Laila Lalami in The Nation:

When King Mohammed rose to the throne in July 1999, he had relatively little to do in order to fill a huge reservoir of goodwill. His father, King Hassan, had left the nation with an appalling human rights record, which included extralegal detentions, torture and censorship; a high level of corruption in virtually all state institutions; a literacy rate that hovered below 50 percent, one of the lowest in the Arab world; a territorial conflict with the Polisario Front; and tense relations with Algeria. Upon the death of the monarch who had ruled Morocco for thirty-eight years, most commentators used some form of the expression “end of an era.”

In his first official speech as head of state, King Mohammed outlined his plans for the country: constitutional monarchy, multiparty system, economic liberalism, regionalism and decentralization, building the rule of law, safeguarding human rights and individual and collective liberties, and security and stability for all. He defined his role as one of arbiter—one who does not side with any parties—as well as architect—giving general orientations and advice. He renewed his father’s commitment to alternance, a system that had allowed leftist parties, after nearly thirty years in the opposition, to finally hold cabinet positions and influence policy. The speech gave a lot of Moroccans great hope that their country would emulate Spain, their neighbor across the Mediterranean, and transition toward a democracy.

More here.

Tony Karon in Time:

A few weeks ago, the U.S. had a reliable ally in Cairo when it came to strong-arming President Mahmoud Abbas to jump through diplomatic hoops against his better judgement. Time and again it had been Mubarak that provided the pressure and then, ostensibly, the political cover — as well as the mandate he was unable to get from his own people — for Abbas to participate in various rounds of photo-opportunity diplomacy with the Israelis in order to help the Obama Administration sustain the impression that it was making progress toward a two-state solution to the Middle East's most enduring crisis. But Hosni Mubarak's era ended decisively a week ago when he was turfed out of office by a citizenry no longer willing to tolerate a leader more attentive to the geopolitical demands of his foreign patrons than to the needs of his own people. And the new demand for sovereignty, accountability and dignity firing up the Arab world bodes ill for Washington's ability to corral Arab backing for its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

More here.

When I was young my father owned a factory in Tonypandy, a town in the Rhondda Valley of South Wales. He always disparaged the character of the Welsh, for whom I therefore conceived an affection that has remained with me ever since. You may be said truly to like a people when you are aware of their imperfections and are fond of them still. If one can be a patriot of a country not one’s own, I am a Welsh patriot. My memories of Tonypandy are hazy, for I was younger than ten when my father took me there. In those days, coal mining, not the administration of unemployment and its attendant social problems, was the Rhondda Valley’s major industry. Our civilization at the time was founded, as George Orwell once remarked, on coal, without which we would have lived in unlit and unheated houses. The miners were like Atlases; upon their shoulders a whole world rested. My visual recollection of Tonypandy is monochromatic—of everything begrimed with coal dust; of the slate roofs of tiny terraced houses dull in the perpetual, dirty rain; of black slag heaps lowering over the town. Whether this is a true memory or a reconstruction based on what I subsequently learned, I could not swear in a court of law. Half a century later, while scouring the secondhand bookshops during a sojourn in Wales, I discovered a writer who came from Tonypandy: Rhys Davies, who published 20 novels and about 160 short stories before he died in 1978. Some critics of his day esteemed him highly, calling him the Welsh Chekhov.

more from Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal here.

It seems rare that an album would inspire the listener to spend time, during the less compelling tracks, idly Googling contextual information about World War I trench warfare and the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, in which thousands upon thousands of men died over a months-long, epically failed invasion of a few square miles of Ottoman peninsula. Rare outside of heavy-metal albums, anyway. But here you have it: Polly Jean Harvey’s latest LP does precisely that, and I fully intend to bore someone, sometime, with every last grim thing I just learned about death, dysentery, great black clouds of flies that never let you sleep, and soldiers breaking their teeth on old biscuits. Try and track down how such an album came to be, and it begins to look like Harvey—an alternately primal and poetic British songwriter—might have spent a few months thinking about the same things as Britain’s actual poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. In the spring of 2009, Duffy gave the public a poem called “Last Post,” commemorating the deaths of the nation’s last few surviving World War I veterans, which borrows a few well-known lines from the soldier-poet Wilfred Owen. Around the same time, on the back half of an album she’d made with longtime collaborator John Parish, Harvey was singing about being a soldier, then echoing a line of World War II poetry from W. H. Auden. (“We must love one another or die,” he wrote—though she sings, ominously, “or accept the consequences.”) Duffy went on to ask her peers for more poetry about modern war, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Harvey went on to wonder why, if there could be more than a century’s worth of “war poets,” there mightn’t be a war songwriter.

more from Nitsuh Abebe at New York Magazine here.

