Garry Wills in The New York Times:

One expects a book by Philip Bobbitt to be over 900 pages (“The Shield of Achilles,” 2002) or just under 700 pages (“Terror and Consent,” 2008). Then how can he diet himself down to a mere 200 or so pages of text on Machiavelli? Bobbitt is a great systematizer in the Toynbee mold — “Shield” gave us six different state systems since 1500 (princely, kingly, territorial, imperial, national, ­market). “Terror” focused on one condition (the market state), but that state is still in formation, so Bobbitt argued its case more (and more and more) extensively. Then how does he deal with Machiavelli so compactly in “The Garments of Court and Palace”? Very easily, as one can tell by the frequency of his self-citations in the new book. He just shows us how wonderfully Machiavelli agreed with Bobbitt’s longer works — as if Niccolò had read them half a millennium ago. Machiavelli is often viewed as surprisingly modern, but does that have to mean he must be surprisingly Bobbitt?

Machiavelli fits into Bobbitt’s scheme because he is the expounder of the first of the six state systems in “The Shield of Achilles,” the princely one (Machiavelli even graced the form with its Bobbittian name). Bobbitt believes that legal systems are changed by military strategies, often by military technology. So, in 1494, when Charles VIII brought bronze cannon into Italy, threatening fortress walls and smashing the governments that relied on them, Machiavelli had to propose new walls, along with new states to defend them. This must mean that Machiavelli was interested in new technologies for war — though in fact he was not very interested in forts (he thought they were less vulnerable to siege than to inner rebellion). In the encyclopedic “Art of War,” he suggests an improved design for forts, but he is still concerned with inner rebellion (he forbids an inner keep where the residents can hole up and tells us starvation is more effectual than siege). Nor did he invest his time or energy in the technological innovations of Leonardo (their one collaboration, diverting a river, was an ancient concept, and it failed).

More here.

The truth is that the secularists beloved of the American political class have little support among Egyptians. Mohammed ElBaradei, who settled for the post of vice president after the military initially chose him to lead the “interim” regime, had returned to the country after the mass demonstrations that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. “If [people] want me to lead the transition, I will not let them down,” he said at the time. But the people didn’t want him to lead. Though he declared his intention to run for the presidency, he withdrew when it became clear he didn’t have anywhere near the support he would need to be elected, and Morsi ultimately won the race in 2012.[1] [1] In a post-coup interview with the New York Times in which he defended the arrests of Muslim Brotherhood members and the shutdown of Islamist television, ElBaradei said, “We just lost two and a half years. As Yogi Berra said, ‘It’s déjà vu all over again,’ but hopefully this time we will get it right.” In Egypt, only two forces genuinely possess the ability to rule at the moment: the army, by virtue of the bayonet; or the Muslim Brotherhood, by virtue of the ballot. Morsi angered many (including his own supporters) with his actions, but he was also facing down the impossible expectations of a populace desperate for change after decades of military rule, and he had not lost his legitimacy. Parliamentary elections had been scheduled for later this year; those elections were the proper vehicle for a change of government, not a coup.

more from Ken Silverstein at Harper’s here.

In 1850 Dickens invented a little game for his seventh child, three-year-old Sydney, the tiniest boy in a family of short people. Initially, in fun, Dickens had asked Sydney to go to the railway station to meet a friend; innocent and enterprising, to everyone’s amusement the boy set off through the garden gate into the street; then someone had to rush out and bring him back. The joke was repeated, and the five-year-old Alfred was sent with him; but when the boys had got used to being rescued, Dickens changed the rules, closed the gate after them, and hid in the garden with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but the Phenomenon [Sydney], shouting “Open the gate!” sent an enormous stone flying into the garden (among our heads) by way of alarming the establishment.’ ‘This,’ Gottlieb remarks of the anecdote with a warmth he sustains throughout his book, ‘was a boy after his father’s heart.’

more from Tim Parks at the LRB here.

