped discussions for two generations about America’s past, and who himself was a provocative, unabashedly liberal partisan, most notably while serving in the Kennedy White House, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 89.

His death, at New York Downtown Hospital, was caused by a heart attack he suffered earlier during a family dinner at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse, his son Stephen said.Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mr. Schlesinger exhaustively examined the administrations of two prominent presidents, Andrew Jackson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, against a vast background of regional and economic rivalries. He argued that strong individuals like Jackson and Roosevelt could bend history.

The notes he took for President John F. Kennedy, for the president’s use in writing his history, became, after Mr. Kennedy’s assassination, grist for Mr. Schlesinger’s own account, “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House.” It won both the Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1966.

More here.

Mathias Risse reviews Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse (eds.), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Much has been written on global justice, and new contributions should now take that into account to advance the debate. To illustrate, one position that has by now been well-articulated is that the state is not the exclusive domain of legitimacy. To make progress on the normative status of the state one needs to go beyond that conclusion, lest the reader is left wondering what has been accomplished at all. For instance, [David] Held introduces principles capturing cosmopolitan values and two “meta-principles” from which to argue for them (“autonomy” and “impartialist reasoning”). He concludes that the state “withers away,” a view Held qualifies by saying that what his argument delivers is merely that “states would no longer be regarded as the sole centers of legitimate power within their borders” (p 26). What do we learn? [Allen] Buchanan refutes the view that it is permissible to determine foreign policy exclusively by national interest. He is self-conscious about offering such a refutation since he regards arguments to that effect as obvious (delivered by any form of recognition of human rights), and seems to think the interesting question is to explain why the refuted view persists. (This is a well-reasoned article, but one perhaps better placed in Foreign Policy, to find its appropriate audience.) So what Buchanan rightly finds obvious, given the state of the philosophical literature, Held derives from an elaborate argument. Again, at this stage of the discussion about the legitimacy of states we need more detail to find value in the conclusion that states are not the sole centers of legitimacy.

Tan argues that what he considers cosmopolitan justice and national allegiances can be reconciled. He discusses two objections, one mentioned above. The other is “that the subordination of nationality to cosmopolitan justice fails sufficiently to accommodate people’s national allegiances” (p 166). The response is that it follows from an extension of our common understanding of justice to the global context, “that the . . . priority of (nationally) impartial justice over national allegiances derives necessarily from the purpose and concept of justice” (p 169). However, Miller convincingly argues that “cosmopolitan respect” is consistent with “patriotic concern.” He offers two arguments for thus combining cosmopolitanism and patriotism. “The first is an argument from excessive costs in lost social trust, the second an argument from the need to provide compatriots with adequate incentives to obey the laws on helps to create” (p 134). Or consider other contributions: Blake (2001), Nagel (2005), and Risse (2006), all of which argue that there is something normatively peculiar about shared citizenship in a manner that turns on the particular kind of coerciveness exercised by states, but also acknowledge duties to those who do not belong to the state, duties easily captured by basic respect. So not much is gained from arguing that, on conceptual grounds, some general standpoint of global justice has priority over national allegiances. This is consistent with arguing that that global standpoint delivers the conclusion that individuals ought to acknowledge far-reaching duties to compatriots.

Martin Shaw on the International Court of Justice ruling in favor of Serbia on the Srebrenicia massacre, in openDemocracy:

The ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the case brought by Bosnia-Herzegovina against Serbia, delivered on 26 February 2007, is a compromise judgment, giving something to the Bosnian victims but largely denying the Bosnian genocide and exonerating the Serbian state of its role. Although seen by some western media as a progressive judgment, it is has largely been greeted with dismay by Bosnians and welcomed by apologists for the most reactionary Serbian forces, including those who seem to occupy the comment pages of the Guardian whenever Yugoslav war issues return to the headlines.

