THE isreali OCCUPATION’S HUMILIATION MACHINE

ZaytounBen Ehrenreich at Literary Hub:

After the turnstile came another turnstile. We were being sorted. Some of the turnstiles were more than six feet tall and barred from top to bottom, a sort of revolving door-cum-cage. Some were the waist-high kind you pass through in subways or public libraries. Except that military engineers had these ones custom-built for checkpoints, specially fitted with arms more than 25 percent shorter than the ones used in Israel. The pretext, as always, was security, so that no one could sneak by with bulky explo
sives. But the turnstiles served another function as well, a more important 
one, and it was standing between them in that dank, longitudinal cell—pressed against the people in front of and behind me, smelling the smoke of 
their cigarettes and the anxiety and irritation in their sweat and their 
breath—that I understood for the first time that in its daily functioning, the 
prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from 
their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its 
checkpoints and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a 
giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the 
production of human despair.

That was the battle. The land mattered to everyone, but despite all the 
nationalist anthems and slogans, the harder fight was the struggle to simply stand and not be broken. It was no accident that clashes tended to occur 
at checkpoints, and it wasn’t just at the soldiers manning them that people 
threw stones. It was at the entire, cruel machine that the soldiers both 
guarded and stood in for, and its grinding insistence that they accept their 
defeat.[1] They knew—even the kids knew—that they couldn’t break it or 
even dent it and they usually couldn’t even hit it, but by fighting, by dancing and dodging fast enough and with sufficient wit and furor, they could 
avoid being caught in its gears. For a while they could, or they could try to.

more here.

Abbas Kiarostami, Palme d’Or-winning Iranian film-maker, dies aged 76

KiarostamiAndrew Pulver and Saeed Kamali Dehghan at The Guardian:

Kiarostami’s rise to the status of one of the world’s foremost auteurs started from relatively humble beginnings. He was born in 1940 in Tehran, and originally studied painting at the University of Tehran; Kiarostami began working as a graphic designer and went on to shoot dozens of commercials for Iranian TV. In 1969 he joined Kanun (the Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), where he ran the film department, and was able to make his own films. In 2005 Kiarostami told the Guardian: “We were supposed to make films that dealt with childhood problems. At the beginning it was just a job, but it was the making of me as an artist.”

In the two decades he worked for Kanun, Kiarostami made films continuously, including his first feature, The Report, in 1977. He managed to negotiate the transition triggered by the Khomeini revolution, re-working the films he made to try and accommodate the demands of a new set of censors. Unlike many of his film-industry peers, Kiarostami decided to remain in Iran after the revolution, likening himself to “a tree that is rooted in the ground”. “[If you] transfer it from one place to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit … If I had left my country, I would be the same as the tree.”

more here.

The strange death of liberal politics

BrexitJohn Gray at The New Statesman:

As it is being used today, “populism” is a term of abuse applied by establishment thinkers to people whose lives they have not troubled to understand. A revolt of the masses is under way, but it is one in which those who have shaped policies over the past twenty years are more remote from reality than the ordinary men and women at whom they like to sneer. The interaction of a dysfunctional single currency and destructive austerity policies with the financial crisis has left most of Europe economically stagnant and parts of it blighted with unemployment on a scale unknown since the Thirties. At the same time European institutions have been paralysed by the migrant crisis. Floundering under the weight of problems it cannot solve or that it has even created, the EU has demon­strated beyond reasonable doubt that it lacks the ­capacity for effective action and is incapable of reform. As I suggested in this magazine in last year (“The neo-Georgian prime minister”, 23 October 2015), Europe’s image as a safe option has given way to the realisation that it is a failed experiment. A majority of British voters grasped this fact, which none of our establishments has yet understood.

No single leader or party is responsible for the debacle of the Remain camp. It is true that gross errors were made in the course of the campaign. Telling voters who were considering voting Leave that they were stupid, illiterate, xenophobic and racist was never going to be an effective way of persuading them to change their views. The litany of insults voiced by some leaders of the Remain campaign expressed their sentiments towards millions of ordinary people. It did not occur to these advanced minds that their contempt would be reciprocated. Increasingly callow and blundering even as they visibly aged in office, Cameron and George Osborne were particularly inept in this regard.

more here.

