publishedmedium:the new york review

  • ’Orientalism,’ Then and Now | by Adam Shatz | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

    https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/20/orientalism-then-and-now

    Un retour sur l’histoire de l’orientalisme et sa « mutation » à l’époque actuelle.

    Edward Said’s Orientalism is one of the most influential works of intellectual history of the postwar era. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Perhaps the most common misunderstanding is that it is “about” the Middle East; on the contrary, it is a study of Western representations of the Arab-Islamic world—of what Said called “mind-forg’d manacles,” after William Blake. The book’s conservative critics misread it as a nativist denunciation of Western scholarship, ignoring its praise for Louis Massignon, Jacques Berque, and Clifford Geertz, while some Islamists praised the book on the basis of the same misunderstanding, overlooking Said’s commitment to secular politics.

    Since the book’s first publication in 1978, “Orientalism” has become one of those words that shuts down conversation on liberal campuses, where no one wants to be accused of being “Orientalist” any more than they want to be called racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic. That “Orientalist” is now a commonly applied epithet is a tribute to the power of Said’s account, but also to its vulgarization. With Orientalism, Said wanted to open a discussion about the way the Arab-Islamic world had been imagined by the West—not to prevent a clear-eyed reckoning with the region’s problems, of which he was all too painfully aware.

  • One Year of Gaza Protests. A New Era of Palestinian Struggle? | Tareq Baconi
    https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/03/29/one-year-of-gaza-protests-a-new-era-of-palestinian-struggle

    As I was driving from Jericho to Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, in early March, I noticed a large sign that Palestinians had set up in preparation for Land Day, on the thirtieth of the month. The sign showed the now ubiquitous Banksy print of a protester, with his nose and mouth covered, hurtling a bouquet of flowers—presumably in place of a Molotov cocktail—at an invisible oppressor. The drawing had been printed under one of the best-known lines by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: On this Land, there is what makes life worth living. Source: The New York Review of Books

  • Our Twisted DNA | by Tim Flannery | The New York Review of Books
    https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/07/carl-zimmer-twisted-dna

    As long as chimeras and mosaics were detected on the basis of physical manifestations or blood type, they were considered to be phenomenally rare—indeed freakish. By 1983, only seventy-five cases of human chimeras, as detected from blood type, were known, while mosaicism was mostly known from medical cases. Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man,” suffered from a form of mosaicism known as Proteus syndrome, which left parts of his body deformed by monstrous growths, while other parts remained completely normal. For decades, his sad example defined the condition for many.

    Recent advances in genetic analysis have revealed that chimerism is common. In fact, chimeric individuals may be the rule, rather than the exception, among mammals. One Danish study of the blood of 154 girls aged ten to fifteen discovered that around 13 percent of them had blood cells with Y-chromosomes. These cells probably originated from an older brother and had crossed into the mother, where they survived before crossing into, and taking root in, the daughter. A Seattle study of fifty-nine women who died, on average, in their seventies found that 63 percent had cells with Y-chromosomes in their brains.

    As bizarre as chimeras might seem, they represent only the surface waters of Zimmer’s deep dive into the nature of inheritance. Epigenetics, a fast-expanding area of science that explains how things experienced by individuals can influence the traits that are inherited by their offspring, seems to contradict our conventional understanding of genetics. The epigenome, “that collection of molecules that envelops our genes and controls what they do,” as Zimmer puts it, operates through methylation—the process whereby methyl-group molecules are added to the molecular envelope surrounding the DNA, and so inhibit certain genes from operating (and, in some cases, from operating in descendants as well).

    We owe one of the most penetrating insights into epigenetics to a laboratory accident. Michael Skinner of Washington State University was examining the impact of the anti-fungal agent vinclozolin on laboratory rats. He discovered that the offspring of rats exposed to the chemical produced deformed sperm. When a laboratory assistant accidentally used these offspring to breed a new generation of lab rats, researchers discovered that the grandsons of the poisoned rats also produced deformed sperm.