This was the major remaining opportunity for an authoritative legal ruling on the Bosnian genocide and Serbia’s role, since former Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic’s death deprived the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) of the possibility of ruling on his responsibility. Although the ICTY has found that genocide was committed in Bosnia, especially at Srebrenica in 1995 (when over 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred), and has convicted individuals for their roles in this crime, the ICJ ruling concerned the responsibility of the Serbian state for genocide committed in Bosnia against Muslims and others over the entire period of the Bosnian conflict (1992-95).

In the Guardian, John Laughland applauds the verdict.

The allegations against Milosevic over Bosnia and Croatia were cooked up in 2001, two years after an earlier indictment had been issued against him by the separate international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at the height of Nato’s attack on Yugoslavia in 1999. Notwithstanding the atrocities on all sides in Kosovo, Nato claims that Serbia was pursuing genocide turned out to be war propaganda, so the ICTY prosecutor decided to bolster a weak case by trying to “get” Milosevic for Bosnia as well. It took two years and 300 witnesses, but the prosecution never managed to produce conclusive evidence against its star defendant, and its central case has now been conclusively blown out of the water.

The international court of justice (ICJ) did condemn Serbia on Monday for failing to act to prevent Srebrenica, on the basis that Belgrade failed to use its influence over the Bosnian Serb army. But this is small beer compared to the original allegations. Serbia’s innocence of the central charge is reflected in the court’s ruling that Serbia should not pay Bosnia any reparations – supplying an armed force is not the same as controlling it. Yugoslavia had no troops in Bosnia and greater guilt over the killings surely lies with those countries that did, notably the Dutch battalion in Srebrenica itself. Moreover, during the Bosnian war, senior western figures famously fraternised with the Bosnian Serb leaders now indicted for genocide, including the US general Wesley Clark and our own John Reid. Should they also be condemned for failing to use their influence?

In Culturekiosque:

On a broad scale, the exhibition [Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s at the Met in New York] reminds us that the break between nineteenth and twentieth-century western art was less about a turn from representational works toward abstraction but the refutation of the belief that art, by definition, had something to do with beauty. The Met’s curators have more specific goals: an exploration of Germany at a particular time and place. Germany had been rolling along brilliantly from its formation in 1871 until World War I sent it skidding into a ditch. It took the addition of the worldwide economic depression to bring on National Socialism—the ultimate example of the political cure that was worse than the disease. Art historians are easily seduced by the notion that the art they love is a reflection of a culture and, at its most prescient, a reflection of where a culture, a civilization or an era is heading. So it is easy to look back on these disturbing works and see the signs of putrefaction that would end in National Socialist victory.

But painting is the world’s most biased medium, and it is dangerous to find universal truths from what it shows. To look at what the Met has hung in seven galleries and you’d hardly guess that the Roaring Twenties were often quite fun in Germany—despite the war, the reparations to the victors and the hyperinflation of 1923. The Portrait of Anita Berber (1925) by Otto Dix shows the dancer at twenty-six, two years shy of death by dissipation; wearing an ice-white face of a woman three times her age and flaunting a blood-red dress as if posing for Vogue, she looks every bit the candidate for an early grave, but it must have been a thrill while it lasted: in his memoirs, the boxer Max Schmeling recalls the time that Berber took a table in the crowded dining room of the Adlon—quite the grandest hotel in Berlin—escorted by two young men. Berber ordered three bottles of Veuve Clicquot, opened the diamond broach on her fur and, letting it fall, toasted her companions in the nude.

In American Scientist, Richard Bellon reviews Michael Ruse’s Darwinism and Its Discontents.

Ruse argues that the unrelenting controversies that cling to evolution reflect its 18th-century origins. Enlightenment thinkers, including Darwin’s own grandfather, sought a non-Christian alternative history of creation. Evolution, by wrapping the craving for social and cultural advancement in a narrative of biological progress, fit the bill nicely. Any answers to unresolved scientific questions provided by pre-Origin evolutionary theory were, in Ruse’s view, only happy accidents. In that era, conservative Christians were not being paranoid when they interpreted evolution as a dagger pointed directly at their spiritual and cultural authority.

