In the thousand years between the decline of Rome and the springtime of the Renaissance, science and other branches of learning took a holiday throughout Europe. It was a benighted time in the history most of us raced through in school, skipping lightly through Charlemagne and Richard the Lion-Hearted, the Norman Conquest and the Crusades, and arriving none too soon at the time of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Columbus and da Gama, Erasmus and Luther. Ignored for the most part in Eurocentric accounts is the parallel culture that rose in the Middle East with the swift spread of Islam after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632. Lands from Spain to Persia and beyond fell to the Muslim sword, and in time some ambitious rulers made their palaces sanctuaries of learning, the think tanks of their day, where astronomers, mathematicians, physicians and philosophers were allowed to venture beyond the received word and to practice science as an empirical inquiry. Jim al-Khalili, an Iraqi-born physicist who has lived in Britain since 1979, has taken on the task of elevating this neglected period to its rightful place in history. His new book, “The House of Wisdom,” reflects a depth of research, an ability to tell a fascinating story well and fair-­mindedness where minds too often are closed.

more from John Noble Wolford at the NYT here.

It's now to the point where we are cutting it close. Julia Felsenthal in Slate:

The Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday that a New Hampshire company is offering post-Rapture pet care for Christians who believe, according to the predictions of Christian radio personality Harold Camping, that Judgment Day is this Saturday. Those willing to pay the (recently increased) $135 fee for the service seem to be operating under the principle that their pets will not be saved. But what is the official word on Fido's chances of making it through the Second Coming?

Not very good. Like all matters of theology, the question of animal salvation is complicated and subject to much interpretation. Camping, who has not been affiliated with a church since 1988, believes that animals do not have souls, and therefore do not experience salvation or ascension to heaven. An animal, when he dies, simply ceases to exist. Many mainstream Christian theologians agree with him. Since the high Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church began framing its understanding of nature and the supernatural in Aristotelian terms, the standard Christian interpretation has been that human beings have an immortal soul, and cannot die, but other forms of life do not, and can.

From Guardian:

On 28 January a young Egyptian man was urging the novelist Alaa al-Aswany to write a book about the revolution that was gathering momentum in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Just minutes after their brief conversation the protester was shot dead by a government sniper from a nearby roof. Aswany never learned his interlocutor's name, but that and other killings, along with the sheer bravery of revolutionaries motivated by “an untameable anger and a profound sense of injustice”, are seared into the memory of Egypt's most celebrated living writer as he articulates his feelings about the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and what it means.

“The revolution was a great human achievement,” Aswany says in a booming voice that amplifies his evident emotion. “It means people are willing to die for freedom and justice. When you participate in a real revolution you become a much better person. You are ready to defend human values.” Now though, like other Egyptian democrats, he fears a counter-revolution led by old regime loyalists fomenting violence and sectarian attacks, precisely in line with the finger-wagging warning by Mubarak of the “chaos” that would follow if he were forced from the presidency. Uncertainties abound, Aswany admits, smoking furiously between appointments in his dental surgery in Cairo's Garden City district, its leafy streets a haven from one of the noisiest urban spaces on the planet, and whose fading charms and human vibrancy he captured in his best-selling novel The Yacoubian Building.

More here.

From The New York Times:

At the age of 80, with almost 40 books behind him and nearly as many accumulated honors, Harold Bloom has written, in “The Anatomy of Influence,” a kind of summing-up — or, as he puts it in his distinctive idiom, mixing irony with histrionism, “my virtual swan song,” born of his urge “to say in one place most of what I have learned to think about how influence works in imaginative literature.” Influence has long been Bloom’s abiding preoccupation, and the one that established him, in the 1970s, as a radical, even disruptive presence amid the groves of academe. This may surprise some who think of Bloom primarily as a stalwart of the Western canon, fending off the assaults of “the School of Resentment” and its “rabblement of lemmings,” or as a self-confessed Bardolator, swooning over “Hamlet” and “Lear.” Not that Bloom abjures these subsequent selves. There is much canon fodder in this new book, along with re­affirmed vows of fidelity to Shakespeare, “the founder” not only of modern literature but also, in Bloom’s expansive view, of modern personhood and its “infinite self-consciousness.”

