Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533 and died (following an attack of kidney stones, like his father) in 1592. His mother was of Marrano descent; her family had been Sephardic Jews, forced into Catholicism. Montaigne himself was always formally obedient to the Church. ‘Otherwise’, he wrote, ‘I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly. Thus I have kept myself intact, without agitation or disturbance of conscience.’ In this respect, he was somewhat the precursor of Evelyn Waugh, who said that, had he not been a Catholic, he would scarcely have been human. Montaigne, however, was a genial man of no officious piety; a dutiful mayor of Bordeaux, unaggressive lord of his modest Périgordin manor, and a courtier without grand ambition. His essays advocated good-humoured acceptance of the vagaries of human life. For all his formal orthodoxy, he was a manifest sceptic: ‘There is’, he observed, ‘no hostility that exceeds Christian hostility.’ In practice, he preferred the Stoic amor fati to religious absolutism and abominated the righteous cruelty of those with undoubting convictions: ‘It is putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.’ Sarah Bakewell takes this to be an allusion to the spate of witch-hunting which accompanied the religious wars, but it is no great stretch to see in it a reference to the ongoing series of autos-da-fé on the other side of the Pyrenees. For those who choose to read him so, Montaigne was a bit of a crypto-Jew.

more from Frederic Raphael at Literary Review here.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species contains only one illustration, and a rather dull one at that – a simple image of the tree-like branching relations between hypothetical species, with the present at the top (not all branches reach the top), and common ancestors deep in the past. In fact, the drawing does not look much like a tree – it is more like some kind of spindly weed. Although it might not seem impressive, this figure was a revolutionary way of representing life, summing up Darwin’s central idea of evolution by natural selection. This image was not the first that Darwin chose to represent his hypothesis. Shortly after his return from the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin drew a coral-like diagram and wrote “I think” alongside it. In his notebooks he later mused that “The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life”. Over the decades, however, the “tree” image and terminology gradually predominated. They were given particular and literal force by Ernst Haeckel, who at the end of the nineteenth century drew a sturdy oak-like tree with the names of organisms scattered around its branches. Down at the bottom were the monera (single-celled organisms without a nucleus), while at the very top – literally the pinnacle of evolution – were humans. We now know that Haeckel’s representation was wrong in so many ways. Not only are humans not at the top of the tree – we are no more or less “evolved” than the monera Haeckel put down at the bottom – if the tree of life were to be drawn to scale, in terms of either the number of organisms, or species, or the duration of their existence on the planet, then monera would take up almost all the space. Life on earth began 4 billion years ago, a mere 500 million years after the planet formed. If you represent our common history as lasting sixty seconds, life is mainly composed of monera, before proliferating in the last seven seconds, following the massive diversification of animal life that occurred with the “Cambrian Explosion” around 542 million years ago. On this scale, the appearance of our species 100,000 years ago is subliminal.

more from Matthew Cobb at the TLS here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:

Some of my readers will likely know that 'Mastodon' is a band formed in Atlanta in 1999, representing the 'new wave' of American heavy metal. I have not myself heard this band, but I gather from certain signs, read directly off of the attire of the youth –with whom, I remind you, I am in daily contact– that this is a band, and indeed a movement, not entirely to be ignored.

I would imagine it is a rather smaller fraction of my readers who will know that the Mastodon is an elephantoid mammal that first appeared in the Oligocene Period, some 30-35 million years ago. As such the Mastodon, whose name means 'breast tooth' in Greek, is something entirely distinct from the woolly mammoth, which appeared only around 150,000 years ago, during a relatively recent Eurasian glaciation.

Before I arrive at my real point, let me stress that it is the last of my intentions to seek to condemn heavy metal. As I understand it, this genre emerges out of the auspicious combination of late '60s psychedelic blues with the multifarious strains of creatively anachronistic neopaganism that became visible in the following decade, but that all, likely, have their roots in 19th-century romanticism, in Waterhouse's fairies, in Wagner's recycling of the Niebelungenlied, and so on. A distinguished genealogy, to be sure.

More here.

Via Glenn Greenwald:

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber:

Ten types of commenter, of which the last are the rarest.