Ruse believes that only with Origin did evolution debut as a fully legitimate scientific theory, one designed primarily to provide rational explanations for the regularities of the physical world, rather than one concerned chiefly with the validation of underlying metaphysical commitments. Darwin had neither the stomach nor the motivation to join fights over worldview, but as he understood acutely, he could never entirely extricate his theory from these battles, as much as he might have wished to do so. Ironically, the more successfully he and his colleagues demonstrated the scientific validity of evolution, the more potent the theory became for extrascientific purposes.

From the moment that Origin became a surprise instant bestseller, Darwin lost direct control over ideas to which his name was (often dubiously) affixed. Although no scientifically literate person rejected evolution by the time of Darwin’s death in 1882, acceptance of natural selection as the chief mechanism in evolution remained a minority view among biologists. Natural selection had legitimate scientific problems, suffering most significantly from the lack of any adequate theory of heredity. Nonetheless Ruse believes that the unwillingness, even (or perhaps especially) among many biologists, to employ evolution as straight science stunted its development as a mature causal theory with natural selection at its heart. Natural selection was scientifically resurrected only in the 1930s with the rise of population genetics. Historians argue over aspects of Ruse’s interpretation of this history. But he is certainly correct to insist that evolutionists of the 19th century and early 20th century bear much of the blame for the ideological baggage that has complicated Darwinism’s place in both science and culture.

One complication is that, for many religious conservatives, evolution in any guise retains the indelible stench of blasphemy, for which creationism is the only fumigant.

Gustav Seibt on the flaws in reasoning that lead to the Iraq war (originally inthe Süddeutsche Zeitung, translated by Naomi Buck in signandsight) .

Most of those behind the war – the exception being Herfried Münkler – didn’t even concern themselves with Iraq, international law, the chances and risks of a war in the Middle Eastern context. The vast majority of arguments for the war were drawn from European experience of the last two or three generations. Thus, one wrote about the overriding issues such as pacifism and anti-Americanism, appeasement and anti-Semitism, rather than addressing the thing itself.

First and foremost was an attempt to draw broad historical analogies. The fall of Saddam, a desirable enough goal, was compared directly with the fight against Hitler, the democratisation of Iraq with the democratisation of West Germany and Japan after the Second World War and the chance for democratic change throughout the entire Middle East was compared with the end of the East bloc and the quick establishment of civilian democracies afterwards. But virtually nobody had anything to say about the actual domestic situation in Iraq today.

Things developed differently than the expectations of imminent success suggested. And therein lies an almost obscene arrogance that is occasion for a sharp criticism of the West. A country is subjected to absolute misery and with what justification? Memories of our own history. It’s understandable that Iraqi intellectuals fall into a cold rage over this today. But we can assume that these Iraqis have other more pressing concerns. Of course the main responsibility for the disaster is to be borne by the political-military actors who initiated an adventure based on falsified information, unrealistic goals and absurd arrogance. No wonder it went spectacularly wrong. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that rarely was such irresponsible behaviour accompanied by so much empty talk.

The comparison with 1914 is all the more depressing because in 2003, we see again the syndrome of a “Literatentum” – a term coined by Max Weber during the First World War, referring to the phenomena of a body of literature that used critical, aesthetic, definitely non-expert, uninformed superstructures to justify risky decisions in matters of war. A lot was at stake in the First World War as well: culture and civilisation, politics and music, the German spirit and the Western anti-spirit and vice versa – and the “war goals” of an obviously unrealistic, in fact insane blueprint.

In The Hindu, an interview with Egyptian novelist and activist Alaa Al Aswany.

Looking at the geo-political context of the region and these authoritarian regimes, one wonders if the people of the region feel let down by their rulers. Is this contributing to the rise of fundamentalism? What other factors are playing their part? One of the characters in your novel too becomes a terrorist.