    Skinner’s rats sparked a flurry of new experiments that showed how methylation could lead to the inheritance of acquired traits. As some researchers commented, it was as if the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (who famously posited that the necks of giraffes had lengthened over generations because they were stretched as the animals reached up to feed) had become reestablished. Science is rarely so simple—still, epigenetics has Zimmer wondering whether “poverty, abuse, and other assaults on parents also impress themselves epigenetically on their children.” The study of epigenetics is still in its infancy, so it may be years before we know the answer. With some recent studies showing that epigenetic effects fade over time, many researchers are unsure whether epigenetics is anything but an interesting codicil to the conventional genetic theory of inheritance.

    #adn #génétique #épigénétique

  • Do We Write Differently on a Screen? | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/do-we-write-differently-on-a-screen

    But, before that, I published my first short novel, “Tongues of Flame.” I continued to write fiction by hand and then type it up. But, at least, once it was typed, you could edit on a screen. What a difference that was! What an invitation to obsession! Hitherto, there was a limit to how many corrections you could make by hand. There was only so much space on the paper. It was discouraging—typing something out time after time, to make more and more corrections. You learned to be satisfied with what you had. Now you could go on changing things forever. I learned how important it was to keep a copy of what I had written first, so as to remember what I had meant in the beginning. Sometimes it turned out to be better than the endlessly edited version.

    We had personal computers at this point, but I still wrote fiction by hand. The mental space feels different when you work with paper. It is quieter. A momentum builds up, a spell between page and hand and eye. I like to use a nice pen and see the page slowly fill. But, for newspaper articles and translations, I now worked straight onto the computer. Which was more frenetic, nervy. The writing was definitely different. But more playful, too. You could move things around. You could experiment so easily. I am glad the computer wasn’t available when I started writing. I might have been overwhelmed by the possibilities. But once you know what you’re doing, the facility of the computer is wonderful.

    Then e-mail arrived and changed everything. First, you would only hook the computer up through your landline phone a couple of times a day, as if there were a special moment to send and receive mail. Then came the permanent connection. Finally, the wireless, and, of course, the Internet. In the space of perhaps ten years, you passed from waiting literally months for a decision on something that you’d written, or simply for a reaction from a friend or an agent, to expecting a reaction immediately. Whereas in the past you checked your in-box once a day, now you checked every five minutes.

    And now you could write an article for The Guardian or the New York Times as easily as you could write it for L’Arena di Verona. Write it and expect a response in hours. In minutes. You write the first chapter of a book and send it at once to four or five friends. Hoping they’d read it at once. It’s impossible to exaggerate how exciting this was, at first, and how harmful to the spirit. You, everybody, are suddenly incredibly needy of immediate feedback. A few more years and you were publishing regularly online for The New York Review of Books. And, hours after publication, you could know how many people were reading the piece. Is it a success? Shall I follow up with something similar?

    While you sit at your computer now, the world seethes behind the letters as they appear on the screen. You can toggle to a football match, a parliamentary debate, a tsunami. A beep tells you that an e-mail has arrived. WhatsApp flashes on the screen. Interruption is constant but also desired. Or at least you’re conflicted about it. You realize that the people reading what you have written will also be interrupted. They are also sitting at screens, with smartphones in their pockets. They won’t be able to deal with long sentences, extended metaphors. They won’t be drawn into the enchantment of the text. So should you change the way you write accordingly? Have you already changed, unwittingly?

    Or should you step back? Time to leave your computer and phone in one room, perhaps, and go and work silently on paper in another. To turn off the Wi-Fi for eight hours. Just as you once learned not to drink everything in the hotel minibar, not to eat too much at free buffets, now you have to cut down on communication. You have learned how compulsive you are, how fragile your identity, how important it is to cultivate a little distance. And your only hope is that others have learned the same lesson. Otherwise, your profession, as least as you thought of it, is finished.

