The case against TED, ctd

Alex Pareene bemoans the event he describes in no uncertain terms as a "money-soaked orgy of self-congratulatory futurism":

According to a 2010 piece in Fast Company, the trade journal of the breathless bullshit industry, the people behind TED are “creating a new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.” Well! That’s certainly saying… something. (What it’s mostly saying is “This is a Fast Company story about some overhyped Internet thing.”) To even attend a TED conference requires not just a donation of between $7,500 and $125,000, but also a complicated admissions process in which the TED people determine whether you’re TED material; so, as Maura Johnston says, maybe it’s got more in common with Harvard than is initially apparent.

Strip away the hype and you’re left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur. For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it’s a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it’s changing the world, like if “This American Life” suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.

Previous posts in the thread here and here.

"Literally"

Greg Ross compiles a list of reader-spotted abuses of the word. "A widely-read pre-war guide to Greece used to describe the inhabitants of that country as so interested in politics as to be visible daily in cafés and restaurants literally devouring their newspapers." Related comic here.

Biden as Lyndon Johnson

George Packer makes an obvious but important historical comparison:

But it was Johnson who pushed hard on civil rights where Kennedy, assuming he’d get to it after his reëlection, hesitated. And it was Biden who, inadvertently, forced Obama to stop evolving and declare himself on an issue that the President clearly hoped would leave him alone until after November. Though same-sex marriage isn’t a cause on the same scale of historic injustice as the color line in America, it is the issue that forces today’s politicians to take a clear and politically difficult moral stand. It’s an issue for politicians whose egos are not under tight rational control—who are, come heaven or hell, passionate.

Though my favourite comment on Biden's remarks was from Dave Weigel, who tweeted, "Okay, Biden. Now say something about decriminalizing pot."

What happened to the philosophical novel?

Jennie Erdal asks if the genre still has life in it:

It seems the problem for philosophical novels these days is, well, their philosophicalness. Which is a pity, for the novel and philosophy have a great deal to give one another. Indeed, one of the things the novel does best is to depict people – fictional characters but recognisably like us – dealing with morally complex situations. Novelists seek, in Wordsworth’s phrase, to “see into the life of things”. But the novel is something felt and lived, not something theoretical, and storytelling has always been the natural, essential way of making sense of the world. 

Oh, the irony!

So sorry I missed this. Well this is about as far from the ardent belief in American exceptionalism we saw during the campaign as you can get. I suppose her brush with fanatic patriotism was fun while it lasted — but then came the votes.

Death of a Salesman, revisited

Arthur Miller's magnum opus has been the subject of renewed interest of late, most of it due to a Tony-nominated revival on Broadway starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. Lee Siegel points out one of the basic ironies of staging the show today:

Certainly few middle-class people, or at least anyone from any “middle class” that Loman would recognize, are among the audiences attending this production. What was once a middle-class entertainment has become a luxury item. Tickets for the original run, in 1949, cost between $1.80 and $4.80; tickets for the 2012 run range from $111 to $840. After adjusting for inflation, that’s a 10-fold increase, well beyond the reach of today’s putative Willy Lomans.

Furthermore:

In 1949, Willy’s desperate cry — “the competition is maddening!” — must have chilled theatergoers for whom competition still had a mostly positive connotation. In 2012, a fight to the death for shrinking opportunities in so many realms of life renders the idea of fair competition an anachronism. It is a sign of the times that sitcoms, in which trivial, everyday conflicts are comfortably resolved into neighborly harmony, are giving way to the Darwinian armageddons of reality TV. It is as if the middle class were being forced to watch the gladiatorial spectacle of its own destruction.

Elsewhere, Giles Harvey wonders what all the fuss was about regarding Miller's play in the first place.

Why write poetry?

Charles Simic on the surprise with which people react when they're told he still writes poetry, a craft whose amateur practitioners are often presumed to be mostly teenage girls and effeminate sixth-formers:

When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself this son of mine has always been a little nuts. Now that I’m in my seventies, I’m asked that question now and then by people who don’t know me well. Many of them, I suspect, hope to hear me say that I’ve come my senses and given up that foolish passion of my youth and are visibly surprised to hear me confess that I haven’t yet. They seem to think there is something downright unwholesome and even shocking about it, as if I were dating a high school girl, at my age, and going with her roller-skating that night.

(Video: the indispensable Fry and Laurie, February 1989.)

"As Ever"

Sadie Stein writes an excessively long but ultimately rather charming ode to her favourite correspondence sign-off:

Immediately, it seemed to me that rare thing, an all-purpose valediction: versatile, graceful, elliptical. If I was writing to a loved one, the sign-off implied my affection was going strong. If I hated someone, well, it didn’t rule that out, either. It could be cool or warm, friendly or formal. Or it could be literal: I was still Sadie Stein, and there was very little arguing with that.

The end of the 'white' majority

Here's the non-news:

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history. 

