Amardeep Singh at his own website:

I don't know if the shooter would have acted any differently if he had really known the difference between the turbans that many Sikh men wear and a much smaller number of Muslim clerics wear — or for that matter, the difference between Shias, Sunnis, and Sufis, or any number of specificities that might have added nuance to his hatred.

As I have experienced it, the turban that Sikh men wear is the embodiment of a kind of difference or otherness that can provoke some Americans to react quite viscerally. Yes, ignorance plays a part and probably amplifies that hostility. But I increasingly feel that visible marks of religious difference are lightning rods for this hostility in ways that don't depend on accurate recognition.

I am not sure why the reaction can be so visceral — perhaps because wearing a turban is at once so intimate and personal and so public? Walking around waving, say, an Iranian flag probably wouldn't provoke quite the same reaction. A flag is abstract — a turban, as something worn on the body, is much more concrete and it therefore poses a more palpable (more personal?) symbol for angry young men looking for someone to target. Whether or not that target was actually the “right one” was besides the point for the Oak Creek shooter.

More here.

Amartya Sen in NPR:

About fifty years ago, in 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre complained about the state of Europe. “Europe is springing leaks everywhere,” he wrote. He went on to remark that “it simply is that in the past we made history and now history is being made of us.” Sartre was undoubtedly too pessimistic. Many major achievements of great significance have occurred in the last half a century in Europe, since Sartre's lament, including the emergence of the European Union, the reunification of Germany, the extension of democracy to Eastern Europe, the consolidation and improvement of national health services and of the welfare state, and the legalization and enforcement of some human rights. All this went with a rapidly expanding European economy, which comprehensively re-built and massively expanded its industrial base and infrastructure, which had been devastated during World War II.

There is indeed a long-run historical contrast to which Sartre could have pointed. For centuries preceding World War II, a lot of world history was actually made in Europe. And this generated much admiration, mixed with some fear, around the world. But the situation changed rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century. When I first arrived in Cambridge as a student from India in the early 1950s, I remember asking whether there were any lectures given on the economic history of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I was told that there were indeed such lectures — and that they were given for a paper called “Expansion of Europe.” That view of the non-European world would seem a little archaic now, not merely because the grand European empires have ended, but also because the balance of political prominence and economic strength has radically changed in the world. Europe is no longer larger than life.

Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef over at Rationally Speaking:

Why do philosophers sometimes argue for conclusions that are disturbing, even shocking? Some recent examples include the claim that it's morally acceptable to kill babies; that there's nothing wrong with bestiality; and that having children is unethical. In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Massimo and Julia discuss what we can learn from these “Philosophical shock tactics,” the public reaction to them, and what role emotion should play in philosophy.

An excerpt from Pankaj Mishra's new book, in Outlook (via Chapati Mystery):

On April 12, 1924, Rabindranath Tagore arrived in Shanghai for a lecture tour of China arranged by Liang Qichao, China’s foremost modern intellectual. Soon after receiving the Nobel prize for literature in 1913, Tagore had become an international literary celebrity; he was also the lone voice from Asia in an intellectual milieu that was almost entirely dominated by Western institutions and individuals. As Lu Xun pointed out in 1927, “Let us see which are the mute nations. Can we hear the voice of Egypt? Can we hear the voice of Annam (modern-day Vietnam) and Korea? Except Tagore, what other voice of India can we hear?”

The Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata once recalled

“the features and appearance of this sage-like poet, with his long bushy hair, long moustache and beard, standing tall in loose-flowing Indian garments, and with deep, piercing eyes. His white hair flowed softly down both sides of his forehead; the tufts of hair under the temples also were like two beards and linking up with the hair on his cheeks, continued into his beard, so that he gave an impression, to the boy that I was then, of some ancient Oriental wizard.”

Packed lecture-halls awaited Tagore around the world, from Japan to Argentina. President Herbert Hoover received him at the White House when he visited the United States in 1930, and the New York Times ran twenty-one reports on the Indian poet, including two interviews. This enthusiasm seems especially remarkable considering the sort of prophecy from the East that Tagore would deliver to his Western hosts: that their modern civilisation, built upon the cult of money and power, was inherently destructive and needed to be tempered by the spiritual wisdom of the East.