This article is posted in honor of Black History Month:

From NMAAHC:

Throughout their over 40-year marriage, collectors Bernard and Shirley Kinsey have celebrated their heritage by seeking unusual souvenirs. From an early version of the Emancipation Proclamation to correspondence between Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the couple has amassed a trove of rare artifacts and artwork that spans four centuries and embodies the hardships and triumphs of the African American experience. Originally housed in a wine cellar in the Kinseys' Los Angeles home, items from their private collection form The Kinsey Collection — a new exhibition organized by the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

During the period of legal segregation (roughly the mid-1890s to the 1960s) signs like this were common in public spaces throughout the South. The signs were meant to demean compliant black citizens and to threaten the rebellious. Inferior facilities for African Americans, such as restrooms and restaurants, were a daily humiliation and a constant reminder of inequality.

A Slave Carrying Her Fate in Her Hands, 1854

A.M.F. Crawford
Ink on paper, 19 ¾ X 12 ½ inches

When 17-year-old Frances carried this letter from her owner, she was unaware that it describes her valuable skills — “she is the finest chamber-maid [sic] I have ever seen in my life” — and offers her for sale. Although Crawford's letter acknowledges the inevitable heart-wrenching separation of Frances from her family, the slaveholder's only concern is for a profitable sale, without a “distressing leave-taking.” As indicated, the proceeds will pay for a new stable.

More here. (Note: Do take a moment to read this chilling letter by clicking on it. Maybe I am so upset because I have a 17 year old daughter…)

From The Guardian:

Take this, for example. Maxim Gorky once claimed that “everything which is good in me should be credited to books”. You find this quoted a lot, as if it carried some generalisable weight. Yet I don't believe it can be true, quite, even of Maxim Gorky, who led an intermittently miserable life. It's a blind and callous thing to say. What about the influences of his family (particularly his grandmother), or his many friends? Nothing good whatsoever emanated from them? If I were his father I'd give him such a slap. You good-for-nothing thankless Gorky you, you book-ridden ingrate, you louse… But, of course, one recognises this sort of overstatement. You have to feel passionately about a subject to talk this foolishly about it. An astonishing number of “lovers” of books and of reading frequently say similarly questionable things, at least if you quote them out of context – which is what people tend to do. I'm doing it too.

Let's take the following, by way of almost random example, from Charles Kingsley: “Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book.” Gosh. Any living man? Any book? Nothing else can compete? Flowers? Sunsets? Palladian villas? Pastrami sandwiches with extra pickles? Rubbish. One remembers Norman Mailer's definition of a “conservative” as one who, given a choice between saving the life of a man and that of a tree, will ask to view the tree and to meet the man before making his decision. You have to look at what is in front of your nose, after all. It's not too much to ask.

More here.

Cairo

You burst into a
million seeds,
poured over the hot
stove of rancour,
Cairo.

When the walls no longer
withstood your curses,
you awakened the streets
with your boots,
Cairo.

Your cries brought the
sky down at Tahrir Square,
the Pharaoh shook
in his dreams,
Cairo.

With you the square
was a fortress of the heart,
engraved in
rebellion’s calligraphy,
Cairo.

When bulls of the regime
let loose their armoury,
you defended your future
with stones,
Cairo.

Your battered men did not
flee the field of honour,
they stood up to
your name,
Cairo.

by Manash Bhattacharjee
from The London Magazine
Feb-March, 2011

Damon Linker in The New Republic:

Who will save science from the scientists? I often ponder that question when I peruse the writings of evolutionary psychologists—and did so once again as I read Jesse Bering’s new book, which is at once marvelously informative and endlessly infuriating.

