Richard Lea in The Guardian:

The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury has had little time for writing over the past month. “First you have to behave as a citizen, and not a writer. If you have one third of your population [taking refuge] in public schools then you have to help. So there is little time for writing.”

For the moment, a ceasefire holds in the Middle East, but for the region’s writers, as for so many others, chaos and disruption continue…

In Tel Aviv, meanwhile, the real world has caught up with Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom. “I used to write books they called postmodern,” she says, “but now it is pure realism.”

Her latest novel, Textile, was published earlier this year. Over the past month she has been writing, “but not a lot”.

More here.

Paul Vitello in the New York Times:

Among lesbians — the group from which most transgendered men emerge — the increasing number of women who are choosing to pursue life as a man can provoke a deep resentment and almost existential anxiety, raising questions of gender loyalty and political identity, as well as debates about who is and who isn’t, and who never was, a real woman.

The conflict has raged at some women’s colleges and has been explored in academic articles, in magazines for lesbians and in alternative publications, with some — oversimplifying the issue for effect — headlined with the question, “Is Lesbianism Dead?”

It has been a subtext of gay politics in San Francisco, the only city in the country that covers employees’ sex-change medical expenses. And it bubbles to the surface every summer at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a lesbian gathering to which only “women born as women and living as women” are invited — a ban on transgendered people of either sex.

More here.

From The New York Times:

He was probably the greatest legislative politician in American history, but he was also one of the most ambitious idealist. He had the rare ability to understand his own flaws and limitations, and he worked hard to overcome them. During the battle over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a reporter asked him why he was fighting so strenuously for a cause to which he had previously demonstrated only a faint commitment. Johnson replied, “Some people get a chance late in life to correct the sins of their youth, and very few get a chance as big as the White House.” Johnson sought power not just to have it, but to use it to accomplish great things — and for a while he was spectacularly successful.

But Johnson was not always at his best. He could be crude, overbearing, arrogant and often cruel. He harbored deep resentments that frequently undermined his own stature. He had terrible relations with the press. He was personally (and sexually) reckless in ways that make Bill Clinton seem a model of rectitude. He pushed his staff and his congressional colleagues so relentlessly that his legislative achievements were often rushed and deeply flawed. And, of course, he was largely responsible for one of the greatest disasters in American history: a war in Vietnam that he inherited, escalated, fiercely defended and failed to examine with the same courage and clarity of mind that he brought to so many other issues. He was, paradoxically, at once one of America’s most successful presidents and one of its most conspicuous failures.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Television can act like a painkiller when it comes to children and is more effective than a mother’s comforting, according to a small Italian study. The University of Siena study, published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, was based on 69 children aged seven to 12 who were divided into three groups to have blood taken. One group was given no distraction while the blood was being taken while mothers of children in the second group attempted to distract the youngsters by talking to them, soothing, and/or caressing them. In the third group, the children were allowed to watch television cartoons while the procedure was being carried out.

From the New York Times:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

 

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s. You too may find them so, in which case Spain’s mesomorphic and totally martial Rafael Nadal is the man’s man for you — he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations. Plus Nadal is also Federer’s nemesis and the big surprise of this year’s Wimbledon, since he’s a clay-court specialist and no one expected him to make it past the first few rounds here. Whereas Federer, through the semifinals, has provided no surprise or competitive drama at all. He’s outplayed each opponent so completely that the TV and print press are worried his matches are dull and can’t compete effectively with the nationalist fervor of the World Cup.

More here.  [Thanks, of course, to Asad Raza.]

Charles Glass in the London Review of Books:

Like Israel’s previous enemies, Hizbullah relies on the weapons of the weak: car bombs, ambushes, occasional flurries of small rockets and suicide bombers. The difference is that it uses them intelligently, in conjunction with an uncompromising political programme. Hizbullah’s achievement, perhaps ironically for a religious party headed by men in turbans, is that it belongs to the modern age. It videotaped its ambushes of Israeli convoys for broadcast the same evening. It captured Israeli soldiers and made Israel give up hundreds of prisoners to get them back. It used stage-set cardboard boulders that blew up when Israeli patrols passed. It flew drones over Israel to take reconnaissance photographs – just as the Israelis did in Lebanon. It had a website that was short on traditional Arab bombast and long on facts. If Israelis had faced an enemy like Hizbullah in 1948, the outcome of its War of Independence might have been different. Israel, whose military respect Hizbullah, is well aware of this.

