What Makes Me Happy

(a simple exercise that should be repeated often)

1. What I contribute to my communities
2. My love (you know who you are :)
3. My job--hell, it consumes so much time, it better be worth it.
4. Respect of my family--multilayered, biological and communal, they all are important and their opinions mean a lot to me.
5. Friends that are honest, playful, and creative
6. Reading a book, or watching a film, or listening to music (that hits my body/soul like a tuning fork, but, instead of tuning me, it shifts my consciousness)
7. Guerilla Gardening (nod to Marchman and Mayer)
8. A message/letter from someone I miss (I know I'm difficult to get a hold of, but it makes my day and I think about when I can find the time to return the favor)
9. My very crazy cats (Marcus and Cleopatra) that keep me from settling down when I get home.
10. Any opportunity to hike...
11. Good food either shared communally or made by loving restaurants like Sahara/Enza's/Stella's/Al's/Alfalfa's
12. Live performances (even moreso when I helped bring it about)
13. Travel
14. Belgian Beer and funky microbrewed ones
15. Cooperative/independent ventures of all types
16. Critical/Geopolitical Theory/History
17. Thunderstorms and Beaches and rushing rivers and fountains (I like water making noises!)
18. Guilty pleasure--I like to drive, even though I try to walk as much as possible...
19. Science Fiction (especially when it has the sensibility of #16)
20. Browsing bookstores and hanging out in coffeehouses.

Actors Guild of Lexington Presents Shakespeare at Equus Run with a production of William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, June 12-28, 2008

(Passing on an announcement for colleagues and friends.)

The Merry Wives of Windsor



Actors Guild of Lexington and Equus Run Vineyard will launch season 2 of Actors Guild of Lexington Presents Shakespeare at Equus Run with a production of William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, June 12-28, 2008 at beautiful Equus Run Vineyards in Midway, Kentucky. The Merry Wives of Windsor is being directed by Centre College theatre professor and Equus Run Artistic Director Anthony R. Haigh (director of last season’s hit production of Love’s Labour’s Lost) and will feature a stellar cast of some of Central Kentucky’s finest talent. Come see Shakespeare’s fattest of knights, Sir John Falstaff, as laughter reigns supreme and feminine wisdom triumphs over a jealous husband, confused lovers, and a web of merriment in this light-hearted comedy. For tickets and more information, please contact the LexArts box office at 859-225-0370 or email boxoffice@lexarts.org

Directed by Dr. Anthony R. Haigh
June 12th -June 28th at the Equus Run Vineyard in Midway, KY
Show begins at 7:00pm

TICKETS
Thursday & Friday Shows: Adult $15, Seniors & Students $10
Saturday Shows: Dinner & Show $25, Show only $18


This production features BCTC Theatre and Film Coordinator Tim Davis and BCTC Theatre students Kevin Greer and Zach Hightower.

Come one come all!!!!

Thanks,
Tim Davis

Music/Art/Film/Wine Festival at Talon Winery this Weekend--FREE!!!

(I arranged the music and I'm excited to see these bands! Come on out--head south on Tates Creek Rd out of the city and you will run into the Talon Winery. Thanks to the fine folks at Talon who are allowing us to hold this event on their site!!! For the performers: The stage is covered with a tent. Musicians, can turn on the road right after the office and park on the gravel “loading and unloading area” There is a walk (from the pavilion by the back of the house) that leads to the stage. This will make it easier for them to move any equipment. This will also be the area that the sound equipment should be unloaded.)

Saturday, June 14th 11:00-7:00 pm
Sunday, June 15th 12:00-5:00 pm
Talon Winery and Vineyards
7086 Tates Creek Road, Lexington

FREE ADMISSION

-Artist Vendor Sales
-Musical Performances
-Theatrical Performances
-Short Film Viewings
-Children’s Art Activities
- Wine Tastings and Wine and Beer Sales
- Food Vendors

Sponsored by Nurses Registry and BCTC Arts on Campus Committee

Bring your family and friends (and a lawn chair) and enjoy the festival at Talon’s beautiful grounds.



Musical schedule:
Saturday:
5-6 PM: Argo Lynn
4-5 PM: What Happened When
3-4 PM: Wes Houp (Delta Blues)
2-3 PM: Rainjunkies
1-2PM: Paul Felice
12-1PM: BCTC Quartet/Actors Guild of Lexington

Sunday:
3-4 PM: For Stella
2-3 PM: Jazzmerized (Jazz )
1-2 PM: Skinny Devil Circus
12-1 PM: Alien Blue

Theatre performance Saturday and short film showing on Saturday and Sunday in the house.



Children’s activities include the following
-Free painting their own design on a fence plank (these to be displayed at the winery grounds after the festival)
-Broom making for children to take home ($3.00 supply costs)


Hope to see you there!

Patrick Cockburn: Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

(Courtesy of Oliver)

Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq
By PATRICK COCKBURN
Counterpunch

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to this reporter, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq.
Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which U.S. troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilize Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the U.S.
President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated.

But by perpetuating the U.S. presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw U.S. troops if he is elected president in November.
The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq -- a victory that he says Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.

America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 -- 10,000 more than when the military "surge" began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for U.S. troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.

The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now.

The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. "It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty," said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal were signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad, which will be seen as an American pawn.

The U.S. has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000 feet and the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.

Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called "strategic alliance" without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rasfajani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said that such a deal would create "a permanent occupation." He added, "The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans."

Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his coalition government cannot stay in power without U.S. backing.

The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more influential in Iraq.

Although Iraqi ministers have said they will reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now. The one Iraqi with the authority to stop deal is the majority Shiia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In 2003, he forced the U.S. to agree to a referendum on the new Iraqi constitution and the election of a parliament.

To Read the Rest of the Article

Francois Cusset: THE STATE OF LITERARY THEORY

THE STATE OF LITERARY THEORY: French Theory's American Adventures
By FRANÇOIS CUSSET
Chronicle of Higher Education



Why still bother with theory, French or otherwise? It would take a true rhetorical talent to convince anyone today, even an academic humanist who hasn't left his or her campus for years, that theory and the many debates surrounding it can have any impact, say, on technological change, the leisure industry, the state of Western democracy, or global geopolitics — or on the run-up to the next presidential election, for that matter. In other words, isn't it simply too late to still be speaking about French theory and its role in the intellectual life of the United States today?

The word "today" conjures up a mix of collective panic and historical changes, an utterly confused, postcommunist, postcolonial age of global civil war and absolute entertainment, religious terrorism and state terrorism — the age of a new type of empire unsure as to who its real enemies are and how to identify, much less absorb, its "citizens." In such an unsettling present, one wonders if there is anything left to expect from this weird textual object known as theory, born between the two world wars or in the crazy 1970s, depending on historical accounts, but definable today as a strange breed of American academic market rules, French (and more generally Continental) detachable concepts, campus-based identity politics, and trendy pop culture. It seems to many observers that the gap between real-life politics and theory's guerrillas is much too wide already, after 30 years of academic fever, for the two worlds to even speak a common language. Or for a possible use of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, or even Jacques Derrida to shed some light on today's global disorders — even when Foucault's genealogy of "biopolitics," Deleuze's comments on our "societies of control," and Derrida's concept of "unconditional hospitality," all coined more than two decades ago, appear to be exactly addressing our contemporary situation.

This tendency to relegate theory to a leisurely time when "reality" wasn't a problem (but did such a time ever exist, even before September 11, 2001?), and to call for more urgent issues to be raised today than just theoretical ones, is where old-style liberals, or even Marxists and neoconservative watchdogs, converge. They agree that theory is perilous today, or at best just patently useless, much as the West German federal police and the East German political police agreed that Foucault was dangerous or useless enough to deserve being arrested twice during his visit to the two sides of Berlin in 1978. That is exactly the kind of consensus that should be tirelessly questioned until it no longer holds, today no less than 30 years ago.

For in fact, theory and activism do converge today. They do so in certain new forms of social activism, within a new generation of readers on both sides of the ocean who manage to think and write in the lines of these authors, but always away from their intimidating shadows. New uses of theory's major texts are possible today, even necessary, beyond the age-old uncertainty over theory and praxis as two distinct moments, in favor of what Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call "theoretical practice" — a real practical approach to theory.