Bering wants to spread the word that belief in a personal God—along with concomitant ideas about the existence of purpose, providence, an afterlife, and a cosmic support for justice—is an “adaptive illusion.” His originality lies not in his confident insistence that such beliefs are groundless—a view that has been defended over and over again in recent years in a series of bestselling books—but rather in the first half of his claim; he contends that theological beliefs serve a crucial evolutionary function. The bulk of his book is devoted to establishing this point, drawing on a wide range of findings in the cognitive sciences to back it up.

Bering, who serves as the director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at the Queen’s University in Belfast, does an excellent job of elucidating these findings. (He is the author or co-author of several of the studies he cites.) As he patiently and absorbingly explains, experiment after experiment has shown that human beings are cognitively predisposed, often from early childhood, to detect signs of order, purpose, and justice in the world. We find it nearly impossible to conceive of our own annihilation, which easily leads to thoughts about the immortality of the soul.

More here.

James Panero in Proto:

It was the hippocampus as no one had ever seen it, illuminated in radiant hues. The image is called, aptly, a Brainbow, the colors serving a scientific purpose by highlighting specific neural structures. Yet their choice also reflects an artistic bent; scientists display the brain not the way it is (an undifferentiated gray) but the way we want to see it, “painted” with bursts of fluorescent color.

This image, created in 2005, is one of many that Carl Schoon­over, a doctoral candidate in neurobiology and behavior at Columbia University, has collected in his recent Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain From Antiquity to the 21st Century (Abrams). As science has probed the brain’s structure and function, scientists have had to rely on art to translate their discoveries to visual form.

Leonardo da Vinci created a notable example around 1500, borrowing the techniques of statue casting to inject wax into the ventricles of a freshly killed ox. After the wax cooled, he carved the brain away to create an impression of the cavity, then sketched this casting of the void, rendering it from multiple angles.

The arrival of powerful optics during the mid-nineteenth century enabled scientists to penetrate the brain’s microscopic dimensions. Soon another Italian, Camillo Golgi, inaugurated modern neuroscience by successfully staining individual neurons. In his 1875 drawing of a dog’s olfactory bulb, Golgi records his observations while also somewhat imagining the process of smell, with bulbs in the shape of root vegetables penetrating a layer of neural connections, depicted in fanciful wavy lines.

More here.

Ken Jennings in Slate:

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it's confident about an answer. Jeopardy! devotees know that buzzer skill is crucial—games between humans are more often won by the fastest thumb than the fastest brain. This advantage is only magnified when one of the “thumbs” is an electromagnetic solenoid trigged by a microsecond-precise jolt of current. I knew it would take some lucky breaks to keep up with the computer, since it couldn't be beaten on speed.

More here.

There's an interesting exchange between John Quiggin over at Crooked Timber and Jonathan Chait at the TNR. Quiggin:

Agnotology is not, primarily, the study of ignorance in the ordinary sense of the term. So, for example, someone who shares the beliefs of their community, unaware that those beliefs might be subject to challenge, might be ignorant as a result of their cultural situation, but they are not subject to culturally-induced ignorance in the agnotological sense.

But this kind of ignorance is not at issue in the case of birtherism. Even in communities where birtherism is universal (or at least where any dissent is kept quiet), it must be obvious that not everyone in the US thinks that the elected president was born oautside the US and therefore ineligible for office.

Rather, birtherism is a shibboleth, that is, an affirmation that marks the speaker as a member of their community or tribe. (The original shibboleth was a password chosen by the Gileadites because their Ephraimite enemies could not say “Sh”.) Asserting a belief that would be too absurd to countenance for anyone outside a given tribal/ideological group makes for a good political shibboleth.

Chait:

I do agree with Quiggin that some conservatives who espouse the belief that Obama is a Muslim or a non-citizen don't quite literally believe this. They believe it and don't believe it at the same time — they believe it is the kind of thing Obama would do, whether or not he's actually done it. Quiggin argues that some form of this belief/non-belief can be found in partisans of both parties, and I agree.

