From NYRB, Joyce Carol Oates reviews The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall; Remainder by Tom McCarthy; Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald; and The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology; a review of A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories by Primo Levi; a review of Greed; Women as Lovers; Wonderful, Wonderful Times; The Piano Teacher; and Lust by Elfriede Jelinek; and a review of The Savage Detectives; Distant Star; Last Evenings on Earth; and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. A review of The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Miserables by Mario Vargas Llosa.
As his autobiography makes clear, Mahatma Gandhi was too concerned with sex, diet and politics to be the otherworldly saint many took him to be. Pankaj Mishra on a classic of the confessional genre. Sex and the Saudi: A story of love, lust and shopping in the lives of four privileged young women is nothing new... but set in the conservative Islamic bastion of Riyadh it becomes a recipe for sensation and scandal. Sally Williams meets the taboo-breaking author Rajaa Alsanea. Prize-winning author Rajiv Chandrasekaran finds that four long-haul flights in a row leave him less than coherent, reflects on his wedding and a rabbi with a palm computer and finds a like mind on Iraq's bloody problems.
From CRB, a review essay on Larry McMurtry and the American West: A novelist who chronicles strong lives, despite himself. Writers Like Me: For most black authors, the writing life rarely unfolds the way it does for so many white writers you could name. The worst novel of the year: A review of The Average American Male: A Novel by Chad Kultgen. Return trip: The 50th anniversary of On the Road sees increased interest in Jack Kerouac and his Beat Generation classic.
The news that Antioch College would close in 2008 brings the question: Would the Antioch Review, an independent literary magazine founded in 1941, be shut down too? Where do the books go when a college closes? An interview with Andre Schiffrin, author of A Political Education, on his life and the world of publishing. A review of The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting by Darren Wershler-Henry. The greatest letters ever written: When the Swiss lawyer Albin Schram died in 2005, he left behind an extraordinary collection of letters by some of Western civilisation's greatest minds. They will soon go under the hammer - but here are the highlights of the collection.
A review of The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty by Wilfrid Sheed. A review of Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor. From Rolling Stone, an article on The Record Industry's Decline: Record sales are tanking, and there's no hope in sight: How it all went wrong (and What Next?). For anyone who cares about music and its current chaotic state, the summer of 1997 was the beginning of the end of the music business as we knew it. So, Steve Jobs, what’s next? The iPhone, after all, is already two days old.
From the International Peace Academy, a series of papers on Coping with Crisis, including essays on Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Central Asia and the Caucasus, Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean. A review of The Bottom Billion: Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it by Paul Collier (and more). Weapon of choice for children, rebels and soldiers: A review of AK47: the Story of the People's Gun by Michael Hodges (and more). A review of How to Kill: The Definitive History of the Assassin by Kris Hollington. When Africa ignores the youth, its warlords celebrate. Some justice, at last: The first war criminals are convicted in Sierra Leone.
From The Ghanaian Chronicle, an article on capitalism and the developing world. Africa's Green Revolution on Shaky Ground: A new African aid project may be in danger of becoming yet another boon for Big Agra. In a world on the move, Cape Verde strains to cope. Poor little brother: Why Lesotho is still unstable. Can drag queens and hired guns save Darfur? Sarah Stillman investigates.
From Ode, a review of On Islamism by Fouad Laroui. The Muslim faithless: Ridiculing and questioning Islam, Muhammad, the Qur'an and religion in general is an ancient tradition in Muslim countries. Can one agree on a principle that can serve as the basis for the establishment of genuine peace and harmony in the world? Ishtiaq Ahmed on reason, sympathy and human relations. The many sides of Allah: From NPQ, an interview with Amartya Sen on Turkey and the clash between religion and secularism.
From The New Yorker, an article on The Taliban’s Opium War: The difficulties and dangers of the eradication program. A review of Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran by Danny Postel. A key Iranian minister calls "temporary marriages" a pragmatic way to deal with young people’s sexual needs and to prevent prostitution, but a wide range of critics lambasts them as little more than ways to give religious sanction to practices that degrade women. A review of The Prince: the Secret Story of the World's Most Intriguing Royal, Prince Bandar bin Sultan by William Simpson. A review of The Truth About Syria by Barry Rubin. Immanuel Wallerstein on winners and losers in Palestine. A review of Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse by Sylvain Cypel.