    Tim Parks, a novelist and essayist, is the author of “The Novel: A Survival Skill” and “Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books.”

    #Ecriture #Ordinateur #Edition

  • Imperial Exceptionalism | by Jackson Lears | The New York Review of Books
    https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/02/07/imperial-exceptionalism

    It is hard to give up something you claim you never had. That is the difficulty Americans face with respect to their country’s empire. Since the era of Theodore Roosevelt, politicians, journalists, and even some historians have deployed euphemisms—“expansionism,” “the large policy,” “internationalism,” “global leadership”—to disguise America’s imperial ambitions. According to the exceptionalist creed embraced by both political parties and most of the press, imperialism was a European venture that involved seizing territories, extracting their resources, and dominating their (invariably dark-skinned) populations. Americans, we have been told, do things differently: they bestow self-determination on backward peoples who yearn for it. The refusal to acknowledge that Americans have pursued their own version of empire—with the same self-deceiving hubris as Europeans—makes it hard to see that the US empire might (like the others) have a limited lifespan. All empires eventually end, but maybe an exceptional force for global good could last forever—or so its champions seem to believe.

    #impérialisme #etats-unis #déni

  • In the Valley of Fear | by Michael Greenberg | The New York Review of Books
    https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/12/20/in-the-valley-of-fear

    Le travail que « volent » les #migrants mexicains aux Etatsuniens est en fait un travail d’esclave que refusent les nationaux et que les Mexicains concernés s’empressent de quitter dès que la situation socio-économique de leur pays s’améliore...

    In response to the argument that immigrants steal jobs from Americans by undercutting their wages, the UFW set up a website offering citizens and legal residents agricultural jobs anywhere in the country through state employment services. This was in 2010, during the Great Recession. The website received about four million hits, out of which around 12,000 people filled out employment forms. Of these, a total of twelve citizens or legal residents actually showed up for work. Not one of them lasted longer than a day . According to a Los Angeles Times report, Silverado, a farm labor contractor in Napa, “has never had a white, American-born person take an entry-level gig, even after the company increased hourly wages to $4 above the minimum.” A wine grower in Stockton couldn’t lure unemployed citizens for $20 an hour.

    Fruit and vegetable picking is a one-generation job—farmworkers I spoke to neither wanted nor would allow their children to follow them into the fields. The heat and physical toll, combined with the feudal power of the growers, make it preferable to work in an air-conditioned hotel or packing house, where you can stand upright and be free of pesticides for the same low wages.

    This means that a constant supply of impoverished Mexican immigrants willing to do the work is required. But those immigrants aren’t coming . Since 2005 more Mexicans have been leaving the US than arriving. And this isn’t only because of a crackdown at the border. In 2000, when the border was far more porous than it is now, 1.6 million Mexicans were apprehended trying to cross into the US. In 2016 the number was 192,969.2 Ed Taylor, an economist at UC Davis, estimates that the number of potential immigrants from rural Mexico shrinks every year by 150,000. This can be partly explained by improved economic conditions in northern and central Mexico , which have dimmed the allure of minimum-wage labor in the US, and partly by the cost and danger of venturing across the border.

    #etats-Unis

  • Opioid Nation | by #Marcia_Angell | The New York Review of Books
    https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/12/06/opioid-nation

    As long as this country tolerates the chasm between the rich and the poor, and fails even to pretend to provide for the most basic needs of our citizens, such as health care, education, and child care, some people will want to use drugs to escape. This increasingly seems to me not a legal or medical problem, nor even a public health problem. It’s a political problem. We need a government dedicated to policies that will narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and ensure basic services for everyone. To end the epidemic of deaths of despair, we need to target the sources of the despair.

