Seventy years ago this summer, in June of 1940, an aging British politician, who for the previous twenty years had seemed to his countrymen to be one of those entertaining, eccentric, essentially literary figures littering the margins of political life, got up to make a speech in the House of Commons. The British Expeditionary Forces had just been evacuated from France, fleeing a conquering German Army—evacuated successfully, but, as the speaker said, wars aren’t won that way—and Britain itself seemed sure to be invaded, and soon. Many of the most powerful people in his own party believed it was time to settle for the best deal you could get from the Germans. At that moment when all seemed lost, something was found, as Winston Churchill pronounced some of the most famous lines of the past century. “We shall go on to the end,” he said defiantly, in tones plummy and, on the surviving recordings, surprisingly thick-tongued. “We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Churchill’s words did all that words can do in the world. They said what had to be done; they announced why it had to be done then; they inspired those who had to do it.

more from Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker here.

The story of Captain Alfred Dreyfus has long had an iconic status, evoked with the expectation that everyone knows and appreciates its weighty implications. Léon Blum, writing about it in 1935, likened the battles over Dreyfus to the fascist challenge to the Republic immediately before the Popular Front of 1936. A decade later, the aged monarchist writer Charles Maurras, sentenced by a French court to life imprisonment for collaborating with the Germans, protested, “It is the revenge of Dreyfus!”. Behind these mythologies, the story of the real Dreyfus has an agreed core. A patriotic Jewish officer of the French general staff, Dreyfus was arrested in 1894 on trumped-up charges of selling military secrets to the Germans. He then faced a secret court martial, a humiliating ceremony of military degradation and a cruel deportation to Devil’s Island, off the shores of French Guiana, where he rotted away for over four years, suffering horribly while his supporters gradually organized to review his conviction, eventually securing his reinstatement. Historians frequently distinguish between the detailed account of this story – the Dreyfus case – and the broader Dreyfus Affair: the conflict over the convicted traitor that divided France; the mobilization both for and against revision of the original judgment; and disputes about the deeper implications, both for France at the time and subsequently, for the history of Jews in the post-emancipation period; and for the continuing struggle for civil rights wherever innocent people face the overweening power of the State.

more from Michael R. Marrus at the TLS here.

From Salon:

Melanie Thernstrom’s pain began inconspicuously, as a burning ache in her limbs after a long swim. But instead of drifting away over the next few days, the feeling dug in, traversing her neck and shoulder and eventually smothering her entire right arm. She popped aspirin, applied hot compresses, and simply tried to ignore it, but slowly the reality became clear — this pain wasn’t going anywhere. For the next several years, she bounced from doctor to doctor searching for an effective treatment for her mysterious ailment. Despite being young, active and seemingly healthy, Thernstrom had joined the ranks of the more than 70 million Americans who suffer from debilitating chronic pain.

In her new book, “The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering,” Thernstrom, a writer for the New York Times Magazine, shadowed doctors and talked with patients about the science and experience of pain. Despite its being so common, she discovered, chronic pain remains a massive medical enigma, hard to treat or even isolate. She met amputees who complained of a constant ache in their missing limbs, women who felt like their entire bodies were bruised when there was not a scratch on them, and hundreds of others haunted by the invisible and devastating burden of constant pain — all the while pursuing a cure for her own suffering (which turned out to be caused by a degenerative arthritic condition in her spine). Her book examines the human experience of pain through the lenses of science, history, philosophy and memoir, creating a comprehensive and thoroughly engaging portrait of a force that all of us have experienced, but few of us truly understand.

More here.

From Nature:

Altruistic behaviour, such as sterile worker ants caring for the offspring of their queen, evolves only between related individuals through what is known as kin selection — or so many evolutionary biologists have thought since the 1960s. They argue that the standard theory of natural selection cannot explain the evolution of eusocial groups of organisms such as bees and ants, because the sterile workers in those groups do not themselves reproduce. A two-part mathematical analysis¹, published in Nature this week, overturns this tenet by showing that it is possible for eusocial behaviour to evolve through standard natural-selection processes.

