Month: August 2010

Terry Teachout ponders David Mamet's conversion to a "libertarian-flavored conservatism." And, yes, Mamet's drift away from right-thinking liberalism does give his plays a kind of grit and realism lacking in, say, the ideological propaganda of a Kushner:

“As a child of the 60’s,” he wrote in the Village Voice, “I accepted as an article of faith … that people are generally good at heart.” It was this credo that he specifically repudiated in that same essay:

I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

But that people can behave like swine means they have a choice. It seems to me that that choice is what underlies great drama. Shakespeare is not grim; and his realism is leavened with great humor and hope. Teachout believes that Mamte's visceral and crude defense of everything Israel informs this worldview:

The battles in which Mamet's characters are engaged, as one of them remarks in American Buffalo, the most archetypical (and artful) of his portraits of American life, are zero-sum games in which only one player can win: 'it's kickass or kissass, Don, and I'd be lying if I told you any different.'… The only difference between Mamet then and Mamet now is that he has decided that government intervention can do little or nothing to ameliorate the effects of these struggles, and that men do better to work out their differences through the operation of free markets."

Except, one supposes, for war. And it is Mamet's contradiction between a libertarian trust in leaving people alone and a super-Zionist belief in the forever war that makes him so interesting a writer.

Ed Yong profiles a group of animals called bdelloid rotifers. The have evolved asexually for between 40 and 100 million years:

They live in an all-female world in which mothers give birth to daughters who are genetically identical clones. No males have ever been found. Many animals, including aphids, sharks and Komodo dragons, can reproduce asexually from time to time but sex is still their default setting… Bdelloids are the tiniest twigs on a tree of life that is otherwise dominated by sex.

What would Aquinas make of that?

A reminder from Jon Rauch:

Jonathan Rauch – FIRE’s CFN 2010 from The FIRE on Vimeo.

Natalie Wolchover is a scientist turned science writer who blogs over at Facto Diem. Here's part of her post on handedness:

What causes the brain to sometimes switch up or mix around? There is no clear consensus on the matter, just a lot of interesting hypotheses. First of all, left-handedness is barely genetic. A child of two left-handed parents has only a 26% chance of being left-handed: higher than the 1-in-10 incidence in the general population, but not that much higher. Some scientists think left-handedness is caused by more testosterone than usual flooding the fetus at a critical moment during gestation. This would explain the higher incidence of left-handedness in males than females, and it could also relate to the putative evidence of a correlation between handedness and sexual orientation. However, the way in which testosterone influences brain lateralization isn't established.

From the Oxford University Press blog:

Henry James was a man of many words. But when it came to selecting just a pair that he would define as the two most beautiful words in the English language, he chose the words, summer afternoon.

Enjoy. The humidity lifted here today – and it's beautiful. I can even breathe!

Dave Carter reports from the road:

As a study of the exotic, it's hard to beat the average truck stop. Taken as a group, truckers are an eclectic bunch. There are a huge number of veterans like yours truly, for whom trucking has enough similarities to a deployment to make it a comfortable fit. There are the cowboy types, complete with hats, belt buckles, pointy-toed boots, and a steely-eyed stare that would turn the Marlboro Man into a first class bed wetter. We have biker types complete with chained wallets and leather everything. We've got couples who decided to tour the country together, and people who elected to escape the Dilbert hell of the office cubicle and acquaint themselves with manual labor. Walking into most truck stops for the first time, you might wonder if you had stumbled upon a Village People convention, or chastise yourself for not bringing any Halloween candy. You could rope us off and charge admission just to watch.

Carl Pyrdum fisks Newt Gingrich. It's a tour de force from an actual student of history:

Notice how carefully he's phrased his claim to give the impression that during the medieval conquest of Spain the Muslims charged into Cordoba and declared it the capital of a new Muslim empire, and in order to add insult to injury seized control of a Christian church and built the biggest mosque they could, right there in front of the Christians they'd just conquered, a big Muslim middle finger in the heart of medieval Christendom.  Essentially, they've done it before, they'll do it again, right there at Ground Zero, if all good Christians don't band together to stop them.

The problem is, in order to give that impression of immediacy, Newt elides three-hundred years of Christian and Muslim history.  Three-hundred years. The Muslims conquered Cordoba in 712.  The Christian church that was later transformed into the Great Mosque of Cordoba apparently** continued hosting Christian worship for at least a generation after that.  Work on the Mosque didn't actually begin until seventy-odd years leader in 784, and the mosque only became "the world's third-largest" late in the tenth century, after a series of expansions by much later rulers, probably around 987 or so…

So what should modern Christians think when they hear a Muslim use the word "Cordoba"?  Well, I know that Newt hasn't been a Catholic for very long now, but maybe his priest ought to direct him to read a little thing called "The Catholic Encyclopedia".  Allow me to quote from the 1917 edition (which has the virtue of being in the public domain and easily searchable) and its entry on Cordoba:

In 786 the Arab caliph, Abd-er Rahman I, began the construction of the great mosque of Cordova, now the cathedral, and compelled many Christians to take part in the preparation of the site and foundations. Though they suffered many vexations, the Christians continued to enjoy freedom of worship, and this tolerant attitude of the ameers seduced not a few Christians from their original allegiance. Both Christians and Arabs co-operated at this time to make Cordova a flourishing city, the elegant refinement of which was unequalled in Europe…

It's easy to see why a group of Muslims creating a community center in the heart of a majority Christian country in a city known for its large Jewish population might name it "The Cordoba House". They're not, as Gingrich hopes we would believe, discreetly laughing at us because "Cordoba" is some double-secret Islamist code for "conquest"; rather, they're hoping to associate themselves with a particular time in medieval history when the largest library in Western Europe was to be found in Cordoba, a city in which scholars of all three major Abrahamic religions were free to study side-by-side.

Read the whole thing.

Nerds get their thug on.