[Aswany] Of course this and other factors are contributing to this phenomenon. Let us take the Egyptian experience, which was quite similar to the Indian experience as they emerged out of colonial domination. Our Saad Zaghlul corresponded with your great Gandhi and our founding fathers believed in secular values and the struggle was both for independence and democracy. Our Delegation (Wafd) and your Congress party shared these ideals. The leadership of the Wafd had devout Muslims and very liberal Muslims and even Coptic Christians in its fold! While you, In India, got democracy after your independence we have been struggling and have now lapsed into long spells of despotic dictatorships. This led to crushing poverty, exploitation, corruption and eventually to terrorism.

Looking at Islam in this context it must be borne in mind that Islam was born in the desert but it found its civilisation away from the desert and thus there exists many interpretations of Islam ranging from an inclusive vision of the religion which is open, tolerant and liberal to less inclusive visions and interpretations. Egypt has always been part of a tolerant stream and that is reflective of our essential national character. But what happened in the late 1970s was a significant turning point in the history of the region. The sudden surge in the price of oil gave unprecedented power to Saudi Arabia. This enabled Saudi Arabia to export its pre-medieval, not-so-inclusive Wahabi vision of Islam to most of the countries in the region. You know the Wahabi vision is a Christmas present to the dictator! It does not encourage dissent against the ruler as long as he is a Muslim. Thus a complex pattern of interlocked factors, including the support these dictators got from outside, led to a steady erosion of liberty and freedom which I believe is at the centre of the woes of this region.

Jessica Valenti, of feministing, has a post over at TPM Cafe on generational tension in the feminist movement.

A sorority at DePauw University in Indiana has recently come under fire for dismissing 23 sisters for being “socially awkward.” The women evicted from the Delta Zeta house included every woman who was overweight and the only black, Korean, and Vietnamese members.

The national officers of Delta Zeta claim to have booted the “undesirable” women because of their inability to attract new recruits to the sorority. As I read the unbelievably pathetic excuses given by the sorority for their actions, it occurred to me that in the same way Delta Zeta resorted to active exclusion as a recruitment strategy, mainstream feminists rely on passive exclusionary tactics to keep the movement “pure.”

In discussing this idea with some of my feminist and blogging peers, we all agreed that there’s a generational tension that comes out in subtle, though no less disturbing, ways. Being told you’re too young to speak on a panel (this happened to someone I know at the 2005 NOW conference); being lectured about how your opinions are naïve or misinformed (“you weren’t there!); being relegated to the “young feminist” table or forum at major conferences, having your accomplishments looked on warily because you didn’t “pay your dues,” getting emails about how all of your hard-working feminist blogging is for naught because your logo is sexist (cough, cough). Being a feminist is hard enough without having to defend yourself from attacks from within.

Mainstream feminism may not be kicking any women out of the treehouse, but it’s certainly not lowering the ladder, either.

Katha Pollitt responds:

Jessica, you’re not the first to point out that NOW, Feminist majority and other big feminist groups founded by 1960s activists have had trouble opening up leadership roles to young women. I’m not sure there’s anything particular to women in this–ie anything that justifies your analogy to that idiotic sorority. I mean, come on — Delta Whatsis expelled women who were insufficiently princessy, white, thin and compliant. How is that like not getting to sit on a panel at the ripe old age of 25 or so?

That said, I totally agree with you about the ingrown and resistant culture of organizational feminism, and so do lots of older feminists. Whether it’s generational, or the result of being in backlash-resistance mode for so long, or something about the particular people involved or what, it’s a serious issue. Fact is, a lot of organizations, from corporations to synagogues, find it hard to reframe the mission, hand over power and welcome new leaders with a different style and different allies.

