Donald Kagan in The New Criterion:

Editors’ Note: Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University and recipient of the National Humanities Medal (2002), retired in May.

My subject is liberal education, and today more than ever the term requires definition, especially as to the questions: What is a liberal education and what it is for? From Cicero’s artes liberales, to the attempts at common curricula in more recent times, to the chaotic cafeteria that passes for a curriculum in most American universities today, the concept has suffered from vagueness, confusion, and contradiction. From the beginning, the champions of a liberal education have thought of it as seeking at least four kinds of goals. One was as an end in itself, or at least as a way of achieving that contemplative life that Aristotle thought was the greatest happiness. Knowledge and the acts of acquiring and considering it were the ends of this education and good in themselves. A second was as a means of shaping the character, the style, the taste of a person—to make him good and better able to fit in well with and take his place in the society of others like him. A third was to prepare him for a useful career in the world, one appropriate to his status as a free man. For Cicero and Quintilian, this meant a career as an orator that would allow a man to protect the private interests of himself and his friends in the law courts and to advance the public interest in the assemblies, senate, and magistracies. The fourth was to contribute to the individual citizen’s freedom in ancient society. Servants were ignorant and parochial, so free men must be learned and cosmopolitan; servants were ruled by others, so free men must take part in their own government; servants specialized to become competent at some specific and limited task, so free men must know something of everything and understand general principles without yielding to the narrowness of expertise. The Romans’ recommended course of study was literature, history, philosophy, and rhetoric.

More here.

Cavan Sieczkowski in the Huffington Post:

The United States military's ban on transgender service members faces a challenge, and her name is Kristin Beck.

Beck is an author and activist who served 20 years as a Navy SEAL on 13 deployments and was once a member of the elite SEAL Team 6. She is also transgender.

Beck comes out publicly as transgender in her new memoir, Warrior Princess: A U.S. Navy SEAL's Journey to Coming out Transgender, which hit stores June 1. The book describes Beck's life as Chris, a Christian boy who grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere and became a Navy SEAL. It describes someone who everyone viewed as “a hero, a warrior, a man” but who knew deep down she was transgender.

“Chris really wanted to be a girl and felt that she was a girl and consolidated that identity very early on in childhood,” Anne Speckhard, a research psychologist who co-authored the biography with Beck, told ABC News. Beck suppressed her transgender identity for decades while training as a SEAL and fighting in Afghanistan, “turning off” her sexuality and consuming herself with battle.

Beck chose to stay silent in respect of the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” guidelines.

More here.

Bill Donahue in Reed Magazine:

Shadab Zeest Hashmi grew up in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the shadow of the snowcapped Safed Koh mountains marking the border with Afghanistan. In the streets near her home, vendors sold plums and corn with salt and lime. She came to love the bakery that served pink coconut rolls and the clothes dyer who sat before boiling pots of dye listening to cricket games on the radio. Then at age 18, she left Pakistan to land at Reed.

It was 1991. That September, Nirvana would release its second album, Nevermind,replete with the smash hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; nose rings would become de rigueur among the more stylish habitués of the Paradox Café. And Shadab would never live in Pakistan again. You’d expect her poetry to be steeped in a longing for home, and in many ways it is. In her second book, Kohl & Chalk, published in early 2013, Shadab visits Peshawar with her three children and remembers:

afternoon shadows on slate verandahs,
the squeaking of a rusted seesaw,
the breaking open of a walnut in a door hinge;
its embossed shell a secret cracking.
The longing aches. Still, even though

Kohl & Chalk is a medley of piquant tableaux largely set in Shadab’s native land, it would be wrong to sum up the book as a sepia-tinted paean to the Pakistan of yore. The volume’s title hints at an outlook that is both cosmopolitan and gracefully political. Kohl is the black lead-based eyeliner that women in Africa and the Middle East have been wearing to dramatic effect since about 3000 BC. Shadab included it in the title because, she says, “My book is the story of a writing woman faced with the challenge of producing poetry while being responsible for raising a family.” “Chalk” is a subtle plea for education which, Shadab says, could prove a “great equalizer” in Pakistan’s viciously stratified society.

More here.

Fran Quigley has a disturbing story in Common Dreams:

In just ten months, the United States managed to transform an 82 year-old Catholic nun and two pacifists from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protestors accused of misdemeanor trespassing into federal felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism. Now in jail awaiting sentencing for their acts at an Oak Ridge, TN nuclear weapons production facility, their story should chill every person concerned about dissent in the US.

