Sara Reardon in Nature:

In the wake of terrorist attacks last week on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Paris supermarket, the world has struggled to understand the combination of religion, European culture and influence from terrorist organizations that drove the gunmen. Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, studies such questions by interviewing would-be and convicted terrorists about their extreme commitment to their organizations and ideals. Atran recently returned from Paris, where he talked with members of the shooters’ communities. He spoke with Nature about what he discovered.

What sociological and cultural factors are behind the Paris attacks?

Unlike the United States, where immigrants achieve average socioeconomic status and education within a generation, in Europe even after three generations, depending on the country, they’re 5–19 times more likely to be poor or less educated. France has about 7.5% Muslims and [they make] up to 60–75% of the prison population. It’s a very similar situation to black youth in the United States.

The difference is here’s an ideology that appeals to them, it’s something that’s very attractive to more people than you might think. In France, a poll by [ICM Research] showed that 27% of young French people, not just Muslims, between 18 and 24 had a favourable attitude toward the Islamic State. The jihad is the only systemic cultural ideology that’s effective, that’s growing, that’s attractive, that's glorious — that basically says to these young people, “Look, you're on the outs, nobody cares about you, but look what we can do. We can change the world.”

And of course they are. These three lowlifes, they managed to capture the entire world’s attention for the better part of a week. They mobilized all of French society. That’s a pretty good cost–benefit for the bad guys.

More here.

Fawzia Naqvi in Kafila:

Pakistan has become a euphemism for insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different outcome. There are though some incredibly brave, thoughtful, humane and patriotic Pakistani men and women who have decided enough is enough and they are determined to chart a different future for the country. After speaking with one of these activist leaders I was reminded of the Russian author Ivan Turganev’s heroes Bazarov, the young Nihilist from Fathers and Sons or Insarov, the Bulgarian revolutionary from On the Eve. Youthful, galvanized, resolute, compelled by the rightness of the cause and their destiny, dreaming of a new country and their place within it, they were the first glimpse of “the new men,” lonely and ultimately tragic. In 1860 Turganev’s heroes were ahead of their time, pulling along a people unwilling to change tradition and unwilling to cede privilege. In 2015 Pakistan, there is a huge obstacle in the way of these courageous souls. They are outnumbered by the rest of us.

The time has come for each of us to recall what it was we were doing when our children were being executed in Peshawar. Is there even a word which encompasses the horror when 135 children are executed? Make no mistake it was our collective shrug which has tipped Pakistan over the edge and into this very dark abyss. It was our collective indifference which let these children be stalked by death at the hands of cold blooded murderers who went from child to child executing them that December 16 morning in Peshawar. We let our children die alone and scared, with no one to comfort them except other wounded and dying children.

More here.

Bloodlines

I.

Even in the dark, I’m ashamed of my lemon breasts,
my peach-fuzzed midsection. I want to go back
home to my father. To my bed with the threadbare
blanket, the hand-carved cross over the headboard.
I want a God-fearing man, hands roughed by fields.

Augusto is a pretty boy with a new blue bicycle.
He rides into the next town, buys all the things
my mother assures me will make for a good life.
But the patch of blood on the bed sheets promises
different, promises thorns no bread or gold can dull.

II.

In America, I’m a maid at the Ramada , I
rent an apartment on Market Street. Broken English
and bad fruit. Pigeons as pets. My two children
in a one-bedroom. A Technicolor TV with antennas
sky-high. Double-locked doors. Barred windows.

An ironbound city, the unfamiliar cacophony: honks
of trailer horns, the bloody spur of factory smoke,
the brandied laughter of construction workers. I try
to sing the lullaby I’d hum to my brothers in the dark
over the news anchor’s Más lluvia para mañana!

III.

Tonight, my granddaughter sits in my kitchen
and considers the importance of bloodlines, waits
for the words to pop like champagne grapes.
Blood from my veins into her veins
until we are both blue with life. Outside, the song

gulls sing as they look for food separates the wind
from the hymn of pine needles. She writes a poem
to remember me, to remember it all— sweat and tears,
Portuguese ancestry, and of course, blood, to run roots
through my future great-granddaughter’s bones.
.

by Maria Carreira
from Acentos Review
November 2014

Paul French in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Every so often, a novel that captures the essence and flavors of the modern China experience is published — yet seemingly totally escapes the attentions of the devoted China reading crowd. They praise and discuss, absorb and dissect other, often distinctly inferior, novels, while Lawrence Osborne’s The Ballad of a Small Player has attracted no attention and fallen through the cracks of the Sinology drain. Yet Osborne has written an acutely observed novel detailing one part of the contemporary China experience and he deserves to be widely read. In fact, I’m going to just go right on and out and say it — Osborne’s novel is the best on contemporary China since Malraux’s Man’s Fate (which, rather depressingly, means we might have to wait another 80 years for the next one!)