Alon Levy weighs in:

Pollitt rebuts not so much Jessica’s argument as the argument she thinks she should be making. Jessica’s demand for giving young women a seat at the table isn’t some personal power thing, a question of daughters criticizing mothers but mothers not allowed to criticize daughters. It’s a specific demand that the feminist movement stop being so ineffective. Think of her as the Markos Moulitsas of American feminism, without the sanctimony.

When Jessica delves more into specifics, she talks about a lot more than generational tension. The feminist movement engages in scaremongering about Roe vs. Wade, which just doesn’t inspire anyone considering that abortion has been legal in the US for 34 years. NOW’s action alerts are so slow that blogs like Feministing are typically months ahead of them. Organizations like NOW and Feminist Majority use a command and control structure that’s reminiscent of machine politics.

From The New York Times:

The films of Abbas Kiarostami are at once simple and enigmatic, guileless in their formal and visual strategies and puzzling in their effects. A central figure in the blossoming of Iranian cinema in the 1990s, and a winner of the top prize at Cannes for “A Taste of Cherry” in 1997, Mr. Kiarostami, who is 66, has now settled into the pantheon of international master filmmakers, a status confirmed by the retrospective of his work that begins at the Museum of Modern Art today. The program, covering more than three decades and including shorts and features, documentaries and instructional films, provides plenty of opportunities to appreciate his plainness and to ponder his mysteries.

In “Ten” (2002) a woman drives through the dense traffic of Tehran, chatting and arguing with passengers who include a pious old woman, a prostitute and the driver’s combative young son.

More here.

From Nature:

Tadpoles can achieve something that humans may only dream of: pull off a tadpole’s thick tail or a tiny developing leg, and it’ll grow right back — spinal cord, muscles, blood vessels and all. Now researchers have discovered the key regulator of the electrical signal that convinces Xenopus pollywogs to regenerate amputated tails. The results, reported this week in Development, give some researchers hope for new approaches to stimulating tissue regeneration in humans.

Researchers have known for decades that an electrical current is created at the site of regenerating limbs.
To investigate, Michael Levin and his colleagues at the Forsyth Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology in Boston, Massachusetts, sorted through libraries of drug compounds to find ones that prevent tail regeneration but do not interfere with wound healing. One such drug, they found, blocks a molecular pump that transports protons across cell membranes; this kind of proton flow creates a current.

The proton pump could also be used to turn on limb regeneration in older tadpoles that would normally have lost this ability.

More here.

My friends Lenny Benardo and Jennifer Weiss on the politics of renaming in New York.

A FEW weeks ago, most Brooklyn residents would have pleaded ignorance about the person for whom Manhattan Beach’s Corbin Place is named. But with the recent airing of the distasteful history of the man Corbin Place memorializes, local politicians have been leading a charge to rename it. A public hearing on possibly renaming the street is scheduled for tomorrow [Februaru 26th].

But renaming is a bad idea. Street names function as a barometer of social values at a given time, and as such have historical significance that goes beyond a name. If anything, we should consider co-naming the street, a solution that has been adopted in Brooklyn and other parts of the city…

[T]he Corbin Place affair presents an opportunity to illustrate why renaming streets, no matter how odious the people involved, is not the answer. Whitewashing the past does not offer historical redress, it obscures history. Corbin’s ideas, while extreme, reflected the realities of the day when Jews were excluded and ostracized as a matter of course. It would be impossible, for example, for an Austin Corbin, no matter how significant his accomplishments, to get a street in his honor today.

Furthermore, changing Corbin Place could be the start of a slippery slope with respect to other streets bestowed on the less than meritorious. Among many of Brooklyn’s founding families who have streets named for them — the Bergens, Lefferts and Lotts — are prominent slaveholders (the Lotts, among Kings County’s largest slaveholders, are memorialized in an avenue, a place and a street). All told, Brooklyn’s streets appear to have more than 70 slaveholders represented. And Peter Stuyvesant, who apparently lends his name to Stuyvesant Avenue, was an anti-Semite of the first order. In 1654, Stuyvesant petitioned the Dutch West India Company to expel the first Jews who settled in New Amsterdam.

