Robin D. G. Kelley in the Boston Review:

When the emails started coming in, I ignored them. By day’s end, my voicemail and email inboxes were filling up with links to the Guardian, followed by links to Facebook pages and blogposts devoted to Cornel West’s takedown of Ta-Nehisi Coates. I felt like I was being summoned to see a schoolyard brawl, and, now that I no longer use social media, I was already late. By the time I read West’s piece, “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle,” it had become the center of international controversy. Perhaps because West named me as an ally, the New York Times requested a comment, followed by Le Monde, and then a slew of publications all trying to get the scoop on the latest battle royale among the titans of the black intelligentsia.

The discourse about the piece descended to the level of celebrity death match, which is never about the celebrities but rather our collective bloodlust. Reactions are still coming in from all corners, calling out West for being dishonest and jealous, and for lobbing ad hominem attacks unrelated to his critique. Meanwhile Coates-haters are delighting in what they take to be the dethroning of the liberal establishment’s literary darling. Coates, to his immense credit, has bailed out of the fray, initially engaging but then exiting Twitter with a sigh of disgust. One can only hope he is reading and working and enjoying the holiday with his family. So to even call this a “feud” is something of a misnomer.

I, too, would prefer to stay out of it. I need to get a Christmas tree, a trampoline for my youngest, and finish grading papers. But I can't, partly because West named me in his piece and partly because I believe it is irresponsible of us to allow this kind of spectacle to, once again, obscure crucial political and philosophical issues.

More here.

Ed Simon at berfrois:

Who would have expected the origin to have been with a castration? A consummately violent act. Hacking away at flesh, and the discarding of that bit of intrinsic manhood. But Origen at that origin, in that moment, in that second, in that utopia, felt he had no other choice to unlock the door to the Kingdom of Heaven but by using the dull blade of a butcher’s gelding knife on his balls. Sometime in the third century the Alexandrian monk, whose ruminations upon the Gospels were so often exquisitely beautiful, meandering digressions in the perfumed garden of allegory, read a crucial passage of Matthew and decided, with perilous results, to uncharacteristically interpret the Bible literally. Christ implores that “there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” and suddenly, at this most crucial juncture, a man for whom Genesis and Exodus were subtle allegory, decided that the Lord must have meant this passage and meant it. Contradictions, contradictions, for Deuteronomy says that “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord,” but for Origen it was apparently he who was without stones who would ironically be permitted to caste them. Origen, who embraced mystery and the apophatic had long preached that God himself must be ineffable that, “God is incomprehensible, and incapable of being measured,” and it would seem that one day Origen decided other things must cease to be capable of measurement as well.

more here.

Emily Matchar in Smithsonian:

Would you eat ketchup made from tossed-out tomatoes? Drink beer made with stale scraps of bread?

Charles Trueheart at The American Scholar:

A half century on, the Vietnam reckoning continues. The recent Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary and a yearly tide of books challenge us to think about America’s fateful descent into a war it had every reason to know was a bad idea. And the choices political leaders made—or had forced upon them, by their lights—elicit from historians a fascination with might-have-beens, prophets without honor, roads not taken.

Max Boot’s Cassandra was Edward Geary Lansdale. A California advertising man, he was recruited into the OSS during World War II and served in the CIA, under military cover, through its early Cold War glory days. Boot calls his subject a “covert warrior,” except that covert no more describes Lansdale’s style than collegial or consensual. Only his paymaster remained a secret.

Trim and mustached, artless and idealistic, Lansdale beguiled a generation of politicians, Asian and American, with his plainspoken nostrums for meeting unconventional threats posed by communist insurgencies. He was a patron saint of the hearts-and-minds school of warfare.

more here.

Corey S. Powell in MACH:

Every day, it seems, our lives become a bit less tangible. We’ve grown accustomed to photos, music and movies as things that exist only in digital form. But death? Strange as it sounds, the human corpse could be the next physical object to vanish from our lives. Within a couple of decades, visiting deceased friends and relatives by traveling to a grassy gravesite may seem as quaint as popping a videotape into your VHS player. By then, our whole experience of death may be drastically different. If you believe Ray Kurzweil, an outspoken futurist and the director of engineering at Google, computers will soon match the capabilities of the human brain. At that point, our consciousness will become intimately mingled with machine intelligence, leading to a kind of immortality.