Voltaire’s Luck: The French philosopher outsmarts the lottery

Roger Pearson in Lapham's Quarterly:

VoltairIt was once said of Voltaire, by his friend the Marquis d’Argenson, that “our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the other in the rue Quincampoix.” The rue Quincampoix was the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris; the country’s most celebrated writer of epic and dramatic verse had a keen eye for investment opportunities. By the time d’Argenson made his remark, in 1751, Voltaire had amassed a fortune. He owed it all to a lottery win. Or, to be more precise, to several wins. Lotteries were all the rage in eighteenth-century Paris. There had been a financial crisis in 1719, and France had nearly gone bankrupt. The bankers were to blame, having devised financial instruments that magicked debt away, only for it to return multiplied once it was discovered that the collateral wasn’t there. With the ensuing austerity came the lottery and the blandishments of la bonne chance. Why tax a weary and resistant populace when luck might seduce them?

…In fact, Voltaire made his own luck. One surviving piece of documentary evidence records that Voltaire “acquired all the ticket books on payment of a deposit without filling them in.” Clearly he had an understanding of sorts with the notaries appointed to sell the tickets, and it seems that he did not have to pay the full price of the tickets, so certain were he and his associates—and perhaps the notaries selling the tickets, presumably cut in on the action—of winning. The records for each successive draw up to and including February 1730 still exist. While the draw of January 8 shows a wide disparity in the redeemable value of the winning tickets (as intended by the original terms of the lottery), already in February there is a marked rise in the number of winning tickets redeemable for the minimum bond value of 1,000 livres, several of them registered to the same owner. La Condamine himself is recorded by name as the owner of thirteen winning tickets that had cost him only one livre each but which now entitled him to the sum of 13,000 livres.

More here.

Consciousness: The Mind Messing With the Mind

George Johnson in The New York Times:

BrainA paper in The British Medical Journal in December reported that cognitive behavioral therapy — a means of coaxing people into changing the way they think — is as effective as Prozac or Zoloft in treating major depression. In ways no one understands, talk therapy reaches down into the biological plumbing and affects the flow of neurotransmitters in the brain. Other studies have found similar results for “mindfulness” — Buddhist-inspired meditation in which one’s thoughts are allowed to drift gently through the head like clouds reflected in still mountain water. Findings like these have become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget their strange implications.

Depression can be treated in two radically different ways: by altering the brain with chemicals, or by altering the mind by talking to a therapist. But we still can’t explain how mind arises from matter or how, in turn, mind acts on the brain. This longstanding conundrum — the mind-body problem — was succinctly described by the philosopher David Chalmers at a recent symposium at The New York Academy of Sciences. “The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that,” he said. Descartes’s notion of dualism — mind and body as separate things — has long receded from science. The challenge now is to explain how the inner world of consciousness arises from the flesh of the brain. Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing.

More here.

A Matter of Interpretation

by Holly A. Case

Kiss-BW

Attila Kiss

Attila Kiss speaks beautiful English. He has been a simultaneous interpreter—from Hungarian to English and English to Hungarian—for various intellectual and spiritual luminaries, among them the Dalai Lama, and for the European Union. When he speaks of interpreting, it is with uncanny precision, betraying an awareness that even speech is an act of simultaneous translation from thought to word.

Ten years ago, Kiss (pronounced “Kish”) was on an interpreting assignment for the EU in Brussels. One evening after work, he attended the screening of a new film on the 1956 revolution in Hungary. Heading back to his hotel he crossed through a park. Someone approached him, said “Good evening,” and then stabbed him with a knife. A struggle ensued. The man fled. Kiss spent a week in intensive care and underwent periodic operations for years thereafter. His attacker has never been identified or apprehended.

Interpretations of the episode began even prior to Kiss's release from the hospital. Initially the Belgian police thought he had gone to the park for a homosexual hook-up that went sour; they found no evidence to back up this hypothesis. Another of their theories involved a disgruntled student, upset about a grade. Their attention focused on one man, who was indeed a former student, but had not received a low grade from Kiss, and in fact counted as a family friend. And thus another narrative bubble burst over the case. One explanation remained. In the police report, Kiss had indicated that he believed his assailant to have been “an Arab.” The police ultimately concluded that he had been attacked by one of a group of young Moroccan fundamentalists who had been targeting EU officials. Given that Kiss was wearing a suit, carrying a laptop case, and walking in the vicinity of the EU Parliament, he may have been mistaken for a Union official.