One of the more anecdotal passages in Hitchens' excellent book Letters to a Young Contrarian describes a yearly row with the government officials (I can't quite recall the exact details) who conduct the U.S. census. On the line regarding 'Race', Hitchens insisted upon putting, simply, 'human'. Indeed, I think we really ought to redefine racism. We ought not to think of it as the belief that there is some hierarchal superiority of one over another, but instead that there is any meaningful distinction between human beings in that way at all. This is particularly pertinent, I think, to my own country of New Zealand, a nation in which a seemingly endless discussion of racial identity and race relations, in spite of honorable intentions, has done untold harm.

The myth about marriage

Why do so many supporters civil unions lack similar support for same-sex marriage, apparently irked by a a fiddly semantic nuance? Most are influenced in at least some way by Christianity. But not even among supporters of complete equality is one simple fact about marriage widely known: it doesn't really have any sacramental history at all. Garry Wills makes this pertinent historical point:

The early church had no specific rite for marriage. This was left up to the secular authorities of the Roman Empire, since marriage is a legal concern for the legitimacy of heirs. When the Empire became Christian under Constantine, Christian emperors continued the imperial control of marriage, as the Code of Justinian makes clear. When the Empire faltered in the West, church courts took up the role of legal adjudicator of valid marriages. But there was still no special religious meaning to the institution. As the best scholar of sacramental history, Joseph Martos, puts it: “Before the eleventh century there was no such thing as a Christian wedding ceremony in the Latin church, and throughout the Middle Ages there was no single church ritual for solemnizing marriage between Christians.”

And on a personal, and I think rather pointed, note:

In the 1930s, my parents had a civil marriage, but my Catholic mother did not think she was truly married if not by a priest. My non-Catholic father went along with a church wedding (but in the sacristy, not the sanctuary) by promising to raise his children as Catholic. My mother thought she had received the sacrament, but had she? Since mutual consent is the essence of marriage, one would think that the sacrament would have to be bestowed on both partners; but my non-Catholic father could not receive the sacrament. Later, when my father left and married another, my mother was told she could not remarry because she was still married to my father in the “true marriage.” When he returned to my mother, and became a Catholic, a priest performed again the sacramental marriage. Since my father’s intervening marriage was “outside the church,” it did not count. What nonsense.

This curious position of advocacy for civil unions but not for 'marriage' was Obama's for a rather long time. Like most, I've known people who struggle personally with the trivial distinction to be made between marriage as they see it, a divine rite, and marriage as it ought to be recognized by the state, a legally-binding contract of kinship between two people. But of course it's a distinction that really need not matter.

Previous coverage of gay marriage on the Report here, marriage in general here.

Camus, lost in translation

Ryan Bloom tells us what the famous first line of Albert Camus' The Stranger (I know it as should be The Outsider) actually should be:

First impressions matter, and, for forty-two years, the way that American readers were introduced to Meursault was through the detached formality of his statement: “Mother died today.” There is little warmth, little bond or closeness or love in “Mother,” which is a static, archetypal term, not the sort of thing we use for a living, breathing being with whom we have close relations. To do so would be like calling the family dog “Dog” or a husband “Husband.” The word forces us to see Meursault as distant from the woman who bore him. 

The novelist's universe

On the fictional world of Martin Amis:

What kind of private universe is this? Well, for starters it's a universe shaped by gusts and headwinds of comic hyperbole ("her buttocks...danced behind her knees like punch-balls") and an undercurrent of the literary high style ("the gloomy pools that were her eyes"). It's a universe both strange and strangely familiar; a universe racked with drink, drugs, and porno (Money); environmental disaster and nuclear weapons (London Fields, Einstein's Monsters); sexual revolution and male anxiety (The Pregnant Widow, The Information). It's a private universe shaped by a partly outraged and partly excited response to the late twentieth century. Much of the comedy in Amis comes from this strange ambivalence. It's what makes reading his essays on topics like Madonna, American presidential campaigns, and Hugh Hefner so engaging. Amis doesn't reject or cower from what he once called the "great convulsion of stupidity" of the modern world; however savage his critique, you can never really shake the feeling that part of Amis takes a perverse pleasure in the modern. He is the fiercely moral litterateur who upholds the achievements of Joyce, Nabokov and Bellow. But he is also the laddish, snooker-playing, cigarette-smoking son of the twentieth century.

 Irving Howe wrote of Saul Bellow's prose that it was sometimes "strongly anti-literary," that it tried to "break away from the stateliness of the literary sentence." Amis, in turn, credited Bellow (his literary mentor and surrogate father) with attempting to find a voice appropriate to the twentieth century, and his own fiction is an extension of this ambition. In London Fields the writer-narrator Samson Young muses that, "perhaps because of their addiction to form, writers always lag behind the contemporary formlessness. They write about an old reality, in a language that's even older."