That is why, having failed to eliminate Hizbullah while it occupied Lebanon, Israel is trying to destroy it now. Hizbullah’s unpardonable sin in Israel’s view is its military success. Israel may portray Hizbullah as the cat’s-paw of Syria and Iran, but its support base is Lebanese. Moreover, it does one thing that Syria and Iran do not: it fights for the Palestinians. On 12 July Hizbullah attacked an Israeli army unit, capturing two soldiers. It said it would negotiate indirectly to exchange them for Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israel, as it has done in the past. It made clear that its attack was in support of the Palestinians under siege in Gaza after the capture of another Israeli soldier a week earlier. The whole Arab world had remained silent when Israel reoccupied the Gaza settlements and bombed the territory. Hizbullah’s response humiliated the Arab regimes, most of which condemned its actions, as much as it humiliated Israel. No one need have been surprised. Hizbullah has a long history of supporting the Palestinians.

More here.

From New Scientist:

A new silicon chip capable of manipulating the spin of a single electron could ultimately allow futuristic quantum computers to be built using conventional electronic technology, researchers say.

A quantum bit, or “qubit”, is analogous the bits used in conventional computers. But, instead of simply switching between two states, representing “0” and “1”, quantum physics permits a qubit to exist in more than one state simultaneously, until its state is measured.

This means quantum computers can essentially perform multiple calculations at once, giving them the potential to be exponentially more powerful than conventional computers.

Researchers have previously developed rudimentary quantum computers by exploiting exotic phenomena to generate qubits. Two of the most sophisticated methods involve using ions trapped in magnetic fields and electrons in superconducting circuits. However, both approaches are far more complicated than making the chips that power conventional computers.

More here.

Jeff Hecht in New Scientist:

Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false? This simple question is splitting America apart, with a growing proportion thinking that we did not descend from an ancestral ape. A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact. [See here.]

Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. “The US is the only country in which [the teaching of evolution] has been politicised,” he says. “Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue.”

Miller’s report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That’s despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. “We don’t seem to be going in the right direction,” Miller says.

More here.

Jack Shafer in Slate:

Reason magazine’s blog, Hit & Run, calls our attention today to a new Government Accountability Office study that casts doubt on official U.S. government estimates that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year.

Scores of news organizations have accepted the 800,000 estimate as credible in their reporting of human trafficking in recent years. Within the last year alone, the figures have appeared, unquestioned, in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and NPR, just to name just a few outlets.

But government estimates must always be approached with suspicion, as I wrote earlier this summer, citing Max Singer’s 1971 Public Interest article “The Vitality of Mythical Numbers” and Peter Reuter’s 1984 sequel, “The (Continued) Vitality of Mythical Numbers.”

More here.

“Who speaks for the mostly poor Bangladeshi community in east London? Delwar Hussain charts a long-term shift from secular leftism to Islamism – one in which British state policy has played a significant role.”

From Open Democracy:

The connection between events in Bangladesh and the large Bangladeshi community in east London is intimate but not static. The influence of economic, political and generational change on the transformation of personal and public identities is profound. In particular, there has been a significant movement in recent years from alignment with secular politics as a vehicle of representation and empowerment towards Islamic-based organisation. An important element in this is that the British state has helped create and support this process through its funding policies and its application of a “multicultural” model of relating to and supporting community organisations in the area.

To understand the context of this change, it is necessary to understand the trend of events in the Bangladeshi homeland itself.

More here.

Professor Heebie McJeebie interviews Darcy James Argue, who with Secret Society, will be performing at the 2nd annual 3QD ball. (Via Lindsay Beyerstein.)

The young composer Darcy James Argue conducts Secret Society, an ensemble of urban hippies who perform his original compositions at various underground locations. On August 26 and 27, Secret Society will perform in various outer-boroughs of New York City. I recently spoke with young person Darcy via my MIDI dictaphone.

Professor Heebie McJeebie: After listening to a few minutes of your music, I would categorize you as a “jazz composer,” yet you have studied with at least one composer of serious music, and you are very skilled at music notation. As someone who thinks carefully about writing things down, where do you draw the line between improvisation and composition?