    #politique #opiacés #opioides #etats-unis

  • The Suffocation of Democracy | Christopher R. Browning
    https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy

    The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary Source: The New York Review of Books

  • Sabra and Shatila: New Revelations
    Seth Anziska , The New York Review of Books, le 17 septembre 2018
    https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/17/sabra-and-shatila-new-revelations

    Historians try not to audibly gasp in the reading rooms of official archives, but there are times when the written record retains a capacity to shock. In 2012, while working at the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, I came across highly classified material from Israel’s 1982 War in Lebanon that had just been opened to researchers. This access was in line with the thirty-year rule of declassification governing the release of documents in Israel. Sifting through Foreign Ministry files, I stumbled upon the minutes of a September 17 meeting between Israeli and American officials that took place in the midst of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

    The startling verbatim exchange between Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and US diplomat Morris Draper clearly demonstrated how the slaughter of civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps of south Beirut was prolonged by Draper’s acquiescence in the face of Sharon’s deceptive claim of “terrorists” remaining behind. This made the US unwittingly complicit in the notorious three-day massacre carried out by militiamen linked to the Phalange, a right-wing political party of Lebanese Maronite Christians that was allied with Israel.

    Some critics have always suspected, and hoped to uncover evidence, that Israeli officials explicitly ordered the massacre or directly colluded in its execution. These new documents don’t supply that smoking gun. What they do show is a pattern of extensive cooperation and planning between Israeli and Maronite leaders in the aims and conduct of the war that provides a more comprehensive framework for judging moral accountability. These sources suggest a line of thinking about the political and military defeat of Palestinian nationalism that built on the legacy of the Nakba itself, reaching tragic ends through the destruction wrought in Beirut.

    The excerpts from the Kahan Appendix do, however, underscore the fact that members of the Israeli military and intelligence organizations knew in advance what the Phalange was intending to do to the Palestinians—at a minimum, forced expulsion through threatened or actual deadly violence, and the subsequent razing of the refugee camps. According to the testimony of Colonel Elkana Harnof, a senior Israeli military intelligence officer, the Phalange revealed that “Sabra would become a zoo and Shatilah Beirut’s parking place.” Harnof added details about acts of brutality and massacres that had already taken place, inflicted by Maronite forces with “specific references to acts of elimination of locals ‘most likely Palestinians.’” This was relayed to Defense Minister Sharon as early as June 23, little more than two weeks after the start of the Israeli invasion (II: 78). On that day, a report was passed to Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Defense Minister Sharon that described the Christian militia’s “terminating” 500 people in the evacuation of West Beirut. The Mossad Director Nahum Admoni and others met with Bashir Gemayel and the description of the meeting contains harrowing evidence of what was planned for the Palestinians throughout Lebanon.

    https://www.scribd.com/document/388796835/Kahan-Commission-Appendix-English#from_embed

    http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4887715-Kahan-Commission-Appendix-Complete-English.html

    #Palestine #Liban #Sabra #Chatila

  • Islam’s New ‘Native Informants’ | by Nesrine Malik | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

    https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/06/07/islams-new-native-informants

    Returning from Lebanon and Egypt in 2003, Edward Said wrote an angry dispatch in the London Review of Books on how the Iraq War as reported on Arabic TV channels portrayed a different conflict from the one reported by the American media, in which journalists were “as lost as the English-speaking soldiers they have been living with.” He argued that the stream of Western commentary “has obscured the negligence of the military and policy experts who planned it and now justify it.” The misguided belief that the Iraqis would welcome the Americans with glee after a period of aerial bombardment, a fundamental flaw in the planning of the military mission, he pinned squarely on the out-of-touch exiled Iraqi opposition and the two Middle East experts who, at the time, held the most sway over US foreign policy in the region: Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami.

    Said dismissed Bernard Lewis as an Orientalist, a generalist, and an ideologue. But the Lebanese-born Fouad Ajami was damned in fewer words: he was a “native informant.” By that was meant one who deploys “we,” Said wrote, “as an imperial collectivity which, along with Israel, never does anything wrong. Arabs are to blame for everything and therefore deserve ‘our’ contempt and hostility.” In a profile of Ajami written for The Nation that appeared at almost the same time, Adam Shatz observed that Ajami’s failure to predict the Saudi conveyor-belt of radicalization that brought about 9/11 (so focused was he on “the menace of Saddam and the treachery of Arafat) still had not dented his Middle East expert credentials as far as the US media were concerned. “America was going to war with Muslims,” Shatz wrote, “and a trusted native informant was needed.”