But then, how to stick to such theoretical practices when the United States is under direct attack? One of the saddest things about the immediate post-9/11 climate in the United States' public space, beyond blind patriotism and a frustrated virility willing to retaliate as soon as possible, was surely the intellectual field's deliberate powerlessness. After decades of rhetorically questioning the imperialistic West, deconstructing America's power, and demonizing the first world's neocolonialism, the various radicals bred in academic quarters stood still, mute and shocked. In the aftermath of the attacks on New York City and Washington, most of these brilliant campus radicals didn't have much to say about George W. Bush, Iraq, terror, national pride, and global democracy, apart from a distant feeling of horror and disarray. Whereas liberals of all sorts in Europe or Asia did expect some sort of awakening from their North American counterparts, or a new inspiration to come from the belly of the beast, perhaps a new tone on American campuses for times of emergency, what they witnessed was mostly self-criticism and a sense of uselessness.

When touring campuses right after 9/11, I was astounded to discover that the dominant feeling in academe was one of desperate impossibility, complete with guilt and resentment. Yesterday's tenured radicals were now writing sophisticated articles just to make a note of the insuperable gap between the world and the text, theory and "reality," intellectual leisure and the new state of global emergency. Just when theory was precisely challenged to speak out beyond self-reflection and lead to other issues inseparable from today's situation — the issues of capitalism and its new social forms, of the media and their industrial production of fear, of the exhausting of the rhetorics of promise as political horizon — academic experts again limited theory to a specialized debate.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Chris Hedges: America's Democratic Collapse

(Courtesy of Claire Glasscock. Chris Hedges provides a powerful critique of our growing corporate state. Even more important, he implicates the Democrats along with the Republicans in America's Democratic Collapse.)

America's Democratic Collapse
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
AlterNet

In a dramatic speech, Chris Hedges warns that the nation is on the verge of becoming a full-blown corporate state.

Note: Chris Hedges gave this keynote address on Wednesday, May 28, in Furman University's Younts Conference Center. The address was part of protests by faculty and students over the South Carolina college's decision to invite George W. Bush to give the May 31 commencement address.

When it was announced in May that Bush would deliver the commencement address, 222 students and faculty signed and posted on the school's Web site a statement titled "We Object." The statement cites the war in Iraq and the administration's "obstructing progress on reducing greenhouse gases while favoring billions in tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies that are earning record profits."

"We are ashamed of the actions of this administration. The war in Iraq has cost the lives of over 4,000 brave and honorable U.S. military personnel," the statement read. "Because we love this country and the ideals it stands for, we accept our civic responsibility to speak out against these actions that violate American values."

I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were African American or Native American or of Japanese descent in World War II, or poor or gay or a woman or an immigrant, but it was a country I loved and honored. This country gave me hope that it could be better. It paid its workers wages that were envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law and respect for human rights. It had social programs from Head Start to welfare to Social Security to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, was dedicated to protecting the interests of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a media that was diverse and endowed with the integrity to give a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to explain ourselves to ourselves.

I am not blind to the imperfections of this America, or the failures to always meet these ideals at home and abroad. I spent 20 years of my life in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent reporting in countries where crimes and injustices were committed in our name, whether during the Contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. But there was much that was good and decent and honorable in our country. And there was hope.

The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father's father and his father's father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. The "consent of the governed" has become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science are obsolete. Our state, our nation, has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish political elite, a small and privileged group which governs on behalf of moneyed interests. We are undergoing, as John Ralston Saul wrote, "a coup d'etat in slow motion." We are being impoverished -- legally, economically, spiritually and politically. And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs, where the American dream will be no more than that -- a dream, where those who work hard for a living can no longer earn a decent wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweatshops in China or the decaying rust belt of Ohio, where democratic dissent is condemned as treason and ruthlessly silenced.

I single out no party. The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the Republicans. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers, he insisted, would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, he argued, to take corporate money. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton's leadership, had virtual fundraising parity with the Republicans. Today the Democrats get more. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.

The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. NAFTA would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States.

"There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home," President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he was lobbying for the bill.

But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the curious effect of reversing every one of Clinton's rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans for Mexican farmers, they had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States. The Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At least 2 million Mexican farmers have been driven off their land since 1994. And guess where many of them went? This desperate flight of poor Mexicans into the United States is now being exacerbated by large-scale factory closures along the border as manufacturers pack up and leave Mexico for the cut-rate embrace of China's totalitarian capitalism. But we were assured that goods would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone would be happier. I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA was great if you were a corporation. It was a disaster if you were a worker.

Clinton's welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation's social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But these were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill. And today we stand in shame with 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars, most for nonviolent drug offenses. More than 1 in 100 adults in the United States is incarcerated, and 1 in 9 black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. The United States, with less than 5 percent of the global population, has almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

To Read the Rest of the Speech

Annalee Newitz: Using Sci-Fi to Change the World

(How come this is the first time I have heard anything about L. Timmel Duchamp's geopolitical SF series?)

Using Sci-Fi to Change the World
By Annalee Newitz
AlterNet



Every year in late May, several thousand people descend on Madison, Wis., to create an alternate universe. Some want to build a galaxy-size civilization packed with humans and aliens who build massive halo worlds orbiting stars. Others are obsessed with what they'll do when what remains of humanity is left to survive in the barren landscape left after Earth has been destroyed by nukes, pollution, epidemics, nanotech wipeouts, or some combination of all four. Still others live parts of their lives as if there were a special world for wizards hidden in the folds of our own reality.

They come to Madison for WisCon, a science-fiction convention unlike most I've ever attended. Sure, the participants are all interested in the same alien worlds as the thronging crowds that go to the popular Atlanta event Dragon*Con or the media circus known as Comic-Con. But they rarely carry light sabers or argue about continuity errors in Babylon 5. Instead, they carry armloads of books and want to talk politics.

WisCon is the United States' only feminist sci-fi convention, but since it was founded more than two decades ago, the event has grown to be much more than that. Feminism is still a strong component of the con, and many panels are devoted to the work of women writers or issues like sexism in comic books. But the con is also devoted to progressive politics, antiracism, and the ways speculative literature can change the future. This year there was a terrific panel about the fake multiculturalism of Star Trek and Heroes, as well as a discussion about geopolitical themes in experimental writer Timmel Duchamp's five-novel, near-future Marq'ssan series.

While most science fiction cons feature things like sneak-preview footage of the next special effects blockbuster or appearances by the cast of Joss "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Whedon's new series Dollhouse, WisCon's highlights run toward the bookish. We all crammed inside one of the hotel meeting rooms to be part of a tea party thrown by the critically-acclaimed indie SF Web zine Strange Horizons, then later we listened to several lightning readings at a stately beer bash thrown by old school SF book publisher Tor.

To Read the Rest of the Article

Speaking of Faith: John O' Donohue "The Inner Landscape of Beauty"

The Inner Landscape of Beauty
Host: Krista Tippet
Speaking of Faith (American Public Media)



John O'Donohue was an Irish poet and philosopher who insisted on beauty as a human calling and a defining aspect of God. He had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with what he called "the invisible world."

To Listen to the Episode

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: The Science of Racism

(Gates comments on his recent interview of genetic scientist James Watson about his inflammatory remarks about "black" intelligence. Another good source on the genetics of race is the three part documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion)

The Science of Racism
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The Root

...

I had read, with the admiring avidity of a high school senior hellbent on medical school, his best-selling book, "The Double Helix," back in 1968. It never occurred to me that I would one day be making documentaries for public television about the uses of DNA for ancestry tracing among African Americans. But it was not until December 2006 that I met the scientist I had so admired. I was in New York, delivering a lecture for alumni of Clare College at the University of Cambridge. I had earned my M.A. and Ph.D. in English language and literature from Clare in February 1979, and Watson was living there and working at the Cavendish Laboratory when he and Crick identified the structure of DNA. As I rose to deliver my lecture at the podium, the Master of Clare College whispered to me that James Watson was in the audience. I was astonished; I had no idea that he was still alive. Following the lecture, I was seated next to Dr. Watson at dinner. He was indeed still alive; he was a sprightly and mentally acute 78 at the time. I found him friendly, but a bit awkward in conversation; generous and thoughtful, funny, but quirky-funny. A week later, unsolicited, a signed copy of "The Double Helix" arrived at my home.

I thought of that slightly awkward dinner conversation and his gracious gift as I arrived at his offices at Cold Spring Harbor on March 17 for our interview. We talked for well over an hour, with no holds barred.

"Well?" one of my friends asked later. "Is he a racist?"