“We’re going to become increasingly non-biological, to the point where the biological part isn’t that important anymore,” Kurzweil declared in 2013 at a conference predicting the world of 2045. “Even if the biological part went away, it wouldn’t make any difference.” But you don’t need to take such speculative leaps to see that the way we deal with death is already in the midst of a wrenching transformation. In 2015, for the first time ever, more people in the U.S. were cremated than buried, according to the National Funeral Director’s Association. Crowded urban cemeteries, along with a new eco-friendly cremation method known as alkaline hydrolysis, promise to continue the trend. By 2030, the association predicts, less than one-quarter of the dead will receive traditional casket burials. The rest will end up…well, that’s the question.

More here.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and Lennox Honychurch at the NYRB:

Lennox Honychurch wrote the book on Dominica. Born on this small, mountainous island in the Windward Antilles in 1952, he first published The Dominica Story in 1975. An updated version of the book remains the standard history of a country that few Americans could distinguish from the Dominican Republic until recently, when Hurricane Maria blasted its peaks with 160-mile-per-hour winds and images on the news showed a once-lush land that then resembled the surface of the moon.

Located between the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, Dominica was named for the day of the week—a Sunday—when Columbus first glimpsed its steep sides. The island— which is just under 300 square miles, about the size of New York City—remained unsettled by Europeans for much longer than its neighbors; it remains home today to a proud community of indigenous people whom the Spanish dubbed “Carib” but who call themselves Kalinago. The island passed back and forth between French and English control many times before it became, in 1763, the British colony it would remain until winning independence in 1978.

more here.

John Williams in the New York Times:

To James, the very broad category of religious experience was inextricably human, and to attempt to argue people out of it would have struck him as similar to trying to argue someone out of right-handedness. “Taking creeds and faith-states together, as forming ‘religions,’ ” he wrote, “and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their ‘truth,’ we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind.”

James compared trendier systems of religious thought (ideas that resemble what we call New Age) to the gospels because of “the adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind.” His pragmatism led him to not care whether it was natural constitution or willful decision, systems age-old or newfangled, that led someone to a life filled with meaning and consolation. He even freely admitted that “reducing inner discord is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form.” Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote: “Some of the enchantment of ‘The Varieties’ comes from its being a kind of race with James running on both teams — here he is the cleverest skeptic and there the wildest man in a state of religious enthusiasm.”

In the space allotted here, I can’t begin to enumerate all of the book’s delights, the wisdom it conveys on every page.

More here.

Carol Tavris in Skeptic:

Sarah Silverman recently made a video in which she described the painful conflict she was feeling about her good friend of 25 years, Louis CK. Watch it and you will see cognitive dissonance in action: on the one hand, she loves and admires the man, and values their long friendship. On the other hand, she detests and condemns the exhibitionist sexual behavior that he acknowledged. Many of the people watching this video wanted her to reduce that dissonance by jumping one way or the other: disavow their friendship, or trivialize his behavior. In this brave embrace of her emotional conflict and their friendship, she did neither.

Our whole country is living in a constant state of hyper-dissonance: “my political candidate/my most admired actor/a brilliant artist/my dear friend has been accused of sexual abuses and misconduct; how do I cope with this information? Do I support him/see his movies/enjoy his art/keep the friendship or must I repudiate him entirely?” Living with dissonance and complexity is not easy, but surely skeptics, of all people, must try. We hear a story that outrages us and, just like true believers and justice warriors of any kind, we’re off and running, and once we are off and running we don’t want to hear quibbles, caveats, doubts, complexities. Thus, when the Guardian (Dec. 17, 2017) reported Matt Damon’s remarks that there was “a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation. Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated,” Minnie Driver blasted him: it’s not for men to make distinctions; “there is no hierarchy of abuse”; men should just shut up for once. “If good men like Matt Damon are thinking like that then we’re in a lot of fucking trouble,” she said. “We need good intelligent men to say this is all bad across the board, condemn it all and start again.”