An op-ed on why the Iraq war won't engulf the Mideast. A review of The Mess They Made: The Middle East after Iraq by Gwynne Dyer. Dennis Ross on Tony Blair's daunting challenge as Middle East envoy. Were the US and UK governments complicit in framing an innocent man for the Lockerbie bombing? The truth has yet to be told.
Wrapped in the Star-Spangled Toga: Recently, it has seemed that ancient Rome is everywhere — especially in comparisons to modern America. A review of Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy; The Idea That is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World by Anne-Marie Slaughter; and Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion by David Gelernter (and more).
Georgian America: Geoffrey Wheatcroft on why George III would have felt right at home in George W. Bush's Washington. Loyal to a Fault: In 1776, one out of five Americans most certainly did not hold those truths to be self-evident. A review of Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence by John Ferling. A review of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg. A review of The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity by Andro Linklater. A review of Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America by Sally Denton. A review of Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life by Beverly Lowry. A review of The Road to Disunion: Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 by William W. Freehling. A review of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America by Andrew Ferguson. The Real Deal: Amity Shlaes on reconsidering our reverence for FDR. A review of Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941 by Ian Kershaw (and more).
Why Winston Wouldn't Stand For W: George W. Bush always wanted to be like a wartime British prime minister. He is. But it's not the one he had in mind. The Darksider: Hendrik Hertzberg on Cheney’s hubris. There's a lot of talk — and wishful thinking — about removing Dick Cheney from office. But Cheney isn't the real problem, says Sanford Levinson. The vice presidency itself, enshrined in the Constitution, is the problem. The country would be better off without it. Bush's Loyal Mess: How the Bush years have showed us the dark side of a grand virtue. If President Bush is a fascist, then the fact is that the beloved first black president, B.J. Clinton, is a Hitler incarnate.
From HNN, Freedom! Liberty! A look at how presidents exploit words. The Stars and Stripes, the Liberty Bell, the Fourth of July: all come under fire from the tough myth-buster The Fourth of July by Peter de Bolla. A review of The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America by Kevin Rozario. From Renew America, Alan Keyes on The Crisis of the Republic and more on electoral politics, elections, media and money, the moral basis for the war on terror, the key to American statesmanship, and sovereignty and submission (with more to come); and Fred Hutchison on a brief history of the five kinds of conservatism from 800 B.C. - 1300 A.D.; from Dante to Shakespeare, 800 B.C. - 1300 A.D.; from the King James Bible to Samuel Johnson, 1600 - 1750; and on the bad seeds sowed from Bacon to Kant, 1600-1800 A.D. (with more to come).
Louis J. Sirico Jr. (Villanova): Original Intent in the First Congress. Michael Cahill (Brooklyn): Retributive Justice in the Real World. A new study shows how often juries get it wrong. A review of Forgiveness, Mercy, and Clemency; a review of The Migration of Constitutional Ideas; a review of Law in Times of Crisis: Emergency Powers in Theory and Practice by Oren Gross and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin; and a review of Judge and Jury: American Tort Law on Trial by Eric Helland and Alexander Tabarrok.
From Salon, an interview with Simon Blackburn, author of Plato's Republic: A Biography. A look at how Bertrand Russell's interpretation of Rousseau in The History of Western Philosophy is both unfair and inaccurate and misrepresents Rousseau's historical legacy. From Harvard Magazine, an anti-utopian, old-school scholar of international relations, Stanley Hoffmann grasps “the foreignness of foreigners”; a review of Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction by Thomas K. McCraw; and Debtor Nation: The rising risks of the American Dream, on a borrowed dime. Are the wrong people voting? Louis Menand reviews The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Politics by Bryan Caplan.
From Zeek, an essay on free will and the last gasp of the unenlightened mind; and a look inside the German brain: An English neurosurgeon abroad. Master of creation? Nobel prize-winning scientist Gerald Edelman says he has discovered how human souls are made. It is an epic story of struggle and triumph in the womb - and it could end the worldwide rift over human-embryo experiments. A review of Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women and the World by Liza Mundy. Why can't you buy a kidney to save your life? A growing legal movement to recognize a new fundamental right — medical self-defense — could bring jarring social changes. A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech: The $73.5 billion global biotech business may soon have to grapple with a discovery that calls into question the scientific principles on which it was founded.