“For me, Shakespeare is God,” he declares at one point, and in other places he says much the same thing, in much the same words, a reminder that to read Bloom once is in a sense to reread him, so often does he repeat himself. Twice he asserts that Shakespeare’s greatest creations are Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago and Cleopatra; twice that “The Tempest” and “The Winter’s Tale” are tragicomedies and not ro­mances; three times that “Titus Andronicus” parodies the tragedies of Shakespeare’s defeated rival Marlowe. Prospero, Bloom shrewdly observes, “is one of those teachers who is always convinced his auditors are not quite attentive.” So too Bloom, himself a “professional teacher” for 55 years now, has perhaps learned that the most efficient way to get your point across is to keep making it, the classroom sage’s version of staying on message.

More here.

For the first time since the end of World War II, no country or strong alliance of countries has the political will and economic leverage to place its goals on the global stage. This vacuum may encourage, as in previous historical periods, the ambitious and the aggressive to seek their own advantage. In such a world, the absence of a high-level agreement on creating a new collective security system—one focused on economics rather than the 20th-century dynamic of military power—is not merely irresponsible but dangerous. A G-Zero world without leadership and global cooperation is an unstable equilibrium that threatens both economic prosperity and security. The argument that we live in a G-Zero rather than a G-20 world should not be taken as a normative statement. It is rather just an analytical statement of the world we are in rather than the world of cooperation we should be in. Since most global issues are transnational, with global spillover effects, the need for dialogue, coordination and cooperation is more necessary than ever. And it is possible that the great powers will realize that most global issues—economic, trading, financial, security—are not a zero-sum game but rather a positive-sum game, where mutually beneficial agreements can and should be reached. But true dialogue may require less rigid and bureaucratic fora, where true dialogue and robust discussion may eventually lead to cooperation and agreement on a wide range of issues that includes not only governments but also non-governmental organizations and representatives of the private sector. That is why fora such as the 21st Century Council can be less formal and more substantial spaces, where there is the real dialogue and debates that are necessary precursors to eventual international cooperation and coordination can take place.

more from Nouriel Roubini at NPQ here.

From 1892 to 1946, India’s premier cricket tournament was fought on the pitch by a pantheon of adversaries: the British, the Hindoos, the Parsees of the Zoroastrian Cricket Club, the Muslims of the Mohammedan Gymkhana, and, as of 1937, a team called “The Rest,” made up of Buddhists, Jews, and Indian Christians. (The Rest never won a match.) The Bombay Pentangular, as it was finally known, was abolished in 1946, condemned for its forthright communalism. And yet, like most things in India, the Pentangular has undergone an unlikely reincarnation. This year, India’s regional film industries — the lissome fivesome of Bollywood, Mollywood, Tollywood, Kollywood, and Sandalwood — will slug it out in the inaugural season of the Celebrity Cricket League. In this latest phase of the ongoing metastasis of a stodgy sixteenth-century British gentlemen’s game into mega-Asian sportainment, the league hopes to cater to (and cash in on) the hundreds of millions of Indians for whom cricket and cinema are two faces of the same god. The Victorians thought that the edifice of civilization could be built on the values of cricket alone. The edifice of cricket, in turn, is built on the Test match. Thirty-three hours of play, stretched out over five days, Test cricket is an exercise in humility. Excellence at cricket requires self-denying stoicism, sportsmanship, and a continual refinement of one’s relationship to the Laws of Cricket — an actual document, safeguarded by the Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord’s Ground in London. A cross between baseball and a garden party, the luxurious pace of the cricket match makes the character of the player nearly as important as his athleticism, requiring precise psychological evaluations of opponents’ strengths and weaknesses on the field. Players are obliged to halt the match for lunch or even tea with enemy cricketers and the umpire, no matter how nail-bitingly tense the game.

more from Anna Della Subin at Bidoun here.

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of thirty-five years. The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”

more from Jane Mayer at The New Yorker here.

Robert Zaretsky in Le Monde Diplomatique (English):

A bronze statue of Michel de Montaigne has graced the Square Paul Painlevé, a leafy refuge off the bustling Rue des Ecoles in Paris’s Latin Quarter, since the 1930s. The occasional tourist stops long enough to read the quotation engraved on the base – about how wonderful a place Paris is – but for the most part it is ignored. Except, that is, by the students at the Sorbonne just across the street who have long made a practice of rubbing Montaigne’s right foot for luck before exams. The rubbing has been so persistent that at one point the foot had to be replaced. Photos from the era show Montaigne, with the same smile hovering on his lips, footless yet fancy-free. Unperturbed and curious, Montaigne would have enjoyed this accident of history.