But when, travelling in China, Tagore expressed his doubts about Western civilisation and exhorted Asians not to abandon their traditional culture, he ran into fierce opposition. “The poet-saint of India has arrived at last,” the novelist Mao Dun wrote in a Shanghai periodical, and “welcomed with ‘thunderous applause’”. Mao Dun had once translated Tagore into Chinese; but in his incarnation as a bitter communist radical he was increasingly worried about the Indian poet’s likely deleterious effect on Chinese youth.

“We are determined”, Mao Dun warned, “not to welcome the Tagore who loudly sings the praises of eastern civilisation. Oppressed as we are by militarists from within the country and by the imperialists from without, this is no time for dreaming.” Within days of his arrival in China, Tagore would face hecklers, shouting such slogans as “Go back, slave from a lost country!”

Robert Shiller in Project Syndicate:

[B]efore we conclude that we should now, after the crisis, pursue policies to rein in the markets, we need to consider the alternative. In fact, speculative bubbles are just one example of social epidemics, which can be even worse in the absence of financial markets. In a speculative bubble, the contagion is amplified by people’s reaction to price movements, but social epidemics do not need markets or prices to get public attention and spread quickly.

Some examples of social epidemics unsupported by any speculative markets can be found in Charles MacKay’s 1841 best seller Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.The book made some historical bubbles famous: the Mississippi bubble 1719-20, the South Sea Company Bubble 1711-20, and the tulip mania of the 1630’s. But the book contained other, non-market, examples as well.

MacKay gave examples, over the centuries, of social epidemics involving belief in alchemists, prophets of Judgment Day, fortune tellers, astrologers, physicians employing magnets, witch hunters, and crusaders. Some of these epidemics had profound economic consequences. The Crusades from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, for example, brought forth what MacKay described as “epidemic frenzy” among would-be crusaders in Europe, accompanied by delusions that God would send armies of saints to fight alongside them. Between one and three million people died in the Crusades.

There was no way, of course, for anyone either to invest in or to bet against the success of any of the activities promoted by the social epidemics – no professional opinion or outlet for analysts’ reports on these activities. So there was nothing to stop these social epidemics from attaining ridiculous proportions.

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi on the Olympics' opening ceremonies, in Paris Review:

The world’s foremost English-language newspapers seemed unanimous in finding the opening ceremony a triumph of quirkiness, but within the New York Times’ apparently laudatory account of Boyle’s show as a plucky celebration of postimperial, midrecession British eccentricity was this assessment: “[A] sometimes slightly insane portrait of a country that has changed almost beyond measure since the last time it hosted the Games, in the grim postwar summer of 1948.” This tinge of insanity lay on the surface of a broader, pervasive, and telling incoherence that might have been predicted by anyone familiar with Boyle’s directorial career, which comprises the following feature films: Shallow Grave, a nimble though slightly dated thriller; Trainspotting, one of the best films of its decade; A Life Less Ordinary, a kidnap road-romance typical of the shaggy ensemble-cast Hollywood productions into which enfants terrifiques are seduced for their second acts and that Boyle himself has characterized as cut-rate Coen brothers; The Beach, a lemon of a Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle; 28 Days Later, an excellent postapocalyptic zombie movie; Millions, a twee story about children in possession of stolen millions; Sunshine, a suspense-horror spaceship plot that comprehensively rips off two other films that were already ripping off Kubrick and Tarkovsky; Slumdog Millionaire, a lively, mediocre film that (for mass-psychological reasons I will not bore the reader by describing in detail but that had a lot to do with the financial crisis, terrorism, heavily publicized reverse-verisimilitude, and that year’s presidential election) achieved a terrifying popularity; and 127 Hours, the tense true story of a climber who has to amputate his trapped arm with a dull knife.

If you watch these films, you will begin to perceive, loosely uniting most of Boyle’s generically diverse projects, a sort of claustrophilia: characters’ extended constraint in cabins, apartments, spaceships (a.k.a. submarines), taxis, crawlspaces, crevasses—even on the beach, there obtains a sort of cabin fever; there is, too, usually fairly tight editing and a disciplined tracking of narrative lines.