From Commentary, Leon Kass on Science, Religion, and the Human Future, with responses by Steven Pinker and others. Richard Dawkins reviews The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism by Michael J. Behe. The Final Days: A growing community of amateur scholars believe that the world as we know it will come to an end in 2012, as prophesied by the ancient Maya. Is the New Age apocalypse coming round at last? The new age of ignorance: We take our young children to science museums, then as they get older we stop. In spite of threats like global warming and avian flu, most adults have very little understanding of how the world works. So, 50 years on from CP Snow's famous "Two Cultures" essay, is the old divide between arts and sciences deeper than ever? And a celebrity panel answers some basic scientific questions.
From Time, an interview with Rupert Murdoch: "They're taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control in an industry in crisis!" The Rupert Murdoch effect: The progressive LA Weekly has gone from a well-reported newspaper to a flashy tabloid with "gotcha" articles. From n+1, a review of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer. A new monthly satirical tabloid, The Levee, aims to get New Orleans residents to see the humor in their situation while at the same time holding local officials accountable for their post-Katrina misdeeds. Right now, many companies are trying to figure out cool new ways to use paper. But who is trying to figure out cool new ways to employ smart, highly trained print journalists? Prostitution is Legal: When advertising is king, media that "puts out" can be queen.
From Salon, a review of It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News. Once a novel idea, now a must: Though a technological minimalist, Marianne Wiggins, like, totally got why she needed a video for her latest book. The literary universe is bigger in the blogosphere: Literary opinions on the web do not have the same status as those in the established press, but they have a much wider scope. A review of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright. The iCommons harvest: There's no tragedy in a digital commons where quality content is king. When public records are too public: Open records are an established tradition, but does Internet access call for a change? One of the thorniest problems of the information age: data collected for one purpose and then used for another, or "data reuse".
From The Atlantic Monthly, Caitlin Flanagan reviews Generation Myspace: Helping Your Teen Survive Online Adolescence and To Catch a Predator: Protecting Your Kids from Online Enemies Already in Your Home. How the second-generation Internet is spawning a global youth culture. Do you prefer Facebook to MySpace? The class divide is thriving on the internet. Facebook gets help from its friends: Music, horoscopes help boost site's user base; will new offerings allow it to catch MySpace? In Your Face: How Facebook could crush MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google. Oh, that John Locke: There's a new sport on the Internet: competing to come up with the best examples of how Wikipedia, the Web's home-grown reference source, is skewed towards pop-culture topics. A review of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen.
Bold gambit for disjointed UN: Launched this year in 8 countries, the One UN pilot aims to improve coordination between agencies. Don’t Kick the Inspectors Out of the U.N.: While individual governments will always track and analyze weaponry, their own national conclusions can never form a credible basis for action by the international community. From The Economist, a review of Swords and Ploughshares: Bringing Peace to the 21st Century by Paddy Ashdown.
From Fortune, Jeffrey Sachs on how he'd fix the World Bank. Protecting the global poor: Almost all rich countries got wealthy by protecting infant industries and limiting foreign investment. But these countries are now denying poor ones the same chance to grow by forcing free-trade rules on them before they are strong enough. From New Statesman, a review of State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth. The combined forces of population growth and urbanisation are creating a planet of slums, where the urban population will have doubled by 2030, according to a report released by the United Nations. With 4D Cities, now we can watch for ourselves the way great cities have grown upwards through time, using software that creates a virtual historical tour. Designing Cities for People: In an age where parks are sacrificed for parking lots, how can city planning benefit people — not cars?
The FT Global 500: The annual snapshot of the world’s largest companies gives a remarkable picture of how corporate fortunes have changed in the past year; and for richer, for poorer: Income inequality within a country can make those at the bottom feel poorer, no matter how high their absolute income. A report finds the number of wealthy individuals worldwide climbed to 9.5 million in 2006, an 8.3% increase from 2005, according to the report. The combined wealth of high-net-worth individuals world-wide increased to $37.2 trillion, up 11.4% from 2005. An article on The Case for Taxing Globalization's Big Winners. The Double Edge of Globalization: An excerpt from Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization by Nayan Chanda.
From The Walrus, Alienated Cosmopolitans: Can we be world citizens yet still retain a sense of place? From Ode, an essay on the instinct to save the planet; the world grows Wiser A new global databank aims to connect good work everywhere; solutions for the problems of growing megacities can be found in their slums and shantytowns; anthropologist Jeremy Narby is bringing together indigenous knowledge and Western science to inform the search for a sustainable future; and a review of We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity by Charles Leadbeater. Make the game, change the world: agoraXchange is an online community for designing a massive multi-player global politics game challenging the violence and inequality of our present political system.