Readers of Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre know that a missing foot – or, more accurately, a missing leg – played a critical role in a celebrated trial that Montaigne had himself attended in Toulouse and then discussed in his essay “On the Lame”, one of more than a hundred essays, all equally rambling and ravishing, that form his oeuvre. This event – and, for that matter, the Paris statue – are among the very few details missing from Sarah Bakewell’s stunning book How to Live: or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.

We can count on the toes of a foot (attached or not) the number of writers who find themselves, thanks to the richness and sheer humanity of their work, claimed by one generation of readers for reasons very different from those held by those who precede and follow. Virgil comes to mind, of course, as does Shakespeare and Montaigne. It is not a coincidence that Montaigne read and reread the Aeneid – he cites Virgil’s simile of Aeneas’s flitting thoughts resembling the patterns that dance across a ceiling when sunlight bounces off a bowl of water as an apt description of his own mind. Shakespeare, it now seems clear, read and reread Montaigne’s Essays too. (If not, certain passages from The Tempest and Montaigne’s “On Cannibals” are one of literary history’s greatest coincidences.)

While Bakewell traces the ways in which successive generations of readers each claimed Montaigne as one of their own, this is not, as the subtitle suggests, her principal aim. Instead, Bakewell wants to converse with Montaigne in the hope that it will lead to an insight into how we can best live our lives.

W. Andrew Shephard reviews China Míeville’s Embassytown in The New Inquiry:

Space Opera is a specific subgenre within science fiction (SF) focusing on interplanetary travel and typically involves contact with alien beings and high adventure. Or, as SF writer Brian Aldiss affectionately terms it, “the good old stuff.” However, this particular mode of storytelling has had something of a controversial history within the science fiction genre at large. On the one hand, it calls to mind the genre at its most exuberantly escapist – think of Gene Roddenberry’s utopian visions of a humanity united by its love of exploration in Star Trek or the retro-cool outlaws of Joss Whedon’s space western Firefly. But the earliest space operas are also often heavily tied to colonialist narratives, of encounters with alien cultures which inevitably end in some sort of conquest and an insistence on the superiority of our own homegrown (often Anglo-American and depressingly patriarchal) values. The most famous example of this would be the insistence of John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, that stories published in his magazine which involved aliens had to end with humanity triumphing over them.

As science fiction became more self-aware and welcomed a more diverse group of authors, they began to challenge, question, and debunk this particular type of narrative, but it still remains a significant reference point for the genre. Case in point: the top grossing science fiction film of all-time, James Cameron’s Avatar, is a strident and unambiguous rebuke of the conquest narrative. Yet as io9’s Annalee Newitz has insightfully pointed out, it can also be read as a fantasy about “[leading] people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.” Consensual colonization, essentially. Míeville’s novel feels like an attempt to move past the fantasies concerned with absolving white guilt or endorsing white privilege in the direction of a more intellectually honest discourse on the subject.

Perry Anderson in New Left Review:

Mass demonstrations by unarmed citizens, nearly everywhere facing repression by gas, water and lead with exemplary courage and discipline, have been the lance of the uprisings. In country after country, the over-riding demand has gone up in a great cry: Al-sha’b yurid isquat al-nizam—‘The people want the downfall of the regime!’ In place of the local despotism, what the huge crowds in squares and streets across the region are seeking is essentially political freedom. Democracy, no novelty as a term—virtually every regime made ample use of it—but unknown as a reality, has become a common denominator of the consciousness of the various national movements. Seldom articulated as a definite set of institutional forms, its attractive force has come more from its power as a negation of the status quo—as everything dictatorship is not—than from positive delineations of it. Punishment of corruption in the top ranks of the old regime figures more prominently than particulars of the constitution to come after it. The dynamic of the uprisings has been no less clear-cut for that. Their objective is, in the most classical of senses, purely political: liberty.

But why now? The odious cast of the regimes in place has persisted unaltered for decades, without triggering mass revolts against them. The timing of the uprisings is not to be explained by their aims. Nor can it plausibly be attributed just to novel channels of communication: the reach of Al-Jazeera, the arrival of Facebook or Twitter have facilitated but could not have founded a new spirit of insurgency. The single spark that started the prairie fire suggests the answer. Everything began with the death in despair of a pauperized vegetable vendor, in a small provincial town in the hinterland of Tunisia. Beneath the commotion now shaking the Arab world have been volcanic social pressures: polarization of incomes, rising food prices, lack of dwellings, massive unemployment of educated—and uneducated—youth, amid a demographic pyramid without parallel in the world. In few other regions is the underlying crisis of society so acute, nor the lack of any credible model of development, capable of integrating new generations, so plain.