Brooke Allen, a Wall Street financier, argues for keeping physicists out of finance, in Science:

I came to Wall Street in 1982 as a computer consultant and went for an MBA in finance at night. That is where I first encountered the finance-as-physics mentality of my professors. I bought into it. By the time I graduated in 1986, it seemed likely that the old-timers who understood only markets would not survive because they could not do physics.

By 1987, the hottest innovation to come from finance theory was something marketed as “portfolio insurance.” The idea was that as markets went up, you could increase your exposure, and when they went down, you could decrease it and protect your gains.

In October of 1987, stock markets experienced the worst crash on record. Believers in portfolio insurance discovered that they could not decrease their exposure fast enough, and as they sold, the crash snowballed.

After the crash, I stopped listening to people who understood physics but not markets and went back to doing what I do best: trying to understand things through direct observation and applying my tools to solving the problems at hand.

The theoreticians dusted themselves off and went back to what they do best. They invented exotic financial instruments that nobody can price properly—not even them—and designed complex, misguided risk models that triumphed over common sense. Markets are now so complex and move so fast that humans cannot participate without assistance from supercomputers—programmed, incidentally, to quality standards so low they would shock engineers responsible for things such as airline safety.

Physicists (and most other “quants”) on Wall Street will tell you over a beer that they know that finance is not a science, but they act as if it is. I think the reasons are that: 1) once you are trained to be a scientist it is hard not to act like one, and 2) management and clients want to believe you are one.

There is also something more insidious going on.

From lensculture:

Over a period of several years, Polish photographer Rafal Milach accompanied seven young people living in the Russian cities of Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk. In intimate pictures, he portrays a generation caught up between the mentality of the old Soviet regime and Russia of the Putin era. In this album, bound in synthetic leather, these snapshots of contemporary Russian life are accompanied by interviews with those portrayed.

PICTURE: “Nowadays it’s different from in the Soyuz. I remember how my aunt, who worked at the Soviet Ministry of Culture, used to organize balls in Sverdlovsk. A neckline lower than the seventh vertebra was regarded as pornography, but now even if you ran about the stage with your tits bare, no one would say a word. These days people feel freer. The difference is that once upon a time people knew what they had to say, but they couldn’t say it. Now you can say anything, but no one knows what to say.”

7 Rooms by Rafal Milach. Texts by Svetlana Alexievich.

More here.

From Columbia Journalism Review:

Paul Wright began his journalism career behind bars. When he was 21, Wright killed a man in Federal Way, WA, during a botched hold-up; the cocaine dealer he went to rob reached for a gun, and Wright fired first. He claimed self-defense, but was convicted of first-degree felony murder in 1987. Rather than languish, Wright began studying the law, and spent most of his time in Washington State’s prison system writing, reporting, and litigating for , a magazine he co-founded with fellow inmate Ed Mead in 1990. (He served 17 years of a 25-year sentence, and was released in 2003.) Some Washington prisons tried to ban Prison Legal NewsPLN, but Wright became an experienced jailhouse lawyer and convinced the courts to overturn those decisions—something he’s since done in nine other states, with three cases pending. What started as a 10-page newsletter is now a 56-page monthly magazine with subscribers in all 50 states and several other countries. PLN has a staff of five, and is the centerpiece of a growing nonprofit—recently renamed the Human Rights Defense Center—with a litigation arm focused on prisoners’ rights, a book-publishing operation, and a budding Web presence. Wright has written three books (two while in prison). CJR’s Alysia Santo spoke with him in PLN’s office in West Brattleboro, VT.

From killer to crusader

The worst phone call I ever made was when I was sitting in jail and called my parents to tell them that I’d been arrested on murder charges. I grew up in Lake Worth, FL. My dad worked for the post office and my mom was a housewife. I liked to read and stay up on what’s happening, but my career goals were always in the law-enforcement arena, not journalism. I graduated high school when I was 16, and then went to Mexico to teach English. I came back to the US when I was 18 and joined the Army. I was stationed in Hanau, Germany, as a military policeman. When I came back to US, I went through a military police investigator course, and I was working as a military police officer in Washington when I was arrested. In retrospect, it was really pathetic.