Macau, the former Portuguese colony off the coast of southern China, is a distinctly little written-about place. It deserves more. In the 1930s, Macau gained a reputation for sin and wickedness, epithets that have long lingered over the place. The American noir writer Sherwood King wrote If I Die Before I Wake in 1938. The book became the basis for the Orson Welles-Rita Hayworth film The LadyFrom Shanghai in 1947. In the novel, Elsa Bannister, a White Russian of dubious reputation, born of refugees in Chefoo, on the China coast, explains her past: “Chefoo is the second wickedest city of earth.” The first? “Macau,” she exclaims, without a moment’s hesitation.

More here.

Alex Bellos in The Guardian:

Harriss was overjoyed when he first saw the spiral because it was aesthetically appealing – one of his primary aims was to draw branching spirals like you might find in Islamic art or the work of Gustav Klimt. But he was particularly delighted because he arrived at the spiral using a very simple mathematical process.

“It’s not hard to make something that no one has seen before,” he said. “It’s more difficult to make something mathematically satisfying that people haven’t seen before.”

His first concern was that maybe someone else had had, in fact, drawn the spiral “One thing about mathematical discoveries and mathematical art is that even if the process is completely new there is no guarantee that someone else has not already explored it.”

It turned out that the ratio 1.325, which gives you the rectangle that creates the Harriss spiral has been written about – it is known as the “plastic number” – but Harriss could find no previous drawings of the spiral. (In fact, the ratio is a number that begins 1.32472… and carries on forever).

More here.

Ken Roth in the Los Angeles Times:

The Israel exception to Western governments' human rights principles has been starkly on display in the reaction to the Palestinian Authority's decision to join the International Criminal Court. In Washington, Ottawa, Paris and London, as well as Tel Aviv, the response has ranged from discouraging to condemnatory. The Palestinian move has been seen as “counterproductive,” “deeply troubl[ing],” “a concerning and dangerous development” that could make a “return to negotiations impossible.” Before accepting these howls of protest, we should ask why, exactly, the Palestinian move is supposed to be bad.

Given the outcry, one would think this move targets only Israel, but the ICC doesn't work that way. Rather, the court will be empowered to prosecute war crimes committed in or from Palestinian territory — that is, crimes committed by Israelis or Palestinians. The court's prosecutor is not dependent on formal complaints by ICC members but can now initiate cases on her own.

Many of the Western objections are based on the argument that having the Palestinians in the ICC will somehow undermine Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations — moribund as they have been. The U.S. State Department opined that it would “damage the atmosphere” for peace.

But the broad parameters for peace have been known for years. What has been lacking is the trust between the two sides to make the painful decisions necessary for a peace accord. Nothing undermines that trust more than impunity for the war crimes that Human Rights Watch has found continue to characterize the conflict, whether settlement expansion, Hamas rocket strikes or Israel's lax attitude toward civilian casualties in Gaza. By helping to deter these crimes, the ICC could discourage these major impediments to peace.

More here.

Jeet Heer at The Paris Review:

“I can’t remember the moment when I fell in love with cartoons, I was so young,” John Updike once recalled in Hogan’s Alley magazine. “I still have a Donald Duck book, on oilclothy paper in big-print format, and remember a smaller, cardboard-covered book based on the animated cartoon Three Little Pigs. It was the intense stylization of those images, with their finely brushed outlines and their rounded and buttony furniture and their faces so curiously amalgamated of human and animal elements, that drew me in, into a world where I, child though I was, loomed as a king, and where my parents and other grownups were strangers.”

This is one of many passages where Updike talks about his childhood love of comics, a theme that recurs not just in essays but also in poems and short stories. What deserves attention in this passage is not only what Updike is saying but the textured and sensual language he’s using when he recalls the “oilclothy paper” and the “buttony furniture.” His tingling prose, where every idea and emotion is rooted in sensory experience, owes much to such modern masters as Joyce, Proust, and Nabokov, but it was also sparked by the cartoon images he saw in childhood, which trained his eyes to see visual forms as aesthetically pleasing. Indeed, the comparison with Nabokov is instructive since the Russian-born author of Lolita was also a cartoon fan.

more here.