Degas’s propensity for saying one thing and doing another is undoubtedly linked to his inveterate experimentalism (or opportunism, as Feyerabend would put it), his propensity to try anything that might lead to new ways of reinterpreting and revising his customary subjects and compositions. Consequently, for all their pungency and quotability, his quips—which I don’t intend to stop quoting—cannot be taken as entirely descriptive of his practice. Pedersen and her colleagues are not as careful about this as they should be. They take at face value the artist’s repeated assertions that, contrary to his fellow Impressionists, he had upheld the classical tradition of draftsmanship as transmitted through Ingres: “I’ve always tried to urge my colleagues to seek for new combinations along the path of draftsmanship, which I consider a more fruitful field than that of color. But they wouldn’t listen to me and have gone the other way.” Degas’s drawings are marvelous, and the early ones, cool and linear, show Ingres’s unmistakable influence. But in the practice of drawing, Degas radically departed from the method of Ingres and the academic tradition of which his work is the apotheosis.

more from Barry Schwabsky at The Nation here.

An Interview with Ambassador Akbar Ahmed.

Wajahat Ali in the Boston Review:

Wajahat Ali: You’re very critical of America’s drone policy and argue that it’s a war on tribal Islam, especially in Pakistan and Yemen. How is it decimating tribal life and what are the consequences?

Akbar Ahmed: I am critical on several counts, not least legal ones involving international borders. What worries me the most, however, are the moral grounds. The fact that every drone strike kills not only the intended target but also many more totally innocent people—too often women and children—is troubling. The consequences of U.S. drone policy are clear to see: It feeds into already high levels of anti-Americanism. It sustains a long line of young suicide bombers seeking revenge. Finally, along with the military actions of the central government and the deadly attacks of suicide bombers, it forces large sections of the local population to flee their homes. Already destitute communities are now scattered in the bigger towns and cities trying to survive with limited financial resources. I fear that an entire generation is being thrown into turmoil and there is little doubt that there will be many angry, confused, and even vengeful men emerging from them. Violence is therefore almost inevitable.

We must do everything possible to check present and possible future violence. Drones, however, have proved to be ineffective in doing so, as I have explained in The Thistle and the Drone. The study relied on 40 case studies of societies beset with violence as a result of the breakdown of relations between the periphery and the central government. Granted, the crisis in these societies already existed before 9/11 and is not a consequence of drones—drones are just one highly symbolic and emotionally charged aspect of the violence in these societies.

More here.

Hamid Dabashi in the New York Times:

Though it is common to lament the shortcomings of reading an important work in any language other than the original and of the “impossibility” of translation, I am convinced that works of philosophy (or literature for that matter — are they different?) in fact gain far more than they lose in translation.

Consider Heidegger. Had it not been for his French translators and commentators, German philosophy of his time would have remained an obscure metaphysical thicket. And it was not until Derrida’s own take on Heidegger found an English readership in the United States and Britain that the whole Heidegger-Derridian undermining of metaphysics began to shake the foundations of the Greek philosophical heritage. One can in fact argue that much of contemporary Continental philosophy originates in German with significant French and Italian glosses before it is globalized in the dominant American English and assumes a whole new global readership and reality. This has nothing to do with the philosophical wherewithal of German, French or English. It is entirely a function of the imperial power and reach of one language as opposed to others.

More here.

Full Moon

No longer throne of a goddess to whom we pray,
no longer the bubble house of childhood's
tumbling Mother Goose man,

The emphatic moon ascends–
the brilliant challenger of rocket experts,
the white hope of communications men.

Some I love who are dead
were watchers of the moon and knew its lore;
planted seeds, trimmed their hair,

Pierced their ears for gold hoop earrings
as it waxed or waned.
It shines tonight upon their graves.

And burned in the garden of Gethsemane,
its light made holy by the dazzling tears
with which it mingled.

And spread its radiance on the exile's path
of Him who was The Glorious One,
its light made holy by His holiness.

Already a mooted goal and tomorrow perhaps
an arms base, a livid sector,
the full moon dominates the dark.

by Robert Hayden

Suketu Mehta in the New York Review of Books:

My Brazilian friend Marina and I were picking up a visiting friend from New York, who heads an NGO, in her hotel lobby near Paulista, the most prestigious avenue in São Paulo. It was 7:30 on a busy Friday night last October.