Reproductive benefits: Kin selection is based on 'inclusive fitness', the idea that, for example, sterile workers can accrue reproductive benefits by helping their relatives. In doing so, they help shared genes to survive and get passed on to the next generation. This provides a route for eusociality to evolve. But Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the lead author of the analysis, says, “there is no need for inclusive fitness to explain eusociality”.

More here.

Ahmed Rashid in The National Interest:

This is a country that sadly appears on every failing-state list and still wants to increase its arsenal from around 60 atomic weapons to well over 100 by buying two new nuclear reactors from China. This is a country isolated and friendless in its own region, facing unprecedented homegrown terrorism from extremists its army once trained, yet it pursues a “forward policy” in Afghanistan to ensure a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul as soon as the Americans leave.

For a state whose economy is on the skids and dependent on the IMF for massive bailouts, whose elite refuse to pay taxes, whose army drains an estimated 20 percent of the country’s annual budget, Pakistan continues to insist that peace with India is impossible for decades to come. For a country that was founded as a modern democracy for Muslims and non-Muslims alike and claims to be the bastion of moderate Islam, it has the worst discriminatory laws against minorities in the Muslim world and is being ripped apart through sectarian and extremist violence by radical groups who want to establish a new Islamic emirate in South Asia.

Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment, or “deep state” as it is called, has lost over 2,300 soldiers battling these terrorists—the majority in the last 15 months after much U.S. cajoling to go after at least the Pakistani (if not the Afghan) Taliban. Despite these losses and considerable low morale in the armed forces, it still follows a pick-and-choose policy toward extremists, refusing to fight those who will confront India on its behalf as well as those Taliban who kill Western and Afghan soldiers in the war next-door. An army that has received nearly $12 billion in direct military aid from the United States since 2001, and has favored-nation status from NATO, still keeps the leaders of the Afghan Taliban in safe refuge.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]

Brendan Kiley in The Stranger:

These days, levamisole is mostly used by farmers to deworm cows and pigs—and, for some reason, it's also used by people in the cocaine trade. The DEA first reported seeing significant amounts of levamisole-tainted cocaine in 2005, with 331 samples testing positive. Then the numbers spiked: The DEA found 6,061 tainted samples in 2008 and 7,427 in 2009. One DEA brief from 2010 reports that between October 2007 and October 2009, the percentage of seized cocaine bricks containing levamisole jumped from 2 percent to 71 percent.

Which is not only sudden, but odd. Levamisole is not like other common cutting agents—sugar, baking powder, laxatives, etc.—in three important ways:

1. It's more expensive than other cuts.

2. It makes some customers sick.

3. It's being cut into the cocaine before it hits the United States.

This last mystery is the most puzzling. Typically, smugglers like to move the purest possible product—less volume means less chance of detection—and cut their drugs once they cross into the United States.

So what's the incentive to use a relatively expensive cut of something that makes your customers sick and increases your smuggling risk?

More here.

Jonny Thakkar in The Point:

If they want to be consistent, conservatives ought really to be anti-capitalist. This may be a little surprising, but in point of fact conservatism has always been flexible as far as particular policies are concerned. In the U.S. conservatives oppose universal healthcare as an attack on freedom; in the U.K. they defend it as a national tradition. Both positions count as conservative because, as Samuel Huntington argues, conservatism is a “situational” ideology which necessarily varies from place to place and time to time: “The essence of conservatism is the passionate affirmation of the value of existing institutions.” It follows that conservatives can seek to conserve all manner of institutions, including those designed to fight inequality, safeguard the environment, tame market forces, and so on.

But the potential for such reversals is by no means restricted to the Right. When Leftists reflect on their opposition to the free market, they will find that their reasons are–at least in part–conservative. And why not? If conservatism is indeed situational then its rightness or wrongness must depend entirely on the situation, and the value of what is to be conserved. One trope of “utopian” literature from Plato’s Republic to Aldous Huxley’s Island is the fear of adulterating perfect arrangements. Even radicals sometimes have to be conservative.

This is more than mere semantics. Successful political movements successfully incorporate divergent elements; moribund ones don’t. Every so often tensions are simply too great to bear, and something snaps. Political constellations shift. Parties emerge. Coalitions form. Southern Democrats defected to the GOP in 1960s America; Britain has just seen the Liberal Democrats ally with the Tories. These things can happen. Left conservatism can happen.