Tom Shone at More Intelligent Life:

Iñárritu is not the only Mexican searching out flesh tones amid the steel of the Hollywood blockbuster. In “Gravity” Alfonso Cuarón signed George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, cast them adrift in outer space, took all the technical resources that pummel us in the summer months and bent them to a stripped-down tale of survival, with explosions ripping soundlessly across the screen and the audience holding their breath while Bullock struggled for hers. Then there is Guillermo del Toro, more of a genre fiend than his compatriots, but on such intimate terms with the gnarled old souls of his monsters—in films like “Pan’s Labyrinth”, “Hellboy” and “Pacific Rim”—that the whole notion of heroism, let alone super-heroism, is left outclassed.

The three directors are friends and run a production company together. But unlike earlier South American directors, who defined themselves in vocal opposition to the Hollywood machine, the three amigos are the children of globalism, as conversant in franchise formulas as they are in Mexico’s indigenous cinema. Working away at the fault-line that separates north from south, blockbuster export from indie import, they are bilingual, speaking Hollywoodese but making up their own grammar and syntax.

It had to happen. Hollywood’s global supremacy over the last 30 years was always going to bring its own form of blowback.

more here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Vidal (1925-2012) was for more than half a century the wittiest gadfly on the American scene, almost a latter-day Mark Twain — but without the lovability of that white-suited curmudgeon. Like Twain, Vidal published best-selling books (“Burr,” “Lincoln”), experimented with literary forms (the gender-shifting comedy “Myra Breckinridge”), produced scores of cultural and political pieces (the collected essays, titled “United States,” run to a thousand pages) and was a charismatic storyteller and performer.

But where Twain cultivated his plain-folks image, Vidal was clearly a patrician, a scion of the American aristocracy. His immediate family included a grandfather who was a distinguished senator, a gold-digger mother (who once slept with Clark Gable) and a father who had starred on the gridiron at West Point, competed in the Olympics and helped build the American airline industry. During one of his mother’s marriages, Jacqueline Bouvier (later Mrs. John F. Kennedy) became a kind of stepsister.

more here.

Mehdi Hasan in New Statesman:

In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a “bid to assassinate” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (Stephen Fry)? It was a crime – not an act of war – perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004. Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t). Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif’” – the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted? . . . Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?

More here.

Andrew Bisharat in National Geographic:

Expect Nothing

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
.

by Alice Walker

Another take on
expecting nothing

Ali Minai in Brown Pundits:

As with most organized religions, the foundational texts and beliefs of Islam can support both peaceful versions and violent ones. Until people recognize and admit that all of these are, in fact, “real Islam”, the issues underlying the problem of jihadi militancy cannot be addressed. If the violence is “not real Islam”, the implication is that Islam – as practiced by most Muslims – needs no reform. But that is manifestly not the case. The scourge of violence in the name of Islam will be removed only when Muslims in general come to reject all instances of violence in the name of Islam, including those that are celebrated in scripture and history. When conquerors who killed “infidels” are regarded as heroes of the faith; when the world is seen as divided into the “house of Islam” and the “house of war”; when dying for God is considered better than living for the sake of fellow humans; when non-Muslims are regarded as morally inferior; when many standard prayers end by asking God for “victory against the infidels”; and when apostasy and blasphemy are regarded as capital crimes – how can jihadi violence be seen as anything but the logical conclusion of such ideas and practices? And yet, these are all part of “mainstream” Islam – some of them derived directly from holy texts. What the extremists are doing is merely taking these ideas more literally and acting on them. The main thing separating most ordinary believing Muslims from the extremists is not so much the narrowness of belief – which they both share – but the willingness to match that belief with action. Small wonder, then, that the militants see non-violent Muslims as hypocrites, which in many ways is worse than being an infidel.

More here.

Kashalkar’s performance was dedicated to jod ragas, a particularly challenging melodic form. When singing a jod raga, the musician must fully elaborate two conjoined ragas—the complex melodic modes at the centre of Indian classical music. Each raga evokes a range of moods, and in a jod raga, the musician moves from one to the other only through their common swaras, or notes, attempting to keep the ambience of each distinct. Even while presenting a single raga, the singer faces the challenge of sustaining an emotional intensity, so that the rendition does not lapse into dry, mechanical exercise.

more here.