But I do think the concept of agnotology applies here. Quiggin's argument hinges on the fact that conservatives understand that some people do not believe President Obama was born outside the United States (or is a Muslim, or…) But what those conservatives believe is that they enjoy access to truth that is denied Americans who are brainwashed by the mainstream media. The believe that Fox News is not just a network that counteracts the biased liberal media, or even a network that reports the stories that the liberal media ignore, but the vehicle for Truth…

Ben Zimmer over at The Atlantic:

Oh, that Ken Jennings, always quick with a quip. At the end of the three-day Jeopardy! tournament pitting him and fellow human Brad Rutter against the IBM supercomputer Watson, he had a good one. When it came time for Final Jeopardy, he and Rutter already knew that Watson had trounced the two of them, the best competitors that Jeopardy! had ever had. So, on his written response to a clue about Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, Jennings wrote, “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”

Now, think about that sentence. What does it mean to you? If you are a fan of “The Simpsons,” you'll be able to identify it as a riff on a line from the 1994 episode, “Deep Space Homer,” wherein clueless news anchor Kent Brockman is briefly under the mistaken impression that a “master race of giant space ants” is about to take over Earth. “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords,” Brockman says, sucking up to the new bosses. “I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.”

Even if you're not intimately familiar with that episode (and you really should be), you might have come across the “Overlord Meme,” which uses Brockman's line as a template to make a sarcastic statement of submission: “I, for one, welcome our (new) ___ overlord(s).” Over on Language Log, where I'm a contributor, we'd call this kind of phrasal template a “snowclone,” and that one's been on our radar since 2004. So it's a repurposed pop-culture reference wrapped in several layers of irony.

But what would Watson make of this smart-alecky remark? The question-answering algorithms that IBM developed to allow Watson to compete on Jeopardy! might lead it to conjecture that it has something to do with “The Simpsons” — since the full text of Wikipedia is among its 15 terabytes of reference data, and the Kent Brockman page explains the Overlord Meme. After all, Watson's mechanical thumb had beaten Ken and Brad's real ones to the buzzer on a “Simpsons” clue earlier in the game (identifying the show as the home of Itchy and Scratchy). But beyond its Simpsonian pedigree, this complex use of language would be entirely opaque to Watson. Humans, on the other hand, have no problem identifying how such a snowclone works, appreciating its humorous resonances, and constructing new variations on the theme.

It is a book that won’t appear until March, yet it has already been hailed as „the most important publishing event of 2011”. Newspapers have written about it. Journalists and politicians have discussed it on television. It is enough to type the first word of its title into a search engine and hundreds, if not thousands, of references come up. Internet fora are flush with comments. Some are full of indignation, outrage and hatred for the author. He has been called a traitor, a renegade, a liar, a cheat and a slave of mammon. Furious bloggers swear they won’t touch the book with a bargepole, let alone buy it, lest they help this scoundrel and bastard make money. There is even a social movement calling for a boycott of the book’s publishers. There have also been calls for fisticuffs and lawsuits. Of course, other voices have also been heard. These, however, typically assume a somewhat different tone. One that is calmer, free of scorn and aggression. The more sensible of them suggest we wait until the book has been published to read it and only then start the mud-slinging, if necessary. Others also insist they are not buying the book as it contains only well known facts, so it would be a waste of money. However, the voices of reason and moderation seem to be in the minority. You will ask what sort of book this is. It is a history book. What is it about? About Poles and Jews, of course. Its author is the Polish sociologist and historian Jan Tomasz Gross, who has been living in the US for decades. Its title, „The Gold Harvest”, refers to activities carried out by Polish peasants in villages situated in the vicinity of the German extermination camps in eastern Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor and Bełżec, but particularly Treblinka.

more from Andrzej Stasiuk at Salon) here.

Paradoxically, what makes Creed’s work as a whole more engaging than Orozco’s is that Creed doesn’t much care if anyone pays attention. While there’s probably a backstory to any of the works on view at Hauser & Wirth—mostly small paintings, but also photographs, wall paintings, a black-and-white film and a large sculpture—a little time spent with them takes the edge off the desire to know whatever their anecdotal background might be. The works don’t open up until you’re willing to accept that what you see is all there is to them. Three large photographs (Work No. 1094, Work No. 1095 and Work No. 1096, all from 2011) show a comically mismatched pair of dogs, one tiny and one huge, a Chihuahua and an Irish wolfhound, romping in a completely white studio. They’re charming to look at, but so what? Well, that “So what?” is the crucial point in any work of Creed’s, the point where you can either shrug your shoulders and walk on or entertain the thought that the insignificant phenomenon before you is worth mulling over—in which case the comical equivalence the photographs propose between the large and small might be all to the point. “His small is enormous,” as one contributor, John O’Reilly, writes in the massive, recently published compendium Martin Creed: Works (Thames & Hudson; $65); in Creed’s Work No. 567 (2006), the phrase small things was lit up in ten-foot-tall neon letters. Paging through the more than 700 works illustrated in the book, dating from 1986 through 2009, one becomes aware that Creed’s numbering system is a way of asserting the equivalence of seemingly unrelated and differently valued kinds of things: a ballpoint pen scribble, some written words, a torn-up or crumpled sheet of paper—the Chihuahuas of art—are simply Works, no more and no less than a theatrical performance or a room-filling installation of balloons—the Irish wolfhounds.