More here.

Jerome Burne in the Times Literary Supplement:

Sixty years ago, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle published his famous attack on Cartesian dualism, The Concept of Mind, which claimed to find a logical flaw in the popular notion that mental life has a parallel but separate existence from the physical body. Among other effects it provided sophisticated support for the psychological behaviourists, then in the ascendant, who asserted that since we could not objectively observe mental activity it was not really a fit subject for scientific investigation.

Nowhere was the notion of banning mental states taken up more enthusiastically than by the emerging discipline of neuropsychiatry. If consciousness and all its manifestations were “merely” the firing of neurons and the release of chemicals in the brain, what need was there to focus on mental states? Once the physical brain was right, the rest would follow.

It was an approach that has spawned a vast pharmaceutical industry to treat any pathological psychological state – anxiety, shyness, depression, psychosis – with a variety of pills. The underlying promise is that scientifically adjusting the levels of various brain chemicals will bring relief and a return to normality. The biggest-selling class of these drugs are the anti-depressant SSRIs – brands include Prozac, Seroxat and Lustral. A recent report revealed that they were the most widely prescribed drugs in America, with an estimated global market value of over $20 billion.

However, as is set out calmly and clearly in Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs, it would seem that the whole golden edifice is based on a lie.

More here.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
………………………………………………………….. i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)

by e.e. cummings,
from Complete Poems 1904-62.
Liveright Publishing, 1994

From The Telegraph:

From the Boston Globe:

With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948.

More photos here.

From Scientific American:

By a simple food-in/energy-out model, a run on the treadmill or swim in the pool should make you want to eat more. But recent findings have suggested that exercise can actually help to slow overeating. And a new study presents evidence that the body's physiologic response to exercise can help retune the nervous system's cues and make the body feel less hungry, rather than more so. Hunger is a complex sensation, but it is determined in part by neurons located in the hypothalamus, which send signals to the brain telling it that you're either hungry or sated. Those neurons get their message from hormones, including insulin and leptin. When the body develops a resistance to these messengers, people become more prone to overeating and weight gain. And scientists have begun to suspect that cellular inflammation might be at least partly responsible for allowing these signals to get out of whack.

Researchers behind the new work found that “physical activity reorganizes the set point of nutritional balance through anti-inflammatory signaling,”

More here.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that the arguments against the construction of the Cordoba Initiative center in lower Manhattan were so stupid and demagogic as to be beneath notice. Things have only gone further south since then, with Newt Gingrich’s comparison to a Nazi sign outside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum or (take your pick from the grab bag of hysteria) a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor. The first of those pseudo-analogies is wrong in every possible way, in that the Holocaust museum already contains one of the most coolly comprehensive guides to the theory and practice of the Nazi regime in existence, including special exhibits on race theory and party ideology and objective studies of the conditions that brought the party to power. As for the second, there has long been a significant Japanese-American population in Hawaii, and I can’t see any reason why it should not place a cultural center anywhere on the islands that it chooses. From the beginning, though, I pointed out that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was no great bargain and that his Cordoba Initiative was full of euphemisms about Islamic jihad and Islamic theocracy. I mentioned his sinister belief that the United States was partially responsible for the assault on the World Trade Center and his refusal to take a position on the racist Hamas dictatorship in Gaza.

more from Hitch at Slate here.

Edward Hopper, viewed a certain way, becomes a dear old chestnut. Rooftops, lonely girls, railroad tracks, gas stations (those queer old pumps), soda fountains, spooky-quaint houses. A melancholy Norman Rockwell. He can be used to conceal a cranky dislike for abstract, modern, and contemporary art—Hopper himself didn’t think much of the Picassos and Pollocks of the world—and he remains, as always, good box office. The Whitney, often rebuked for being trendily obscure, all but owns the Hopper franchise. Shouldn’t the museum enjoy a moment of rest, reputation, and the elderly paying customer? Inevitably “Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time,” organized by Barbara Haskell and Sasha Nicholas, will have something of this cozy old-movie feel. Drawn almost entirely from the Whitney’s collection, the show is constructed around Hopper, but includes work from 34 other well-known artists who made their names before World War II and whose imagery is fairly realistic. (They range from John Sloan of the Ashcan School to the Precisionist Charles Sheeler.) The show intends to have a jangly urban emphasis, but the “modern life” invoked in the title obviously refers to a different modern than the one we know today. This is a survey of another, earlier America.

more from Mark Stevens at New York Magazine here.

