Nicholas Clairmont in Big Think:

Ours is a cultural and linguistic moment obsessed with irony.

For just that reason, people need to stop using the word 'literally' to mean 'figuratively'. I am not the first to say this. Yet the point failed to sink in. Worse, prompted by the addition of the non-literal sense of 'literal' to several dictionaries, including the Oxford Enflish Dictionary Online, the usage is getting even more accepted.

The situation is also getting worse because the flames are being fanned by several reactionary articles which claim that the usage which means 'figuratively' is perfectly legitimate. They make this claim based on three lines of reasoning: That the usage is very old, that nobody actually gets confused by the two meanings, and that language evolves naturally and we must simply describe it and conform to it, rather than judge it or make prescriptions for it.

I will describe precisely why this usage is a bad thing for the language. But first, because all of the above arguments are faulty, I want to take the time to point out why:

Bad Reason 1: “Aha!” they point out. “The usage is not some horrible new invention of the millennials, it has been around for a very long time, in the dictionary since 1903, and first used in 1759!”

This point tends to be the primary data used to make the non-literal use of 'literally' look legitimate to detractors. Why the hell does this matter to anyone?

More here.

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

It remains to be seen whether this latest lurch into war will pay off or not, and whether the United States and its allies will have saved lives or squandered them. But the real question we should be asking is: Why does this keep happening? Why do such different presidents keep doing such similar things? How can an electorate that seemed sick of war in 2008 watch passively while one war escalates in 2009 and another one gets launched in 2011? How can two political parties that are locked in a nasty partisan fight over every nickel in the government budget sit blithely by and watch a president start running up a $100 million per day tab in this latest adventure? What is going on here?

Here are my Top 5 Reasons Why America Keeps Fighting Foolish Wars:

1. Because We Can.
The most obvious reason that the United States keeps doing these things is the fact that it has a remarkably powerful military, especially when facing a minor power like Libya. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, when you've got hundreds of planes, smart bombs, and cruise missiles, the whole world looks like a target set. So when some thorny problem arises somewhere in the world, it's hard to resist the temptation to “do something!”

More here.

Soniah Kamal at her website:

Can you tell us a little about your writing/revision process?

I write on an empty stomach. The first draft is hand-written in a slim notebook that I keep with me. I like to take a break before revising, so I have some distance from the work and I can be super-critical. I revise on the computer and I revise multiple times, typically with tea and almonds.

Any advice for a beginning writer?

Read a rich variety of works. Don’t ignore the voices in your head—they’ll never say anything unimportant to an artist. Be kind to yourself when writing and harsh when editing. I believe that “there is no great writing, only great rewriting.”

A favorite essay/memoir/short story on the topic of identity and borders?

Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh” is a classic. NovelsAli and Nino by Kurban Said and People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks explore identity in poignant ways. I find Ibtisam Barakat’sTasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood to be one of the most moving, beautiful memoirs dealing with identity and borders.

Your favorite social media tool?

Facebook

More here.

Berlin’s image as an outpost of America within Germany was established long before the 1920s. Mass spectator sport in the form of six-day cycle races antedated the war; the first such event was held in New York in 1896, and they were introduced into Berlin in 1909. In Georg Kaiser’s Expressionist drama Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight, probably written in 1912), the mass excitement aroused by a cycle race leads the protagonist briefly to hope that such collective feeling can form the basis for a new society. The editors take a gloomier view, seeing in such large-scale sporting events the prototype for the mass spectacles organized under the Third Reich; the Berlin Olympics of 1936 come readily to mind. The narrative that emerges from the extracts assembled by Frisby and Boyd Whyte inevitably terminates in the Third Reich. Hitler’s state did not reject the modernity typified by Berlin, but adapted and redirected it. For example, the factory of the Borsig engineering company in Tegel was used to produce anti-aircraft guns instead of locomotives. Light effects like those at Karstadt were further developed so that Mussolini, paying a state visit in 1937, was greeted as he drove along Unter den Linden by the semblance of hundreds of golden eagles.

more from Ritchie Robertson at the TLS here.