I don't think James Watson is a racist. But I do think that he is a racialist—that is, he believes that certain observable traits or forms of behavior among groups of human beings might, indeed, have a biological basis in the code that scientists, eventually, may be able to ascertain, that the "gene" is some mythically neutral space and what it purportedly "measures" or "determines" is independent of environmental factors, variables and influences. The difference, the distinction, between being a racist and a racialist is crucial. James Watson is not the garden-variety racist as he has been caricatured by the press and bloggers, the sort epitomized by David Duke and his ilk, and he seemed genuinely chagrined, embarrassed and remorseful that Duke and other racists had claimed him as their champion, as one of their own, because of his remarks as quoted in the London Sunday Times. And, as we might expect, he apologized profusely for those remarks, contending that he had been misquoted, at worst, and his remarks taken out of context, at best. (I have not been able to determine if the writer who reported the remarks taped them or reconstructed them from notes or memory.)

But I did leave Cold Spring Harbor convinced that Dr. Watson believes that many forms of behavior—such as "Jewish intelligence" (his phrase) and the basketball prowess of black men in the NBA (his example)—could, possibly, be traced to genetic differences among human beings, although no such connection has been made, and will probably never be made on any firm scientific basis, it seems to me. And I have to say that it was ultimately chilling to me when he remarked, with what seemed to me to be monumental naivete, that "if they find genes for all kinds of Jewish intelligence, I don't think it's going to affect me in the slightest," especially when we couple that sort of remark with his passionate belief that "everyone should be judged as individuals. No one should be judged by a term like 'black.'"

Yet precisely because of the misuses of science and pseudoscience since the 18th century, which put into place fixed categories of four or five "races" to justify an economic order dependent upon the exploitation of blacks (and other people of color) as cheap sources of labor, starting with slavery and continuing through Jim Crow and beyond, it has never been possible for a person of African descent to function in American society simply and purely as an "individual." And if the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama has taught him, and us, anything at all, it is that this perhaps ideal state of affairs—to function as an individual and to be judged on your individual merits—still remains a most elusive and somewhat naïve dream.

Watson's error is that he associates individual genetic differences (which, of course, do in fact exist) with ethnic variation (which is sociocultural and highly malleable). Character traits—abilities and behaviors, such as intelligence or basketball skills, that are popularly attributed to groups and are defined as "genetic"—will, in fact, continue to delimit the freedom of choice and expression of individuals who fall into those "racial" categories, regardless of our individual attainments and achievements. In the end, visions that are racialist may end up doing the same work of those that are racist. This is a lesson Watson has lived, and it is one from which we all might learn.

Having spent the past three decades studying racist discourse in the West (starting with my Ph.D. dissertation on the Enlightenment), I know that such conclusions—say, about an entity called "Jewish intelligence"—would deleteriously affect me as a black person because it would reinforce stereotypes about Jewish people being genetically superior to us, and that such a conclusion would reinforce stereotypes about black people being inherently less intelligent than other members of the human community. If such differences in intelligence were purported to have a genetic basis, as David Duke proclaimed on his Web site with such naked glee, all of the social intervention in the world could have only so much effect. (Head Start? Why bother, when nature is to blame.) Sooner or later, in a time of increasing economic scarcity, members of these supposedly "different" or "lesser" ethnic groups or genetic populations could very well find their life possibilities limited and perhaps even regulated. Who among us can doubt that this would be true?

Likewise, I worry even more that Dr. Watson confessed to me that "we shouldn't expect that different persons have equal intelligence, because we don't know that. And people say that these should be the same [that is, that all human beings, that all members of different "racial" groups, should have the same basic range and potential for development of intelligence genetically]. I think the answer is we don't know." And later, he remarked in passing that "we're not all the same," by which he meant genetically. Rest assured that in the very near future, some scientist somewhere will claim to have proven this through our genes, and that claim will be deeply problematic for the future development of black people in American society.

As I drove away from Cold Spring Harbor, I realized that my conversation with Dr. Watson only confirmed something I already, with great trepidation, have come to believe: That the last great battle over racism will be fought not over access to a lunch counter, or a hotel room, or to the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, in a test tube, under a microscope, in our genome, on the battleground of our DNA. It is here where we, as a society, will rank and interpret our genetic difference.

To Read the Entire Article

Gary Lachman: On Henri Bergson's Theory of the Mind and Cosmic Consciousness

Bergson developed his radical ideas about the role of consciousness and the brain into a complete evolutionary theory, presented in Creative Evolution (1907), his most widely known work. He accepted Darwin's by-then triumphant idea that the organic forms of the present had evolved out of much earlier forms over long periods of time. But like many other thinkers, Bergson was unsympathetic to the strict determinist interpretation of evolution that had gained scientific support and popular credence. In its place he offered a vision of a creative impulse, the elan vital or life force, penetrating matter and driving evolution to higher forms of complexity and freedom. Bergson did, however, borrow one idea from Darwin's later interpreters. For Darwin, evolution proceeds through chance mutations that prove successful in the struggle to survive; such beneficial adaptations give an organism an advantage over its competitors. For Darwin's followers, the mind itself was just such an adaptation and evolved a s a useful tool for dealing with the demands of the environment. The intellect, then, was a strictly practical device, and its use was solely limited to dealing with the necessities of staying alive. One imminently useful way of doing this was to "carve" out of the seamless flow of experience, seemingly solid, discrete, and stable objects occupying an extended space. It would be most helpful in the struggle for suvival to recognize out of the "blooming, buzzing confusion" the tiger about to pounce on you, or the antelope you wish to eat. The difference between this kind of consciousness and a cosmic consciousness, open to the influx of the whole, is evident. The brain's function then, for Bergson, was to act as a "reducing valve," limiting the amount of "reality" entering conciousness. As he wrote in 1911, "The brain is the organ of attention to life," and the part it plays is that of "shutting out from consciousness all that is of no practical interest to us."

Cosmic consciousness, then, can be seen as a perception of the world not limited by or filtered through the brain. And a s most of us are compelled to "deal with" the world most of the time, it is clear why incidences of cosmic consciousness are rare. Yet one drawback to the brain's highly efficient ability to focus on necessities is that it "falsifies" reality, which, as Bergson earlier argued, is in truth a continuing flow of experience. The mind constantly takes snapshots, as it were, of reality, which enables it to orient itself admist the flux. The problem is that science, which takes the most comprehensive snapshots, makes the mistake of confusing photographs with reality itself.

We would, it seems, be left in a situation in which we are highly successful at dealing with the world, at the cost of losing contact with its reality. But, as Bergson argued in his essay "An Introduction to Metaphysics" (1903), the mind has another means of "knowing," aside from the rational intellect. This, he argued, was intuition. Just as we have an immediate, irreducible awareness of our own inner states, through intuition we have access to the "inside of the world. And that inside, Bergson argued, was the elan vital. Through drawing back from our habitual gesture of "dealing" with the world, we can, as Edward Carpenter experienced, discover a kind of consciousness in which subject and object--we and the world--are "one." This consciousness, Bergson argues is not necessarily associated with the brain. He argues that we perceive "virtually" much more than what actually reaches our conscious awareness. This would make sense, since that awareness is subject to the highly efficient editing procedures of the brain, which limits the amount of input coming to it through the senses. The whole past, for example, Bergson believed "still exists, ... is still present to consciousness in such a manner that, to have the revelation of it, consciousness has no need to go out of itself. ... It has but to remove an obstacle, to withdraw a veil." Such insights are the foundation of Marcel Proust's immense nove Remembrance of Things Past, perhaps the most determined effort to put Bergson's ideas into practice.

Lachman, Gary. A Secret History of Consciousness. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2003: 22-23.

Lucy Lippard: All Over Place

Lippard, Lucy. “All Over the Place.” The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. NY: The New Press, 1997: 4-20.