Darcy James Argue: Some jazz musicians feel that improvisation is just composition in real-time. I don’t actually buy this. Open-ended improv is really its own thing, and it creates a very different set of expectations and reactions in the listener than a pre-structured piece does.

As for my own process, I find improvisation can be a great way to generate or mess with raw materials — to fill up the sketchbook with ideas, to assist with the pre-compositional work, and the like. But then I have to hunker down and figure out how to structure those ideas. It’s like what the faculty are always telling the kids at jazz camp: “play drunk, write sober.”

None of this, however, makes Johnson fashionable in academic circles, where many write him off not just as a dead white male, but as a high-church, moralistic, Tory, conservative, monarchist misogynist (take your pick). While it is true that Samuel Johnson continues to find favor with various Johnsonian clubs whose members tend to be cultural conservatives, the real Johnson is much more complex than this narrow pigeon-holing would allow. The high Anglican had Methodist, Presbyterian, Quaker, and other low-church friends, admitted to a lifetime of agonizing doubt about his faith, and was known to kneel in prayer at night with the servants. The ardent Tory was also a lifelong opponent of slavery who fiercely criticized the European conquest of Africa and America, and denounced cruelty to indigenous peoples everywhere. He hated capital punishment. His charity to the poor, the sick, and the miserable was so profound that it sometimes shocked his society friends. The supposed misogynist (“A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all”) was actually a major critic of the exploitation of women, a leading advocate of women’s education, and a supportive friend to dozens of women striving for writing careers in an era of male domination. (Mary Wollstonecraft, who met and liked him, put five of Johnson’s works in her feminist anthology, The Female Reader, in 1789.) As Henry Hitchings acknowledges about midway through his superb book, Johnson was in many ways “a progressive liberal.”

more from The Claremont Review here.

If any books change the world, Republic has a good claim to first place. It is commonly regarded as the culminating achievement of Plato as a philosopher and writer, brilliantly poised between the questioning and inconclusive earlier dialogues and the less compelling cosmological speculations and doubts of the later ones. Over the centuries it has probably sustained more commentary, and been subject to more radical and impassioned disagreement, than almost any other of the great founding texts of the modern world. Indeed, the history of readings of the book is itself an academic discipline, with specialist chapters on almost every episode in the story of religion and literature for the past 2,000 years and more. To take only the major English poets, there are entire books on Platonism and Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Shelley and Coleridge, to name but a few, and there are many others on whole movements and times: Plato and Christianity, Plato and the Renaissance, Plato and the Victorians, Plato and the Nazis, Plato and us. The story of Plato’s direct influence on philosophy is another study in itself, one peppered with names such as Philo Judaeus, Macrobius, Porphyry, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, as well as the better-known Plotinus, Augustine or Dante. Sometimes the Plato in question is the author of other texts, notably the inspirational dialogue Symposium and the theologically ambitious Timaeus. But Republic is seldom far away.

more from Guardian Books here.

On December 18, 1927, at three-thirty in the morning, Walter Benjamin began writing a memorandum titled “Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish.” It is characteristic of Benjamin that the first fact he thought it necessary to record was not the time he had taken the drug but the time he started writing about it. Like the books he read and the streets he wandered—like life itself—hashish was important to him less for its own sake than as a subject for interpretation.

For a writer with Benjamin’s interests and allegiances, a rendezvous with hashish was inevitable. The surprising thing is that it took him until the age of thirty-five to try it. As early as 1919, he had been fascinated by Baudelaire’s “Artificial Paradises,” in which the poet issues warnings against the drug so seductive that they sound like invitations: “You know that hashish always evokes magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions, cascades of liquid gold.” Benjamin, who regarded Baudelaire as one of the central writers of the nineteenth century, admired the book’s “childlike innocence and purity,” but was disappointed in its lack of philosophical rigor, noting, “It will be necessary to repeat this attempt independently.”

more from The New Yorker here.

Alex Motyl looks at Ukraine’s political virtues.

Although the prevailing mood in Ukraine almost two years after the orange revolution is one of profound disappointment, Ukraine is a far different, and better, country today. It has opened itself to the world. It is democratic and free, even if chaotically so. Civil society and the media are robust, open debate is the norm, foreign direct investment has boomed, and the rule of law has improved. Ukraine remains poor and corrupt, but, unlike Belarus and Russia, it is anything but an authoritarian state with a dictatorial leader and a passive population.