1. The commenter who has not read the post properly, decides they know what it says anyway, and fires off a series of disgusted observations.

2. Commenter who applies the most uncharitable possible interpretation to the post, and goes straight into rant mode.

3. The commenter who takes the opportunity to make some sarcastic remarks highlighting his (99% of cases are male) own superior scholarship/intelligence and damning the CT author. “If only Chris has read the second treatise of Heinrich von Pumpkin in the original German, he’d be aware ….”

4. The commenter who uses every comment as a peg on which to hang his (yes, “his”) own obsessions about, e.g. analytical philosophy, populism, Palestine, etc

5. The commenter who simply wants to make nasty personal remarks about the CT author, often about female members of the collective, often using an alias.

More here.

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on December 10, 2009. Winners of the contest, as decided by Tariq Ali, will be announced on December 21, 2009.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

Cheers,

Abbas

P.S. If you notice any problems, such as a nominee is missing from the list below, please leave a comment on this page. Thanks.

BEWARE: We have various independent ways of keeping track of attempts at voting multiple times, which I am deliberately not revealing publicly. Any attempts at fraud will be thoroughly investigated, and anyone caught trying to vote multiple times will be instantly disqualified. I don’t think I really need to say this, but there are always a couple of bad eggs who will try!

December 10, 2009, NOTE: The voting round is over.

Hello,

The period for nominating entrees for the 3QD Politics Prize is over.

To see a full list of the nominees and then vote, go here.

To see details of the prize, go here.

Good luck to all! The voting round closes on Wednesday, December 9, 2009, at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Malise Ruthven Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West and Tariq Ramadan's What I Believe, in the NYRB:

The tone is lofty, the language high-minded. It is the preacher, rather than the intellectual, who speaks. Ramadan does not stoop to engage directly with his critics. As he grandly writes in his introduction, “I will not waste my time here trying to defend myself.” This is a pity. The charges of doublespeak against Ramadan are not just based on what he describes as “double-hearings,” malicious, deliberate, or otherwise. The claims of his most trenchant critic, the French journalist Caroline Fourest,[4] are specific and detailed and documented, based on the tapes of Ramadan's lectures to youthful Muslim audiences as well as his published writings.

Fourest presents Ramadan as a fundamentalist wolf in reformist clothing, a position at variance with his declared advocacy of a “critical intellectual attitude” toward Islamic tradition. Most of her charges depend on family links he refuses to abjure—his maternal grandfather Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, his Islamist father Said Ramadan, and especially his brother Hani, a more strident critic than Tariq of “Europe's atheistic materialism” who has publicly justified the stoning of adulteresses “as a punishment” that is also “a purification.” Tariq, by contrast, notoriously argued in a 2003 television debate with Nicolas Sarkozy that the penalty of stoning should merely be subject to a “moratorium” while scholars debated the issue.

Other troubling details that emerge from Fourest's vigilant, even obsessive, trawl through the Ramadan canon include explicit condemnations of Kant and Pascal and fence-sitting, not to say “double-talk,” on Darwinism. A work published by the Islamist publishing house with which he is closely associated explicitly denies evolution, while his audiotapes advocate creationism as a “complementary instruction” to the teaching of evolution in schools. Yet when asked in a television interview whether he accepted evolutionary theory, he “preferred to agree,” rather than express his true convictions in front of the general public.

Scott McLemee reviews Cornel West's Brother West in Inside Higher Ed:

Cornel West’s work was once bold, challenging, exciting. The past tense here is unavoidable. His critical edge and creative powers might yet be reborn (he is 56). But in the wake of his latest book, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, this hope requires a considerable leap of faith. Published by Hay House, the book also bears a second subtitle: “A Memoir.” It is the most disappointing thing I have read in at least a year.

This is not the intellectual autobiography West promised a decade ago. In essence it is a fawning celebrity profile — one in which reporter and superstar have somehow fused into a single first-person voice. And in fact that turns out to be quite literally true. In the final pages, West pays tribute to David Ritz, his collaborator, who has undertaken similar projects with Marvin Gaye and Grandmaster Flash, among others.