Ken Silverstein in Harper’s Magazine:

Other countries, as former senior CIA official Michael Scheuer reminded me, do not look at the world from the same point of view as the United States. “The first duty of any intelligence agency,” he said, “is to protect the national interest. Pakistan is not going to destroy the Taliban because at some point they would like to see the Taliban back in power. They cannot tolerate a pro-Indian, pro-American, pro-Russian, pro-Iranian government in Afghanistan. They already have an unstable Western border and have to worry about a country of one million Hindus that has nuclear bombs.”

That point was echoed by a second retired CIA official, who asked to remain anonymous. “The United States,” he told me, “has never recognized the essential security concerns of Pakistan, which are on its eastern border. India can be in Islamabad in three days. We tell them India would never do that, but they have fought three wars against India. Pakistan cannot be put in a position where it might have to fight a war on two fronts, from India and Afghanistan.”

More here.  [Thanks to Husain Naqvi.]

For a while I joked that Asad should do a review of the best strip club buffets in the city (prompted by all the buffet ads, especially in mid-town, not as a connoisseur of strip clubs) for 3QD. (The idea of that combination seems bizarre to me.) But The New York Times’ Frank Bruni has taken the first step.

IT may be laughable when someone says he gets Penthouse magazine for the articles. It’s no joke when I say I went to the Penthouse Executive Club for the steaks.

Over the years I’d read reports that this pleasure palace, on a stretch of West 45th Street closer to the edge of Manhattan than most diners venture, peddled more than one kind of seductive flesh. And I felt obliged — honestly, I did — to check it out, knowing that great food often pops up where you least expect it.

You can find bliss in the soulless cradle of a strip mall. Why not the topless clutch of a strip club? And so, early this month, I gathered three friends for an initial trip (dare I call it a maiden voyage?) to the Penthouse club — or, more specifically, to the restaurant, Robert’s Steakhouse, nestled inside it.

We were strangers to such pulchritudinous territory, less susceptible to the scenery than other men might be, more aroused by the side dishes than the sideshow: underdressed, overexposed young women in the vestibule, by the coat check, at the top of the red-carpeted stairs up to the restaurant, on the stage that many of the restaurant’s tables overlook.

It may seen a bit policy wonky, but it’s a historic step. The People’s Republic debates the reform of property rights, in the Beijing Review.

Chinese philosopher Mencius, who lived over 2,200 years ago, once said, “People can have a long-term life plan only after knowing their private properties are secured.”

This teaching deeply influenced China for more than 2,000 years, but after the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, public ownership gradually played a dominant role.

Since China began to embrace the market economy in the early 1980s, private property rights and ownership have been increasing, but they remain an unfamiliar concept for many in the country.

Following a revision to China’s Constitution to include private property rights protection, the country is now expected to adopt the Property Law this March. If passed at the annual session of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), that law would define and regulate property rights across China for the first time.

A draft property law had its first reading in China’s legislature in 2002 as part of a civil code. Since then it has been deliberated on for seven times. During those deliberations the full text of the draft law was also released to the general public to solicit opinion. At the 25th session of the 10th NPC Standing Committee held last December, lawmakers reached a consensus on the draft law.

In Granta, there is this beautiful peice.