From CRB, Charles R. Kesler on Iraq and the Neoconservatives: Beyond the Bush Doctrine; a review of At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA by George Tenet and Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA by John Prados; and an essay on Taming Big Government: Congress won't and the president can't; the Greatness and Decline of American Oratory: A review of American Speeches: Political Oratory from the Revolution to the Civil War and American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton edited by Ted Widmer. From Naked Punch, an interview with Noam Chomsky on hegemony and counter-hegemony (and part 2 and part 3); and Artemy Kalinovsky on understanding empire. Will to win: Why do big, powerful countries with strong militaries sometimes lose wars to small countries with weak ones?
Cass R. Sunstein on Minimalists vs. Visionaries: The real divide on the Supreme Court is between two kinds of conservatives (and more from TNR). Geoffrey R. Stone on Roberts, Alito and the rule of law. Erwin Chemerinsky on how Roberts and Alito delivered high court ideology and Ellen Goodman on the transformation of Justice Ginsburg. Blinded by the Law: Teen sex case shows that focusing on the letter of the law doesn't always spell justice. Linda Kimball wants to know.
From PopMatters, a review of Courting Equality: A Documentary History of America's First Legal Same-Sex Marriages by Patricia A. Gozemba and Karen Kahn; and I'm Comin' with the U-Haul, Baby: Society as a whole is relatively indifferent to the lesbian community, whether through acceptance, titillation, or oblivion. Out and proud parents: As tolerance spreads, gay life is becoming more suburban, contented and even dull. An interview with Mike Jones, author of I Had to Say Something: The Art of Ted Haggard's Fall.
From GQ, Hail Mary, U.S.A.: Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan has built a town in southern Florida dedicated to hard-core Catholic living. James O’Brien walks among the blessed. From Christianity Today, I Love, Therefore You Are: A look at why the modern search for self ends in despair. Sam Harris writes In Defense of Witchcraft. Am I a dwarf or a horseman? Christopher Hitchens wants to know: "It's an honour to be mentioned in the same breath as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. We could become known as the Four Horsemen of the Counter-Apocalypse". A camp they can believe in Ohio's Camp Quest lets young atheists enjoy summer fun with like-minded children.
From the latest issue of The Commoner, Massimiliano Tomba (Padova): Differentials of surplus-value in the contemporary forms of exploitation; Ferruccio Gambino (Padova): A critique of Fordism and the Regulation School; and Mariarosa Dalla Costa (Padova): Reruralizing the World.
A new issue of Colloquy is out, including David Lane (Monash): On Truth and Lie in a Rhetorical Sense; Semantic Perils in Nietzschean Thought; and a review of Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger. An Unresolved Conversation, 1951 - 1970 by James K. Lyon. From Naked Punch, an interview with Richard Shusterman, author of Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture. From Radical Society, Aristotle in America: Joseph Lough reclaims a classic.
Peter A. Hall (Harvard): The Dilemmas of Contemporary Social Science. A review of Freedom and Determinism. A review of The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. Chimpanzees, as well as 18-month-old children, will assist strangers even when getting no personal reward, suggesting that human altruism has deep evolutionary roots. Ain't misbehaving: Adultery yields benefits to females as well as males. Recent studies suggest that labeling and talking about it — literally, just getting it out in the open — can help us deal with intense emotional experiences.
From the latest issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, a review of Applied Evolutionary Economics and the Knowledge-Based Economy by Andreas Pyka and Horst Hanusch; a review of Innovation, Evolution and Complexity Theory by Koen Frenken; and a review of I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter.
The first chapter from The Pythagorean Theorem: A 4,000-Year History by Eli Maor. A Golden Sales Pitch: A design incorporating the golden ratio makes blue jeans aesthetically pleasing, or so the manufacturer claims. What are the top 10 science pop songs? From the threat of nuclear war to the wonder of heterosexual love the pop song reaches places other science fears to tread – namely, the intimate headspace of a brooding teen.
From Harvard Magazine, A Scholar in the House: A profile of President Drew Gilpin Faust. Who killed Antioch? Womyn: The college went from liberal bastion to PC laughingstock with its sex and dating policy. An article on how law schools are also ranked by blogs now.