“David Ritz and I have worked together to sculpt a voice that I hear as my own,” explains West, or someone trying to sound like him. “Many of my other books were written in what I consider an ‘academic voice.’ Brother West is rendered in a ‘conversational’ voice.”

In this respect, of course, the Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University is following the lead of David Hume – who, after writing A Treatise of Human Nature, published numerous very popular essays with the help of a writer from Entertainment Weekly.

The problem, to be clear, is not that this is meant to be is a popular book, or even that West himself could not be bothered to write it. Brother West offers much evidence that amour propre and self-knowledge are not the same thing. One tends to be in conflict with the other. A memoir will often show traces of the struggle between them.

Not so here. That battle is plainly over. Self-knowledge has been taken hostage, and amour propre curdled into self-infatuation.

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: America, the Cold War, and the Taliban
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Embers from my Neighbor’s House
3. 3 Quarks Daily: Is Obama About To Become Just Another War Criminal?
4. 3 Quarks Daily: May our Gods be angry: Celestial politics in Bas Congo
5. 3 Quarks Daily: Obama’s Address to the State of Non-belief
6. 3 Quarks Daily: On Freeze and Dismantling Between Cairo and Bar Ilan Universities
7. 3 Quarks Daily: Under the sealed sky: Drones
8. 3 Quarks Daily: Who ended the 6-month ceasefire in Israel/Palestine?
9. Black Agenda Report: Liar, Liar!! Barack Obama’s Secretary of War
10. Black Agenda Report: The Great Black Hajj of 2009
11. Chapati Mystery: Will Pakistan Become a Theocracy? III
12. Club Troppo: Is it Still Foolish to Hope?
13. Cochin Blogger:  The 26/11 Mumbai Attack: How I Lost and Recovered My Liberalism
14. Corrente: How will the White House make amends for censoring single payer in its Iowa health care forum “live blog” transcript?
15. East Asia Forum: Sex, race and religion still political weapons in Malaysian politics
16. Elizabitchez: Middle class values don’t solve poverty
17. ePluribus Media: An Aussie Visiting America
18. Glenn Greenwald: Greg Craig and Obama’s worsening civil liberties record
19. Glenn Greenwald: Phil Carter’s resignation from key detainee policy post
20. Glenn Greenwald: The commendably missing element from Obama’s speech
21. I Hate What You Just Said: Thomas Paine, Teabagger
22. Justin E. H. Smith: Birobidzhan!
23. Justin E. H. Smith: On Criticizing Israel
24. Lenin’s Tomb: “Race Mixing Is Communism”; or, race is class
25. Lenin’s Tomb: Rwanda, the RPF, and the myth of non-intervention
26. MF Blog: Is the Obama administration still worth defending?
27. Montclair Socioblog: Torture and Masculinity – Anxiety on the Right
28. News From the Zona: Republican Virtue and Equality
29. Once Upon A Time: Tribalism and the Destructive Politics of Demonization (I): The Largely Unrecognized Possibility for a New Coalition
30. PH2.1: Zero Global Zero
31. Stump Lane: What Is Torture For?
32. Talking Points Memo: A Second Stimulus is Good Politics
33. The Cedar Lounge Revolution: The market and high incomes
34. The Frump Gazette: Post Election-Loss Disorder On the Rise
35. The Last Laugh: The Basement Church of The Perpetual Loons
36. The Other Journal: The Evil Eye Controls Something Which Is Counted
37. The South Asian Idea Weblog: Iran and the Dilemma of Democracy
38. The South Asian Idea Weblog: Jaswant Singh: The Road to Partition
39. The South Asian Idea Weblog: Jinnah, Nehru, and the Ironies of History
40. The South Asian Idea Weblog: September Eleven
41. Tom Paine’s Ghost: Should scientists speak their minds?
42. Tremble the Devil: How the war on drugs is a war on class
43. Unqualified Reservations: A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 9d)
44. Vagabond Scholar: Torture Versus Freedom
45. William K. Wolfrum Chronicles: I’m heterosexual – and, wow, do I have a lot of rights
46. Wisdom of the West: Blunderbuss

To vote, click here.