Each time we enter a new place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity, which is really what all “local places” consist of. By entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we may play a different role. A white middle-class art type without much money will have a different affect and effect on a mostly Latino community with less money than on a mostly white upper-class suburb with more money. [The artist] remains the same person, and may remain an outsider in both cases, but reciprocal identity is inevitably altered by the place, by the relationship to the place itself and the people who are already there. (Lippard, 6)

The intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand—our land, our place, the local. The lure of the local is the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. (Lippard, 7)

Inherent in the local is the concept of place—a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, the resonance of a specific location that is known and familiar. Most often place applies to our own “local”—entwined with personal memory, known or unknown histories, marks made in the land that provoke and evoke. Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. Its about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there. (Lippard, 7)

For many, displacement is the factor that defines a colonized or expropriated place. And even if we can locate ourselves, we haven’t necessarily examined our place in, or our actual relationship to, that place. Yet our personal relationships to history and place form us, as individuals and groups, and in reciprocal ways we form them. Land, history, and culture meet in a multicentered society that values place but cannot be limited to one view. (Lippard, 9)

I use space here as a physical, sometimes experiential, component. If space is where culture is lived, then place is the result of their union. (Lippard, 10)

Gravity Rides Everything: Imagine...

One of my students is writing about puppy mills and started with this effective exercise in getting his audience to imagine:

Imagine for a moment that you were born in a wire cage along side your brothers and sisters. You come into this world full of curiosity, and hunger. Your mother is to exhausted to feed you. There are so many people crammed inside your cage with you that you cant move. Then you notice your standing in feces, and urine.

--Gravity Rides Everything

Lauren Elkin: Becoming Simone de Beauvoir

Becoming Simone de Beauvoir
by Lauren Elkin
The Quarterly Conversation



It is proof, if proof were needed, of Simone de Beauvoir's mythic stature in France, that to commemorate the centenary of her birth the French news weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur published a photograph of Beauvoir's naked derriere on its January 3rd cover.

Taken in 1952, when Beauvoir was in Chicago visiting her then-lover, Nelson Algren, the photograph shows the great feminist standing in the bathroom, wearing not a stitch of clothes, looking at herself in the mirror. And it was not Algren who took it, but his close friend, the photographer Art Shay. The way Shay tells it, Beauvoir heard the shutter snap behind her and, laughing, chastised him: "Naughty Boy!" (No word on why Shay was around while Beauvoir was in the altogether).

The author of The Second Sex would have turned 100 this year, and in spite of all the tributes, assessments, analyses, and appreciations—a special issue of Le Magazine Littéraire, a three-day conference under the direction of Julia Kristeva, several new books—it is the sexy, controversial aspects of her life that have been emphasized, once again, in the mainstream media: her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, their pact not to marry and to tell each other everything of their extracurricular conquests, their tendency to pass lovers back and forth and how it was all his idea. Beauvoir comes off as a doormat every time—which suits popular opinion just fine, thriving as it does on human fallibility. What sells more papers: a fair and balanced portrait of the "greatest feminist theorist of our time," or a photograph of her ass?

Even Beauvoir scholars are guilty of projecting their own anxieties onto her, and it is the relationship with Sartre that plays such an ambiguous role in their idol's life. Did he compromise her or copy from her; inspire her or keep her down? "Sartre trapped Simone de Beauvoir by insisting that she follow him," maintains Michelle Le Doeff. Edward and Kate Fulbrook have been at pains to show that Sartre cribbed the philosophy in Being and Nothingness from Beauvoir. Even the most recent biography to appear in English was a double biography—Hazel Rowley's Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Thinking Simone de Beauvoir apart from Jean-Paul Sartre has not, apparently, been feasible: too many scores to settle, that embarrassing pact, and the paradox of the great feminist in thrall to her boyfriend.

Of course, the relationship between two of the most important philosophers of the 20th century is worth spilling a little—okay, a lot—of ink. It did last half a century. But Beauvoir's image—not the one that evolves through a careful study of her writing but her popular, mainstream image—could benefit from a little one-on-one time with the lady in question. We can therefore be grateful that Beauvoir's early diaries have now been released to the public, giving us a glimpse of a passionate, joyful, brilliant young woman, who suspects she has greatness in her, but has no idea of the icon she will become. We meet in them not the older, self-protective Beauvoir who looks back at this period in volume one of her four-volume autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, 1958); rather, we meet the intimate and not-yet-formed Beauvoir, speaking in her own youthful voice, asserting her dedication to ideas, to literature, and to dedicated thought.

When Beauvoir died in 1986, her adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, found these diaries in among her papers (an earlier diary, from 1925, which Beauvoir refers to, has not been found). In 1990 she donated them to the Bibliothèque National in Paris, where they were made available for scholarly research, and subsequently, thanks to the efforts of two American Beauvoir scholars, Margaret A. Simons and Barbara Klaw, the first volume of the diaries appeared in English in 2006 as part of the University of Illinois Press's Beauvoir Series. But this volume covers only 1926 to 1927; the events of 1929—which chronicles Beauvoir's meeting Sartre and the beginning of their affair, her passing the agrégation examination (coming in second only to Sartre), her move out of her parents' home, and the death of her childhood friend Zaza—will be released at a yet-to-be-determined date.

The Cahiers de jeunesse cover the years 1926 - 1930, when Beauvoir was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, and then preparing for the agrégation (a highly competitive national exam, which women had only been allowed to take since 1905) while finishing her undergraduate degree. She would not meet Sartre until 1929; we are granted three full years of Beauvoirean thought to consider apart from Sartre's. And we can also begin to assess the young Beauvoir from a different perspective than the account she gave of herself, years later, in her autobiography.

Beauvoir describes in the Memoires the unhappiness of her adolescent years; in 1919 her grandfather (president of the Meuse bank) went bankrupt, and her father, a bourgeois gentleman and lawyer by training, had to go to work. Georges de Beauvoir was a very charming man, but not particularly suited to the professions, and the family's income steadily dwindled. He moved his family to a cramped apartment on the rue de Rennes, on the sixth floor with a meager supply of running water. Simone and her younger sister Hélène shared a tiny bedroom off of the kitchen. Their devoutly religious mother read their mail, doted on "Poupette" (as Hélène was nicknamed), and gave Simone a hard time about her reading habits. The Beauvoir girls would have to be educated, their father decided, so that they might go out and earn their living—as they certainly would have no dowry. For Simone this was a blessing, and she threw herself into her studies to combat the loneliness, shame, and frustration of her circumstances. She said later that it was after reading Little Women and identifying so much with tomboy Jo that the idea came to her that marriage was not her only choice in life; doubtless the knowledge that she would have to earn her own living compounded this feeling that marriage was optional. As Beauvoir admitted to her biographer Deirdre Bair, even if Jo does marry in the end, her rebellion was fortified early on by exposure to literary women like Jo March.

In 1926 and 1927, the diaries give us a privileged viewpoint on the emotional effects of her rebellion from her bourgeois family. She feels keenly the lack of an intellectual equal to confide in, and she writes repeatedly, in the early years at least, of her utter solitude, trying to make a virtue of her difference, occasionally yielding to her misery in pages of despondent prose. But her misery is countered by wild, exultant intellectual discoveries. She reads widely and deeply, frequently including long passages copied out from books that impress her: Bergson, Barrès, Claudel, Mauriac, Fournier, Jammes, Cocteau, Arland, Gide. All the great French writers of the early 20th-century are represented.

To Read the Rest of Review Essay

Susan J. Douglas: Tilting at Media Windmills?

Tilting at Media Windmills?
By Susan J. Douglas
In These Times

In April, the news media began a predictable turn to “image scandals” in the presidential campaign. And then it got worse.

ABC’s instantly scandalous April 16 “debate” — moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos (who looked like newsmen, only smaller) — prompted an outpouring of protest and criticism. Public outrage — that it took 50 minutes to get to any issue of substance — became a news story in its own right.

These people do not think the news media is “too liberal.”

They think it’s too stupid.

The audience has grown more willing than ever to vocally criticize the corporate media and their refusal to serve our interests. Some of the credit for this goes to Bob McChesney and John Nichols, founders of the spirited media reform organization, Free Press, and to Josh Silver, its indefatigable director.

When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or Congress is about to offer yet another regulatory gift basket to conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, or to allow corporate interests to determine what you can and cannot get online, Free Press mobilizes hundreds of thousands and bombards the Feds with protests. In 2007 alone, it helped generate more than 1 million letters to Congress and the FCC — not bad for an upstart organization founded by an academic (McChesney) and a journalist (Nichols) and that includes media critics like me on its board.

Free Press started in 2003 as an effort to focus people’s exasperation over the inanities we saw on our TVs and the radio. (Remember when Clear Channel censored songs like “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” after 9/11?) Its goal was to also address the corporate consolidation going on behind the screens.

To Read the Rest of the Article

James H. Ewert Jr.: Adbusters' Ads Busted

(To see the Adbuster print Spoof Ads. A great example of detournement.)