Yet to date, between the deeper social springs and the political aims of the Arab revolt there has been an all but complete disjuncture. In part, this has reflected the composition of its main contingents so far. In the big cities—Manama is the exception—it has not, on the whole, been the poor who have poured into the streets in force. Workers have still to mount any sustained general strike. Peasants have scarcely figured. That has been an effect of decades of police repression, stamping out collective organization of any kind among the dispossessed. This will take time to re-emerge. But the disjuncture is also an effect of the ideological limbo in which society has been left by the same decades, with the discrediting of Arab nationalism and socialism, and the neutering of radical confessionalism, leaving only a washed-out Islam as a passe-partout. In these conditions, created by dictatorship, the vocabulary of revolt could not but concentrate on dictatorship—and its downfall—in a political discourse, and no more.

From The Paris Review:

The British actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon met for dinner recently at an Italian restaurant in New York. As a plate of cheese and meat was passed around the table, Brydon, who was wearing a pink shirt, grabbed his midsection and sighed. “I’ve gained so much weight, and I haven’t been able to shift it,” he said. “It makes me so mad.” The men were in town because their new film, The Trip, was playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. In The Trip, Coogan and Brydon play slightly fictionalized versions of themselves and drive around England’s Lake District reviewing restaurants for The Observer. (The film originally aired as a six-part series on the BBC.) During filming, the men ate each meal three times, to allow for different camera setups. “Steve was smart,” Brydon said. “He just pushed the food around his plate. But I ate everything. Eating makes you a better actor because it distracts part of your brain. It’s like driving—if you’re eating or driving, you’re doing something real, so the acting seems more real, too.” (Much of The Trip takes place on the road, but Coogan did all the driving.)

…Part of the joke of the film is that neither man knows very much nor particularly cares about food or wine, as evidenced at the first stop, The Inn at Whitewell, where Coogan, struggling to describe his tomato soup, says, “Well … it tastes of tomatoes.” Later, at Holbeck Ghyll in Windmere, Brydon approves a Premiere Cru—“premiere: first, the best”—before getting stuck on what cru means. At the Michelin-starred L’Enclume in Cumbria (“a duck-fat lolly? Why not?”), Coogan declares their appetizer of manioc leaf liquor topped with a ginger whiskey fizz has the consistency of snot—albeit snot that “tastes great.” “I hate what I call the dot-dot-dot people, where they put the sauce around the plate, dot, dot, dot,” Coogan said, cutting his roast chicken entrée. He was also wearing a pink shirt. “It’s like, put the fucking sauce on. I like simple dishes, well cooked. I don’t like overly fussy-tasting menus. The one really great thing I ate was at Kiplin Hall, in Yorkshire, this forced rhurbarb dessert. It’s grown in the dark, so it’s very pink—it’s kind of the veal of vegetables. If you can have vegetable cruelty, this is it. But it was so good. I ate three of those, and I want to go back for more. I think of it at night, when I’m lonely.”

More here.

From MSNBC:

A biblical scholar has raised a holy fuss by declaring that more than a third of the books of the New Testament were “forged” — that is, written by scribes other than the apostles to which they've been ascribed. By itself, the suggestion that nearly half of Paul's epistles and both of Peter's were not written by Peter or Paul is not all that surprising. Most scriptural scholars, even those who are true believers, acknowledge that's the likeliest explanation for the New Testament's disagreements in narrative and anomalies in writing style. But Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, goes further by asserting that such ghost-writing — or, as Greekophiles put it, “pseudepigraphy” — would be unacceptable if it were brought to light in ancient times. In fact, the writers of such works would be “roundly condemned for lying and trying to deceive their leaders,” Ehrman says.

“In antiquity, people called this lying,” Ehrman told me today. “That was the most common term used to discuss it.” Ehrman lays out his case for Biblical-era fraud and forgery in a recently published book, titled “Forged.” The book has sparked a counter-wave of critiques from other scholars who take Ehrman to task not so much for what he's saying, but for the way he's saying it. “Those who are looking for an excuse to call the early Christians liars and deceivers are delighted with this book,” Ben Witherington, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, wrote in the first of a series of blog posts about “Forged.”

More here.

Maria Konnikova over at Big Think's Artful Choice:

Is free will real, or is just one of our happy illusions? As it turns out, the answer might not matter as much as our belief in the answer does. A recent study showed that, when people’s belief in free will was experimentally reduced, pre-conscious motor preparation, or that activity that precedes action, in the brain was delayed by more than one second relative to those who believed in free will – an eternity in brain time.