No hierarchy of abuse? Really? That is one of the universal symptoms of revolutionary zealotry: go for broke, ignore gradations of villainy, who cares if some innocents are thrown over the side, we are furious and we want everything at once.

More here. [Thanks to Daniel Dennett.]

Andreas Schmidt-Colinet and Andrea Zederbauer at Eurozine:

AZ: For some time now, there has been talk about reconstructing antique sites destroyed by IS. The German art historian Horst Bredekamp has spoken of ‘combative reconstruction’. In his opinion, the art of reconstruction must triumph over the destruction wrought by IS: as a show of resistance against its iconoclasm.

ASC: There is a neo-colonial undertone in this discussion that I don’t like at all. According to this argument, it is the temples excavated by ‘our’ archaeologists for ‘our’ tourism that are supposed to be reconstructed. In a sense, we have prepared a skeleton – for example the Temple of Bel in its 2015 state – and put it on display. And it is above all the West and its scholars that have done this. Today, neither archaeologists nor any institution responsible for cultural heritage would do it the same way. To then speak of reconstructing the temple is in some way perverse. This will not return the skeleton to life. No. I think, we should do absolutely nothing! We can only make suggestions, perhaps create 3D animations, but above all, we can provide funding and perhaps specialized personnel.

But first, precise records have to be made of everything, and the destruction must be recorded exhaustively. We archaeologists know how to create detailed architectural documentation of a destroyed building and how to reconstruct a temple or to rebuild it. It will take years just to identify all the stones that are lying there. Furthermore, why should one rebuild the temple as it looked between 1929 and 2015? That was the shortest phase of its life. During the longest phase, it was a mosque. One could leave the ruins as they are today. One could even carry out more excavations.

more here.

Stephen Lovell at the TLS:

What more fitting monument to a millenarian movement could there be than a thousand-page “saga”? Yuri Slezkine’s guiding argument in this remarkable, many-layered account of the men (rarely women) who shaped the October Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were not a party but an apocalyptic sect. In an extended essay on comparative religion that constitutes just one of his thirty-three chapters, he puts Russia’s victorious revolutionaries in a long line of millenarians extending back to the ancient Israelites; in their “totalitarian” demands on the individual believer, he suggests, the Bolsheviks are cut from the same cloth as the sixteenth-century Münster Anabaptists and the original “radical fundamentalist”, Jesus Christ.

Slezkine is by no means the first person to draw the analogy between the Bolsheviks and sectarians (Lenin himself is reported to have taken an interest in the Münster Anabaptists and Cromwell’s Puritans as he pondered Russia’s revolutionary potential in the early twentieth century), but no one before him has extracted such analytical mileage from it.

more here.

John Horgan at Scientific American:

This is a time, part of me thinks, for men to listen to women rather than pontificating about sexism. But I just talked about sexism in science with my friend Robert Wright on Meaningoflife.tv. And I feel obliged to say something about this issue because I teach at an engineering school where females account for less than 30 percent of the professors and students. Below are points I made or wanted to make during my conversation with Wright.

Is science sexist? Of course it is, in two ways. First, women in science (including engineering, math, medicine) face discrimination, harassment and other forms of maltreatment from men. Second, male scientists portray females as males’ intellectual inferiors. These two forms of sexism are mutually reinforcing. That is, male scientists use science to justify their sexist attitudes toward and maltreatment of women. Then, when women fail to thrive, the men say, See? Women just aren’t our equals.

In her important, timely new book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, British science journalist Angela Saini documents how science has long denigrated females.

more here.

Harriet Fraad and Richard Wolff in Alternet:

Susan Lindquist in Phys.Org:

For patients with mild cognitive impairment, don't be surprised if your health care provider prescribes exercise rather than medication. A new guideline for medical practitioners says they should recommend twice-weekly exercise to people with mild cognitive impairment to improve memory and thinking. The recommendation is part of an updated guideline for mild cognitive impairment published in the Dec. 27 online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "Regular physical exercise has long been shown to have heart health benefits, and now we can say exercise also may help improve memory for people with mild cognitive impairment," says Ronald Petersen, M.D., Ph.D., lead author, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Mayo Clinic, and the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging. "What's good for your heart can be good for your brain." Dr. Petersen is the Cora Kanow Professor of Alzheimer's Disease Research.