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, 1990. A lady named Clara lies dying in a nursing home. As she declines, she has strange dreams and hallucinations. Fragments of her life come back to her in snatches. She sees herself in her old house in Omaha, Nebraska. All the furniture is gone. She sees rain falling through a hatch in the ceiling and freezing into icicles. One day she sees a newspaper unroll on a screen above her, and all the news is of tiny fleeting moments—someone finding a penny, or doing the dishes, or picking up a coaster from a table. “I thought there was something so strangely beautiful about that,” Chris Ware says. “There’s no telling what one will remember. It makes no sense, but there will be these moments that glow in our memories.” Clara was his grandmother, and he has been thinking about this ever since. Ware is America’s most subtle and original graphic novelist, but for the sake of simplicity he often calls himself a cartoonist.

more from Simon Willis at More Intelligent Life here.

What will become of the EU countries outside a more tightly co-ordinated Eurozone? In Au Revoir, Europe: What if Britain Left the EU? David Charter, a Times journalist, argues that the combined dynamics of growing Euroscepticism in the UK and increasing integration in the Eurozone mean that London will either have to negotiate a form of second-tier membership – some have proposed making a virtue of a looser outer ring, which could include Turkey and the Balkan states as well as Britain – or quit the EU altogether. One can see why many in Europe might welcome that possibility. Britain has loyally fulfilled De Gaulle’s prediction that it would serve as a Trojan horse for US interests in Europe. Cameron has lately spared no efforts in defending London’s derivative traders – mostly subsidiaries of US banks – from EU regulation, let alone taxes, while backing savage austerity programmes and urging Germany to step up to the mark. Charter’s history of the UK’s relationship with Europe is a useful reminder that much of what people loathe about the EU has been the result of British intervention. Polls say a majority would favour a single market – Thatcher’s dream – without the mass of EU regulations, but the latter are a precondition for the former. By the 1980s, every advanced industrial economy had built up its own web of health and safety rules, not without reason: specifications for product labelling; safety requirements for electrical appliances; protocols for food standards and abattoir inspection agencies; restrictions on toxic substances, such as lead paint on children’s toys.

more from Susan Watkins at the LRB here.

Shinnosuke Nakayama in Scientific American:

In humans, leaders generally show higher scores in certain personality traits, notably extraversion. Similarly, in animals, bolder and more active individuals tend to be found as leaders. Evolutionary theories suggest that boldness and leadership can coevolve through positive feedback. Individuals who force their preferences on others are more likely to be followed, which in turn encourages these individuals to initiate more often. This feedback results in distinct social roles for leaders and followers within a group, as shown by several experimental studies. It would therefore seem that leaders and followers are born through natural selection, and that you have no chance of becoming a leader if you are born a follower. But our work with stickleback fish suggests that while followers may not have what it takes to lead, leaders can learn to follow. In our paper, we tested the nature of leaders and followers using pairs of fish. Sticklebacks are well known for showing individual differences in boldness, such as when foraging. When they emerge from safe cover to a risky foraging area, the bolder fish are more likely to initiate collective movement, while the shyer animals tend to follow.

We forced the pairs of fish to take opposite roles to see if they could switch with a little training. The shy fish was rewarded with a small amount of food every time it initiated collective movement, regardless of whether it was followed by the bolder partner or not. The bolder fish was also rewarded every time it followed the shyer member, but not when it emerged from safe cover by itself. In this way, we trained pairs to swap their natural roles and compared their behavior to the pairs that assume their natural roles. Our prediction was that bold individuals would perform poorly when forced to become followers, because they are less responsive to the behavior of others in their natural role, while shy individuals would adopt the role of leader more easily. However, the results were completely opposite: for both bold and shy individuals, the tendency to lead is much less flexible than the tendency to follow. The bold fish readily adapted to following but the shy fish could not be trained to lead, even when it learnt to stop following the other fish.