Adbusters’ Ads Busted
By James H. Ewert Jr.
In These Times









Kalle Lasn is a fighter for the right to communicate. A privilege, says the founder of Adbusters magazine, that goes one step farther than the freedom of speech.

“You can stand on the corner and shout at people as they are going by,” Lasn says. “But if a handful of corporations have media in their pocket, they can totally hoodwink the public.”

From his home in Vancouver, Lasn himself communicates to the masses on the pages of Adbusters—a 10-year-old culture-jamming magazine published through the Adbusters Media Foundation.

On Feb. 18, the Supreme Court of British Columbia dismissed a case that Lasn brought forth, which argued that Canadian TV conglomerate CanWest Global was obligated, under the Canadian Broadcasting Act, to sell television advertising time to Adbusters.

The court’s dismissal reiterated the rulings of North American courts that have found private TV broadcasters under no obligation to allow the public access to public airwaves.

“This case goes right to the very heart of democracy—[about] who has a voice and who doesn’t,” Lasn says.

Of the major broadcasters, only CNN has aired Adbusters’ “Buy Nothing Day” commercials (or “subvertisements”) that tell people not to go shopping the Friday after Thanksgiving.

One of the subvertisements mocks Calvin Klein’s black-and-white underwear ads. This 30-second parody concludes with an ultra-slim model replaced by a more normally proportioned woman bent over a toilet as if giving into a bulimic impulse. “Why are nine out of 10 women dissatisfied with some aspect of their own bodies?” the narrator asks blankly. “The beauty industry is the beast.”

(The rejected ads, along with the tape-recorded refusals from major media organizations, are available at http://www.adbusters.org.)

Lasn first filed his suit in 1995, after the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) terminated an advertising contract when the automobile industry complained about an Adbusters anti-car ad. The Supreme Court of Canada, however, chose not to hear the case.

In 2004, following a string of CanWest refusals to air any of Adbusters’ 30-second TV parodies that ridiculed the forestry, fast food, pharmaceutical and high fashion industries, Lasn filed suit against the corporation, which owns three major daily newspapers and a majority of TV stations in Vancouver.

“We just want this high-minded, legal right to walk into a television station and buy airtime under the same rules and conditions as advertising agencies do,” Lasn says.

Adbusters is considering an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada—again.

“We’re not just trying to win a legal battle,” Lasn says. “We’re trying to create a sort of media literacy lesson for all the people in North America to show the fact that there is no democracy on the public airwaves.”

“It’s pretty ridiculous that a nonprofit, public interest group can’t buy advertising on the public airwaves,” says Steve Anderson, coordinator of the nonprofit Canadian Campaign for Democratic Media. “What’s interesting is that the CBC, specifically, wouldn’t allow this, because the CBC, unlike PBS [in the United States], runs advertisements.”

To Read the Rest of the Report

Jarret Dapier: Atheism’s Unholy Trinity

(I consider myself a strange hybrid of an anti-theist/pantheist, I do not consider myself an atheist... although I'm often mistaken for one. In this debate surprisingly I find myself siding with Chris Hedges. For me, my siding with Hedges, is not a matter of faith, instead, I find his argument/reasoning more convincing than the dismissive polemics of war-mongering fundamentalist aetheists like Hichens. However, one more qualification, I do support the efforts of secular humanists, while rejecting its more extreme fundie-ranters. Religion is a problem, but we don't need to kill it.)

Atheism’s Unholy Trinity
By Jarrett Dapier
In These Times



Last spring, Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, flew to California to see some atheists about God. Over the course of two debates — one in Los Angeles, the other in Berkeley — Hedges sparred with Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great. According to Aneli Rufus, who reported on the Hedges vs. Hitchens debate for AlterNet, Hedges was “trounced.”

Atheism 2, God 0.

Now, out of these debates comes Hedges’ latest book, I Don’t Believe In Atheists (Free Press, 2008), a relentless, deeply considered defense of the religious impulse.

The book’s title is neither an accurate personal statement nor a reflection of the volume’s contents. As Hedges has said, he is no atheist. Nevertheless, he eloquently defends atheists who are “intellectually honest” — those “who accept an irredeemable and flawed human nature” — and believes “they hold an honored place in a pluralistic and diverse community.” Intended to provoke, the title sets up false expectations for a simplistic “no atheists in foxholes” screed that sells the book short.

Instead, Hedges’ main target is utopia, which he calls “the most dangerous legacy of the Christian faith and Enlightenment.” And primarily in the works of evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins, as well as Hitchens and Harris — the “new atheists,” as Hedges calls them — the author finds a morally bankrupt utopian worldview that divides humanity between the primitive faithful and the civilized rational.

According to Hedges, the new atheists argue that once humanity is delivered from religion — what Hitchens has called “man-made filthy propaganda” — and places its faith in science and reason, we will finally advance morally as a species. But “hidden under the jargon of reason and science,” writes Hedges, this conviction is a secular version of religious extremism. To Hedges, this makes them dangerous.

“Too many of the new atheists, like the Christian fundamentalists, support the imperialist projects and pre-emptive wars of the United States as necessities in the battle against terrorism and irrational religion,” he writes. To make his case, he cites Harris’ justification for a nuclear first-strike on the Middle East and Hitchens’ continued support for democracy-via-bombing in Iraq.

Hedges doesn’t mince words about these atheists: They are “suburban mutations,” “hopeless epicures” and “products of the morally stunted world of entertainment.” Because many atheists conflate radical, literalist religion with all religion — and refuse to see any good that has come from faith — Hedges sees them as intellectually shallow. To him, one must come at faith honestly — through years of sustained thought, reading, reflection and introspection. The same goes for atheism.

One of the strengths of Atheists is Hedges’ authority to write on the topic. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he witnessed how his father’s faith inspired him to fight for social justice, even when it was deeply unpopular in the rural, upstate New York communities in which he preached. It was this model of courage-through-faith that led Hedges to pursue a degree from Harvard’s Divinity School, where he gained his understanding of theology.

Hedges spent the next 20 years covering foreign wars for a host of newspapers, including the Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief. He has witnessed many of the late 20th century’s worst horrors — in Algeria, Bosnia, El Salvador, Iraq, Kosovo and Sudan (where he was imprisoned). Hedges mined these experiences to great effect in his excellent, hard-hitting 2003 book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.

In a 2008 interview with Salon, Hedges said, “I spent so long in war zones that I think we don’t know what we would do under repression and abuse. … That’s the brilliance of the great writers on the Holocaust, like Primo Levi. … They understood the humanity of their own killers.”

Hedges spends the first half of Atheists refuting the claim that humanity has advanced morally. “The Enlightenment myth … taught that our physical and social environment could be transformed through rational manipulation. … [But] human history is not a long chronicle of human advancement. It includes our cruelty, barbarism, reverses, blunders and self-inflicted disasters.”

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Mark Twain: What We Know?

"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure, that just ain't so."

--Mark Twain

Local Opportunity for Musicians

(Message from Good Foods)


We are looking for a few local musicians to perform during our grill outs in July. The dates are July 12, 19, and 26th from 2-4pm each day. We're talking small scale, outside our cafe, under a 10' x 10' tent.

Please message me if you are interested!

Crystal

Reconstruction 8.2: Cartoons

(Our new issue is now available)

Reconstruction 8.2: Cartoons

Cartoons Issue Publication Announcement
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture is proud to announce the publication of Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008: Cartoons, guest edited by Davin Heckman. Featured in the issue:

* Davin Heckman, "Suspended Animation: Meditations on the Time and Space of the Moving Image"

* Ngwarsungu Chiwengo, "Memory, Ideology, and Exile: J. M Kibushi's Mwana Mboka"

* Joanne Knowles, "The Simpsons and the Nuclear Family"

* Sean Chadwell, "Technological Determinism and the Poisoned Apple: The Case of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"

* Paul Ward, "Animated realities: the animated film, documentary, realism"

* Laurie Cubbison, "Not just for children's television: Anime and the changing editing practices of American television networks"

* Matthew Diebler, "'Thank Goodness He-Man Showed Up': Hypermasculine Cultural Posturing and the Token Women of 80s Animated Action Teams"

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes one open issue and three themed issues quarterly.

Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Reconstruction continuously accepts submissions for its annual open issue, and is now accepting submissions for the following upcoming themed issues:

* The Avant-Garde as Critical Practice (August 15, 2008)

Please consult Submission Guidelines for all submission requirements, and Call for Papers for individual CFP requirements and guest editor contact information.

Reconstruction is always interested in proposals for future themed issues. If interested in proposing a themed issue, please consult FAQ for Prospective Guest Editors and contact Reconstruction Managing Editor for further information.

All submissions and submission queries should be written care of reconstruction.submissions_at_gmail.com.

Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols: Who'll Unplug Big Media?

Who'll Unplug Big Media? Stay Tuned
By Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols
The Nation and Free Press

On a Thursday in mid-May, the Senate did something that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Led by Democrat Byron Dorgan, the senators--Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives--gave Rupert Murdoch and his fellow media moguls the sort of slap that masters of the universe don't expect from mere mortals on Capitol Hill.

With a voice vote that confirmed the near-unanimous sentiment of senators who had heard from hundreds of thousands of Americans demanding that they act, the legislators moved to nullify an FCC attempt to permit a radical form of media consolidation: a rule change designed to permit one corporation to own daily and weekly newspapers as well as television and radio stations in the same local market.

The removal of the historic bar to newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership has long been a top priority of Big Media. They want to dramatically increase revenues by buying up major media properties in American cities, shutting down competing newsrooms and creating a one-size-fits-all local discourse that's great for the bottom line but lousy for the communities they are supposed to serve and a nightmare for democracy.

That's just some of the good news at a time when the media policy debate has been redefined by the emergence of a muscular grassroots reform movement. Bush Administration schemes to use federal dollars to subsidize friendly journalists and illegally push its propaganda as legitimate news have been exposed and halted, with the House approving a defense appropriations amendment that outlaws any "concerted effort to propagandize" by the Pentagon.

Public broadcasting, community broadcasting and cable access channels have withstood assault from corporate interlopers, fundamentalist censors and the GOP Congressional allies they share in common. And against a full-frontal attack from two industries, telephone and cable--whose entire business model is based on lobbying Congress and regulators to get monopoly privileges--a grassroots movement has preserved network neutrality, the first amendment of the digital epoch, which holds that Internet service providers shall not censor or discriminate against particular websites or services.

To Read the Rest of the Article

Peter Svensson: Time Warner Cable Tries Metering Internet Use

Time Warner Cable Tries Metering Internet Use
By Peter Svensson
Free Press

You're used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?

Time Warner Cable Inc. customers -- and, later, others -- may have to, if the company's test of metered Internet access is successful.

On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.

Metered billing is an attempt to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among Time Warner Cable's subscribers, said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable's executive vice president of advanced technology.

Just 5 percent of the company's subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines, Leddy said. Other cable Internet service providers report a similar distribution.

"We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure," Leddy said.

Metered usage is common overseas, and other U.S. cable providers are looking at ways to rein in heavy users. Most have download caps, but some keep the caps secret so as not to alarm the majority of users, who come nowhere close to the limits. Time Warner Cable appears to be the first major ISP to charge for going over the limit: Other companies warn, then suspend, those who go over.

Phone companies are less concerned about congestion and are unlikely to impose metered usage on DSL customers, because their networks are structured differently.

Time Warner Cable had said in January that it was planning to conduct the trial in Beaumont, but did not give any details. On Monday, Leddy said its tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap.

To read the rest of the article

Ian McEwan: The Day of Judgment

The day of judgment
by Ian McEwan
Guardian



End-time thinking - the belief in a world purified by catastrophe - could once be dismissed as a harmless remnant of a more superstitious age. But with the rise of religious fundamentalism, prophets of apocalypse have become a new and very real danger.

...

Still the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, and perhaps its most bizarre, certainly one of its most lurid, remains important in the United States, just as it once was in medieval Europe. The book is also known as the Apocalypse - and we should be clear about the meaning of this word, which is derived from the Greek word for revelation. Apocalypse, which has become synonymous with "catastrophe", actually refers to the literary form in which an individual describes what has been revealed to him by a supernatural being. There was a long Jewish tradition of prophecy, and there were hundreds, if not thousands of seers like John of Patmos between the second century BC and the first century AD. Many other Christian apocalypses were deprived of canonical authority in the second century AD. Revelation most likely survived because its author was confused with John, the Beloved Disciple. It is interesting to speculate how different medieval European history, and indeed the history of religion in Europe and the United States, would have been if the Book of Revelation had also failed, as it nearly did, to be retained in the Bible we now know.

The scholarly consensus dates Revelation to AD95 or 96. Little is known of its author beyond the fact that he is certainly not the apostle John. The occasion of writing appears to be the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Domitian. Only a generation before, the Romans had sacked the Second Temple in Jerusalem and are, therefore, identified with the Babylonians who had destroyed the First Temple centuries earlier. The general purpose quite likely was to give hope and consolation to the faithful in the certainty that their tribulations would end, that the Kingdom of God would prevail. Ever since the influential 12th-century historian Joachim of Fiore, Revelation has been seen, within various traditions of gathering complexity and divergence, as an overview of human history whose last stage we are now in; alternatively, and this is especially relevant to the postwar United States, as an account purely of those last days. For centuries, within the Protestant tradition, the anti-Christ was identified with the Pope, or with the Catholic Church in general. In recent decades, the honour has been bestowed on the Soviet Union, the European Union, or secularism and atheists. For many millennial dispensationalists, international peacemakers, who risk delaying the final struggle by sowing concord among nations - the United Nations, along with the World Council of Churches - have been seen as Satanic forces.

The cast or contents of Revelation in its contemporary representations has all the colourful gaudiness of a children's computer fantasy game - earthquakes and fires, thundering horses and their riders, angels blasting away on trumpets, magic vials, Jezebel, a red dragon and other mythical beasts, and a scarlet woman. Another familiar aspect is the potency of numbers - seven each of seals, heads of beasts, candlesticks, stars, lamps, trumpets, angels and vials; then four riders, four beasts with seven heads, ten horns, ten crowns, four and twenty elders, twelve tribes with twelve thousand members ... and finally, most resonantly, spawning 19 centuries of dark tomfoolery, "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred, three score and six." To many minds, 666 bristles with significance. The internet is stuffed with tremulous speculation about supermarket barcodes, implanted chips, numerical codes for the names of world leaders. However, the oldest known record of this famous verse, from the Oxyrhynchus site, gives the number as 616, as does the Zurich Bible. I have the impression that any number would do. One senses in the arithmetic of prophecy the yearnings of a systematising mind, bereft of the experimental scientific underpinnings that were to give such human tendencies their rich expression many centuries later. Astrology gives a similar impression of numerical obsession operating within a senseless void.

But Revelation has endured in an age of technology and scepticism. Not many works of literature, not even the Odyssey of Homer, can boast such wide appeal over such an expanse of time. One celebrated case of this rugged durability is that of William Miller, the 19th-century farmer who became a prophet and made a set of intricate calculations, based on a line in verse 14 of the Book of Daniel: "unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." Counting for various reasons this utterance to date from 457BC, and understanding one prophetic day to be the equivalent of a year, Miller came to the conclusion that the last of days would occur in 1843. Some of Miller's followers refined the calculations further to October 22. After nothing happened on that day, the year was quickly revised to 1844, to take into account the year zero. The faithful Millerites gathered in their thousands to wait. One may not share the beliefs, but it is quite possible to understand the mortifying disenchantment. One eyewitness wrote:

[We] confidently expected to see Jesus Christ and all the holy angels with him ... and that our trials and sufferings with our earthly pilgrimage would close and we should be caught up to meet our coming Lord ... and thus we looked for our coming Lord until the bell tolled twelve at midnight. The day had then passed and our disappointment became a certainty. Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. It seemed that the loss of all our earthly friends could have been no comparison. We wept, and wept, till the day dawned.

One means of dealing with the disillusionment was to give it a title - the Great Disappointment - duly capitalised. More importantly, according to Kenneth Newport's impressive account of the Waco siege, the very next day after the Disappointment, one Millerite leader in Port Gibson, New York, by the name of Hiram Edson had a vision as he walked along, a sudden revelation that "the cleansing of the sanctuary" referred to events not on earth, but in heaven. Jesus had taken his place in the heavenly holy of holies. The date had been right all along, it was simply the place they had got wrong. This "masterstroke", as Newport calls it, this "theological lifeline" removed the whole affair into a realm immune to disproof. The Great Disappointment was explained, and many Millerites were drawn, with hope still strong in their hearts, into the beginnings of the Seventh Day Adventist movement - which was to become one of the most successful churches in the United States.