Here is how it happened.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, July 28, 2012, long-time peace activists Sr. Megan Rice, 82, Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, and Michael Walli, 63, cut through the chain link fence surrounding the Oak Ridge Y-12 nuclear weapons production facility and trespassed onto the property. Y-12, called the Fort Knox of the nuclear weapons industry, stores hundreds of metric tons of highly enriched uranium and works on every single one of the thousands of nuclear weapons maintained by the U.S.

Describing themselves as the Transform Now Plowshares, the three came as non-violent protestors to symbolically disarm the weapons. They carried bibles, written statements, peace banners, spray paint, flower, candles, small baby bottles of blood, bread, hammers with biblical verses on them and wire cutters. Their intent was to follow the words of Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Sr. Megan Rice has been a Catholic sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus for over sixty years. Greg Boertje-Obed, a married carpenter who has a college age daughter, is an Army veteran and lives at a Catholic Worker house in Duluth Minnesota. Michael Walli, a two-term Vietnam veteran turned peacemaker, lives at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker house in Washington DC.

In the dark, the three activists cut through a boundary fence which had signs stating “No Trespassing.” The signs indicate that unauthorized entry, a misdemeanor, is punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

No security arrived to confront them.

Hannah Gersen over at the Millions:

If you can read, you can cook — and if you can’t cook, you can always read cookbooks. At least that’s my philosophy. Although I’ve never been much of a cook, I have been fortunate to live with people who enjoy cooking — first my mother and now my husband. As a result, I’ve spent many pleasant evenings perusing cookbooks while someone else prepares a meal nearby. Growing up, I paged through The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, with its handwritten vegetarian recipes, and The Joy of Cooking — a somewhat joyless read and yet lively for the sheer number and variety of recipes. Now I am just as likely to scroll through cooking blogs in anticipation of a delicious meal, but I still love my cookbooks for their ability to take me back to a specific time and place. I also appreciate the stories and anecdotes that cookbook authors include with their recipes — although I sometimes wonder if only non-cooks like myself bother to read them.

What follows is a list of some of my favorite cookbooks to read while someone else does the cooking, a list that is, like most cookbook collections, highly personal and idiosyncratic. Please help me to round it out by leaving your own favorites in the comments.

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen

This cookbook brings me right back to my childhood, when my mother — and a lot of my friends’ mothers — was discovering vegetarian cooking. It was first published in 1982 and the recipes are very eighties: lots of quiches, soufflés, and casseroles involving tofu. It’s written in a casual, conversational way with a lot of underlining and phrases in all-caps — can we call this “pre-blog” style? The recipes are imaginative and sometimes whimsical, including the title recipe, a casserole in which broccoli stalks are made to stand upright so that they resemble trees. You have to love the author’s passion for vegetarian cooking; at one point she lists “innocence” as one of tofu’s attributes.

Amy Knight in the NYRB blog:

It is a well-known fact that the Russian FSB (successor to the KGB) has infiltrated all the major rebel groups in these two territories. If, as numerous reports have claimed, Tamerlan [Tsarnaev] was regularly meeting with Islamic rebels in 2012, the FSB would have been aware of it. Russian authorities also would have known that he then returned to the US. Yet the Americans were told nothing about Tamerlan’s trip, or his meetings with radicals.

Instead of raising questions about Russia’s file on Tamerlan, US officials have gone out of their way since the bombings to thank Moscow for its help in fighting terrorism and welcome Russian security officials in Washington. All this has played into the Kremlin’s hands and helped reinforce its longstanding arguments that the Chechen rebels it has been fighting in a brutal counter-insurgency for years are part of a larger al-Qaeda-led group that has the goal of international jihad.

Consider what has happened in recent weeks. The head of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), which oversees domestic crime-fighting, Vladimir Kolokoltsev, traveled to Washington, where he met with US Attorney General Eric Holder, Head of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and FBI chief Robert Mueller. All three US officials, according to public reports of the meetings, supported more cooperation with Russia in the area of security and law enforcement. Muellereven promised to share FBI files with the Russians, saying that “such resources could be useful to Russian law enforcement agencies in view of the Sochi Olympics.

Meanwhile, Russian National Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev also visited Washington and met with Barack Obama to deliver a letter from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Patrushev and Obama reportedly discussed the importance of “deepening counter-terrorism cooperation“ between Russia and the US.