More here.

Dance Me to the End of Love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
.
Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love
.

by Leonard Cohen
from I'm Your Man, 1988

Over at the University of Chicago, Elizabeth Anderson delivers the Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy:

Critics of every social insurance proposal in the U.S., including recent health care reform, have called them socialist attacks on private property. To be sure, social insurance is a central pillar of social democracy, and social democratic parties originated in a socialist critique of capitalism. Yet the equation of social insurance with socialism is doubly ironic. The first realistic proposal to abolish poverty by means of universal social insurance was Thomas Paine, who explicitly advanced his scheme as a defense of private property against socialist revolutionaries. And the first actual social insurance scheme was introduced by Otto von Bismarck, who advanced it against the German Social Democratic Party, which opposed his plan. This talk will consider how Paine grounded the justification of social insurance in a neo-Lockean theory of private property rights, and explore the implications of the ironic inversion of social insurance from a bulwark of to a perceived assault on capitalism.

Charlie Rose interviews David Harvey and Richard Wolff:

Patrick Higgins in Counterpunch:

From Cockburn to Vidal, some great thinkers and men have moved on over the past few weeks. Among those ranks is the French documentarian—nay, cine-essayist is more near correct—Chris Marker, whose “brilliance as a thinker and filmmaker has,” in the words of film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, “largely (and unfairly) eclipsed by Godard’s.”

Both men, Godard and Marker, are responsible for more than a few films of almost upsetting beauty. Both men also contributed greatly to the withering art of film criticism, their best moments as critics achieved through the camera rather than the typewriter. It is true that Godard has made films one could safely call revolutionary (despite the spirited abuse the Situationists leveled at him), just as it is true that Godard possesses a painter’s eye and the deepest of possible understandings of the text and the image, but Marker’s intensity as a narrator and dedication as a wonderer and intelligence as a traveler have not been matched by Godard or anybody else. It is time this artist of the highest caliber, for whose talents 91 years could never suffice, received his due.

On my backpack—the one perpetually hanging from my body—is a rusting button with the image of the Cheshire Cat, its sprawling grin teasing and frightening. The button has been there for years, and will remain there for many years more, because to be put in mind of Marker’s films is to be put in mind of so many other wonderful things. The image is from Marker’s The Case of the Grinning Cat, in which the image of the Cheshire Cat, found as graffiti on walls and in metros throughout Paris, serves as Marker’s springboard for ruminations on nearly everything. As it should be. What better to capture Marker’s syndicalist-ish spirit and sensibility than street art, anonymously created, continually evolving, and publically consumed?

Marker films help me more than most in understanding the clutter and serenity, the noise and peacefulness of the world we inhabit. He was expert at finding “moments.”

Neal Ascherson in the LRB:

In a few weeks, all going well, I will get to see my Polish file. Any foreign journalist who visited Poland regularly in the Communist period must assume that the old Security Service built up a dossier on him or her. Mine is now in the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, and I can read it. I don’t know what it contains. Much irrelevant rubbish, no doubt: surveillance teams have to justify their expenses. But one thing I am prepared for: reports to the secret police by people I considered to be friends or at least friendly acquaintances. Some ‘targets’ find the idea of such reports so horrible and distressing they prefer not to see their file at all. My view is different.

‘People’s Poland’ was the land Ryszard Kapuściński lived in, but left as often as he could. Many men and women there who despised the regime made bargains with themselves: if the price of getting a passport to a conference in Paris, or of befriending a Western foreigner, was to visit a certain Major Kowalski now and then and invent some harmless platitudes – cheap at that price. A few of my friends admitted this and joked about it. Others kept it delicately unsaid. They were reluctant informers, not professional spooks out to entrap me, and knowing that, I trusted them.