In passing, I note the connections between this church and the medieval sects that Cohn describes - the strong emphasis on the Book of Revelation, the looming proximity of the end, the strict division between the faithful remnant who keep the Sabbath, and those who join the ranks of the "fallen", of the anti-Christ, identified with the Pope whose title, Vicarius Filii Dei (vicar of the son of God) apparently has a numerical value of 666. I mention Hiram Edson's morning-after masterstroke to illustrate the adaptability and resilience of end-time thought. For centuries now, it has regarded the end as "soon" - if not next week, then within a year or two. The end has not come, and yet no one is discomfited for long. New prophets, and soon, a new generation, set about the calculations, and always manage to find the end looming within their own lifetime. The million sellers like Hal Lindsey predicted the end of the world all through the seventies, eighties and nineties - and today, business has never been better. There is a hunger for this news, and perhaps we glimpse here something in our nature, something of our deeply held notions of time, and our own insignificance against the intimidating vastness of eternity, or the age of the universe - on the human scale there is little difference. We have need of a plot, a narrative to shore up our irrelevance in the flow of things.

In The Sense of an Ending , Frank Kermode proposes that the enduring quality, the vitality of the Book of Revelation suggests a "consonance with our more naive requirements of fiction". We are born, as we will die, in the middle of things, in the "middest". To make sense of our span, we need what he calls "fictive concords with origins and ends. 'The End', in the grand sense, as we imagine it, will reflect our irreducibly intermediary expectations." What could grant us more meaning against the abyss of time than to identify our own personal demise with the purifying annihilation of all that is. Kermode quotes with approval from Wallace Stevens - "the imagination is always at the end of an era". Even our notions of decadence contain the hopes of renewal; the religious minded, as well as the most secular, looked on the transition to the year 2000 as inescapably significant, even if all the atheists did was to party a little harder

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Studio 360: Harlan Ellison Interview

Harlan Ellison Interview
Host: Kurt Anderson
Studio 360 (WNYC)



Over the last 50 years, he's written hundreds of short stories ("A Boy and His Dog"), several novels and movies and worked on TV shows like "The Man From UNCLE," the original Star Trek, and "The Outer Limits." But don't call him a science-fiction author: Ellison says he's the heir to Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge-Luis Borges. Kurt asks Ellison about his brash reputation and about the new documentary about him called "Dreams With Sharp Teeth."



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In Memory of Dr. William Parker

Longtime educator dies
WILLIAM PARKER WAS HEAD OF MINORITY AFFAIRS AT UK

I met Dr. Parker for the first time this month when he gave a speech at a friend’s graduation and I was privileged to sit with him at a table of BCTC professors. His speech was a moving account of the problems we face as a culture that has grown intellectually lazy and he celebrated my friend as an example of a young person who is fighting this trend. I was moved by his speech and during our meal I talked to him about his Cultural Intelligence course (which I had heard raves about from students). I was immediately impressed with his intelligence, his generosity, and his vision. We had made plans for me to visit his classes in the fall and to talk more about education. I immediately sensed that Dr. Parker was someone special. He had 50+ years of experience teaching and after retiring from UK, he continued to teach Bluegrass Community and Technical College students about cultural issues/intelligence. I wish I had known him better, but I am thankful that I met him and was allowed to be inspired by his educational vision.

Michael Benton

Jessica Valenti: The Sexual Double Standard

He's a Stud, She's a Slut: The Sexual Double Standard
By Jessica Valenti, Seal Press
AlterNet

Excerpt from:



If you have a vagina, chances are someone has called you a slut at least once in your life. There's just no getting around it.

I remember the first time I heard the word "slut" -- I was in my fifth-grade science class. A certain little girl (terror) named Eleena had been making my life miserable all year in a way that only mean little girls can. She had turned all my girlfriends against me, spread rumors and the like. She walked up to me at my desk and said, "You called me a slut." I had absolutely no idea what the word meant. I just sat there, silently. She repeated herself: "You called me a slut, but you're the slut." I don't remember how long after that I found out exactly what "slut" meant, but I knew it had to be terrible and I knew I didn't want to be it.

Naturally, I'd be called a slut many times over later in life -- not unlike most girls. I was called a slut when my boobs grew faster than others'. I was called a slut when I had a boyfriend (even though we weren't having sex.) I was called a slut when I didn't have a boyfriend and kissed a random boy at a party. I was called a slut when I had the nerve to talk about sex. I was called a slut when I wore a bikini on a weekend trip with high school friends. It seems the word slut can be applied to any activity that doesn't include knitting, praying, or sitting perfectly still lest any sudden movements be deemed whorish.

Despite the ubiquity of "slut," where you won't hear it is in relation to men. Men can't be sluts. Sure, someone will occasionally call a guy "a dog," but men simply aren't judged like women are when it comes to sexuality. (And if they are, they're judged in a positive way!) Men who have a lot of sexual partners are studs, Casanovas, pimps, and players. Never sluts. In fact, when I just did a Google search for "male sluts," the first result I got was She Male Sluts DVD! I know, should have seen that coming. The point is, there isn't even a word -- let alone a concept -- to signify a male slut.

But it makes sense when you think about what the purpose of the word "slut" is: controlling women through shame and humiliation. Women's bodies are always the ones that are being vied over for control -- whether it's rape, reproductive rights, or violence against women, it's our bodies that are the battleground, not men's.

And if you don't think it's about control, consider this little bit of weirdness. The most recent incarnation of the sexual double standard being played out in a seriously creepy way is through Purity Balls. These promlike events basically have fathers take their daughters to a big fancy dance where they promise their daddy their virginity. Likewise, the father promises to be the "keeper" of his daughter's virginity until he decides to give it to her future husband. Where are the Purity Balls for men, you ask? Oh, they're there, but they're about controlling women too! Called Integrity Balls, these events focus on men not having sex because they'd be defiling someone else's "future wife"! Not because men need to be pure or be virgins -- but because they need to make sure women are virgins. Unbelievable, really.

Outside of the feminist implications of the sexual double standard, the slut/stud conundrum has always been my favorite because it just makes no sense logically. Why is a woman less of a person, or (my favorite) "dirty," because she has sex? (Heterosexual sex, that is; somehow lesbian sex isn't "real.") Does a penis have some bizarre dirtymaking power that I'm unaware of? Every time I have sex, do I lose a bit of my moral compass? "Sorry to mug you, Grandma, but I had sex twice this week!"

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Michael Dirda: A biography of the world's most famous sex manual

Review of THE BOOK OF LOVE: The Story of the KamasutraBy James McConnachie
A biography of the world's most famous sex manual
By Michael Dirda
Washington Post



Years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around drinking when I heard a friend murmur two sentences I have never forgotten. "You know, guys, sex is the greatest thing in the world." He paused and we were all about to nod in agreement. He was, after all, a noted and knowledgeable ladies' man. Unexpectedly, though, he then added, with infinite wistfulness: "But it's just not that great."

There, in that gulf between the reality and the dream, lies the domain of pornography, the sex industry and the masturbatory fantasy -- of Viagra and the midlife crisis. Our Western myths of love are seldom about fulfillment; they are all about yearning. In Plato's Symposium we are told that the gods divided the original ball-like human beings in two, and that we consequently spend our lives searching for the other half who will complete us. So-called romantic love, which first blossomed in 12th-century France, revels in passion delayed, forbidden or otherwise thwarted. Its real theme is desire.

But for the Western imagination, the East has long represented an escape from this pervasive sexual unhappiness. Baudelaire spoke of tropic realms of "luxe, calme et volupté"; Hawaii and Tahiti once beckoned as Edens of innocent voluptuousness. From the 18th century on, the Orient, in general, seemed a perfumed garden, offering the tender attentions of geishas, bare-breasted island girls and pretty boys. Here, amid erotic graciousness, the darkness of sin was unknown. And yet, even this scented, sensual wonderland turned out to have its guide, its bible: The Kamasutra, sometimes subtitled "The Hindu Art of Love."