Finding free will in the brain

For over fifty years, almost all the way up to his death in 2007, Benjamin Libet studied the neural correlates of consciousness. While the philosophical conclusions that have been drawn from his work remain contentious—and some would say highly problematic—he did make some fascinating discoveries about the human brain that have remained central to the study of conscious awareness.

First, he observed the existence of something called the readiness potential, or RP, in the brain, up to 550ms prior to the initiation of action. In other words, our brains are prepared to act over half a second before we actually act. So far, not so terribly surprising – as long as we are aware of planning an action. Of course, our brain needs time to prepare. That makes a whole lot of sense.

However, the more striking finding was that this RP preceded conscious awareness of the intention to act: Libet’s subjects became aware of their action intention 350-400ms after the RP had started. Or, to put it differently, our brains seem to initiate an action before we are even aware of wanting to make it.

But note the crucial timing here: volitional action is initiated in a preconscious stage, yes, but we do have a window of opportunity (anywhere from 150 to 200ms) when we are already aware of the action but have not yet acted, should we wish to change, stop, or otherwise redirect that action. So, for those who want to take a philosophical interpretation of the physiology, free will might be constrained, but remains alive and well in those 150-200ms.

Libet’s paradigms have since been used extensively in the study of free will, consciousness, and agency, and have sparked extensive debates (including some highly existential ones) on what it means to have free will, how free we actually are, and what it all means.

Our brains care if we believe in free will

The present study puts all the philosophy of free will aside, and asks instead about the belief in free will. Does what we believe, in a broad sense, actually impact our neural involvement in action preparation? Or, to put it in Libet’s terms, can disbelieving in free will delay the onset of the RP?

The answer seems to be, yes, it can.

Simon Johnson in Project Syndicate:

John Boehner, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, is leading the Republican Party’s charge on fiscal policy, arguing that his side needs to see “trillions of dollars” in spending cuts in order for Congress to approve an increase in the US government’s debt ceiling. But framing the issue this way creates a major problem for Boehner: it will directly, completely, and quickly antagonize one of the Republicans’ most important constituencies – the US corporate sector.

Focusing on the debt ceiling creates a political trap for Boehner and the Republicans. It is true that the US Treasury’s ability to borrow will reach its legally authorized limit in early August. It is also true that whenever Republicans rattle their sabers about the debt ceiling, and threaten not to raise it, the bond market yawns and there is no significant impact on yields.

If the Republicans’ threats were credible, any news that increased the likelihood of a problem with the debt ceiling would send Treasury bond prices down and yields up. This is not happening, because bond traders cannot imagine that the Republicans would be able – or even willing – to follow through.

After all, the consequences of failing to increase the debt ceiling would be catastrophic. The entire credit system in the US – and in much of the rest of the world – is based on the notion that there are “risk-free assets,” namely US government securities. There is no provision in the US Constitution to guarantee that the US will always pay its debts, but the American Republic has proven itself for 200-plus years to be about as good a credit risk as has ever existed.

David Rieff on Bernard-Henri Lévy's defense of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in TNR:

Early in the summer of 1995, a colleague and I went into South Sudan to report from the side of the South Sudanese guerrilla army, the SPLA. At dinner on the day we arrived, completely out of the blue, one of our minders turned to me and said, “I am so sorry about this Gennifer Flowers.” I had expected to talk about many things in South Sudan, but the woman with whom Bill Clinton had had an affair in the 1980s was certainly not one of them. Not quite sure of how I should answer, I took refuge in sanctimonious platitudes. We take sexual exploitation of women by powerful men very seriously in the United States, I said. Hearing this, the minder only smiled. “With us,” he said, “the fault is always with the woman.”

I have not thought of this incident for years, but the reaction of so many leading French public figures—and not just his allies within the French Socialist Party—to the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn brought it all back to me. The International Monetary Fund’s managing director who, until this week, was widely believed to have a good chance of being elected president of France in next year’s elections is facing seven charges, including attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment of a maid at the New York hotel in which he was staying. From Bernard-Henri Lévy to Jean Daniel, the longtime editor of the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, to the distinguished human rights lawyer turned politician Robert Badinter, who, as Francois Mitterand’s justice minister secured the abolition of the death penalty, the French elite consensus seems to be that it is Strauss-Kahn himself and not the 32-year-old maid who is the true victim of this drama.