Thomas Bernhard is certainly one of the major, titanic writers of any era, any country. Enormously influential, unremittingly bleak and pessimistic but never without a sense of humor, his style evolved into single-paragraphed philosophical rants extending hundreds of pages, the best of which are Woodcutters, ‘Walking’ (from Three Novellas), and Gathering Evidence. I have finally accumulated what I believe are all the publications translated into English. His books have been translated and published by a variety of presses from the major (Knopf) to the tiny (Ariadne), across decades, with many of them out of print for long stretches, so I thought it would be helpful to those interested in Bernhard to see everything in one place.

more from Scott Bryan Wilson at The Quarterly Conversation here.

From The New Yorker:

A digest of last week’s prophetic and interpretive thought

“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding.” —Barack Obama

“We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they?” —Sarah Palin

“Where the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ is concerned, opposition is roughly proportional to distance, even in New York.” —Hendrik Hertzberg

“I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state—as important a test as we may see in our lifetimes—and it is critically important that we get it right.” —Michael Bloomberg

More here.

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

I decided to become a political scientist in the spring of 1976, while I was attending the Stanford-in-Berlin overseas study program. I had already declared an International Relations major, but was trying to decide between going to law school (the supposedly safe option) or pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science (looked risky). While in Berlin, I took Professor Gordon Craig's course on German history, and one lecture — on the role of intellectuals in the Weimar Republic — finally tipped the balance for me.

In that particular class, Craig argued that one of the many forces that doomed the Weimar Republic was the irresponsible behavior of both left-wing and right-wing intellectuals. The German left was contemptuous of the liberal aspirations of the Weimar Constitution and other bourgeois features of Weimar society, while right-wing “thinkers” like Ernst Junger glorified violence and disparaged the application of reason to political issues. So-called “liberal” intellectuals saw politics as a grubby business unworthy of their refined sensibilities, and so many just disengaged from politics entirely. This left the field to rabble-rousers and extremists of various sorts and helped prepare the ground for Nazism. (You can read Craig's account of this process in his book Germany 1866-1945, chapter 13, on “Weimar Culture”).

The lesson I took from Craig's lecture was that when intellectuals abandon liberal principles, disengage from politics, and generally abdicate their role as “truth-tellers” for society at large, it is easy for demagogues to play upon human fears and lead a society over the brink to disaster. So I decided to forego a legal career and get a Ph.D. instead, hoping in some way to contribute to more reasonable discourse about issues of war, peace, and politics.

Whether I succeeded in that aspiration I leave for others to decide, but I've been thinking about that episode as I contemplate the current state of American political discourse.

More here.

Ben Zimmer in Language Log:

But what about sentences that use pure nonsense in place of “open-class” or “lexical” morphemes, joined together by inflectional morphemes and function words? This characterizes nonsense verse of the “Jabberwocky” variety ('Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe). One commenter recalled a classic of the genre, The ventious crapests pounted raditally, which was introduced by the cognitive scientist Colin Cherry in his 1957 book, On Human Communication: A Review, Survey, and a Criticism.

Here's the relevant passage (pieced together from snippet view on Google Books):

It is essentially experience with our own language that ensures this identification of “parts of speech”; familiarity with common types of sentences and with the ways in which different semantic categories are built into them. Indeed, so deeply engrained is our knowledge of such conventional forms and of word affixes that we have no difficulty in analyzing “nonsense” sentences of simple types:

The ventious crapests pounted raditally.
(adjective) (noun) (verb) (adverb)

We can readily translate this into French:

Les crapêts ventieux pontaient raditallement.

but we cannot carry over these parts of speech, or the sentence structure, to more remote languages any more than we can translate each word into a word. Thus, this nonsense sentence could not be put into, say, a Chinese dialect!

More here.