The Demon Barber of Cranbrook

In reaching conclusions about an individual's suitability for public office, Americans rarely account for the stupidity of a candidate's youth. And, to be honest, nor should they. Bush The Younger certainly put his own youthful stupidity in a fitting light by simply saying, "When I was young and irresponsible I was young and irresponsible." Though his near-abnormal incuriosity and notorious inarticulacy disqualified him in the eyes of many of us, observers and critics (okay, me included) must at least admire this ability, or rather willingness, to acknowledge bad behaviour. I suspect what irks people about the latest 'scandal' — I use the term with caution — is Romney's reluctance in confirming what the rest of us already know: that as a kid he was, frankly, kind of a jerk.

The 'news' this week on the Romney front came by way of the Washington Post. Jason Horowitz's piece is troubling partly due to its vividness in description. "Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground," Horowitz writes. "As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors." John Lauber, an unassuming, soft-spoken student one year behind the bully, was presumed to be gay, or 'queer' as they might have put it, by his classmates. The future presidential candidate considered Lauber's hair a little too long by the prestigious Cranbrook prep school's exacting standards, and thus adopted it as his job to ensure it was cut. Lauber died in 2004, but was spotted by a witness to the incident at an airport in the mid-1990s, who apologized for not doing more to assist him. "It was horrible," the victim said simply, adding later, "It's something I've thought about a lot since then." A student who assisted in restraining the victim for Romney's hack-job haircutting enterprise was quoted by the Post and recalled that the episode "happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me." He, too, later apologized to Lauber.  "What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do."

Other accounts of various pranks are less disturbing, but worth remembering nonetheless. Leading a blind teacher into a closed door isn't exactly kosher, but still dwells rather comfortably on the 'prank' end of the spectrum. Though most of his classmates recall with fondness the (and here I make full use of the inverted commas) "pranks" he used to play, others remember a "sharp edge" to the young Willard Romney. Another student, who kept his homosexuality concealed but was at any rate the victim of abuse, was in the same English class as Romney, and remembers his contributions in class being punctuated by outbursts of "Atta girl!" from the presidential aspirant to-be. While anti-gay sentiment is rarely concealed within such environments, perhaps more surprising still is the gay student's recollection of various teachers using similarly-snide language. I don't think I'm pushing too many boundaries, or taking too many liberties with the term, when I say that this is gay bashing — the earlier mob haircut incident included.

What are we to make of these reports? I use the word reports, not its cheap and easily-dismissed 'synonym' allegations, because there is, quite simply, sufficient evidence to suggest that they are true. No one is out to allege that Romney was a rank schoolyard bully; we already know that this was the case. The legitimate question, and the one we really ought to be asking one another, is whether or not these irksome stories mean anything in the context of a bid for the presidency.

Romney has said he cannot remember the attack on Lauber in particular, but that he apologizes for it anyway. May I just say: I think he's lying. But of course this I cannot prove, nor can I easily dismiss the notion, however, that an apology so long after the incident occurred, and so long after the death of the victim, means next to nothing. Politically, Romney is now desperately in need of a new genesis story. The one put forth by Horowitz in the Post is so horribly unflattering I'm inclined to conclude that this, combined with the public's perception and general lack of enthusiasm for the candidate, make a campaign based on 'good character' — or something else equally intangible — impossible or worse. Why can't this man confront the story properly, and discuss his reckless actions with the seriousness the situation demands? Romney's inability to remember, and his empty apology, instead of taming the threat posed to his campaign by these revelations, makes the stories more troubling still.

 (Image: "Young Mitt Romney at Cranbrook, a prep school, where he is reported to have bullied another student." Courtesy of Cranbrook Prep School, via Slate.)

Rome's long shadow

Adrian Goldsworthy reviews Rome: An Empire’s Story by Greg Woolf, and considers the lasting influence of the Roman Empire in the modern world:

The empire flourished in the first two centuries AD, the period when the vast majority of its great monuments were built. It also survived subsequent crises, but ultimately it still collapsed. The dream of Rome’s success cannot avoid the nightmare of its fall—or almost inevitably its “decline and fall,” for the title of Edward Gibbon’s great work is firmly established in our minds. Whether called the Dark Ages or the early medieval period, the world that followed was a lot less sophisticated. The lesson appears to be that progress is not inevitable and success rarely permanent. Yet that has not stopped successive generations from looking to Rome in the hope of matching its success and avoiding its failure.

President Obama's moment

The Times editorial on why the endorsement matters:

With those 10 words, Mr. Obama finally stopped temporizing and “evolving” his position on same-sex marriage and took the moral high ground on what may be the great civil rights struggle of our time. His words will not end the bitter fight over marriage rights, which we fear will continue for years to come. But they were of great symbolic value, and perhaps more. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted, no expansion of rights embraced by a president has failed to become the law of the land. 

(Image: A poster, seen at Obama campaign headquarters, via SFist)

Should we ban college football?