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Independence? Day

by Libby Bishop

DressageHappy Fourth of July. This is the United States holiday that celebrates the American colonies throwing off the shackles of undemocratic rule by a controlling European power and purports to honour freedom. I am an American, living in the now-less-United Kingdom, where, on the 23rd of June, 37% of the electorate voted to free itself from the European Union, or so it believes. It is impossible to say that the result was about a single issue, be it immigration, xenophobia, European Union bureaucracy, or anti-elitism. But there is no doubt that the Leave campaign promised freedom. The campaign fanned fears that Britain was being controlled by Brussels, and voting Leave would free Great Britain to be Great again. Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of the Leave movement, even called the 23rd of June Britain's Independence Day. In the referendum, the issues were framed in simplistic and binary terms: in or out, controlled or free.

This idea of sovereign freedom is a potent elixir. Its synonyms connote positive associations such as liberty and emancipation, whereas most words that describe limitations on freedom are negative: restriction, dependence, weakness, subjection, suppression, slavery, and as in the referendum, controlled. I have come to question this bipolar perspective of free versus controlled. Indeed, rather than being opposites, I claim that freedom and control co-exist, indeed, that authentic freedom can exist only in finely honed tension with control.

In my experience, freedom with control occurs across widely diverse disciplines and practices: horseback riding, music and political economy. I have ridden horses for over fifty years, starting as a horse-crazy girl, riding in jumping competitions in my teens, and as an adult, practicing dressage. Dressage, the French word for “training”, is a method of training a horse in obedience and precision of movement. It is about evoking a particular way of moving—forward, energetic, but always balanced, calm, and responsive. Yet as is so often the case, translation cannot convey the full meaning of the original word. Training implies basic fitness and obedience to commands, but dressage is concerned with training to higher levels of ability, akin to training a dog to be a guide for a blind person. Henry Wynmalen says, “…dressage is the art of improving one's horse beyond the stage of plain usefulness” (p. 4).*

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Monday Poem

No Address

—in memory of B.D.

my oldest friend has left us

he now has no address or
his address is now not numbered
there’s no street to be remembered
no place that I can place him and
now ephemeral I miss him

he was a bollard I could tie to
I could call him when I’d want to
I could talk with him of childhood and
the changes that we went through
(how that world seemed less in torment)
and though we knew our days were numbered
we could go there in a phone call but
palpable as past was when we
laughed about our dreaming we
could riff on time still streaming
in the moments we were living, we
could pick up where we’d left off
the last time we were speaking as if
years had lost their meaning,
as if nothing really mattered but the
talk that we were having, which we
owed to long affection and

as we swapped our thoughts in breaths
there was no reason to be grieving
.

by Jim Culleny
6/23/16
.

BLESSED ARE THE MODERATE: HOW NOT TO TALK ABOUT RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE

by Richard King

1280px-Sankt_Matthaeus_Kirke_Copenhagen_altarpiece_detail1BEARDED MAN: Could you be quiet please? What was that?

WISEGUY: I dunno; I was too busy talking to Bignose.

SPECTATOR: I think it was “Blessed are the cheesemakers”.

BEARDED MAN'S WIFE: What's so great about the cheesemakers?

BEARDED MAN: Well obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

Monty Python's Life of Brian, 1979

The scene takes place at the edge of a crowd, which has gathered to hear – or to try to hear – Christ deliver the Sermon on the Mount. The punchline is delivered with a knowing air, as if nothing could be more natural than that Jesus would decide to set out his creed with a certain amount of poetic obfuscation. “Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally …” And yet, as we know, much ink will be spilled over precisely how literally to take Christ's words, and the words of many a prophet besides. Much ink, much blood, and an ocean of tears …

*

As I write this, Istanbul's Ataturk Airport is a scene of devastation and chaos. On Tuesday evening, local time, three attackers armed with guns and explosives laid siege to Europe's third busiest airport in what appears to be a well organised operation, one calculated to maximise casualties. The victims include people from Iraq, China, Tunisia, Jordan, Iran and Ukraine. Most of them, of course, were Turkish citizens. At this moment – around 1 am GMT on 29 June 2016 – the death toll stands at 42, though some outlets put it at 41. Hundreds are injured. Thousands are grieving. The Turkish people are in shock, again.