    Fifteen calamitous years later, the scorn that the late Ajami received at the time has been vindicated. But the term “native informant” has become a troubling one. As a derogatory description of an indigenous person considered a collaborator with the colonial or invading power, it sits too closely for comfort to slurs such as “house slave” and its derivatives. In the discipline of postcolonial studies, “native informant” was once useful in understanding the way certain cultural brokers from former colonies could benefit from helping more powerful Western authorities objectify their people. In an essay on the Lebanese-American academic Evelyne Accad, the scholar Dorothy Figueira described native informants as “disciplinary gatekeepers providing an authoritative version of history for the upper classes (reformers or nationalists), and the West.” But in a world where these “authoritative versions” are not simply academic, but can also be the ideological underpinnings of military aggression, the native informant’s role is that of enabler.

  • Orientalism : An Exchange | by Edward W. Said | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/08/12/orientalism-an-exchange

    1982

    Lewis’s verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong. Of course, these are familiar attributes of the Orientalists’ breed, some of whom have at least had the courage to be honest in their active denigration of Islamic, as well as other non-European peoples. Not Lewis. He proceeds in his usual mode by suppressing or distorting the truth and by innuendo, methods to which he adds that veneer of omniscient tranquil authority which he supposes is the way scholars talk. The fact is that the present political moment allows him to deliver ahistorical and willful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism.

  • A Mighty Wind | by Max Rodenbeck | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/04/19/narendra-modi-mighty-wind

    Of the BJP’s 285 incoming members of parliament in 2014, Vaishnav observes, a third had been charged in ongoing criminal cases and a fifth were facing prosecution for jailable offenses, up to and including rape and murder. More shockingly, a ten-year database of state and national elections compiled by Vaishnav showed that candidates with criminal cases were three times more likely to win than others . This suggests that they are more skilled either at buying or intimidating voters or at persuading them that they are better placed to “get things done” than law-abiding rivals.

    #Inde #crimes #politique

  • Raised by Wolves | by Tim Flannery | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/04/05/raised-by-wolves

    Distinguishing a dog from a wolf is not always straightforward, and because several US states have laws prohibiting the keeping of wolves or wolf/dog hybrids, expert testimony is often called upon to determine whether an animal is a dog or wolf. Pierotti has been called as a witness eighteen times; having kept wolf/dog hybrids and studied both wolves and dogs extensively, his testimony is highly valued. In many cases, he has been able to demonstrate that the canid in question has no admixture of wolf genes. But as he points out, there is a larger question here, for the laws assume that wolves are more dangerous than dogs, when in fact the reverse is true. In the US between 1979 and 1996, more than three hundred people were killed by 406 dogs, and only fifteen of these instances involved purported wolf/dog crosses, some of which, according to Pierotti, are “highly questionable.” The situation with purebred wolves is even more clear-cut, for there is not a single example of a wolf in nature killing a human in the entire history of North America.

    #chiens #loups

  • Art et Liberté: Egypt’s Surrealists | by Charles Shafaieh | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

    http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/02/03/art-et-liberte-egypts-surrealists

    In March 1938, the Egyptian poet and critic Georges Henein and a small group of friends disrupted a lecture in Cairo given by the Alexandria-born Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, who was an outspoken supporter of Mussolini. Six months later, Henein, along with the Egyptian writer Anwar Kamel, the Italian anarchist painter Angelo de Riz, and thirty-four other artists, writers, journalists, and lawyers, signed the manifesto “Vive l’Art Dégénéré!” (“Long Live Degenerate Art!”) that would inaugurate Art et Liberté, a short-lived but influential artists’ collective based in Egypt that is the focus of an illuminating exhibition currently at the Tate Liverpool, in Britain, covering the years 1938–1948. Printed in Arabic and French, with a facsimile of Guernica on its reverse, the declaration was a direct challenge to the previous year’s Nazi-organized exhibition “Entartete ‘Kunst’” (“Degenerate ‘Art’”), which presented art by Chagall, Kandinsky and other modern artists, largely Jewish, that the Nazi Party deemed decadent, morally reprehensible or otherwise harmful to the German people.