Author Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Outliers) argues for the affirmative in this Intelligence Squared debate:



Ted Miller takes on the points raised by the Gladwell team:

Now I'll make note of a quibble that is also the basis for my position. Neither Bissinger nor Gladwell know much about college football. It's not just that they haven't played, it's that they aren't educated on the subject. That is where most critics of college football come from: the ignorant. I've been around college football much of my life, and professionally since 1997. My take on the sport, and the take of most folks who have been around the sport for a good deal of time, is that the good far outweighs the bad. If the sport is far from pure, it's also far from impure. And I'd be glad to debate that point with anyone. They'd lose.

The kids are not alright

Terry Castle advances the view that orphanhood, "the absence of the parent, the frightening yet galvanizing solitude of the child," is the defining fixation of the novel as a genre. Not only that, but that orphanhood, or at least a meaningful disconnection from one's parents, is vital to development and maturity:

In the broad, even existential, sense of the term I deploy here, orphanhood is not necessarily reducible to orphanhood in the literal sense. At least metaphorically, virtually any character in the early realist novel might be said to be an orphan—including, paradoxically, many of those heroes and heroines who have a living parent (or two), or end up getting one, as Moll Flanders does. A feeling of intractable loneliness—of absolute moral or spiritual estrangement from the group—may be all that it takes. You don't need to have been abandoned by a parent in the conventional sense, in other words, to feel psychically bereft.

Indeed, from a certain angle—and thus my second big lit-crit hypothesis—the orphan trope may allegorize a far more disturbing emotional reality in early fiction: a generic insistence on the reactionary (and destructive) nature of parent/child ties. The more one reads, the more one confronts it: Whatever their status in a narrative (alive, dead, absent, present, lost, found), the parental figures in the early English novel are, in toto, so deeply and overwhelmingly flawed—so cruel, lost, ignorant, greedy, compromised, helpless, selfish, morally absent, or tragically oblivious to their children's needs—one would be better off without them. You might as well be an orphan.

Oh, please do read on.

Is Facebook making us lonely?

Stephen Marche's cover story for The Atlantic confronts the question:

A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook’s isolation is a grind. What’s truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume—750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend—but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users—and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee.

The idea of leaving Facebook has accrued a certain appeal lately. What's amusing about the process of deleting a Facebook account is the emotional blackmail the company attempts to employ as it begs you to stay. I recall being greeted with an almost parodic-looking page with photos of friends and captions like, "...will miss you." It was — in a word — weird. Most striking of all was the interesting claim, "Your 358 friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you." Because, of course, Facebook is now the only conduit for communication that exists in the world. Sorry, guys: sometimes I forget. On the subject of whether or not social networking sites are having the opposite-to-intended effect of making us lonelier, more isolated creatures, I'm still undecided. Claude S. Fischer rebels against the idea put forth by Marche:

The first systematic studies of the Internet’s social side suggested that early adopters were hiding away from people. But as Internet use became widespread, the findings changed. Robert Kraut, a leading researcher who had raised early warnings explicitly recanted; the resulting Times headline was, “Cyberspace Isn’t So Lonely After All.” People using the Internet, most studies show, increase the volume of their meaningful social contacts. E-communications do not generally replace in-person contact. True, serious introverts go online to avoid seeing people, but extroverts go online to see people more often. People use new media largely to enhance their existing relationships—say, by sending pictures to grandma—although a forthcoming study shows that many more Americans are meeting life partners online. Internet dating is especially fruitful for Americans who may face problems finding mates, such as gays and older women. Finally, people tell researchers that electronic media have enriched their personal relationships.

Referring to Marche and other writers operating in the same field of thought, Fischer writes, "Remind me not to “friend” these guys; they sound so sad and overwrought." Will do. Given the appeal of account deletion, I often wonder while trawling through the newsfeed why I don't simply delete the damn thing. Surely I'm not one to be swayed by the pathetic, imploring whimpers of the "Please Don't Leave" account de-activation page. Perhaps I am. Or — and this is more likely — perhaps each of us has become married to Facebook in a way, and though it might be an underwhelming relationship, it fulfills certain needs. You could take birthdays on Facebook as an example. While perhaps laughable in one sense or another, the birthday greetings one receives are reliably day-brightening. And not even that can account for the occasional glimmers of genius demonstrated by friends with a comedic streak or the trivial insights status updates can and sometimes do reveal, the entertainment the whole silly thing can bring, however frivolous. One need only wait for the birthday greetings that make themselves reliably conspicuous each and every year to understand Facebook's obscure and inexplicable, if perhaps fleeting, charm.

Losing your religion

Analytic thinking undermines religious belief:

Analytic thinking undermines belief because, as cognitive psychologists have shown, it can override intuition. And we know from past research that religious beliefs—such as the idea that objects and events don't simply exist but have a purpose—are rooted in intuition. "Analytic processing inhibits these intuitions, which in turn discourages religious belief," Norenzayan explains.