In the coming hours certain statements will be made. Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan will come on television to say that this was a crime against humanity and an attack on Turkey's national soul, or sentiments to that effect. He will urge unity and resolve in the face of intimidation. Turkey must not give in to terror. He may well say that the dead are martyrs. Such platitudes are to be expected, and not all of them are to be despised.

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Does Brexit illuminate Trumpism?

by Emrys Westacott

Obama-trump-brexitWhether we like or not, whether we admit or not, those of us who live in the modernized world are heirs of the Enlightenment. We know from experience and from scientific studies that there are numerous ways in which human beings are often quite irrational. Nevertheless, rational, informed deliberation in which evidence and arguments are critically and carefully evaluated remains an ideal that most of us subscribe to. It is how we think (and say we think) most decisions should be made, both in our personal lives and when we act politically as citizens, whether we are hiring an electrician or voting in an election.

So when we see people acting, as we see it, out of ignorance, or unwittingly against their rational self-interest, or swayed by emotions we don’t respect, such as racial hatred, xenophobia, or machismo, we are naturally critical. We are also, if not shocked! shocked! often bewildered. How can people not see what is so obvious to us?

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Choose the Axiom II

by Carl Pierer

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M.C. Escher: Reptiles.

In the first part of this essay, the axiom of choice was introduced and a rather counterintuitive consequence was shown: the Banach-Tarski Paradox. To recapitulate: the axiom of choice states that, given any collection of non-empty sets, it is possible to choose exactly one element from each of them. This is uncontroversial in the case where the collection is finite. Simply list all the sets and then pick an element from each. Yet, as soon as we consider infinite collections, matters get more complicated. We cannot explicitly write down which element to pick, so we need to give a principled method of choosing. In some cases, this might be straightforward. For example, take an infinite collection of non-empty subsets of the natural numbers. Any such set will contain a least element. Thus, if we pick the least element from each of these sets, we have given a principled method. However, with an infinite collection of non-empty subsets of the real numbers, this particular method does not work. Moreover, there is no obvious alternative principled method. The axiom of choice then states that nonetheless such a method exists, although we do not know it.

The axiom of choice entails the Banach-Tarski Paradox, which states that we can break up a ball into 8 pieces, take 4 of them, rotate them around and put them back together to get back the original ball. We can do the same thing with the remaining 4 pieces and get another ball of exactly the same size. This allows us to duplicate the ball. This beautifully paradoxical result casts some doubt about the status of the axiom. Perhaps, if the axiom leads to something as counter-intuitive as the Banach-Tarski Paradox, it should be rejected?

This second part will look at a famous and important lemma, known as Zorn's Lemma, which is logically equivalent to the axiom[i]. Due to its relevance in proofs of highly useful mathematical propositions, this will give some support against the counterintuitive consequence of the axiom.

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Boris Johnson Lights Out for Virgin Territory

by Claire Chambers

Much has been written about Boris Johnson as a politician in recent weeks. But Johnson is also an author of fiction, verse (I won't dignify it by using the word 'poetry'), and Boris Johnsonjournalism. As such, another way of understanding the man's worldview is to scrutinize his imaginative work. I examine Johnson's ​little-known ​comic novel Seventy-Two Virgins (2004), which centres on the attempt by an Islamist cell to attack Westminster Hall during a visit from an unnamed American president.

In this blog post I consider the book's inescapable Islamophobia​, and the light this sheds on Johnson, ​figurehead of the Brexit campaign​. Such Islamophobia is particularly concerning in the context of the post-referendum ​British ​upsurge in xenophobia​, racism​, and religious hatred​.

Seventy-Two Virgins is an unpleasant and unfunny book which has a simile and a stereotype problem. Johnson's similes are usually clunky and sometimes offensive. Early on in the novel, he describes ​West London as being 'spread out … in the morning sun, like a beautiful woman surprised in bed without her make-up'. Not only does this reveal Johnson's patronizing view of women, about which more shortly, but also the image's derivation − unwitting or otherwise − from T. S. Eliot's superior lines, 'the evening is spread out against the sky. | Like a patient etherized upon a table', does no favours to either text. Much later, clapping from the audience in Westminster Palace is compared to 'the spastic batting of a butterfly's wings as it dies against a window'. Here Johnson's verbiage and the imprecision of his image flutter against his outdated and ableist use of the word 'spastic'.