I thought Kapuściński was in that sort of league. We met quite a few times, mostly in Warsaw, and I felt that we were friends. Perhaps I was wrong. He was charming, intent, always apparently interested in what you had to say. And yet, as Artur Domosławski observes in this biography, that warm, complicit smile was for everyone. I can’t remember much of what he said. This is because he never said much. He was one of those rare journalists whose way of listening makes other people open up and talk. That’s what this elusive man used his smile for. That, and to take attention and curiosity away from himself. Kapuściński was evasive, and it turns out he had plenty to evade.

Jina Moore in the Boston Review:

In 1906, the readers of The New York Times opened their papers to a story about the Bronx Zoo’s latest attraction: Ota Benga, a 22-year-old Mutwa from today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“Ota Benga let some of the savage nature of the African forest come out yesterday,” began the story, in which Benga is drenched with a hose in the zoo’s monkey cage.

Today, the “savage nature” of Africa is still on display, in American headlines: “Uganda’s rebels in murderous spree,” “Congo a country of rape and ruin” “Africa’s Forever Wars.” Sometimes the savagery doesn’t come from the “savages” themselves. It comes from poverty—“NIGERIA: Focus on the scourge of poverty”—or disease—“AIDS at 30: Killer has been tamed, but not conquered.” Other times, all the savagery blends together: “Starving Babies, Raped Mommies, Famine in Africa—Do you care?”

All I can imagine from these headlines is that Africa—all 54 countries, all 11.7 million square miles of it—must be a very deadly place.

But I’ve lived there. It’s not. Or rather, it can be, in certain places, at certain times. Far more often, and across most of the continent, it isn’t. Not even in its most infamous “war-torn” countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Goma, part of a region the United Nations’ special representative on sexual violence in conflict Margot Wallström two years ago dubbed “the rape capital of the world,” I went to an impromptu hip-hop show, full of dancing Congolese. In Kinshasa, nearly a thousand miles away on the other side of the country, I met an oboist for the city’s symphony orchestra.

More here.

Jalees Rehman in the Huffington Post:

In the course of studying non-Muslim writings and Scriptures during this Ramadan, I came across the excellent essay “What I Believe” by the great atheist philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell. This essay can be found in a collection of essays, including the famous or perhaps infamous “Why I Am Not a Christian.” I remember reading this essay collection a number of years ago, but as with many of Bertrand Russell's writings, it does not hurt to continuously re-read them since one is bound to find new facets of wisdom each time. In “What I Believe,” Russell formulates some of the key principles of his humanist and atheist philosophy.

Part of the essay is devoted to critiquing religion, such as when he says: “Religion, since it has its source in terror, has dignified certain kinds of fear and made people think them not disgraceful. In this it has done mankind a great disservice: all fear is bad.”

Russell acknowledges that fear is found not only in religion, but in many aspects of our society.

“Fear is the basis of religious dogma, as of so much else in human life. Fear of human beings, individually or collectively, dominates much of our social life, but it is fear of nature that gives rise to religion.”

More here.

Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic (article is a few months old but interesting):

While there are more than 8 million Holstein dairy cows in the United States, there is exactly one bull that has been scientifically calculated to be the very best in the land. He goes by the name of Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie.

Already, Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie has 346 daughters who are on the books and thousands more that will be added to his progeny count when they start producing milk. This is quite a career for a young animal: He was only born in 2004.

There is a reason, of course, that the semen that Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie produces has become such a hot commodity in what one artificial-insemination company calls “today's fast paced cattle semen market.” In January of 2009, before he had a single daughter producing milk, the United States Department of Agriculture took a look at his lineage and more than 50,000 markers on his genome and declared him the best bull in the land. And, three years and 346 milk- and data-providing daughters later, it turns out that they were right.

“When Freddie [as he is known] had no daughter records our equations predicted from his DNA that he would be the best bull,” USDA research geneticist Paul VanRaden emailed me with a detectable hint of pride. “Now he is the best progeny tested bull (as predicted).”

Data-driven predictions are responsible for a massive transformation of America's dairy cows. While other industries are just catching on to this whole “big data” thing, the animal sciences — and dairy breeding in particular — have been using large amounts of data since long before VanRaden was calculating the outsized genetic impact of the most sought-after bulls with a pencil and paper in the 1980s.

More here.

From The Atlantic:

It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband commuted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’” She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.

More here.