Wikipedia's finest

There you go. It's a surprisingly good list. Take a look at number one.

Why Obama couldn't wait

Richard Socarides considers the political imperative:

For a long time, Democrats have taken the gay vote for granted. Political consultants tell Democrats that gay and lesbian voters have nowhere else to go, and thus, in effect, can be counted on, so long as politicians pay lip service to the issue. But that is old thinking, out of touch with the new reality of the gay-rights movement. While I know that most gays and lesbians would have supported President Obama, both with their votes and with their financial contributions, no matter what he did on the issue of marriage equality, we were also not going to take “no” for an answer on the most important civil-rights issue of our day. That meant holding the President’s feet to the fire—first on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and then on marriage equality.

Dahlia Lithwick says the evolution leading to the decision matters just as much as the decision itself:

Taking his words at face value, what he was saying reflects precisely the thing Obama does at his best: He listens. My oracle at Facebook tells me that many of us think that is also precisely the thing Obama does worst—he compromises, triangulates, and negotiates. But perhaps we could at least stipulate that listening to and—yup, I’m saying it—empathizing with people who are very different from you, and rejiggering your views to accommodate them, is a quality we have seen almost none of in this presidential campaign, from either side. That isn’t to say that every person in the country deserves special solicitude on every policy question from every candidate. But it is to say that the quality whose absence Obama most lamented at the Supreme Court—empathy—has been vanishingly rare in this election cycle as well.

And Andrew Sullivan's applauding words deserve repeating:

[Let] me simply say: I think of all the gay kids out there who now know they have their president on their side. I think of Maurice Sendak, who just died, whose decades-long relationship was never given the respect it deserved. I think of the centuries and decades in which gay people found it impossible to believe that marriage and inclusion in their own families was possible for them, so crushed were they by the weight of social and religious pressure. I think of all those in the plague years shut out of hospital rooms, thrown out of apartments, written out of wills, treated like human garbage because they loved another human being. I think of Frank Kameny. I think of the gay parents who now feel their president is behind their sacrifices and their love for their children.

(Image: "President Obama is seen on television monitors at the White House on Wednesday. Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press, via the Washington Post.)

Obama's evolution

Though roundly ridiculed by opponents, Obama's delay in coming to a firm decision on the subject of marriage equality speaks far more of general confusion than of that flaunted symbol of America's political furniture: the flip-flop. Around halfway through the clip embedded above, Obama is asked for his views on the long-running and apparently enduring debate over whether homosexuality — and surely, then, heterosexuality — is a choice. At first he gives what I would regard as the correct answer. But the interviewer then moves immediately to the obvious next question. Though he certainly attempted to, the future-president couldn't produce a rational answer. His thought progression demonstrated every sign of someone who in an intellectual sense recognizes the need for equality under the law, but cannot, for whatever reason, bring themselves to 'feel' in the same way.

And, like most of these evolutions (if you don't mind me using the term), the delay is caused not by an inability to rationalize or justify but instead by the inability to align one's thoughts and one's feelings so that they correspond properly. Obama thought like a liberal, but his feelings were decidedly — dare I stoop to such meaningless distinctions — conservative. Obama's evolution was not one of thought, but of feeling. Unfortunately, though, it's a change so deplorably few have yet experienced.

A terrorist in retirement

Rafia Zakaria provides some insight as to Osama bin Laden's life in Abbottabad during the five months preceding his death, locked away with three wives and over a dozen children:

Hiding in Abbottabad, the retired Osama retreated to the most private and intimate realm available in Pakistani culture: the women’s world. In placing him deep within a feminine world, one whose sanctity has strong historical, cultural, and religious precedent, his Al-Qaeda handlers calculated the successful concealment of their leader. But in doing so, they also enabled another transformation: his emasculation and deposition from a position of leadership in both of his family and the organization he helped found.

If you read nothing else, make sure you catch the last paragraph.

Obama endorses same-sex marriage

The evolution is complete:

Europe's new political disease

The rise of the counter-jihad movement threatens communal harmony as much as so-called 'militant Islam', says Muhammad Abdul Bari:

It is disheartening that a continent that had learnt many lessons in such a hard way, after the devastation of the two World Wars, and which prides itself in equality and human rights, is allowing itself to be influenced by the forces of intolerance and hate. It is now open season to malign Muslims because of their religious and cultural practices. Yet Muslim immigrants arriving after the war joined in the effort to rebuild the economies of war-torn Europe in the 1950s. In almost every field of life, Muslims have been an integral part of the European tapestry. Muslims are today at home in Europe, have been contributors to its past and are stakeholders in its future.

The genius and insanity of Maurice Sendak

The late author was profiled in a small way by Dave Eggers in 2011 for Vanity Fair. Money quote:

Sendak’s sense of humor is pitch-black and ribald, though this fact, and the baroque essence of his work, is often lost on readers now that his books have become canonical. “A woman came up to me the other day and said, ‘You’re the kiddie-book man!’ I wanted to kill her.” He hates to be thought of as safe or his work as classic, and he won’t tolerate overpraise. “My work is not great, but it’s respectable. I have no false illusions.”