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Monsoon musing

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

They say that this year the monsoon will hit the Indian subcontinent hard and strong. They say that we who have been parched by the sun six months and some long, will now cower from the rains, for the next few, and then some. They say that climate change is real. And that we have made it so. That we shall reap what we sow, which is, in this case, the opening out of the heavens, in the kind of bounty that one neither wants nor can handle. The monsoon in this part of the world, that creature of romantic songs, and tea by the window, is a capricious creature of munificent gifts and unbearable fury. Not six months ago, I wrote about a city suffering the monsoon and its unreasonable gifts, brought to its knees by the usual combination of bureaucratic surprise and political willfulness.

And yet, the many years that I was away from these tropical parts, I missed the monsoon. And the fragrance of the first rains. The rains smell, like all writers attempting a description of smell will tell you, like nothing that you may have smelt if you haven't smelt the rain. Its closest description can only be brought about through invocation. Invoke if you will, a morning of semi-darkness, one where the previous night has been spent in heavy argumentation with people you love, where food and drink have flown in equal measure, where one has said things that sound right and ring true, and where sleep has brought dreams of the kind one wishes to remember, but can't. As you emerge from this dream-filled, accomplished stupor, something of the nature of memory winds through your nostrils, and you remember every moment of every happy day that you may have ever lived. Your limbs feel supple, and your mind light, and your body feels one with the bodies of leaves, and tree trunks, and branches, and flowers. And you know that it has rained. Such is the potency of this smell that people have even tried to bottle it up.

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Four days in Jogja

by Hari Balasubramanian

IMG_20140821_154313_746 copyI was in the city of Jogjakarta (also spelled as Yogyakarta) in May 2015. It was a short stay: I was primarily visiting Hong Kong, but then had to exit Hong Kong to re-enter because my visa-free stay had expired. Nearby countries would have served the purpose, but I chose Indonesia — six hours south by flight and across the equator — because I'd always been drawn to its size and diversity: thousands of islands in a tremendous sprawl (if the northwestern-most part of Indonesia started in Alaska, the archipelago would stretch all the way to Virginia); 240 million people, 87% of them Muslim, speaking 400 odd languages (even greater linguistic diversity than India); an unlikely national experiment that began in 1940s after centuries of Dutch colonial rule and a short but painful three years of Japanese occupation.

There was no way to capture even a fraction of that complexity in four days, but I wanted to start somewhere. Jakarta, the sprawling capital where I stayed the first night, was too daunting; but Jogjakarta, an hour's flight from the capital and which holds a unique place in Javanese culture, seemed more manageable. Here are some informal impressions: nothing very detailed, just a first take.

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Tate Modern, the Switch House and Brexit

by Sue Hubbard

ScreenHunter_2071 Jul. 04 14.50It seems a long time ago since the Tate Summer party to celebrate the opening of the new Switch House adjoining the original Bankside Power Station. It was a different world then. On the 16th June, the date of the party, we were still in Europe. The architects Herzog & de Meuron, who did the conversion, are a Swiss firm based in Basel. They have worked with Tate for 20 years, originally to transform Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's power station. Since Tate Modern opened in May 2000 it has had more than 40 million visitors, many of them from abroad, coming to sample the unique cultural pleasures of this multi-cultural city. As a result of Tate Modern's presence the surrounding area of the South Bank that includes Shakespeare's Globe, has turned from a web of grey streets into a buzzing cosmopolitan hub filled with street performers and food stalls selling cuisine from around the world. It's become a must-see landmark. To walk across the Thames on Anthony Caro's lightening-flash of a bridge, with its vistas along the river east and west, is to feel that you are at the centre of one of the most exciting global capitals of the world.

The night of the party – despite the inefficiency of the lifts and mounting queues – I went with friends up to the viewing platform on the 10th floor. The panorama is stunning. The city laid out below in 360-degrees with views of the Shard, Westminster Abbey, the Post Office Tower, Saint Paul's Cathedral and, down river, Wembley Stadium. This is a building designed and built in hope and optimism. A cultural temple that firmly puts us at the epicentre of the artistic world: inclusive, challenging, forward looking. At the opening party the place was awash with the great and the good: royalty, journalists and international art stars. The sense of possibility and optimism was palpable.