    Internationalist in orientation and opposed as much to fascist-endorsed art as to the Egyptian academy’s own nationalist-minded aesthetics that resurrected ancient symbols in the name of “Egyptianness,” the group declared that it was “mere idiocy and folly to reduce modern art… to a fanaticism for any particular religion, race, or nation.” Surrealism—in its rejection of tyranny in any form and by championing uninhibited freedom of expression—was a fitting counterpoint that the group believed could also be harnessed to bring about social change.

  • Controlling the Chief | by Charlie Savage | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/08/pentagon-president-controlling-the-chief

    In short, Trump’s generals—some still in uniform, some now civilians—are clearly trying to mitigate turmoil and curb potential dangers. That may be at once reassuring and disturbing. In the United States, the armed forces are supposed to be apolitical. While the nation should be grateful in these troubled times that the military as an institution has remained loyal to constitutional values, Ned Price, a former CIA officer who served on the National Security Council under Obama, wrote in an essay in Lawfare that the military’s very act of contradicting or distancing itself from the president, even subtly, “goes against the grain of our democratic system and should engender at least fleeting discomfort among even the most virulent administration critics.” Thus, even if it is a good thing for now that the line between “civil and military affairs in American society” is getting a bit blurred, in the long run, Price warned, “that line must again become inviolable when our political class returns to its senses.” Or as Mullen, in a speech in October at the US Naval Institute, put it:

    How did we get here to a point where we are depending on retired generals for the stability of our system? And what happens if that bulwark breaks, first of all? I have been in too many countries globally where the generals, if you will, gave great comfort to their citizens. That is not the United States of America.

    #etats-Unis #pouvoir #militaires #civils

  • ’My Only Friend Is My Conscience’: Face to Face With El Salvador’s Cold Killer | by Jonathan Blitzer | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/07/my-only-friend-is-my-conscience-face-to-face-with-el-salvadors-cold-killer

    I was due to fly to El Salvador the next night, because I wanted to confront Ochoa about the theft. While I was packing my bags in New York, the Salvadoran police began rounding up the culprits. Within hours, four were in custody, and several others had gone into hiding. The names of the officers appeared on television sets across El Salvador, listed by rank on the local news. These were aged and haggard men, geriatric fugitives. Two of them had been arrested before, in 1991, but were released from prison after the passage of the amnesty law.

    Around the time that the Jesuit priests were killed, Ochoa had retired from military service and was working as the head of the state electric company, a privileged civilian post, and his name was circulating among officials at the State Department and CIA as a possible presidential candidate. He wasn’t personally implicated in the Jesuit killings, but he was friendly with another colonel who’d been found guilty of orchestrating the murders. Several months after the assassinations, Ochoa appeared on 60 Minutes saying that his friend was acting on someone else’s orders. This was farther than even the friend was willing to go—he had known enough to stay quiet. But Ochoa, who felt unencumbered by institutional allegiances, declared that “it was all planned beforehand,” implying that a group of military and political leaders had organized the crime. This flummoxed the Salvadoran government, which had no choice but to issue a string of denials.