He’s wrong, of course. Sendak is the best-known, and by most measures simply the best, living creator of picture books, and in the stretch of years since his most prolific period—when he made In the Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Are, Kenny’s Window, The Sign on Rosie’s Door, and the “Nutshell Library”—his work has only grown in stature. No one has been more uncompromising, more idiosyncratic, and more in touch with the unhinged and chiaroscuro subconscious of a child.

Katie Rolphe writes that Sendak understood the crucial fact that children actually need to be terrified, while John Plotz describes the writer's wonderful compositions, I think rather memorably, as 'unparaphrasable'. Listen to Barack Obama (now here's a bit of fun) read from Sendak's most famous work, dramatically, here, and read the NYT obituary here. The first paragraph is so perfect: "Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83."

(Image: "Maurice Sendak and his German shepherd Herman, named after Melville, photographed at Sendak’s house in Ridgefield, Connecticut." Annie Leibovitz, via Vanity Fair)

"Why do they hate us?" Ctd

Parastou Hassouri critiques Mona Eltahawy's Foreign Policy essay:

Over the years, many accounts of women in the Muslim/Arab world, especially in mainstream media, have portrayed women as “objects” lacking any power and agency. For those of us who live in the region or have spent significant time here, and who know that the reality is far more complex, these depictions are particularly frustrating. Perhaps El Tahawy’s piece is too focused on violations, as opposed to the ways in which women are challenging them. However, she does end her piece by citing Samira Ibrahim, the only woman who filed a lawsuit after she was subjected to virginity tests by the Egyptian army, and who she quotes, “They want to silence us; they want to chase women back home. But we’re not going anywhere.” El Tahawy’s listing of the violations and citing of Ibrahim is a call to arms – she is specifically calling upon men and women to rise up against these practices.

Others have been critical of the language Eltahawy uses, particularly in the title of her essay:

Lastly, pace the assertion of Eltahawy collapses all the serious problems of Muslim women onto the simple categories of “hate”, in a way that is reminiscent of the worst writings of Islamophobes such as Brigitte Gabriel who write books with titles like: “Because They Hate.” In fact thirty years of scholarship on Islam and women suggests that the actual problem is often much more complicated, dealing with a variety of factors such as economics, tribal structures, nationalism, colonial legacy, changing family models, and authoritative discourses that attempt to regulate the body. Hate, it turns out, is simply not a sufficient explanatory category.

Quote of the Day

"I said anything I wanted because I don't believe in children I don't believe in childhood. I don't believe that there's a demarcation. 'Oh you mustn't tell them that. You mustn't tell them that.' You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it's true. If it's true you tell them." — Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are, who died today. NYT obituary here. His work, still relevant, remains a staple of childhood reading. He was 83.

Why are the rich complaining?

Alex Pareene on America's 'idiot rich':

The Times Magazine has the story of the Obama campaign’s difficulty in matching its record 2008 contributions from the finance sector. The problem with inequality in America, you see, is apparently that it has led to rhetorical attacks on the winners of the class war. Greg Sargent wrote, in response to this story: “One wonders if there is anything Obama could say to make these people happy, short of declaring that rampant inequality is a good thing, in that it affirms the talent and industriousness of the deserving super rich.”

Murdoch's pride, America's poison

Former New York Times editor, turned-coumnist, Bill Keller writes that Fox News is Rupert Murdoch's most toxic legacy (I would add that there's some rather tough competition for the title). He goes on to say that his complaint when it comes to the network is not its unabashed conservatism, but its pretending to be something it isn't: namely, 'fair and balanced':

I would never suggest that what is now called “the mainstream media” — the news organizations that most Americans depended on over the past century — achieved a golden mean. We have too often been condescending to those who don’t share our secular urban vantage point. We are too easily seduced by access. We can be credulous. (It’s also true that we have sometimes been too evenhanded, giving equal time to arguments that fail a simple fact-check.) But we try to live by a code, a discipline, that tells us to set aside our personal biases, to test not only facts but the way they add up, to seek out the dissenters and let them make their best case, to show our work. We write unsparing articles about public figures of every stripe — even, sometimes, about ourselves. When we screw up — and we do — we are obliged to own up to our mistakes and correct them. Fox does not live by that code.