“Inside every organ, cell, and piece of DNA in our bodies lie over 3.5 billion years of the history of life”, writes Shubin, whose new book aims to extend his argument beyond the history of life on earth, all the way back to the birth of the universe, some 13.7 billion years ago. It’s an ambitious thesis – that our biology, including our consciousness, was shaped by the birth of stars and the movements of celestial bodies – but Shubin unearths plenty of supporting evidence, such as the way that our internal body clocks were pre-set by a planetary catastrophe that occurred around a billion years before the emergence of life. Long-term experiments on sleep cycles have shown how our cellular clocks run on 24-hour rhythms, which require resetting whenever we cross a time zone (hence the trauma of jet lag), and which adjust themselves continually to the changing light of the seasons. All this is due to the earth’s 23.5 degree axial tilt, the consequence of a collision with a Mars-sized asteroid some 4.5 billion years ago, the impact of which knocked our planet off-centre while leaving it with a tide-creating moon. The days, meanwhile, grow ever longer as the spinning earth is slowed by the drag of the oceans: twenty-second-century days will be two milliseconds longer than they are now, an imperceptible rate of planetary change to which our inner clocks can easily adjust.

more from Richard Hamblyn at the TLS here.

Koons has always used materials that are shiny, dense, multicolored, monochrome, or clear. He’s made marble self-portraits, a porcelain Michael Jackson, a wooden Buster Keaton. He’s created basketballs floating in vitrines of distilled water; encased new vacuum cleaners lit by fluorescence in Plexiglas towers; cast statuary and everyday objects in high chromium stainless steel; fashioned painted polychrome figurative wood sculptures; cast glass sculptures of sex. All these objects come at you with an intense optical presence. Here Koons turns to an absorptive, non-shiny, non-hard material of dead-white matte plaster. Most of the sculptures are big; some are clunky. As I stared at them, each with its glitzy blue Viagra pill on top, something freakish happened. In a few cases, the plaster surfaces absorbed so much light as the orbs atop created their distorted mirrored views—of both the sculptures themselves and the world around them—that the casts snowblinded me. They receded from my visual field and disappeared. They left the weird blue balls hovering in some new no-space, like disembodied seeing-eyes or planetoids.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

If “cuteness” is symptomatic of the aesthetics of contemporary consumption, “zaniness” is about production. Perhaps the classic cinematic example would be Charlie Chaplin’s character in Modern Times, who struggles energetically to submit to the inhuman demands of the factory in which he works. Unable to keep up with the staccato demands of the production line, Chaplin is dragged by the conveyor belt into the heart of the machine itself. In a delirious sequence, he is wrapped around giant gears and waltzes through the innards of the machine before being spat out like Jonah from the whale. Incorporated and then ejected, he has been reborn as the little tramp, whose stuttering walk and ticky gestures echo the movement of celluloid film through a projector. Victimized by the machine, Chaplin becomes the archetypal modern zany; a jittery bundle of crankshaft limbs, whose stiff gestures make every vibration of the projector visible upon the screen. To excavate the prehistory of such slapstick, Ngai goes back to the original “zanni” of the commedia dell’arte, the illiterate peasant driven by poverty into the city and forced into the incompetent pursuit of every imaginable trade or vocation.

more from Adam Jasper at Bookforum here.

From LiveScience:

Earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old, and for much of that history it has been home to life in one weird form or another. Indeed, some scientists think life appeared the moment our planet's environment was stable enough to support it. The earliest evidence for life on Earth comes from fossilized mats of cyanobacteria called stromatolites in Australia that are about 3.4 billion years old. Ancient as their origins are, these bacteria (which are still around today) are already biologically complex—they have cell walls protecting their protein-producing DNA, so scientists think life must have begun much earlier, perhaps as early as 3.8 billion years ago. But despite knowing approximately when life first appeared on Earth, scientists are still far from answering how it appeared.

Today, there are several competing theories for how life arose on Earth. Some question whether life began on Earth at all, asserting instead that it came from a distant world or the heart of a fallen comet or asteroid. Some even say life might have arisen here more than once. Most scientists agree that life went through a period when RNA was the head-honcho molecule, guiding life through its nascent stages. According to this “RNA World” hypothesis, RNA was the crux molecule for primitive life and only took a backseat when DNA and proteins—which perform their jobs much more efficiently than RNA—developed. “A lot of the most clever and most talented people in my field have accepted that the RNA World was not just possible, but probable,” Deamer said.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Early Earth was not very hospitable when it came to jump starting life. In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world. Lawrence Livermore scientist Nir Goldman and University of Ontario Institute of Technology colleague Isaac Tamblyn (a former LLNL postdoc) found that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds, including the building blocks of proteins and nucleobases pairs of DNA and RNA. Comets contain a variety of simple molecules, such as water, ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide, and an impact event with a planetary surface would provide an abundant supply of energy to drive chemical reactions. “The flux of organic matter to Earth via comets and asteroids during periods of heavy bombardment may have been as high as 10 trillion kilograms per year, delivering up to several orders of Pmagnitude greater mass of organics than what likely pre-existed on the planet,” Goldman said.