    Soon, there was talk in political circles of sacking Ochoa and forcing him to “wallow in the assembly, where he could talk to his heart’s content,” as one US Embassy cable summarized. (It is a mark of the times that a spot in congress was considered a demotion, a posting far from the action.) Ultimately, American officials cautioned their Salvadoran counterparts against making a martyr out of Ochoa. It was a lesson that would never be fully learned. In 2012, the left-wing president of El Salvador, reacting to another of Ochoa’s typically incendiary public comments, tried to remove him from contention for congress by reactivating his military status and conscripting him back into service. Ochoa coasted to reelection.

  • France, Islam, & the Ramadan Affair | by Sylvain Cypel | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/11/30/france-islam-the-ramadan-affair

    #Valls may lack a political home for now, but he has signaled that he means to make identity—#Islam vs. #France —his main theme. If President Macron fails to pull the country out of its socio-economic doldrums, he will have to face a dangerously sharpened identity politics

  • This Poisonous Cult of Personality | by Pankaj Mishra | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/01/this-poisonous-cult-of-personality

    Donald Trump’s election last year exposed an insidious politics of celebrity, one in which a redemptive personality is projected high above the slow toil of political parties and movements. As his latest tweets about Muslims confirm, this post-political figure seeks, above all, to commune with his entranced white nationalist supporters. Periodically offering them emotional catharsis, a powerful medium of self-expression at the White House these days, Trump makes sure that his fan base survives his multiple political and economic failures. This may be hard to admit but the path to such a presidency of spectacle and vicarious participation was paved by the previous occupant of the White House.

    Barack Obama was the first “celebrity president” of the twenty-first century—“that is,” as Perry Anderson recently pointed out, “a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that,” and for whom “personal popularity” mattered more than the fate of own party and policies.

    Public life routinely features such sensations, figures in whom people invest great expectations based on nothing more than a captivation with their radiant personas. Youthful good looks, an unconventional marriage, and some intellectual showmanship helped turn Emmanuel Macron, virtually overnight, into the savior not just of France, but of Europe, too. Until the approval ratings of this dynamic millionaire collapsed, a glamour-struck media largely waived close scrutiny of his neoliberal faith in tax breaks for rich compatriots, and contempt for “slackers.”

    Another example is Aung San Suu Kyi who, as a freedom fighter and prisoner of conscience, precluded any real examination of her politics, which have turned out to be abysmally sectarian, in tune with her electoral base among Myanmar’s Buddhist ethnic majority. Her personal sacrifices remained for too long the basis for assessing her political outlook, though the record of Robert Mugabe, among many other postcolonial leaders, had already proved that suffering for the cause of freedom is no guarantee of wise governance, and that today’s victims are likely to be tomorrow’s persecutors.

  • Nuclear Apocalypse Now? | by Ariel Dorfman | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/09/22/nuclear-apocalypse-now

    But there was another, more telling aspect of Trump’s UN speech. This most thoughtless and impetuous of American presidents also called the possibility of nuclear conflict “unthinkable.” On the contrary, we must think about it. And crucial to any understanding of the moral import of the possible use of nuclear weapons is to go back to the foundational moment of this nuclear age and ask again: Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki war crimes?

    We have no way of knowing what the people of North Korea would make of that question, any more than we know what their views are about their leader’s avowed willingness to order a nuclear first strike. After all, the citizens of the so-called Democratic Republic are closeted in a “dense fog” created by Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, “to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.”

    We do, on the other hand, know something about what Americans think. Two years ago, a Pew Research poll found that 56 percent of American respondents regarded the bombing of Hiroshima as justified, a clear majority, though significantly down from the 85 percent who felt that way in 1945.

    There is still much controversy around the issue. The traditional justification for the attack was that it was the only way to force the Japanese High Command to surrender immediately, and to avoid a long and costly invasion of island after island that would have led to countless American and Allied casualties. But subsequent historical research has revealed that Japan capitulated out of fear that the Soviet Union would land forces on the Japanese mainland and occupy half the country. The findings of historians Gar Alperovitz, Murray Sayle, and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, among others, refute the conventional wisdom that the first nuclear attack in history was an absolute necessity.