More here.

White Spine

Liar, I thought, kneeling with the others,
how can He love me and hate what I am?
The dome of St. Peter's shone yellowish
gold, like butter and eggs. My God, I prayed
anyhow, as if made in the image
and likeness of Him. Nearby, a handsome
priest looked at me like a stone; I looked back,
not desiring to go it alone.
The college of cardinals wore punitive red.
The white spine waved to me from his white throne.
Being in a place not my own, much less
myself, I climbed out, a beast in a crib.
Somewhere a terrorist rolled a cigarette.
Reason, not faith, would change him.

by Henri Cole
from The Visible Man
Knopf, 1998

Over at the NYRB, recording of the five panels of the following event:

On June 22, 2013, at Wadham College, Oxford, The New York Review held a free conference to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary and to honor the lives, work, and legacy of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams. Cosponsored by The New York Review of Books Foundation, Fritt Ord, All Souls College, The Europaeum, Wadham College, and Wolfson College, the conference included remarks by Avishai Margalit, Alan Ryan, Mary Warnock, John Gray, Helena Kennedy, Mark Lilla, Naomi Eilan, Edward Skidelsky, Jerome Bruner, Samuel Scheffler, Jeremy Waldron, Timothy Garton Ash, and Marc Stears. The sessions were chaired by Robert Silvers, John Vickers, Hermione Lee, and Ken Macdonald.

Teju Cole over at the New Yorker's blog Page Turner:

In 1913, a compilation of Gustave Flaubert’s satirical definitions was posthumously published as “Le Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues” (“The Dictionary of Received Ideas”). Flaubert hated cliché, a hatred that expressed itself not only in the pristine prose of “Madame Bovary” but also in his letters and notes on the thoughtless platitudes of the day. “The Dictionary of Received Ideas” is a complaint against automatic thinking. What galls Flaubert most is the inevitability, given an action, of a certain standard reaction. We could learn from his impatience: there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight.

Flaubert’s “Dictionary” inspired me to try something similar, over the course of a few hours, on Twitter. I think, also, there was the influence of Ambrose Bierce and his cynical “Devil’s Dictionary,” Samuel Johnson’s mostly serious but occasionally coruscating “Dictionary of the English Language,” and Gelett Burgess’s now-forgotten send-up of platitudes, “Are You a Bromide?” What the entries in these books have in common, in addition to compression and wit, is an intolerance of stupidity. As I wrote my modern cognates, I was struck at how close some of them came to the uninterrogated platitudes in my own head. Stupidity stalks us all.

Ian Hurd in the Boston Review:

The Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that “the use of force without the approval of the United Nations Security Council is a very grave violation of international law.” He used these words to argue against American and other outside intervention against the Syrian government after its chemical weapons massacre. He also stepped into one of the most hotly contested topics in international law: is it permissible for governments to use force against another country to prevent human rights atrocities?

There are three views on the question and all are on display in the current debates over Syria. As President Obama decides on an American response, he too will have to take a position on these issues.

Lavrov expressed a common view of international law: the U.N. Charter forbids countries from “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” This makes war illegal. It is a descendant of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, the first general treaty to outlaw war.

Having spent a decade as Ambassador to the United Nations, Lavrov knows well that the U.N. Charter makes no allowance for the intentions of the states involved. Except in self-defense, the Charter outlaws all war-making by states, and is unconcerned with the motivation of the states involved. Whether a state intends to save a population from genocide, to punish a neighbor for an insult, or to gain territory by aggression, the Charter treats all the same. All are forbidden by Article 2(4).

More here.

