Innehållsförteckning för December 7, 2015 från The Nation

@thenation.com Quantum of Science Marilynne Robinson [“Humanism,” Nov. 9] seems to misunderstand what scientists do. Unanswerable questions are the province of philosophy and religion; science is limited to answerable questions, in the sense that reasonable people can eventually agree that experiments favor one answer over another. Obviously, both types of question are important to people. (Which category the untestable theories of modern cosmology fall into is debatable.) Whether the soul, or nonphysical “self,” is real is an unanswerable question, but Robinson wants neuroscientists to address it. That is not their job. Sometimes scientists replace a difficult question with an easier one; this is called “reductionism.” For Robinson, this is tantamount to genocide, but for most of us it is simply a strategy for approaching difficult problems. Deferring the difficult parts…

Multimedia artist Laurie Anderson collaborated with Mohammed el Gharani on Habeas Corpus, a threeday performance at New York’s Park Avenue Armory this fall. El Gharani was seized at age 14 and held for nearly eight years at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility without charge. For the show, he was beamed in via telepresence from where he now lives in West Africa. —Laura Flanders Laura Flanders: You originally tried to do this kind of telepresence project with prisoners from upstate New York. What happened? Laurie Anderson: We worked on it for several months. We talked to lots of wardens; a lot of the prisons were interested in doing it. Homeland Security let us know that we would not be doing this project, ever. LF: Why? LA: It wasn’t clear. I think…

The conflict in Syria has become a brutal proxy war with many sides, leading to about 11 million displaced people, four million of whom have fled the country altogether. In March 2011, when peaceful protests began in Syria, the country had already suffered three years of a punishing drought thought by many to have its origin in climate change. That drought wreaked havoc on food production and on millions of livelihoods. Desperate farmers moved into the cities, increasing the competition for jobs there. About 1.5 million people were internally displaced, adding to the country’s social upheaval. Would the war in Syria have broken out without global warming? That, of course, is impossible to say. But we can no longer ignore the ways in which our failure to combat climate change…

China in Ten Words by Yu HuaTranslated by Allan H. Barr Vintage, 2012 Yu Hua’s searching essays distill modern China into riffs on just 10 words. Essays centered on terms such as “people,” “leader,” “reading,” and “revolution” reach back to Yu’s childhood during the Cultural Revolution, when he witnessed extrajudicial executions. Later, he turns to the present day: Violence on the scale of the Cultural Revolution, Yu argues, is still officially sanctioned, now in the form of forcible demolitions that evict homeowners in favor of rapid property development. Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar & Michael Schoenhals Harvard University Press, 2006 The most nuanced, in-depth history accessible to the general reader, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals’s authoritative account tracks the interactions between Communist Party elites at every stage of the Cultural Revolution.…

In the spring of 2008, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an essay in these pages about presidential candidate Barack Obama. Reviewing a book by the retrograde culture warrior Shelby Steele—subtitle: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win—Coates explored what was new about Obama’s blackness. Reading the piece now brings into sharp relief how much has changed in the past seven years, for Coates and for the country. “The essential power of Barack Obama,” Coates wrote, was “that he is revealing for white America the quiet mass of black people who do not spend their days calculating the wages of slavery.” His blackness “has no need of marches and placards. It rejects an opportunistic ignorance of racism but understands that esoteric ramblings about white-skin privilege do not move the…

The pianist was still droopy-eyed, her face as dark as the keys they left her to press for half a century, though she must have been white as an angel when they first strung her up in the heavy frame on the wall. Here amid the sighs of Umm Kalthum and the local wine of uncertain vintage, I thought my courage might come through that door next to the bar. While the garçon read his tabloid, and I slid among my options like drop of dew on a bunch of grapes, an Arab nationalist made an entrance, his hair all white as if he’d just been fighting off an invasion of the midan down the street. “The nation is on fire,” he said, instead of good evening, and I started…

ACROSS 1 Maude’s cracking up laughing (6) 5 Makeshift containers flipped about sport organization (7) 10 Turner heading to Indonesian island (5) 11 Normal representation of a beautiful woman eating a dog (source of vitamins) (4,5) 12 Audibly scrape aircraft in part of the Midwest (5,6) 13, 16 down and 22 Although revolutionary Communist is brutally killed… (9) 14 …“Soldier’s Return” is included in choral arrangement for one of the powerful few (8) 17 Appreciate university during depression (5) 19 Search outside of a familiar hangout (5) 20 I run after wild pigeon in negligee (8) 22 See 13 23 They do the unconventional thing when the drinks are on the house? (4,7) 26 Traveling guys, or car carrying someone else’s child (9) 27 Quick comeback for badass, at first?…

Fourteen years ago, immediately after the Al Qaeda terror attacks in the United States on September 11, the French daily Le Monde published a headline that perfectly expressed the sentiments of grief, shock, and solidarity that so many around the world felt at the time: Nous sommes tous Américains (We are all Americans). In the wake of the Islamic (We are all Americans). In the wake of the Islamic State’s terror attacks on Paris, many of those same feelings flooded the world media, this time for the City of Light (a wave soon followed by rueful acknowledgment that earlier ISIS atrocities, from Beirut to Baghdad and Aden to Ankara, had elicited far less sympathy in the Global North). Adding to the shock this time was the horrifying realization that these…