From AARP:

Intimate with madness, pioneering psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison learned to fear emotional excess. So she avoided passion and tried to hold love at bay. “Then,” she writes in her new memoir, Nothing Was the Same, “I met a man who upended my cautious stance toward life…. He prodded my resistance with grace and undermined my wariness with laughter.” Jamison succumbed, and we follow suit. This is a finely told midlife love story, a romance as elegant as it is doomed. Before tragedy strikes, though, what a couple she and her husband, Richard Wyatt, made! We’re in the salutary presence of scientific royalty here—professional giants of mental health, all the more imposing for having overcome their own personal afflictions.

The 63-year-old Jamison, a psychologist specializing in manic-depressive illness and now co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center, movingly described her own struggles with the disease in her 1995 memoir, An Unquiet Mind. She co-authored the leading academic textbook on manic depression (also known as bipolar disorder) and has written well-received books on exuberance, suicide, and the link between mood disorders and creativity. Wyatt was no slouch either. An expert on schizophrenia, he served as chief of the neuropsychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health from 1972 until his death in 2002. The couple traveled in elite circles, counting as friends Nobel laureate James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, and Robert C. Gallo, the co-discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS.

More here.

A small suburb of Brazzaville in Congo has become an unlikely style capital, thanks to its dedicated followers of foppish fashion. Dressed to the nines in bowler hats and tailored suits, a group of cigar-wielding ‘sapeurs’ have been strutting their stuff through the shanty town – and on to the pages of a glossy new book by Italian photographer Daniele Tamagni.

more from photographer Daniele Tamagni at The Guardian here.

ON MAY 1, 1997, A SCANT HALF-DOZEN YEARS after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I found myself in the Russian capital with a day off from my teaching duties at Moscow State University and decided to head over to Red Square to see what a May Day parade looked like on its home grounds. It proved to be nothing like the televised versions I remembered from the evening news during cold-war days. One of the most sacred and extravagantly celebrated rites of the official Soviet calendar had become a scruffy protest march by a few thousand pensioners. Onlookers reacted to the sight of this aging rabble, carrying their red flags and portraits of Stalin, with what appeared to be a mixture of disdain, embarrassment, and amusement. On reaching Red Square, the marchers devoted the next hour or so to shouting insults at the Kremlin’s current resident, Boris Yeltsin (despised for having presided over the dissolution of the USSR), then sang a few desultory choruses of “The Internationale” before dispersing. History tends to repeat itself, as Karl Marx once shrewdly commented, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce—a maxim that holds as true for the vanished Soviet age as it did for the botched restoration of Louis-Napoléon in 1851.

more from Maurice Isserman at Bookforum here.

After Work

The shack and a few trees

float in the blowing fog

I pull out your blouse,

warm my cold hands

on your breasts.

you laugh and shudder

peeling garlic by the

hot iron stove.

bring in the axe, the rake,

the wood

we'll lean on the wall

against each other

stew simmering on the fire

as it grows dark

drinking wine.

by Gary Snyder

It is without any sense of surprise, but with the greatest of pleasure that I inform you that our very own Morgan Meis has been awarded an extremely well-deserved $30,000 by the Warhol Foundation in recognition of the excellence of his writing on art.

You can see all of Morgan's writing for 3QD, on art and on other things, here.

You can see Morgan's writing for The Smart Set here, and here.

Morgan has also written for Harper's, The Believer, and the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Congratulations, Morgan!

[Photo Copyright 2009 by Margit Oberrauch.]

Andrew Sullivan in his blog, The Daily Dish:

You can hold certain principles inviolate and yet also be prepared to back politicians or administrations that violate them because it's better than the actual alternatives at hand. I also understand the emotional need to have a default party position, other things being equal. But there has to come a point at which a movement or party so abandons core principles or degenerates into such a rhetorical septic system that you have to take a stand. It seems to me that now is a critical time for more people whose principles lie broadly on the center-right to do so – against the conservative degeneracy in front of us.

He later goes on to say:

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.

I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.

I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government's minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.

I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.

I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.

I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.

I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.

I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.

I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.

Does this make me a “radical leftist” as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.

To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.

And increasingly, I'm not alone.

More here.