Patrick Duffy at The Dublin Review of Books:

The passenger pigeon (Ecotopistes migratorius), so-called because of its wandering, unpredictable migratory behaviour, ranged in enormous flocks from Canada to Florida, probably accounting for more than a quarter of all birds in North America. As a metaphor for the environmental impact of colonial settlement in the sixteenth, and population explosion in the nineteenth century, its extinction has many lessons. When European settlers made first contact with North America, they encountered an environment teeming with wildlife of incredible abundance. The awesomeness of American nature in the eyes of travellers from the Old World is well represented in accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Even before permanent settlement, the vast codfish shoals off Newfoundland were well-known to Europeans. By the 1630s French missionaries in Quebec were talking about une infinité de Tourtelles (turtle doves), feeding on wild raspberries, strawberries, acorns, grapes and the seeds of the forest – oak acorns, beech mast, red maple and American elm seeds, hazel and alder. The core range of the wild pigeon corresponded with the eastern and southern deciduous trees, and ultimately its fate was bound up with the fate of the forests.

more here.

Roxana Robinson at The Nation:

Marilynne Robinson’s novels are beautifully rendered works of realism, which is perhaps our most distinguished literary genre. They are intellectually complex and emotionally compelling. Miraculously, they also manage to be accessible, popular and commercially successful. So in many ways Robinson is a mainstream author, but in others she is in direct opposition to the traditions of Anglo-American literature.

Despite our various personal and political commitments to religion, when it comes to literature we have become a decidedly secular nation. The presence of religious doctrine, or Scripture, or theology, in mainstream fiction is scant. Religion seems directly at variance with the skeptical, rational, pragmatic realism that dominates our literary tradition. Whatever question the novel poses, God is not the answer.

In Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay muses, with conventional piety, “We are in the hands of the Lord. But instantly she was annoyed with herself…she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean…. The insincerity…roused her, annoyed her.” Now she wants to purify that lie “out of existence” and goes on to think, “How could any Lord have made this world?… there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that.” Mrs. Ramsay’s calm pronouncement affirms that it is possible to love the world, and the people in it, without a belief in God.

How would religion enter into fiction anyway?

more here.

Michelle Starr in CNet:

It's commonly accepted that life expectancy in the Middle Ages was pretty low, hovering around the early 30s — mainly because of the hazards of childhood. If a person made it to adulthood, the average was in the 60s — but, although that's comparable with today's global life expectancy, the world was still a much more dangerous — and openly vicious — place. It wasn't, for example, unusual for popes and kings to be assassinated.

Take Cangrande I della Scala. Born in 1291, he rose to rule Verona in 1311 at the age of 20, and was a skilled warrior and ruler, claiming several additional territories for his family's rule. He was also the most prominent patron of poet Dante Alighieri, and was considered a brave, yet merciful man.

In the year 1328, at the age of 37, he took possession of the Padua region, after 16 years of bloody conflict. In 1329, he prepared to move on Mantua, formerly the seat of a trusted ally with whom he had become estranged, but postponed the action due to a change of government at Treviso, a territory long contested and the last slice of the Veneto region to fall into his control.

But his triumphal procession into Treviso was spoiled by a sudden, sharp illness. Rumour had it that Cangrande had become ill after drinking from a polluted spring a few days before. The most powerful man in Verona's history reached his lodgings four days after entering Treviso, took to bed and promptly died on 22 July 1329, at the age of 38. Immediately, rumours proliferated that someone had poisoned the nobleman.

Now, a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science has revealed that the rumoured poisoning was actually the case.

More here.

David Blair in The Telegraph:

Qatar and Saudi Arabia have ignited a “time bomb” by funding the global spread of radical Islam, according to a former commander of British forces in Iraq.

General Jonathan Shaw, who retired as Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff in 2012, told The Telegraph that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were primarily responsible for the rise of the extremist Islam that inspires Isil terrorists.

The two Gulf states have spent billions of dollars on promoting a militant and proselytising interpretation of their faith derived from Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth century scholar, and based on the Salaf, or the original followers of the Prophet.

But the rulers of both countries are now more threatened by their creation than Britain or America, argued Gen Shaw. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) has vowed to topple the Qatari and Saudi regimes, viewing both as corrupt outposts of decadence and sin.

So Qatar and Saudi Arabia have every reason to lead an ideological struggle against Isil, said Gen Shaw. On its own, he added, the West's military offensive against the terrorist movement was likely to prove “futile”.

“This is a time bomb that, under the guise of education, Wahhabi Salafism is igniting under the world really. And it is funded by Saudi and Qatari money and that must stop,” said Gen Shaw. “And the question then is 'does bombing people over there really tackle that?' I don't think so. I'd far rather see a much stronger handle on the ideological battle rather than the physical battle.”

More here.