More here. (Note: Will Francis Crick be finally vindicated for his theory of Panspermia as an explanation for life on Earth?)

Over at the Immanent Frame, various scholars weigh in on the shift at the Vatican:

The retirement of Pope Benedict XVI and the subsequent elevation of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to the throne of St. Peter involves a number of “firsts” for the Catholic Church: the first papal retirement in 600 years, the first election of a non-European pope in the modern era, and the first Jesuit pope ever. Even the papal name chosen by Bergoglio—Francis I, in honor of St. Francis of Assisi—is a first. Many observers both within and outside the Church have interpreted these “firsts” as a sign that the papacy of Francis I will mark a departure from his most recent predecessors and will bring much-needed reform to a Church hamstrung by the sex abuse scandal, a rigid and opaque bureaucratic structure, concerns about the role of women in the Church, and the ever-dwindling ranks of the faithful.

Early actions and statements suggest that, in keeping with his namesake, the new pope will adopt a more humble, ascetic style, and work to reorient the church toward a fuller embrace of its mission to serve the poor. But critics have also pointed out that Francis remains bound to the same conservative positions on questions of sexuality, gender, and reproduction upheld by his predecessors. Moreover, questions have been raised about the new pope’s relationship to the military junta responsible for Argentina’s “dirty war” in the 1970s and 80s, when Bergoglio served as provincial for the Jesuit order in Argentina.

Does the election of Francis I signal a major shift in Vatican policy, structure, or doctrine? How significant is Francis’ status as an “outsider” to the Roman Curia, especially his background as a Latin American and a Jesuit? Is this status likely to position him as an agent of change within the Church, or do his theological continuities with his predecessors and the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy guarantee that any reform he initiates will be largely cosmetic?

An interview with Helen Longino in New Books in Philosophy:

What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Longino, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, the “both” answer misses the fact that the nature/nurture divide is itself problematic. In her groundbreaking book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression & Sexuality(University of Chicago Press) Longino looks closely at a variety of scientific approaches to the study of human aggression and sexuality to argue that there is no one right way to divide nature from nurture within the scientific approaches to the study of behavior, and that the nature/nurture dichotomy reinforces and reflects an undue emphasis on explanations that focus on the dispositions of individuals rather than those that look at patterns of frequency and distribution of behavior within populations. She reveals the distinct and incompatible ways these different approaches define the factors that explain behavior, how these different explanatory approaches are related, and how the bias towards particular types of explanation is reflected in the way the scientific findings are publicly disseminated.

Ted Scheinman in the LA Review of Books:

Arrested Development, of course, is also a show about family, a unit the show sketches via ad absurdum caricature, all the more absurd because a lot of people seem truly to care about the largely atrocious and backbiting Bluths. (This writer included.) But Mitch Hurwitz, the show’s creator, is interested in more than the dynamics of family betrayal, and for social satire he uses the family frame as a metaphor in itself. Name a show whose politics are at once so oblique and so obvious: the Bluths were both a conspicuous model of the Bushes and a warning about con-men and short-sellers seeking to capitalize on the real estate bubble, no small foresight in 2003 when the show first aired. Biblical in its simplicity, Freudian in its symbolism (it is rumored that Buster breast-fed into his teens), Arrested Development was as rich in formal and moral delights as any other show on the planet.

Yes, it was probably too “smart” for TV, but mainly it was too weird, and non-initiates couldn’t exactly just slip into the show’s groove; plot, and the slow accretion of glimmering self-reference, were the bellylaughs. Two and a Half Men this was not. But man did it hit the spot via DVD marathon. Plus or minus the smoke, this is how Arrested Development deserves, and ought, to be watched.

The fourth season — 15 episodes released simultaneously on May 26 — has kept cognoscenti drooling for years but has also left time for new viewers to enter the welcoming, only vaguely canine circle of devotion. A lot has happened between 2005 and 2013, for the Bluths and for us. The new episodes each focus on what has happened to a given character in the years following the implosion of the latest Bluth scheme, and very rarely is it pretty to look at. If in 2003 Enron was a topical referent for the Bluths’s dynastic malfeasance, the collapse of the housing bubble, and of all the dreams and derivatives that depended on it, offer creator and executive producer Mitch Hurwitz far darker material.