We walked up to a taxi outside the hotel. I sat in the front to let the two women chat in the back. Marina asked me to Google the restaurant menu. I was doing so when I saw a teenage boy run up to the taxi and gesticulate through my open window. I thought he was a beggar, asking for money. Then I saw the gun, going from my head to the cell phone.

“Just give him the phone,” Marina said from the back seat.

I gave him the phone. He didn’t go away.

“Dinheiro, dinheiro!”

I didn’t want to give him my wallet. The boy was shouting obscenities. “Dinheiro, dinheiro!”

The boy’s body suddenly jerked back, as a man’s arm around his neck pulled him off his feet. The man, dressed in a black shirt, was shouting; he had jumped the boy from behind. He started hitting the boy. The taxi driver sitting next to me was stoic. He said that this had never happened to him before, but he couldn’t have been more blasé.

More here.

From Chapati Mystery:

Kavita S. Datla received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. She is currently Associate Professor at Mount Holyoke College’s History Department. Her book, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India was published by University of Hawaii Press in 2013.

What is your book arguing?

My book tells the story of a set of vernacular projects in the Urdu language in the early twentieth century. It argues that the people involved in these projects were self-consciously trying to ‘modernize’ the Urdu language and make it fit for new national, and secular, purposes. Given Urdu’s associations with Muslims, these projects were simultaneously about finding a place for Muslims in the nation. The book begins by considering the general character of education in the Hyderabad state, and the different projects of reform that were proposed by late nineteenth/early twentieth century administrators and thinkers – from a plan to create an Islamic university that would usher in a theological reformation in the larger Muslim world, to a proposal to found India’s first vernacular university. Ultimately, it was the latter that was taken up and the new university became a site for a massive project of translation, and for the unfolding of new research agendas. Many of these projects sent intellectuals sifting through the Indian past and non-Western (and especially Islamic) scholarly traditions to identify vocabularies and experiences that might be retrieved and used for a newly defined common good. Ultimately, the book tries to recover some of the tensions and debates involved in this process (as people argued about which vocabularies or traditions to draw from) and also the political impasses that they led to; the latter most dramatically in discussions with figures like Gandhi over India’s national language (Hindi, Urdu, or Hindustani). In that sense, it is as much about language as it is about the political questions opened up by Indian nationalism.

More here.

From Nature:

In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fertile plains of central Poland when he came across an assortment of odd artefacts. The people who had lived there around 7,000 years ago were among central Europe's first farmers, and they had left behind fragments of pottery dotted with tiny holes. It looked as though the coarse red clay had been baked while pierced with pieces of straw. Looking back through the archaeological literature, Bogucki found other examples of ancient perforated pottery. “They were so unusual — people would almost always include them in publications,” says Bogucki, now at Princeton University in New Jersey. He had seen something similar at a friend's house that was used for straining cheese, so he speculated that the pottery might be connected with cheese-making. But he had no way to test his idea. The mystery potsherds sat in storage until 2011, when Mélanie Roffet-Salque pulled them out and analysed fatty residues preserved in the clay. Roffet-Salque, a geochemist at the University of Bristol, UK, found signatures of abundant milk fats — evidence that the early farmers had used the pottery as sieves to separate fatty milk solids from liquid whey. That makes the Polish relics the oldest known evidence of cheese-making in the world¹.

Roffet-Salque's sleuthing is part of a wave of discoveries about the history of milk in Europe. Many of them have come from a €3.3-million (US$4.4-million) project that started in 2009 and has involved archaeologists, chemists and geneticists. The findings from this group illuminate the profound ways that dairy products have shaped human settlement on the continent. During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because — unlike children — they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.

More here.