(Image via Getty)

What the Ayatollah really fears

Karim Sadjadpour writes of the Iranian regime's strange obsession with sex:

What they fail to consider is Khamenei's deep-seated conviction that U.S. designs to overthrow the Islamic Republic hinge not on military invasion but on cultural and political subversion intended to foment a "velvet" revolution from within. Consider this revealing address on Iranian state TV in 2005: 

Uncreative writing

Poetic writing often seems rather like rearrangement these days:

If “creative writing” has become as formulaic as I have been suggesting, then perhaps it is time to turn to what Kenneth Goldsmith calls “uncreative writing.” Tongue-in-cheek as that term is, increasingly poets of the digital age have chosen to avoid those slender wrists and wisps of hair, the light that is always “blinding” and the hands that are “fidgety” and “damp,” those “fingers interlocked under my cheekbones” or “my huge breasts oozing mucus,” by turning to a practice adopted in the visual arts and in music as long ago as the 1960s—appropriation. Composition as transcription, citation, “writing-through,” recycling, reframing, grafting, mistranslating, and mashing—such forms of what is now called Conceptualism, on the model of Conceptual art, are now raising hard questions about what role, if any, poetry can play in the new world of instantaneous and excessive information.

Here's the book referred to, by the way.

How to end this depression

Paul Krugman thinks he knows.

The way we should speak

Joan Acocella on Henry Hitchings' study of proper English and the ongoing war between prescriptivists and descriptivists. Money quote:

In the prescriptivists’ books, you will find that, contrary to Hitchings’s claims, many of them, or the best ones, are not especially tyrannical. Those men really wanted clear, singing prose, much more than rules, and they bent rules accordingly. White, addressing the question of “I” versus “me,” in “The Elements of Style,” asks, “Would you write, ‘The worst tennis player around here is I’ or ‘The worst tennis player around here is me’? The first is good grammar, the second is good judgment.” Kingsley Amis, for all his naughty jokes, is often philosophical, even modest. His preference for “all right” over “alright,” he tells us, is probably just a matter of what he learned in school. But it is Fowler, that supposedly starchy old schoolmaster, who is the most striking opponent of rigidity. In his first edition, he called the ban on prepositions at the end of a sentence “cherished superstition,” and said that those who avoid split infinitives at the cost of awkwardness are “bogy-haunted creatures.” Even more interesting is to watch him deal with matters of taste. One of his short essays, “vulgarization,” has to do with overusing a fancy word. It’s wrong to do this, he says, but “Nobody likes to be told that the best service he can do to a favourite word is to leave it alone, & perhaps the less said here on this matter the better.” This almost brings a tear to the eye. He doesn’t want people to lose face.

The linguistic pedants among us (or, in Acocella's parlance, 'prescriptivists') ardently tie themselves to the insane notion that there is a 'correct' way to speak and write, and that there are a number of 'rules' to be followed in performing either of these elementary tasks. Though the absurdity of a rulebook on the subject is entirely self-evident, I will offer this thought, by way of the marvelous Stephen Fry: the way we are linguistically is comparable to a great degree with the way we are sartorially. He means that while there may be conventions to be followed in each ('sometimes, always, never' in fastening suit buttons; 'I before E except after C' in spelling), the strictness of one's adherence to those so-called rules is entirely dependent on circumstance and company and the kind of behavior particular circumstances demand. There is no right or wrong language in the same way that there are no right or wrong clothes. Anyone who expresses themselves with originality ought to be celebrated rather than scorned.

Like most in my circle of scholastic cohorts, I find it rather difficult not to wince, cringe, and shudder when someone utters 'expresso' or aspirates the word 'aitch', not to mention 'mispronounciation' and other vulgarizations. But I try desperately to dismiss any contempt for the speaker and accept that, actually, it doesn't matter if 'less' is used where I would have said 'fewer', or 'disinterested' where 'uninterested' is the textbook-prescribed term. Oh, well. Nobody's perfect and so on. Everybody — and I mean everybody — makes mistakes, so we may be well advised to keep our stones well out of reach lest we be confronted with mortal grammatical sin. There have been a couple of regrettable incidents of my own I'd like very much to remedy or forget. And it's those mistakes that teach us all to be slightly less pedantic in our own way, even if pedantry is a particularly difficult habit to kick.

(Image: "What the plain-English manifestos have been to Britain, 'The Elements of Style,' by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, is to the United States. Strunk was an English professor at Cornell, and 'The Elements of Style' began life as a forty-three-page pamphlet that he wrote in 1918 and distributed to his students in the hope of reforming what he saw as their foggy, verbose, and gutless writing." Source.)

When Fox gets something right

Shep Smith offers us this rare moment:

How do you legislate against hate speech?

Jeremy Waldron thinks he knows:

Once we understand the harm that hate speech may inflict, we are in a better position to grasp the argument in favour of the legislation that restricts it. Such legislation, in the countries where it exists, aims to uphold important elements of basic social order – and in particular the civic status or basic dignity of all who live in the society. Particularly in communities with histories of injustice or in modern conditions of religious or ethnic diversity, one cannot assume that the basic dignitary order will be upheld. There will always be attempts to stigmatise, marginalise, intimidate, or exclude members of distinct and vulnerable groups, and what we call hate speech is often a way of doing this or initiating this. As I have argued in "Dignity and Defamation: The Visibility of Hate" (the 2009 Holmes Lectures at Harvard University), hate speech legislation seeks to uphold a public good by protecting the basic dignitary order of society against this kind of attack.