more from Barry Schwabsky at The Nation here.

Kurt Vonnegut called jokes mousetraps. This metaphor fits into a traditional conception of humor as a form of violence. (Freud theorized that humor is an act of aggression.) Much of the language of comedy is hostile. We say of funny people that they kill us or slay us. A comic will say that a joke killed, which is the opposite of bombed. We say of wit that it is either dull or sharp, and a sharp wit might be called rapier. Dull humor clubs us over the head or even bludgeons us. We describe wit as mordant and sardonic. The root of mordant is the Latin mordere (“to bite”), and the root of sardonic is the Greek sardonios, referring to a plant on the island of Sardinia that (according to legend), when ingested, makes you laugh so hard you die. By comparison, Vonnegut’s mousetrap is fairly innocuous, though illuminating. To be certain, there is an element in joke-telling of entrapment by lure, and there is a sense that the receiver (the victim) walks into the joke, following desires or expectations toward the punch line. As many jokes work by swift and precise reversal (of expectation or logic), you could call the very form of the joke cunning and aggressive. Punch lines—they’re called punch lines—are often short and sharp. They are brutal in form if not content. If the receiver of the joke does not feel punched, he might feel as if he has been blindsided or as if he has suffered a kind of logical whiplash. Vonnegut, though, wasn’t talking explicitly about the violence of joke-telling. He was talking about the craft of joke-telling, the mechanism of the joke. The joker sets the trap—just as there is potential energy stored in a compressed spring, there is tension in the joke’s setup—then springs it. The punch line snaps, harnessing and releasing the joke’s energy.

more from Chris Bachelder at The Believer here.

Laura Marsh reviews Robert Morrison's The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, in TNR:

Robert Morrison’s biography somewhat daringly, then, takes its title from De Quincey’s most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. While he draws on De Quincey’s reminiscences and self-analysis, Morrison also shows what De Quincey’s life looked like from the outside. In an opening vignette, we meet not the introspective sybarite of the Confessions but a down-at-heel, elderly magazine writer, who has walked eight miles to hand in his copy. Indeed, De Quincey’s tendency to bring hardship upon himself (and others) permeates the rest of the book. Born in 1785 into a wealthy family with aristocratic pretensions (hence the ‘De’), he ran away from Manchester Grammar School at 16, choosing to live alone and penniless in London. He began to dissipate his inheritance long before he was legally entitled to it by living determinedly beyond his means. He was, for most of his life, pursued by creditors, whom he eluded with gusto, although he was imprisoned for debt once and publicly humiliated on several occasions. His long-suffering daughter Florence described leaving the debtors’ sanctuary where they spent seven years as “one of the most lively foretastes of Paradise I have had in my life.”

By tracing De Quincey’s public persona as “The Opium Eater” through to old age, Morrison avoids reducing his subject to The Man Who Wrote The Confessions. Soon after he was identified as the author of the hugely successful (and originally anonymous) memoir, which was one of his first published works, he was able to trade on “the magic prefix ‘by the Opium Eater.’” It was the name under which he published his Gothic novel Klosterheim: or the Masque, the signature on many of his London Magazine articles, and the name used against him in gossip columns.

An excerpt from Michael Chorost's new book, in the NYT:

In Ramez Naam’s book More Than Human I learned of an idea that had been proposed by Rodolfo Llinás, a New York University neuroscientist. It was hair-raising. He suggested that engineers could bundle thousands of slender wires into a cable and insert it into the femoral artery in the groin. They would snake the cable through the bloodstream to the brain, as if doing an angiogram. As the cable entered the brain, the wires would spread out so that each one ended up in a capillary. Once put in place, each wire could detect a single neuron’s firing, and change its firing by pulsing a jolt of electricity to it.