To be sure, Strauss-Kahn might not be guilty. But French intellectuals’ vociferous defense of him, without all the facts of the situation, goes too far. In his weekly column in Le Point, Lévy asked “how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most New York hotels of sending a ‘cleaning brigade’ of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.” For his part, Daniel wrote in an editorial for his magazine that the fate meted out to DSK, as Strauss-Kahn is generally referred to in the French press, has made him think that, “We [French] and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization,” and demanded to know—shades of my guerrilla friend in South Sudan—why “the supposed victim was treated as worthy and beyond any suspicion?”

In a 1930 essay titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes ridiculed economists for having a high opinion of themselves and their work. As the Great Depression engulfed the world, Keynes looked back at historic rates of economic growth, arguing that the real problem people would face in the future was not poverty but the moral quandary of how to live in a society of such abundance and wealth that work would cease to be necessary. The “economic problem,” as he put it, was technical, unimportant in the larger scheme of things. “If economists,” he wrote, “could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!” John Kenneth Galbraith—the Harvard-based economist whose books shaped the public conversation on economic matters for a generation in mid-twentieth-century America—would have agreed. Today, given the rise of mathematical methods and computer modeling, economics is if anything even more labyrinthine, esoteric and inaccessible to the layman than it was in the days of Keynes and Galbraith. It is also more intellectually and politically ascendant than it was in the 1930s. Its methods now dominate much of the social sciences, having made inroads in law and political science. Its central theme of the superiority of free markets is the gospel of political life. This makes the publication of the Library of America edition of four of Galbraith’s best-known books—American Capitalism; The Great Crash, 1929; The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State—a cause for celebration. (The volume is edited by Galbraith’s son James, also an economist.) Galbraith delighted in puncturing the self-importance of his profession. He was a satirist of economics almost as much as a practitioner of it. He took generally accepted ideas about the economy and turned them upside down. Instead of atomistic individuals and firms, he saw behemoth corporations; instead of the free market, a quasi-planned economy.

more from Kim Phillips-Fein at The Nation here.

Why is it that we cannot read any discussion of a political sex scandal, or a sex scandal involving a politician, without pseudo-sophisticated comments about the supposedly different morals of Americans and Europeans? And why is it that this goes double if the politician is French, or if the reactions being quoted are from Gallic sources? And when did this annoying journalistic habit become so prevalent? It must have sprung up quite recently, or at least since the time when Charles de Gaulle and John F. Kennedy were presidents of their respective countries. The first man was a strict and fastidious Puritan who never gave his wife Yvonne a moment’s cause for complaint, while the second was a sensational debauchee who went as far as importing a Mafia gun-moll into the White House sleeping quarters. Yet the American culture, which regards Kennedy as a virtual Galahad, is the supposedly shockable one, while in France—ah, la France—a much more broad-minded and adult attitude prevails. Surely France and its partisans are not saying that the attempted rape of a chambermaid would not rearrange so much as an eyebrow in the supposedly refined salons of Paris? (After all, the endlessly cited François Mitterrand may have had a daughter out of wedlock, but he took good care to keep it a secret for as long as he could.) The problem arises from mentioning the two types of sexual behavior in the same breath. A related problem derives from the belief that Americans will not tolerate marital infidelity from their politicians.

more from Christopher Hitchens at Slate here.

Why May 21, 2011? Because, according to Family Radio’s president Harold Camping, it’s exactly 7,000 years to the day after God originally showed his infinite love—my words, not his—by drowning almost every woman, man, and child on earth in a worldwide flood. I’d explain the math behind Camping’s calculations, but, honestly, I don’t understand it. I tried. The timeline in the back of his book, Time Has an End, which I ordered from Amazon a few weeks ago, didn’t make the reasoning any clearer. I got hung up on passages like this: “The year 391 B.C. is the year when the Old Testament was finished, and 2,011 + 391 – 1 = 2,401, or 7 × 7 × 7 × 7. In the perfectly complete end of time, Christ will finish speaking to this present world.” How seriously do believers take this message? One guy I met in the Family Radio lobby had just returned from an RV proselyting trip that went as far as Colorado. Another told me he drove up from Los Angeles that morning just to correct a translation error in one of the ministry’s tracts. Some listeners in China have sold their homes and are donating the money to Family Radio’s campaign. NPR reports that in the U.S., one couple—with one kid and another on the way—cashed out their savings accounts and budgeted to run out of money on the big day.

more from Ted Cox at Killing The Buddha here.