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Confessions of a Ramadan Mom

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Image1

Photo by Ayesha Bokhari.

A breathless list of what you’re likely to see fifteen minutes before sunset on my Iftaar table: fruit chaat, a sweet and spicy fruit salad made mostly of apples from my yard, bananas, grapes, orange or lemon juice, chick peas, sometimes guavas and pomegranate seeds, dahi baray, chick pea fritters soaked in yogurt that is spiced with roasted, ground cumin and red chili, cholay, spicy beans, samosay, a deep fried beef- or potato- filled pastry. You’ll also see dates in a small dish and an assortment of frayed, speckled flowers from the yard. On a good day, you’ll see mint chutney, on most days, ketchup, Habanera, Sriracha. On a good day, sweet lassi, on most days, juice. During the countdown to Iftaar, which coincides with the Maghrib (sundown) call to prayer, a dinner item or two are on the stove, water is boiling for tea, and I’m in a frenzy to finish frying pakoray, chick pea fritters which must be served piping hot.

Needless to say, it’s hard to be in a good mood, to not feel drained after a day of fasting and an afternoon of cooking, but I try, as one must. When my children were old enough to reminisce, each of them remarked on how much they enjoyed the aroma and taste of Iftaar food: quite a dilemma for someone like myself who is not particularly in favor of having deep fried treats every day for a month.

If fasting for the month of Ramadan requires patience and stamina, cooking for Ramadan requires stamina plus a sustained effort to keep the home feeling like an island of festivity for the whole month, to keep up the Ramadan spirit against fatigue and a sense of alienation, as we try to meet work and school deadlines while fasting for up to 16 hours. We rarely change our regular routine, still attending meetings, taking the kids for soccer and piano practice, attending open houses and work parties. Self-discipline, and a quiet, unfussy, constant aim to rejuvenate inner peace in Ramadan is part of the Muslim life, but in the present climate of Islamophobia, I find myself needing to do more to shield the family during this time of reflection and private spirituality, from the news of violence and the violence of news, from outrage against being silenced, demonized, and consequent bitterness. Feast-like cooking, I notice, has become an act of self-preservation.

At a recent Iftaar-dinner for poet friends, I found myself commenting that an ideal iftaar is a simple, well-cooked, nutritious meal, and that Ramadan is not about elaborate iftaars, but about cultivating the spiritual self and renewing the bond with family and community by sharing in the hunger and the feeding, but I know from experience that it doesn’t work that way, that the Iftaar menu inherited from the culture gives a sense of atmosphere and nostalgia, constructs and punctuates tradition. So I chop the fruits and mix the chick pea paste, deep fry and garnish everything with chaat masala all month long, taking comfort and a measure of delight in the family’s expectation of the the month-long nightly party.

Robert Pinsky: In Praise of Memorizing Poetry—Badly

Robert Pinsky in Slate:

ScreenHunter_2070 Jul. 03 19.49Mistakes are instructive. In particular, they can become a form of analysis, as, for example, in sports or music, when getting something a little bit wrong leads to improvement in technique or understanding.

Many of us, in the imperfect memorizing of a poem, make mistakes, too—as though we were folk singers or blues artists, but without the traditional flexibility of those forms. Is it “many recognitions dim and faint,” you might ask yourself, or “many recognitions sad and faint”? And, before you can find the authoritative book and check, which one do you prefer? And why?

A dramatic demonstration of this principle came to me on a hike in the mountains years ago.

More here.

The 18th-century thinkers behind laissez-faire economics saw slavery as a great example of global free trade

Blake Smith in Aeon:

Header_V1-Essay-FINAL-2005.3.1For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people into bondage. Scholars estimate that around 1.5 million people perished in the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic. The slave trade linked Africa, Europe and the Americas in a horrific enterprise of death and torture and profit. Yet, in the middle of the 18th century, as the slave trade boomed like never before, some notable European observers saw it as a model of free enterprise and indeed of ‘liberty’ itself. They were not slave traders or slave-ship captains but economic thinkers, and very influential ones. They were a pioneering group of economic thinkers committed to the principle of laissezfaire: a term they themselves coined. United around the French official Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), they were among the first European intellectuals to argue for limitations on government intervention in the economy. They organised campaigns for the deregulation of domestic and international trade, and they made the slave trade a key piece of evidence in their arguments.

More here.