Imagine it: a flower blossoming inside the brain, nanometer stalks splitting away from a micrometer stem. Expanding into every available capillary, touching every cubic millimeter of the brain, collecting terabytes of data in every second. By the same token, it could send in terabytes of data every second. It would be the most intimate interface ever invented. If you connected one person’s wired brain to another person’s, you could literally connect them together; they would have a real corpus callosum joining them (albeit with links of radio waves rather than wires.) And if you connected a number of people to each other via the Internet, then you would have a network in which each node was a human brain. The World Wide Web would become the World Wide Mind.

You wouldn’t think there’s room inside your capillaries to insert any kind of wire, but there is. As the image above shows, each nanowire is less than a micron (a millionth of a meter) across—substantially narrower than a capillary. Llinás’s lab has shown that it can be done in principle. They inserted platinum nanowires into the capillaries of tissue samples and detected the activity of neurons lying next to them. Power tends to dissipate rapidly from extremely thin wires, but researchers are trying, with some success, to create wires that can carry the necessary levels of current.[1]

Larger-scale technologies already exist. Doctors can now thread a tube from the groin into the brain to inject anticancer drugs into tumors. These devices, called microcatheters, are thousands of times wider than nanowires, at half a millimeter to a millimeter in diameter. Nonetheless, they show that it’s possible to go deeply into the brain by threading a wire through the bloodstream. In an article on microcatheters the New York Times quoted a doctor as saying, “Technically, I can go anywhere in your brain.”

Of course, anyone can see problems with using large numbers of nanowires in a living brain. How does one guide thousands of wires through tangled kinks of capillaries? (Brain capillaries are as gnarled and twisted as baobab tree branches.) How does one get each one of them to a specific location? What if the wires get tangled? How do you keep them from shorting each other out? What about blood clotting? What if a wire goes through a capillary wall?

But virtually all of these objections were raised against cochlear implants in the 1970s.

Michelle Goldberg in Tablet:

Breaking the Silence was formed almost by accident in 2004. It started as an exhibition of photographs and video testimonies by soldiers who had served in Hebron and were anguished by their own behavior. The IDF wasn’t happy—military police raided the Tel Aviv gallery where the exhibit was mounted and confiscated one of the videos—but thousands of Israelis attended. Many of them were soldiers who’d never discussed their own shame. Among them was Manekin, who’s still dealing with what he describes as a “great sense of discomfort about my own personal behavior” during his army service. He agreed to give his own testimony, and soon he was part of a nascent movement.

There was no single epiphany that radicalized Manekin, no moment when he realized that much of what he’d taken for granted about Israeli righteousness was wrong. The son of two professors—his mother teaches modern Jewish history, his father medieval Jewish philosophy—he grew up in a home that was religiously Orthodox and decidedly Zionist, if also politically liberal. He had dual Israeli-American citizenship, and he spent a lot of time going back and forth between the two countries. When he was a teenager, Manekin’s family moved to Israel full-time, and he was sent to an Orthodox high school where right-wing politics predominated.

For Manekin, being accepted into the Golani battalion was like getting into a good college. “You want to excel,” he says. He enlisted for four years, one year more than required. He served first in Southern Lebanon and then in the Nablus region in the West Bank. During that time, he did things that he’s ashamed of, though they’re the sorts of things that any soldier controlling a restive, angry population would do, such as shooting stun grenades at Palestinians to intimidate them at checkpoints. Once, when his unit was assigned to protect the route to a settlement, the soldiers commandeered a house in a nearby village to serve as a lookout, and then, suspecting others might be more suitable, they took over those instead. Manekin was troubled by the soldiers’ cavalier attitude toward Palestinian homes. When he voiced his concerns, he was summoned to the battalion general, who asked if he was uncomfortable serving in the territories.

At the time, he was indignant at the suggestion that he wasn’t ready to do everything required by his military position. But in retrospect, he realized the general was right. There is no way to maintain an occupation without cruelty and moral squalor.