Most news coverage has pronounced the recent terror attacks in France the country’s worst loss of life since the end of World War II. But in between those years was a massacre that’s been little discussed. In 1961, 30,000 Algerians marched peacefully in Paris to demand an end to France’s colonialist war in their country. The demonstrators were attacked by riot police, who murdered at least 40 (and probably closer to 200). Dead bodies were thrown into the Seine, as well as some live ones—those of people beaten unconscious and left to drown. The massacre was never acknowledged by the French state until 1998. Sadly, the tangled history of French colonialism was still present on November 13, when the attackers and their victims included people of Algerian origin or parentage.…

Trump 24%of the GOP vote “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” Carson 23% “Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, were both classmates in the class of 1968 at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where they became acquainted with a young Vladimir Putin.” Rubio 14% “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” Cruz 13% “When millions of Americans rose up against Planned Parenthood, I was proud to lead that fight.”…

As Patricia J. Williams discusses in her column, luxurious tours sponsored by the Four Seasons allow wealthy travelers to traverse the globe without encountering troublesome border controls, the hardship of toting luggage, or even the bottom of one’s champagne flute. The cost? Only $120,000. Glancing down from their all-first-class Boeing 757, these luxury tourists might see the warped reflection of their happy peregrinations. Millions of migrants fleeing violence and starvation are posing their own challenge to national borders. Take, for example, the tens of thousands of Afghans estimated to have left their country just this year. In one of the most inexpensive and common routes, these Afghan migrants flee on foot to Iran, where they have to pay a smuggler just to shepherd them across that country, before facing further…

I sold my earrings at the gold store to buy a silver ring in the market. I swapped that for old ink and a black notebook. This was before I forgot my pages on the seat of a train that was supposed to take me home. Whenever I arrived in a city, it seemed my home was in a different one. Olga says, without my having told her any of this, “Your home is never really home until you sell it. Then you discover all the things you could do with the garden and the big rooms—as if seeing it through the eyes of a broker. You’ve stored your nightmares in the attic and now you have to pack them in a suitcase or two at best.” Olga goes silent…

You can identify the one who broke apart, the one whose spine they managed to straighten, whose neck they stuck back on his shoulders. From where you stand, drinking coffee and watching the passersby, you imagine the line of the vein they threaded from his wrist to his heart, you catch the glint of imported surgical pins in his knees. You see how carefully he takes his steps, walking slowly, usually in a straight path. He’ll never turn for you to see his eyes. This one is sealed tight. It will be easier with one who scattered. The one who scattered often turns around, as though looking for a part he’s still missing. When he turns around, he sometimes looks sweet, because they’ve patched him together with gum, or else…

What happened in Paris on November 13 has happened before: in a shopping district of Beirut on November 12, in the skies over Egypt on October 31, at a cultural center in Turkey on July 20, at a beach resort in Tunisia on June 26—and nearly every day in Syria for the last four years. COMMENT The scenario is by now familiar to us all. News of the killings will appear on television and radio. There will be cries of horror and sorrow, a few hashtags on Twitter, perhaps even a change of avatars on Facebook. Our leaders will make staunch promises to bring the terrorists to justice, while also claiming greater power of surveillance over their citizens. And then life will resume exactly as before. Except for the victims’…

The United States’ military strategy has long been predicated on being able to fight two wars at once. Now the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris, just weeks before the French capital hosts a landmark international climate-change summit, will test whether the world as a whole can address two crises at once. Massacring innocent civilians is never justified and calls for a range of responses: grief for the victims and their loved ones; solidarity with all who condemn such heinous acts; bringing to justice the immediate perpetrators; and unraveling the deeper causes of such violence. These necessities, however, must not be allowed to distract the world’s governments, media, or citizens from the equally urgent task of reversing our collective march toward climate chaos. COMMENT Dooming young people and future generations (not…

The essential mystery of American politics is this: How is it that the Republicans have succeeded in laying the groundwork for long-term dominance at the very moment they have allowed their party to be captured by an irrational, irredentist faction with virtually no concern for public opinion, honest governance, or even empirical reality? Beginning next year, Republicans will control not only the House and Senate but also 60 percent of state governorships and nearly 70 percent of partisan state legislatures, their strongest position ever. At the same time, the party is being led by a group of people with politics so extreme and explanations so silly—and often transparently dishonest—that one cannot help but question their sanity. Can Donald Trump really believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that…

“Itried but failed to ward off the second bottle of champagne,” begins David Brooks’s much-derided essay in the November 15 issue of the New York Times style magazine, T. Entitled “My $120,000 Vacation,” the piece recounts his genteel discomfort with the Four Seasons’ opulent “new 24-day, round-the-world fantasy trip.” His heart is really in the right place, sort of: “I tried to protest,” Brooks says of that champagne. “Sometimes it is the structure of things that you shall be pampered and you have no choice but to sit back and accept that fact.” Indeed, the velvet ropes and fur-lined handcuffs of “Turkish delight,” Russian caviar, and “tray of figs” render him helpless: “Other sweet moments came when I just said what the heck and enjoyed the self-indulgence.” After all, “we…

Before the Tiananmen Square massacre, I was a rebel poet, volatile and impulsive, who liked picking fights and telling tall tales. I’d won more than 20 state literary prizes, and I figured that one day I would earn international fame in the literary world. But all my poems earned me was a stint in jail. That dreamy poet’s look was flayed from my face. Then I was released. It felt as though my world had been turned upside down and I’d been abandoned. The massacre of thousands of students on June 4, 1989, was a turning point. Before June 4, being patriotic was in fashion, and everyone loved China. After June 4, everyone loved the renminbi. As a penniless former labor-camp inmate, I could tell people despised me. I got…