In a way, Waldron steals my point. "There will always be," he writes, "attempts to stigmatize, marginalize, intimidate, or exclude members of distinct and vulnerable groups, and what we call hate speech is often a way of doing this or initiating this." It's encouraging that even he agrees: there will always be these issues. The one point I think is central to the matter, though, is that of a freedom of speech that is absolute and uncompromising. I'll furnish you with an example. Though I find the Westboro Baptist Church (an organization even renounced by the Ku Klux Klan) to be utterly reprehensible and worthy of endless condemnation for the wicked things they say, I see that it is necessary to defend their right to say those things. Note that this does not constitute a defense of the church, but instead recognition of the dangers of restricting speech, even hateful and vitriolic speech, simply because we do not like it.

South Africa's new threat to freedom

Nadine Gordimer reveals it:

In the new South Africa that was reborn in the early 1990s, with its freedom hard-won from apartheid, we now have the imminent threat of updated versions of the suppression of freedom of expression that gagged us under apartheid. The right to know must continue to accompany the right to vote that black, white, and any other color of our South African population could all experience for the first time in 1994. But since 2010 there have been two parliamentary bills introduced that seek to deny that right: the Protection of State Information Bill and the Media Tribunal.

"We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people"

Columnist, activist, and the creator of the It Gets Better project Dan Savage recently spoke at a high school journalism convention. When he opened with an attack on biblical superstitions and biblically-inspired homophobia, some felt compelled to leave:



The establishment Right wing — surprise, surprise! — was less than impressed. (I link to Breitbart because their branding of Savage as an anti-Christian 'bully' was just too ludicrous to ignore.) While he's prepared to offer that the 'pansy-assed' comments may have been a little excessive, he remains firmly unapologetic about the rest, all of it legitimate criticism:

I was not attacking the faith in which I was raised. I was attacking the argument that gay people must be discriminated against—and anti-bullying programs that address anti-gay bullying should be blocked (or exceptions should be made for bullying "motivated by faith")—because it says right there in the Bible that being gay is wrong. Yet the same people who make that claim choose to ignore what the Bible has to say about a great deal else. I did not attack Christianity. I attacked hypocrisy. My remarks can only be read as an attack on all Christians if you believe that all Christians are hypocrites. Which I don't believe.

In any case, the a la carte nature of most religious practice in the United States (and indeed the rest of the world) ensures that the Bible's more extreme passages are largely ignored, except when they're called upon as warrants for sinister bigotry of another kind altogether. The decision to place human decency above ancient scribblings is not so much a political issue as a moral one.

Quote of the Day

"Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river." — Will Durant, Life, Oct. 18, 1963

Benzion Netanyahu, 1910 – 2012

Benjamin Netanyahu's father, an historian and academic of great renown, died today; he was 102. Jeffrey Goldberg reacts:

He was the hardest of the hard -- a man for whom compromise was anathema -- but he was all too often tragically correct about the nature of what he called "Jew hatred" (the term "anti-Semitism" wasn't for him; it was coined by anti-Semites to give a civilized gloss to anti-Jewish prejudice). His masterwork, "The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th Century Spain," posited racial, rather than religious, motivations for anti-Jewish persecution, and for the elder Netanyahu, race-based Jew-hatred was an immortal phenomenon. He was profoundly influential on his son (and all of his sons, as those who have read the collected letters of Yoni Netanyahu, his oldest son, who died at Entebbe, surely know): Many people who watch the prime minister believe that his father's passing will allow him to take steps toward compromise he wouldn't have made so long as his father was living nearby. There's something to this, of course, but I'm not sure how much.

(Image: "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and his father, Benzion, attend the official memorial service for the late Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky at the Mt. Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, July 11, 2010," Kobi Gideon / AP Photo, via The Daily Beast.)

The creepy narcissism of gender-reveal parties

George Packer labels the creepy phenomenon as a symptom of cultural despair:

That’s the nature of manufactured customs and instant traditions. They emerge from an atomized society in order to fill a perceived void where real ceremonies used to be, and they end by reflecting that society’s narcissism. Is it too much to say that gender-reveal parties are a mild symptom of cultural despair? A society that turns exercise into a sixty-minute communion with the sacred, or the choice of food into the highest expression of personal virtue, has probably lost faith in real change—the kind of change, for example, that might allow the staggering number of ex-felons to rejoin it with a degree of dignity.

Banning religious parties

I'm a wee bit late to this (the blogging breaks are really taking their toll, aren't they?), but it's worth noting:

Libya's ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) has issued a new law that bans parties that are based on religious principles, the council spokesman said. The law, which was passed on Wednesday, comes two months ahead of the country's first general elections to choose a 200-member assembly tasked with writing a new constitution and forming a government.

We've discussed this before.