How could a democratic breakthrough take place in a country known for systemic stasis and government deadlock? Paradoxically, the “stagnation” of the 1990s made the orange revolution possible. It takes time for institutions – or valued rules of the game – to take hold. They “stick” only after people use them repeatedly and come to view them as effective, valuable, and “natural”. Since such rule-based behaviour evolves slowly, almost invisibly, many observers failed to see that Ukraine had become transformed since independence in 1991, when it was a post-totalitarian and post-imperial “space” without the institutions of a state, the rule of law, democracy, a market, and civil society.

A new campaign calls for the cultural and academic boycott of Israel, and will most likely re-spark the debate seen last year.

We call upon the International community to join us in the boycott of Israeli film festivals, Israeli public venues, and Israeli institutions supported by the government, and to end all cooperation with these cultural and artistic institutions that to date have refused to take a stand against the Occupation, the root cause for this colonial conflict.

We call upon you to take a stand in order to appeal to the Israeli people to give up their silence, to abandon their apathy, and to face up to their responsibility in the destruction and killing their elected government is wreaking.

In the Economist:

Estimates of the prevalence of Quechua [the language of the Inca Empire] vary widely. In Peru, there are thought to be 3m to 4.5m speakers, with others in Bolivia and Ecuador. The language has long been in slow decline, chiefly because the children of migrants to the cities rarely speak it. But it is now getting a lot more attention.

In recent months, Google has launched a version of its search engine in Quechua while Microsoft unveiled Quechua translations of Windows and Office. Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui, who last year translated “Don Quijote” into Quechua, recalls that a nationalist military government in the 1960s ordered that the language be taught in all public schools. It didn’t happen, because of lack of money to train teachers. By law its official use—and bilingual education—is now limited to highland areas where it is predominant.

I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago, on the 2nd anniversary of Sidney Morgenbesser’s death. When Abbas, in coversation, recently mentioned his unfortunate run-in with skinheads, after which Morgenbesser was quick to help Abbas with legal assistance, I was reminded of it. (For those who don’t know about Morgenbesser, see here, here, here, and here.) The second anniversary also marks two years into the five-year fund raising drive into the Sidney Morgenbesser Memorial Fund.

In cooperation with the Columbia College Office of Development, the Philosophy Department is establishing a Fund in Sidney’s honor to support scholarship students at Columbia College or, if possible, a faculty position at Columbia.

The amount required permanently to endow a scholarship fund is $50,000; additional scholarships could be funded at the same amount. Faculty positions require much more substantial amounts.

At the end of a five year period, the Department, the Development office, and Sidney’s friends and family will determine whether the Fund can best be used to support student scholarships or a faculty position.

Contributions may be sent to:

Columbia College Office of Development, 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 917, New York, NY, 10115

From The New Republic:

Midway through his new book on emancipation and Reconstruction, Eric Foner remarks on how “unanticipated events” — in this case, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — “profoundly shaped” the course of the era. Foner finds it “inconceivable” that Lincoln, had he lived, “would have so alienated Congress” as to have faced impeachment, and speculates that Lincoln and his fellow Republicans in Congress would likely have fashioned a Reconstruction plan “more attuned to protecting the rights of the former slaves than the one [Andrew] Johnson envisioned, but less radical than the one Congress eventually adopted.” Such a plan, Foner acknowledges, might well have united the North and gained greater acceptance in the white South, thus smoothing the process of sectional reunification and avoiding the struggles and political violence that left bloody and painful scars on the nation for generations to follow. But, he asks, would such an alternative, however appealing in some regards, “have served the nation’s interests, and especially those of the former slaves?”

Foner’s question defies the reconciliationist narrative that has long focused popular opinion on the importance of healing the nation’s wounds —

More here.

From Nature:

Genetic mutations that increase lifespan also seem to be particularly good at fighting tumours, a worm study suggests. The finding could shed light on why cancer risk increases as we get older, and may also suggest new targets for cancer therapeutics.

You might expect that genes that promote long life and fight cancer would go hand-in-hand: a gene that protects against tumours would help to stop cancer from killing you, after all, so you would probably live longer. But it seems that the relationship is more complicated than that. Genes that make some animals live longer through non-cancer-related mechanisms also seem to have a particular skill for suppressing tumours.

More here.