The title alone summons visions of exceedingly ambitious sexual postures. Yet the real Kamasutra is even more fascinating than its myth. In his "biography" of this Sanskrit classic, James McConnachie starts by exploring the philosophical and historical background of its 3rd-century text. "Kama" is the Sanskrit word for sexual pleasure or delight; a "sutra" is "a scholarly treatise designed to compress knowledge into a series of pithy maxims." The Kamasutra itself is a work of consolidation or reclamation, since its author, Vatsyayana, tells us that he was building on seven earlier treatises about love (all now lost). It was intended "to be a contribution to the great scientific project of the era: the composition of authoritative studies of all aspects of human behaviour and understanding." Other treatises were devoted to dharma -- a word associated with law, justice, duty and principle -- and artha, which covered worldly success.

Under the Gupta dynasty, 3rd-century India developed a highly aesthetic urban culture, and Vatsyayana's intended readers were young men about town, who frequented the theater, practiced the arts and lived playboy lives devoted to pleasure. His treatise (or shastra) is divided into seven "books." In Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar's 2002 translation, these are: General Observations, Sex, Virgins, Wives, Other Men's Wives, Courtesans, and Erotic Esoterica. Full of details from contemporary life, The Kamasutra is highly dramatic and has been likened to an extended play. It also strives to establish sex as a humane activity, a cultivated art that rejects both confining Buddhist morality and unchecked sexual aggression.

In the notorious Book Two, Vatsyayana describes 64 kama-kalas, or ways to make love. Surprisingly, these are not 64 positions, notes McConnachie, "but simply a kind of grand total of the categories into which Vatsyayana divides the different moods and modes of lovemaking. Theorists, Vatsyayana says, divide sex into eight different topics, namely 'embracing, kissing, scratching, biting, the positions, moaning, the woman playing the man's part, and oral sex.' As each of these modes of sex is supposed to have eight different particular manifestations, there are thus sixty-four ways in which a man or woman could be said to be having sex in its broadest sense." But, as McConnachie emphasizes, "the kama-kalas are not just tools for successful love making," they also "lie at the heart of what constitutes an educated man."

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Jennifer Bennett: Operation Return to Sender

Operation Return to Sender: The government's immigration enforcers run amok.
By Jennifer Bennett
Slate

May has been an embattled month for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, faced inquiries from House and Senate members about the inhumane treatment of people detained for violating immigration laws. This congressional scrutiny followed a special report in the Washington Post (and a rash of articles elsewhere) detailing stomach-turning—and sometimes deadly—mistreatment in immigrant detention centers.

A bill to improve detention center conditions has recently been introduced in Congress, but this legislation would do nothing to address the abuses committed by ICE officers well before the people they pick up reach a detention center. Nor would it alter the framework of immigration enforcement that has led to the mistreatment. Congress should be thinking about these problems, too—and so should the courts.

Since 2006, ICE has been dispatching teams of agents into neighborhoods throughout the country as part of a ramped-up enforcement effort called "Operation Return to Sender." Each team must apprehend an annual quota, currently set at 1,000, of fugitive aliens. These are immigrants who remain in the United States despite outstanding orders to leave.

Unsurprisingly, people who've been ordered deported are not always easy to find. This is not just because undocumented immigrants flee deportation (although, of course, some do). It's also because, according to a 2006 Department of Homeland Security report, about half of the information in ICE's "Deportable Alien Control System"—a database of immigrants to be deported—is incorrect or incomplete. This means that many immigrants never receive a deportation notice and so don't know they've been ordered to leave. It also means that ICE officers, relying on faulty information, don't know where to find them.

And so, to meet their quotas, enforcement teams carry out large-scale sweeps, raiding homes in neighborhoods with a lot of immigrants just after sunrise. Without an accurate list of which homes actually harbor undocumented immigrants, agents often rely on race to figure out who's here legally and who isn't. For example, in Fair Haven, Conn., several residents reported that during a raid last summer, ICE officers went door to door asking how many people were inside each house—and what race they were. In an ICE operation in Willmar, Minn., Latino residents were handcuffed and interrogated while white residents, some even in the same home, went unquestioned.

Race, in fact, is not a very good indicator of whether someone is in the United States illegally. Up to two-thirds of the people ICE arrests have never received deportation orders, frequently because their presence here is lawful. By ICE's own admission, the bureau has mistakenly detained, arrested, and even deported not only legal immigrants but also U.S. citizens. Those caught up in recent home raids include Adriana Aguilar, a citizen living in East Hampton, N.Y., who was sound asleep with her 4-year-old son when ICE officers stormed into her bedroom, pulled the covers off the bed, and shined flashlights into her face before interrogating her. In San Rafael, Calif., ICE detained 6-year-old Kebin Reyes, a citizen from birth, holding him in a locked office for 12 hours after immigration agents, pretending to be police, stormed into the apartment he shared with his father and forcibly removed him from his home.

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To the Best of Our Knowledge: Give Peace a Chance

Give Peace a Chance
To the Best of Our Knowledge (Wisconsin Public Radio)
Host: Steve Paulson



When asked what he thought about Western civilization, Gandhi once famously said: I think it's a good idea. Gandhi's form of extreme nonviolence led to the civilized retreat of the British from the Indian sub-continent. But does non-violence still have the right stuff to effect social change in today's world? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, some new ideas about a very old subject - non-violence. And, could nonviolence have prevented World War II?

SEGMENT 1:



Satish Kumar is a peace activist who lives in Devon, England, and he's the author of "The Buddha and the Terrorist." A former Jain monk, he still follows Gandhi's principles of non-violence. Kumar tells Jim Fleming about some of the people he met on his 8,000 mile walk for peace, and why he thinks violence is an obsolete weapon. Also, Reihan Salam critiqued the movie "Gandhi" for Slate Magazine in an article called "Meet the Hindustani Malcolm X." Salam tells Steve Paulson that David Attenborough's bio-pic may have been about an Indian man, but it was a thoroughly Western movie.



SEGMENT 2:



Mark Kurlansky is the author of "Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons in the History of a Dangerous Idea." In constructing his history of non-violence, Kurlansky looks at history with a revisionist's eye and tells Steve Paulson that WWII might not have been necessary ...

SEGMENT 3:



Andrew Carroll is the Founder of the Legacy Project whose latest book is "Grace under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War." The Legacy Project collects and publishes letters from combatants and their families and friends, and others who have been touched by the experience of war.

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Natalie Angier: Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science

Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science
By NATALIE ANGIER
New York Times



...

To illustrate how the New Humanities approach to scholarship might work, Dr. Heywood cited her own recent investigations into the complex symbolism of the wolf, a topic inspired by a pet of hers that was seven-eighths wolf. “He was completely different from a dog,” she said. “He was terrified of things in the human environment that dogs are perfectly at ease with, like the swishing sound of a jogging suit, or somebody wearing a hat, and he kept his reserve with people, even me.”

Dr. Heywood began studying the association between wolves and nature, and how people’s attitudes toward one might affect their regard for the other. “In the standard humanities approach, you compile and interpret images of wolves from folkloric history, and you analyze previously published texts about wolves,” and that’s pretty much it, Dr. Heywood said. Seeking a more full-bodied understanding, she delved into the scientific literature, studying wolf ecology, biology and evolution. She worked with Dr. Wilson and others to design a survey to gauge people’s responses to three images of a wolf: one of a classic beautiful wolf, another of a hunter holding a dead wolf, the third of a snarling, aggressive wolf.

It’s an implicit association test, designed to gauge subliminal attitudes by measuring latency of response between exposure to an image on a screen and the pressing of a button next to words like beautiful, frightening, good, wrong.

“These firsthand responses give me more to work with in understanding how people read wolves, as opposed to seeing things through other filters and published texts,” Dr. Heywood said.

Combining some of her early survey results with the wealth of wolf imagery culled from cultures around the world, Dr. Heywood finds preliminary support for the provocative hypothesis that humans and wolves may have co-evolved.

“They were competing predators that occupied the same ecological niche as we did,” she said, “but it’s possible that we learned some of our social and hunting behaviors from them as well.” Hence, our deeply conflicted feelings toward wolves — as the nurturing mother to Romulus and Remus, as the vicious trickster disguised as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.

In designing the New Humanities initiative, Dr. Wilson is determined to avoid romanticizing science or presenting it as the ultimate arbiter of meaning, as other would-be integrationists and ardent Darwinists have done.

“You can study music, dance, narrative storytelling and artmaking scientifically, and you can conclude that yes, they’re deeply biologically driven, they’re essential to our species, but there would still be something missing,” he said, “and that thing is an appreciation for the work itself, a true understanding of its meaning in its culture and context.”

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