    Yet the myth persists. The question is: To what extent does Americans’ belief in the rightness of President Truman’s fateful decision in 1945 provide moral support for the brimstone rhetoric of nuclear conflagration that President Trump is deploying today?

  • Macron’s California Revolution | by Sylvain #Cypel | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/05/macrons-california-revolution

    Among the many ideas put forward by Emmanuel Macron, the new French president, was to institute an annual speech to the French parliament, a sort of State of the Union à la française. It seems that he couldn’t wait more than ten days after the legislative elections to give it a try. On Monday, in a major speech in the French Parliament, Macron compared his election to a “new start” for a country that is “regaining optimism and hope”; he also introduced a raft of bold proposals for streamlining government. But even bolder than his proposals was the speech itself, and the American-style executive it seemed to usher in.

    Along with the speech, there has been Macron’s quasi-official investiture of his wife, Brigitte, as a highly visible First Lady. And then there are the market-driven economic policies he has endorsed. All this has seemed—from the French point of view—emblematic of Macron’s #fascination with the United States. Or to be more exact, with the California version of the United States, where #Silicon_Valley libertarianism mixes with a general progressivism on social issues—access to education and health care, openness to immigration and minorities, support for gay marriage, efforts to control climate change, etc. Didn’t he declare, on June 15, visiting VivaTech, a technological fair, that he intends to transform #France in “a nation of #start-ups” able to “attract foreign talents”?

    #Etats-Unis

  • The Demolition of American Education (The New York Review of Books)
    http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/06/05/trump-devos-demolition-of-american-education

    Thus, we have a budget for federal education policy that swings a mighty scythe, mostly at programs that serve middle-income and low-income students. Its major innovation is a proven failure. DeVos has no ideas about helping or improving public schools. Her only idea is choice. But we already know how that will turn out.

    #éducation #politique #budget #USA

  • The black box warning on philanthrocapitalism - Jocalyn Clark & Linsey McGoey | The Lancet
    http://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)32184-5/fulltext

    On Sept 21, 2016, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced plans to invest US$3 billion in a mission to “cure, prevent or manage all diseases” by 2100, part of an earlier promise to donate 99% of their stock in Facebook, a company Zuckerberg founded. It is the latest example in a growing number of pledges by billionaires to give away their wealth for social causes rather than pass it down to descendants.

    Opinion: Charities and Taxpayers Deserve More From Donor-Advised Funds - The Chronicle of Philanthropy
    https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Opinion-Charities-and/238202

    What all of these organizations have in common is that they offer donors the ability to make what appear like outright donations to charity. Behind the scenes, what is happening, in essence, is that DAF sponsors make a side agreement with the donors to hold these funds and let the contributor have control over the money.

    #philanthrocapitalisme #fondations #donations #bmgf

  • In the Depths of the Net
    (Sue Halpern, Oct 2015)

    She wrote a review in the New York Review of Books about The Dark Net: Inside The Digital Underworld by Jamie Bartlett
    (cf https://seenthis.net/messages/405584)

    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/depths-net

    The same article also appeared here a week later, accessible in full (without an account):

    http://www.afr.com/technology/social-media/in-the-depths-of-the-internet-20150930-gjy14n

    It turns out that even without resorting to intensive detective work, Tor’s anonymity can be penetrated. In a paper published online, Paul Syverson, one of Tor’s original developers at the Naval Research Laboratory, along with four colleagues, demonstrated that users who regularly browsed the internet with Tor could be easily identified. “Our analysis,” they wrote,

    “shows that 80 per cent of all types of users may be deanonymised ... within six months [and] roughly 100 per cent of users in some common locations are deanonymised within three months.”

    More recently, security experts have devised a simple way to distinguish Tor users by their particular style of typing. Add to these a new search engine called Memex, designed specifically to troll the dark net, developed by the Defence Department’s research arm, DARPA. It already has successfully unmasked human traffickers working in secret.

    #dark_net
    #Ross_Ulbricht #Silk_Road