From this persistent dream of weightlessness, my mind returns to a well-known rendition of the Geryon episode in the seventeenth canto of th Inferno. The ‘wild beast’, reconstructed by Dante from classical sources and also from word-of-mouth accounts of the medieval bestiaries, is imaginary and at the same time splendidly real. It eludes the burden of weight. Waiting for its two strange passengers, only one of whom is subject to the laws of gravity, the wild beast rests on the bank with its forelegs, but its deadly tail floats ‘in the void’ like the stern-end of a Zeppelin moored to its pylon. At first, Dante was frightened by the creature, but then that magical descent to Malebolge captured the attention of the poet-scientist, paradoxically absorbed in the naturalistic study of his fictional beast whose monstrous and symbolic form he describes with precision. The brief description of the journey on the back of the beast is singularly accurate, down to the details as confirmed by the pilots of modern hang-gliders: the silent, gliding flight, where the passenger’s perception of speed is not informed by the rhythm or the noise of the wings but only by the sensation of the air which is ‘on their face and from below’. Perhaps Dante, too, was reproducing here unconsciously the universal dream of weightless flight, to which psychoanalysts attribute problematical and immodest significance.

The ease with which man adapts to weightlessness is a fascinating mystery. Considering that for many people travel by sea or even by car can cause bouts of nausea, one can’t help feeling perplexed. During month-long spells in space the astronauts complained only of passing discomforts, and doctors who examined them afterwards discovered a light decalcification of the bones and a transitory atrophy of the heart muscles: the same effects, in other words, produced by a period of confinement to bed. Yet nothing in our long history of evolution could have prepared us for a condition as unnatural as non-gravity.

Thus we have vast and unforeseen margins of safety: the visionary idea of humanity migrating from star to star on vessels with huge sails driven by stellar light might have limits, but not that of weightlessness: our poor body, so vulnerable to swords, to guns and to viruses, is space-proof.

In Edge.org, the latest in the Daniel Dennett -H. Allen Orr exchange: H. Allen Orr responds to Dennett’s open letter:

Dennett asks me to identify some allegedly serious thinkers on religion. I named two in my review but am happy to name them again: William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I chose these two as both wrote after Darwin and had training in science or engineering; both were, then, presumably in a position to recognize the challenges posed to religion by science. One may or may not find convincing James’s attempt to discern whether religion is possible in an age of science or Wittgenstein’s interpretation of religious practice. Indeed I myself have reservations about their claims. But I find it shocking that someone writing at book-length on religion would fail to discuss, or even mention, their views or those of their intellectual equals. What, for instance, does Dawkins think of Wittgenstein’s picture of religion? Does he reject Wittgenstein’s idea that believers sometimes use language in a way that differs from (and is incommensurable with) how we normally use language? Would he even count Wittgensteinian-style religion as religion? And, if not, is it still child abuse? Is it evil? (For more on Dawkins and Wittgenstein, and from a bona fide philosopher, see Simon Blackburn’s superb review of Dawkins’s earlier book, A Devil’s Chaplain (The New Republic, December 1, 2003).)

The bottom line is that Dawkins, by ducking serious thought on religion, made things far too easy for himself. One result is that the naïve reader of The God Delusion can walk away from the book wholly unaware that serious post-Darwinian thinkers have wondered if religion is really so simple as Dawkins pretends.

David Remnick in The New Yorker:

“Saturday Night Live” is erratic in middle age but rarely cruel. An exception came late last spring, when, at the stroke of eleven-thirty, an NBC announcer gravely told the American people to stand by for a “message from the President of the United States,” and Al Gore, surrounded by Oval Office knickknacks, came into focus to deliver what could best be described as an interim report from a parallel, and happier, galaxy. President Gore reviewed some of his actions and their unintended consequences:

In the last six years we have been able to stop global warming. No one could have predicted the negative results of this. Glaciers that once were melting are now on the attack. As you know, these renegade glaciers have already captured parts of upper Michigan and northern Maine. But I assure you: we will not let the glaciers win.