The reasons why these particular writers drank, or more precisely why they became dependent on alcohol, were inter alia weak, suicidal or resentful fathers (when Cheever was conceived his father’s first act was to invite the local abortionist to dinner), suffocating mothers, class anxiety, sexual anxiety (Cheever endured the dual burden of passing for both bourgeois and heterosexual), shyness, guilt, pram-in-the-hall pressures, disastrous role models (Dylan Thomas in the case of Berryman, who trailed his bad mentor through New York’s traditional stations of dissolution, the White Horse, the Chelsea Hotel; Hart Crane, the alcoholic poet and suicide, in the case of Williams), and a shared genius for self-sabotage. None of them drank to improve his writing, but addiction and recovery became for some an important theme, something to chronicle, and, moreover, had a subterranean but profound impact on their literary styles. Laing is acute about the warping impact alcoholism has on memory, a writer’s major resource. Reading Cheever, for example, she identifies “a persistent attribute of his work: a kind of uncanniness produced by radical disruptions of space and time”. Excess drinking might have contributed special effects to Cheever’s prose, but Laing refuses to romanticize this given the damage done. Similarly, after waxing lyrical about the landscape of Port Angeles, Washington, and empathizing with Carver’s view of Morse Creek as a “holy place”, she adds: “Watching water work through rock, you might come to a kind of accommodation with the fact that you’d once smashed your wife’s head repeatedly against a sidewalk for looking at another man”. This movement between heady rhetorical inflation and sobering deflation is felt throughout the book, beginning with its florid title – Echo Spring is the wistful pet name that the drunkard Brick, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, gives to his liquor cabinet – which is soon undercut by the baldly explanatory subtitle.

more from Paul Quinn at the TLS here.

You probably won’t have heard of Frederick Bruce Thomas. He doesn’t feature in history books and failed to make the cut for the American National Biography. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry but that may be about to change. Vladimir Alexandrov’s new book, The Black Russian, tells Frederick Thomas’s life story, and – hold on to your eyelids – it’s quite a tale. Indeed it’s so colourful and improbable that it reads more like a novel than a work of historical biography. It begins as a classic rags to riches story: poor boy leaves downtrodden parents and seeks to make his fortune. But Frederick Thomas’s point of departure is already far from ordinary. He was the son of ex-slaves who farmed in America’s Deep South. His life might easily have ended in the grinding poverty that was the lot of so many of Mississippi’s freed slaves. But a remarkable set of circumstances enabled him to escape his roots and reinvent himself as an entrepreneurial millionaire. Bizarrely, he made his fortune not in America, the land of opportunity, but in tsarist Russia, a reactionary autocracy riddled with obscurantism.

more from Giles Milton at Literary Review here.

We do not arrive at any idea of what is best for the collective unless we are prepared to seize the day and practise it on our own behalf. Most mature individuals understand what this means in respect of themselves – it’s just all those feckless others that they don’t trust to act appropriately. And so, by one means or another, they seek to organise society in such a way as to corral the human kine and herd them towards pastures new. But really, the sweet-smelling grass is beneath our hoofs right now: what is required is that we take pleasure in what is available to us. I said above that my pessimism resulted in an epicureanism when it came to personal life. Unfortunately, in our gastro-fixated culture, the epicurean is associated with fancy concoctions of wheatgrass, rather than the stuff growing close to hand. We need to redress this balance and understand that once the basic necessities of life are accounted for, all the rest can be creative and even wilful. The optimist can never embrace this perspective, driven as she is by an inchoate need that can always be shaped by others so as to tantalise her. The optimist – again, paradoxically – lives in fear of a future that she endeavours, futilely, to control.

more from Will Self at The New Statesman here.

Zadie Smith in The Guardian:

What's this novel about? My books don't seem to me to be about anything other than the people in them and the sentences used to construct them. Which makes NW sound like an “exercise in style”, a phrase you generally hear people using as an insult of one kind or another. But to me, an exercise in style is not a superficial matter – our lives are also an exercise in style. The hidden content of people's lives proves a very hard thing to discern: all we really have to go on are these outward, manifest signs, the way people speak, move, dress, treat each other. And that's what I try to concern myself with in fiction: the way of things in reality, as far as I am able to see and interpret them, which may not be especially far.