Fifty years ago today, 250,000 people joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Dissent‘s Tom Kahn worked closely with veteran socialist and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin to organize the March. In “The Power of the March—and After,” Kahn traced the March’s history back to labor leader A. Philip Randolph’s 1940 plan to demonstrate in the capital for an end to wartime employment discrimination (called off once Franklin Roosevelt conceded certain demands). Echoing the speech delivered by John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Kahn identified the promise of the march with the prospect of continued militancy:

At the Lincoln Memorial, a quarter of a million people pledged to continue the struggle at home—in the streets as well as in the courts. This pledge may well turn out to be more important than the eloquent speeches or the specific demands. The streets were the incubators of the March on Washington, and it was pressures from the streets that fused jobs and freedom into a single slogan. Action in the streets in cities and towns across the country, in keeping with the pledge, will keep the March on Washington Movement alive and militant.

more from The Editors at Dissent here.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that called for equal rights for African-Americans, Getty has published a book of Magnum photographer Leonard Freed’s photographs titled This Is the Day: The March on Washington. Included in the book are 75 previously unpublished images Freed made that focus on moments both quiet and profound before, during, and after the march. There is also a selection of images from the 20th-anniversary march that took place in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 27, 1983. Freed, who died in 2006, was a Brooklyn, N.Y.–born photographer who discovered his craft in 1953. He joined Magnum in 1972 and became known for his images of the American civil rights movement. Paul Farber, visiting assistant professor of writing at Haverford College, met Freed’s widow, Brigitte Freed, in 2009 and served as a historical adviser and co-curator of This Is the Day. According to Farber, it was Freed who came up with the idea for the book. “She shared with me a germ of an idea she had for a posthumous Leonard Freed book, inspired by words she heard Barack Obama say while on the campaign trail: ‘I am here because somebody marched.’ ”

more from David Rosenberg at Slate here.

From Nature:

Public opinion towards science has made headlines over the past several years for a variety of reasons — mostly negative. High profile cases of academic dishonesty and disputes over funding have left many questioning the integrity and societal value of basic science, while accusations of politically motivated research fly from left and right. There is little doubt that science is value-laden. Allegiances to theories and ideologies can skew the kinds of hypotheses tested and the methods used to test them. These, however, are errors in the application of the method, not the method itself. In other words, it’s possible that public opinion towards science more generally might be relatively unaffected by the misdeeds and biases of individual scientists. In fact, given the undeniable benefits scientific progress yielded, associations with the process of scientific inquiry may be quite positive. Researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara set out to test this possibility. They hypothesized that there is a deep-seated perception of science as a moral pursuit — its emphasis on truth-seeking, impartiality and rationality privileges collective well-being above all else. Their new study, published in the journal PLOSOne, argues that the association between science and morality is so ingrained that merely thinking about it can trigger more moral behavior. The researchers conducted four separate studies to test this.

…Across all these different measures, the researchers found consistent results. Simply being primed with science-related thoughts increased a) adherence to moral norms, b) real-life future altruistic intentions, and c) altruistic behavior towards an anonymous other. The conceptual association between science and morality appears strong.

More here.

Winter Finch
.
The small red finch
so deftly slips
from the swaddling
and unseeing snow
that all envelops,
and buries all,
he thrills
and puffs
his buff red bib,
flicks his tail,
turns the lanterns
on his wings, left
right, left,
preens the gold
fleck on his
pope and
aims
his beak
with an inspired eye
t’wards the ash’s
knobbly buds,
vibrates
his craw
as if an ember
sets his throat
ablush –

and –

from the frozen holly,
snow divested
he escapes,
zips a zigzag trail of fire
across
the sky before
he fades,
a tint,
a sound,
that we tell each other,
and withhold,
and re-narrate
under the table lamp
when everything
has turned once more
to white and black
and silence
as before.
.

by Marlene van Niekerk
from Poetry International, 2013
translation by author

Over at the BBC, “A new drama by Sir Tom Stoppard to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon,” incorporating the music into the radio play (h/t: Ajay Chaudhary):