Nor was this the only problem. Although Social Security had been repaired, the cost had been high: the budget surplus was “down to a perilously low eleven trillion dollars.” The price of gas had dropped to nineteen cents a gallon, and the oil companies were hurting. (“I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash.”) After winning the plaudits of a grateful world—and turning Afghanistan into a premier “spring-break destination”—Americans could no longer risk travelling abroad, for fear of “getting hugged.” Even the national pastime was in danger. “But,” Gore added hopefully, “I have faith in baseball commissioner George W. Bush when he says, ‘We will find the steroid users if we have to tap every phone in America!’ ”

The cruelty here was not to Gore, who probably requires no prompting to brood now and then about what might have been, but to the audience. It is worse than painful to reflect on how much better off the United States and the world would be today if the outcome of the 2000 election had been permitted to correspond with the wishes of the electorate.

More here.

Robert Douglas Fairhurst in New Statesman:

Few biographers come to the task as well qualified as Druin Burch, whose training as a doctor means that he is used to emerging from the dissecting room and “finding bits of fat and connective tissue later in the day, trodden onto the sole of my shoe or hitching a ride in the fold of my jeans”. And few subjects are as well suited to this treatment as Astley Cooper (1768-1841), the charismatic surgeon whose skill, energy and talent for self-promotion helped to drag medicine into the modern age. Having trained at Guy’s Hospital at a time when surgeons were little better than licensed butchers, Cooper’s professional dedication to investigating how the human body worked, rather than how it was popularly supposed to work, produced a revolution in surgical techniques with aftershocks that continue to be felt. (His research into the anatomy of the breast is still being cited in the 21st century.)

As is often the case with ambitious men, Cooper’s story is really two stories: one which traces his rise to worldly success and influence, and the other which traces the gradual decline of his youthful political idealism. In 1792, with a revolutionary glint in his eye, he made a pilgrimage to Paris, and was an appalled witness to the violence of the mob as they processed through the streets with bits of the bodies they had torn apart, like a grotesque parody of the enlightened surgical techniques he had gone there to learn. By 1820, having meekly submitted to his employers’ demands for a public recantation (not altogether convincingly excused by Burch as “a pragmatic choice, a sensible one”), he had been so dazzled by the glamour of the court that he could describe the bloated and debauched George IV, seemingly without any irony, as “the Prince of grace and dignity”.

It is an unappealing trajectory, and Burch doesn’t gloss over the unpleasant aspects of Cooper’s personality: the vanity that sometimes confused the “theatre” of surgery with a love of self-display; the clumsy sense of humour that led him once to ask his hairdresser to reach into a tub of hair powder which he had replaced with monkey entrails; the willingness to use body-snatchers in his quest for new anatomical specimens; and especially the obsession with dissection that seemed to go well beyond the needs of medical science.

More here.

Sara Wood and John Pickrell in Cosmos Magazine:

A new genetic analysis of ancient human remains proves that humans were unable to digest milk prior to the spread of agriculture and dairy farming within the last 8,000 years.

Though all people can digest milk in infanthood, most of the world’s population lose that ability at between two and five years of age.

At this time their bodies stop producing an enzyme called lactase, which is essential for digestion of lactose sugars found in dairy products. Most Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, native Americans and Pacific Islanders remain lactose intolerant today.

However, a mutation in many European and some African populations allows them to produce lactase into adulthood, and in these cultures dairy products – such as milk cheese and yoghurt – traditionally form a key component of the diet.

More here.

Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times:

For decades, cities have seen Olympic bids as among the most effective ways to jump-start civic ambition. Barcelona used the run-up to the 1992 Summer Games as an occasion to reinvent its waterfront, among other expensive improvements. And Beijing is remaking itself at a breakneck pace as it gets ready for the Olympics next year.

But as Chicago and Los Angeles jockey for the right to hold the 2016 Summer Games, a different vision of what the Olympics mean for cities is emerging. It is decidedly modest. This pair of American cities, so different in so many ways, seem to agree that the best way to win the Olympics — and to pay for them — is to design a sort of pack-and-go games. Put aside any notions of an Olympics that might spur interest, here or in Chicago, in new subway lines or massive architectural icons. A central goal in both bids is to avoid the white elephants that have plagued Sydney and other host cities.

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