When I was writing this novel what I really wanted to do was create people in language. To do that you must try to do justice simultaneously to the unruly, subjective qualities of language, and to what I want to call the concrete “thingyness” of people. Which was Virginia Woolf's way of being a modernist – she loved language and people simultaneously – and her model is important to me. I admire Beckett and respect Joyce. I love Woolf. Whenever the going gets tough I reread her journals and it helps me through. What inspired this novel? Two seeds seem important, one involving thingyness and the other, language.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

A glass of champagne is often synonymous with toasting some of life’s biggest moments—a big promotion at work, weddings, the New Year. So too, is the tickle that revelers feel against their skin when they drink from long-stemmed flutes filled with bubbly. There’s more to that fizz than just a pleasant sensation, though. Inside a freshly poured glass of champagne, or really any sparking wine, hundreds of bubbles are bursting every second. Tiny drops are ejected up to an inch above the surface with a powerful velocity of nearly 10 feet per second. They carry aromatic molecules up to our noses, foreshadowing the flavor to come.

In Uncorked: The Science of Champagne, recently revised and translated into English, physicist Gerard Liger-Belair explains the history, science and art of the wine. His book also features high-speed photography of champagne bubbles in action and stop-motion photography of the exact moment a cork pops (potentially at a speed of 31 miles per hour (!). Such technology allows Liger-Belair to pair the sommelier with the scientist. “Champagne making is indeed a three-century-old art, but it can obviously benefit from the latest advances in science,” he says. Liger-Belair became interested in the science of bubbles while sipping a beer after his finals at Paris University about 20 years ago. The bubbles in champagne, he explains, are actually vehicles for the flavor and smell of champagne, elements that contribute to our overall sipping experience. They are also integral to the winemaking process, which produces carbon dioxide not once but twice. Stored away in a cool cellar, the champagne, which could be a blend of up to 40 different varietals, ferments slowly in the bottle. When the cork is popped, the carbon dioxide escapes in the form of Liger’s beloved bubbles. Once poured, bubbles form on several spots on the glass, detach and then rise toward the surface, where they burst, emitting a crackling sound and sending a stream of tiny droplets upward.

More here.

Lents District

Whenever I return a fight breaks out
in the park, someone buys a lottery ticket,
steals a bottle of vodka, lights
a cigarette underneath the overpass.
205 rips the neighborhood in half
the way the Willamette rips the city in half.
It sounds like the ocean
if I am sitting alone in the backyard
looking up at the lilac.
This is where white kids lived
and listened to Black Sabbath
while they beat the shit out of each other
for bragging rights,
running in packs, carrying baseball bats
that were cut from the same trees
our parents had planted
before the Asian kids moved in
to run the mini-marts
and carry knives to school, before the Mexicans
moved in and mowed everyone’s front yard –
white kids wanting anything
anybody ever took from them in shaved heads
and combat boots.
On the weekend our furious mothers
applied their lipstick
that left red cuts on the ends of their Marlboro Reds
and our fathers quietly did whatever
fathers do
when trying to keep the dogs of sorrow
from tearing them limb from limb.
Lents, I have been away so long
I imagine that you’re a musical
some rich kid from New York wrote about debt,
then threw in Kool-Aid
to make it funny. I can see the dance line,
the high kicks of the skinheads, twirling
metal pipes, stomping in unison
while the committed rage of the Gypsy Jokers
square off with the committed rage
of the single mothers.
In the end someone gets evicted, someone
gets jumped into his new family
and they call themselves Los Brazos,
King Cobras, South-Side White Pride.
Dear Lents, dear 82nd avenue, dear 92nd and Foster,
I am your strange son.
You saved me when I needed saving,
your arms wrapped around
my bassinet like patrol cars wrapped around
the school yard
the night Jason went crazy –
waving his father’s gun above his head,
bathed in red and blue flashing lights,
all-American, broken in half and beautiful.

by Matthew Dickman
from All-American Poem
American Poetry Review, 2008

David Beer in Berfrois:

It has become an accepted motif of the day, perhaps even a cliché, that data about our lives are captured and harvested in multifarious ways. The rise of powerful new media infrastructures has made this escalation of data harvesting possible. These infrastructures have become the backdrop to everyday life, and are virtually ubiquitous and inescapable in their scope. We live within them.