Mary Carmichael in Newsweek:

At first glance, Paul's HIV vaccine looks familiar; it uses the “neutralizing antibody” strategy, which calls on the body's B cells to make proteins that fight the virus. This approach is how all existing vaccines for other diseases work, but it hasn't succeeded against HIV. The virus is too smart to fall victim to the human immune system. It hides many of the identifying proteins on its outer coat, cloaking them from the prying eyes of B cells, and thus no antibodies are made.

A few proteins on the outside of the HIV virus remain naked and exposed. They have to, in order to bind to human cells and kill them. Paul has his eye on one of these proteins, called gp120. According to his theory, it is a superantigen, a protein related to a fragment of a retrovirus that wormed its way into the human genome hundreds of thousands of years ago and stayed there.

Paul says that because gp120 is a superantigen, it's similar to something the body has seen before. That means the immune system can make antibodies against it—just not enough of them, because after infection, the viral protein sabotages the B cells' assembly line. This is where Paul's vaccine comes in. By chemically manipulating gp120 and administering it as a vaccine, he says, he can cause the B cells to ramp up their production of unusually powerful antibodies, thwarting the virus's attempts at sabotage, arming the immune system, and protecting the body against HIV.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The act of hearing is a group effort for the human body's organs, involving the ears, the eyes and also, according to the results of a new study, the skin. In 1976 scientists discovered the importance of the eyes to our sense of hearing by demonstrating that the eyes could fool the ears in a peculiar phenomenon named the McGurk effect. When participants watched a video in which a person was saying “ga” but the audio was playing “ba,” people thought they heard a completely different sound—”da.” Now, by mixing audio with the tactile sense of airflow, researchers have found that our perception of certain sounds relies, in part, on being able to feel these sounds. The study was published November 26 in Nature.

Normally when we say words with the letters “p,” “t” and “k,” we produce a puff of air. This puff helps the listener distinguish words with these letters from those with the similar sounding “b,” “d” and “g,” respectively, even though the puff is so subtle that most of us do not even notice feeling it. “Unless you're a microphone manufacturer or a radio jockey or a phonetician, this isn't something that you're aware of,” says Bryan Gick, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and lead author of the study. Donald Derrick, a graduate student in the University's Department of Linguistics, is the other author on the study.

More here.

An interview with Tariq Ali by Mara Ahmed and Judith Bello, in CounterPunch:

Mara Ahmed and I were given the opportunity to interview Tariq Ali when he spoke at Hamilton College in Upstate New York on November 11, 2009, during his recent speaking tour of the United States. Tariq, a native of Pakistan who lives in England, is a well known writer, intellectual and activist. He has traveled all over Southwest Asia and the Middle East while researching his books. Mara, who is working on a film highlighting the opinions of the Pakistani people regarding the current situation in Pakistan and the Western initiated 'Global War on Terror', had a lot of questions for Tariq about the internal state of Pakistan. I wanted to ask Tariq for his opinion about the effects of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and what alternatives he thought might be available. –JB

Mara: What is the role of Islamophobia in the Global War on Terror. Many American war veterans have described the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as imperialistic, racist and genocidal. Your comments?

Tariq: Well, I think Islamophobia plays an important part in things, because it creates an atmosphere in which people feel, “Oh, we're just killing Muslims, so that’s alright.” And this situation is becoming quite serious in the United States and in large parts of Europe, where people feel that the fact that a million Iraqis have died is fine because they're not like us, they're Muslims. So, Islamophobia is becoming a very poisonous and dangerous ideological construct which has to be fought against.

It sometimes irritates people but I do compare it to the anti-Semitism that existed in the 20s and 30s and 40s of the last century. And I do wonder whether all the education that people are being given, and rightly so, about the killing of the Jews and the Judeocide of the Second World War is having an impact. What sort of education is it if they can't relate what happened then to some of the things that are happening now. Education which just centers on one atrocity and that's all, where people feel very opposed to that [one atrocity], but they can support other atrocities, is in my opinion not a proper education. And some of the level of ignorant comment on Islam and the Islamic world in the United States is deeply shocking. That's all it is. It's ignorance.

More here. [Thanks to Yousaf Hyat.]