A video of Zygmunt Bauman and Alain Touraine in conversation over at Reset DOC:

Elif Shafak in The Guardian:

“My dear Prime Minister, I was an apolitical man; then how come I took to the streets? Not for two trees. I rebelled after seeing how, early at dawn, you have attacked those youngsters who were silently protesting in their tents. I took to the streets because I do not wish my son to go through the same things and I would like him to live in a democratic country.”

This poignant letter, addressing Recep Tayyip Erdogan and written by one of the protesters in Istanbul's historic Taksim Square, was widely circulated on Turkey's social media. That the owner of these words, Cem Batu, is the creative director of an advertising agency, and he and his team of well-educated, modern, young Istanbulites have been subjected to tear gas and injured during the protests says a lot about the ordeal of these last days.

It all started as a peaceful sit-in to save one of the last remaining public parks in a city of almost 14 million people. The government has been adamant about razing the park to rebuild the old Ottoman military barracks that once stood there and to then turn it into a museum or a mall. It was a decision that was made too fast and without proper public and media debate. Many people, who would opt for a public garden over a shopping mall, felt their voices were not heard by the politicians. Of these, some have ended up occupying Gezi Park. At the same time, the hashtag #occupygezi was launched, calling out for support and solidarity. As Koray Çaliskan, a political scientist from the Bosphorus University, wrote in the daily Radikal newspaper, these early protesters came from diverse ideological backgrounds, and among them were even people who had voted in the past for the party in power, the Justice and Development party (AKP).

More here.

The reality of that didn’t hit me until I was almost fifty. I woke up one morning a few days before my fiftieth birthday and suddenly grasped the enormity of it. A half a century is no joke. When I was already old enough to pull the tail of our cat in Belgrade, German tanks were rolling into Paris. It wasn’t the gray hairs on my head that got me, but the deluge of memories. I remembered sitting in the first grade classroom in the fall of 1945 staring at the pictures of Marx, Stalin, and Marshal Tito that hung over the blackboard. I recalled the long forgotten brands of Balkan cigarettes; Russian, French, and American pop tunes from the war years, and the 1930s movies, of which few people alive today have any notion, that were still being shown in my childhood. So many memories came back to me at once; all of a sudden my life seemed to be that of a complete stranger. It took months to get used to it—if one can ever get used to knowing that the world and people one once knew have vanished without a trace. In the final months of my father’s life, every time I went to visit him we talked about books. He had no patience for novels any more. History still fascinated him, and so did certain philosophers. The gloomier the thinker he was reading, the more pleased my father became, since it confirmed his long-held suspicion: the world was going to hell.

more from Charles Simic at the NYRB here.

A striking feature of Agamben’s work is its tendency to leap immediately from the tiniest detail to the broadest possible generalization. In Homo Sacer, for instance, we learn that the entire history of Western political thought was always heading toward the horrors of totalitarianism, as we can tell by taking a look at an obscure corner of ancient Roman law. Similarly, while his late works boast increasingly large-scale ambitions, they are nonetheless written in a fragmentary form and always make room for digressions and asides (often in the form of notes inserted right into the middle of the text, introduced by the Hebrew letter “aleph”). These idiosyncratic traits can, I believe, be traced back to Agamben’s two most significant influences: Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Agamben served as editor of the Italian edition of Benjamin’s complete works, which consist primarily of dense essays and cryptic fragments, the majority of them not published during Benjamin’s lifetime. It’s clear that Agamben admires the compression and vast interdisciplinary range of Benjamin’s work and aspires to similar effects in his own writing. The link to Heidegger is perhaps even closer: as a student in one of Heidegger’s postwar seminars, Agamben picked up the great philosopher’s ambition to provide an overarching account of the history of the West, and use that history to shed light on the contemporary world.

more from Adam Kotsko at the LA Review of Books here.

This is philosophical fiction and what Janine and Ardis are hungry for and what they stumble upon in the course of their “adulteries,” goes beyond the physical or sexual, beyond earthly love. Salter and Camus have given their women a deeper reach, a solitary quest for something that no man—husband or lover—could possibly embody or provide for a woman, and vice versa. It is the aspiration, the urge, the hunger to go into the pure space of Rilke’s “open.” In the everyday Ardis and Janine yearn for an essential life, for the quiver and tremble of copious primal love. Both are “unfaithful” and in their consummation with nature, sky, the night, they are given the taste, the thirst for something transcendental and they are both saved and ruined and there will be no going back for them, ever. In the final scene of “My Lord You” when the dog is resurrected at dawn and disappears, Ardis is bereft. She will never see him again. Salter tells us that the dog may be gone—”lost, living elsewhere, his name perhaps to be written in a line someday though most probably he was forgotten, but not by her.”

more from Mary Costello at Guernica here.