This is not really news to most: we are fairly aware of the fact that our actions have the potential to generate data. In many ways, data harvesting exists as a purely abstract concept – we know that data about us are being extracted but we are not sure in exactly what form, what they capture or how they are being used – yet it is still seen to be a material reality of everyday life. We even expect to give up some data from time to time.

But why is this? How did it happen? When we think of the data generated about us we often think big, very big in fact. Visions of data harvesting tend to conjure up images of global proportions. We might think about new forms of capitalism, monolithic commercial organisations, about transactions and information, about vast networks or databases, about powerful software and predictive analytics and even about questions of governance and political transparency. These are clearly all very important issues that need attention, but as a result of this focus we often miss the lived realities of by-product data that are to be found within the mundane routines of everyday life.

Dissent has a symposium on Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers and Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, with Bruce Robbins, James Livingston, Corey Robin, and Michael Kazin. Bruce Robbins:

As a believer in a broad-church left that wanted both to see Obama reelected and to hope that once reelected he can be prevailed upon to do things differently this time around, I feel well represented by these two excellent books, each of which finds a compelling public voice for convictions very like my own. I have certainly not thought about what the left should be as seriously as both Corey Robin and Michael Kazin clearly have. If I suspected that this panel demanded a public display of factionalism, I wouldn’t have agreed to be on it. What I assumed is, the Society for U.S. Intellectual History being an organization devoted to intellectual history and intellectual history moving more slowly than the presidential election cycle, it would make sense, even in the pre- and post-election frenzy, to talk about longer-term issues and perhaps a view of the left that’s also a view of the academy, which Lord knows also runs on slower cycles.

First, however, a couple of observations on the two books we’ve been asked to discuss.

Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation announces that it’s arguing against the idea that the American left has been a “failure.” Much as I would like to agree and moved as I am by the exemplary lives gathered in its pages, it’s hard for me to feel that the book entirely avoids the conclusion it says it’s arguing against. This seems to me a story, as Kazin puts it, of “political marginality and cultural influence.” In other words, I think it’s saying that the left has been a success in the domain of culture but a failure in the domain of politics, the domain that has always been taken to define left and right.

Assuming that the book is trying to say that this combination of success and failure ought to be thought of as less of a failure and more of a success than many of us might have thought—Michael is here to pronounce one way or the other—it seems to me that it could use a sharper polemical engagement with those on the other side of the question who are still dumbfounded by the loss of the white male working-class majority and who think cultural progressives are crazy to imagine that any progress has been made as long as drones circle overhead and economic inequality continues to be as dramatic as it is.

Jaspreet Singh in the NYT [h/t: Meghant Sudan]:

Thomas Bernhard, the great Austrian author, created several curious characters in his short play “The German Lunch Table.” An ordinary extended family sits down for a meal around a “natural oak” table, but somewhere down the line they find Nazis in the soup. Nazis in the soup. Nazi soup. The mother complains: When I open packages of noodles in the kitchen, I find Nazis inside the packages and they always enter the soup.

When I first read the play, I wondered if it could be adapted for Indian stage, especially in the context of the Sikh pogrom in November 1984 in the days following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.

My first response, and I have not been able to revise it, was that the Bernhard play would fail to work in India because the perpetrators and the organizers of the pogrom were never punished. Some of the accused rose to become ministers in the Congress government; some became members of the Indian Parliament. In the Indian context, it is the victims and survivors who have a real and pressing need to hide inside packets of noodles. From time to time, their impoverished bodies and ghostly voices do manage to enter the soups served on powerful lunch tables in the Indian capital. At times, the dead themselves enter the curries of those who shield the guilty or suppress or silence a tragic history.

In Delhi, every year busloads of tourists visit the memorials established by the Indian government for the late Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi, and her son Rajiv Gandhi. These “memorials” are “forgetorials”; they do not inform the visitors of the chillingly sinister justification provided by Mr. Gandhi for the Sikh pogrom: “The ground does shake when a big tree falls.”