Daniel Felsenthal in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Arguably most famous for the sordid details of his violent death, filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote two novels during the 1950s — Ragazzi di vita (1955) and Una vita violenta (1959) — that are all but unknown in the English-speaking world. William Weaver translated both novels into English, yet Pasolini’s fiction is not as widely read in the United States as that of Italo Calvino and Alberto Moravia, his fellow Italians and friends. In 2016, Europa Editions reissued Ragazzi di vita(as The Street Kids) in a new translation by Ann Goldstein, providing an opportunity for American readers to reassess Pasolini’s literary reputation.

Weaver himself admitted, in a 2002 interview with the Paris Review, that A Violent Life (as he titled Una vita violenta) is the only translation of his career with which he is unhappy. The novel follows a boy, Tomasso, from his beginnings as a prepubescent “snot-nose” to his premature death by consumption at the age of 20, through a beleaguered Roman underworld dominated by a natural-feeling yet largely fantastical sexuality. Tomasso and his friends (named “Shitter” and “Stinkfeet” and less scatalogical things like “The Patient” and “Brooklyn”) are impoverished Romans living first in the Pietralata, a suburb of shantytown huts, and later in the homogenous, fortress-like high-rises that postwar Italy erected during its “economic miracle” — a phenomenon Pasolini would satirize in his neorealist masterpieces Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma(1962). In the novel, Tomasso and his friends pursue romantic targets of either gender, commit repeated acts of violence and petty crime, and flirt with political allegiances.

More here.

Aaron M. Bornstein in Nautilus:

We don’t know what our customers look like,” said Craig Berman, vice president of global communications at Amazon, to Bloomberg News in June 2015. Berman was responding to allegations that the company’s same-day delivery service discriminated against people of color. In the most literal sense, Berman’s defense was truthful: Amazon selects same-day delivery areas on the basis of cost and benefit factors, such as household income and delivery accessibility. But those factors are aggregated by ZIP code, meaning that they carry other influences that have shaped—and continue to shape—our cultural geography. Looking at the same-day service map, the correspondence to skin color is hard to miss.

Such maps call to mind men like Robert Moses, the master planner who, over decades, shaped much of the infrastructure of modern New York City and its surrounding suburbs. Infamously, he didn’t want poor people, in particular poor people of color, to use the new public parks and beaches he was building on Long Island. Though he had worked to pass a law forbidding public buses on highways, Moses knew the law could someday be repealed. So he built something far more lasting: scores of overpasses that were too low to let public buses pass, literally concretizing discrimination. The effect of these and dozens of similar decisions was profound and persistent. Decades later, bus laws have in fact been overturned, but the towns that line the highways remain as segregated as ever. “Legislation can always be changed,” Moses said. “It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.”

Today, a new set of superhighways, built from data shaped by the old structures, refresh these divisions. While the architects of the new infrastructure may not have the same insidious intent, they can’t claim ignorance of their impact, either.

More here.

Andrew Taggart in Aeon:

Imagine that work had taken over the world. It would be the centre around which the rest of life turned. Then all else would come to be subservient to work. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, anything else – the games once played, the songs hitherto sung, the loves fulfilled, the festivals celebrated – would come to resemble, and ultimately become, work. And then there would come a time, itself largely unobserved, when the many worlds that had once existed before work took over the world would vanish completely from the cultural record, having fallen into oblivion.

And how, in this world of total work, would people think and sound and act? Everywhere they looked, they would see the pre-employed, employed, post-employed, underemployed and unemployed, and there would be no one uncounted in this census. Everywhere they would laud and love work, wishing each other the very best for a productive day, opening their eyes to tasks and closing them only to sleep. Everywhere an ethos of hard work would be championed as the means by which success is to be achieved, laziness being deemed the gravest sin. Everywhere among content-providers, knowledge-brokers, collaboration architects and heads of new divisions would be heard ceaseless chatter about workflows and deltas, about plans and benchmarks, about scaling up, monetisation and growth.

In this world, eating, excreting, resting, having sex, exercising, meditating and commuting – closely monitored and ever-optimised – would all be conducive to good health, which would, in turn, be put in the service of being more and more productive.

More here.