Saturday, June 22, 2013

Idealizing the Paleolithic. By Marlene Zuk.

The Problem with Evolutionary Psychology. By Marlene Zuk. History News Network, June 17, 2013.

Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. By Marlene Zuk. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014. 336 pp.

How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked. By Ferris Jabr. Scientific American, June 3, 2013.

Who is Grok? By Mark Sisson. Mark’s Daily Apple.

The Twilight Zone: The Changing of the Guard.

The Twilight Zone: The Changing of the Guard. Season 3 Episode 37 (episode 102 in the complete series). Original airdate,  June 3, 1962. Video. Hulu. Also at Daily Motion, CBS. Plot summary at Wikipedia.

Exploring The Twilight Zone, Episode #102: “The Changing of the Guard.” By Peter Martin. Twitch, November 8, 2011.




Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm. By Jennifer Schuessler.

Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm. By Jennifer Schuessler. New York Times, June 18, 2013.

1964 Report: Humanities “Uniquely Equipped to Fill the ‘Abyss of Leisure’” Made Possible by Forty-Hour Workweek. By David Austin Walsh. History News Network, June 19, 2013.

Some long term perspective on the “crisis” in humanities enrollment. By Benjamin Schmidt. Sapping Attention, June 7, 2013.

The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, June 2013. Also here. PDF.

Report of the Commission on the Humanities. American Council of Learned Societies, 1964.

The Humanities Project. Harvard University, June 2013.

Remarks by President Carol Quillen at Davidson College Commencement 2013. Davidson.edu, May 20, 2013.

The Humanist Vocation. By David Brooks. New York Times, June 20, 2013.

Why Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering Freshmen. By John Horgan. Scientific American, June 20, 2013.

The Decline and Fall of the English Major. By Verlyn Klinkenborg. New York Times, June 22, 2013.

A Case for the Humanities Not Made. By Stanley Fish. New York Times, June 24, 2013.

As More Attend College, Majors Become More Career-Focused. By Nate Silver. New York Times, June 25, 2013.


The purpose of education for the individual is to guide, develop, and enhance his or her intellectual and spiritual capacities as a human being and a citizen. The purpose of education for the economy is to develop the human capital needed for the creation of wealth.

But Man does not live by STEM alone. The purpose of education in the humanities is to help you develop an appreciation, a passion and love for, the good, the true, the noble, the honorable, and the beautiful. It is to guide the young student on his or her first steps on the path to knowledge and wisdom. It is to open us to the full range of human emotions, to give us an understanding of the realities of human nature, including its dark and cruel side.

History, which straddles the humanities and social sciences, is the collective biography of humanity. It shows how human nature actually operated on the ground over thousands of years. History is the story of the societies we created, their rise and fall, their ideals and accomplishments, and their failures. It shows the disconnect between how people actually lived and the ideals they aspired to. History also records the deed of those individuals who have actually made a difference in the course of human events (admittedly a tiny, tiny, number), whose deeds great and terrible shaped and transformed the paths humanity would take. And, over the long term, history shows how we really have made progress from the Paleolithic to the Information Age. As the collective memory of our species, the story of our mythopoetic journey, history shows us where we have come from, which is the beginning of wisdom in figuring out where we are going.

Alice Walker’s Undisguised Jew Hatred. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Alice Walker’s Undisguised Jew Hatred. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 19, 2013.

Pet Shop Boys vs. Alice Walker. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, June 20, 2013.

Alicia Keys, Israel and Civil Rights. By Richard Friedman. NJBR, June 12, 2013. With related articles on Alice Walker.

Rubio, Ryan and the Excommunication Impulse. By Peter Wehner.

Rubio, Ryan and the Excommunication Impulse. By Peter Wehner. Commentary, June 20, 2013.

The Anti-Rubio Rally. By Katrina Trinko. National Review Online, June 20, 2013.

How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby. By Jean M. Twenge.

How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby. By Jean M. Twenge. The Atlantic, July/August 2013. Also here.

Deep anxiety about the ability to have children later in life plagues many women. But the decline in fertility over the course of a woman’s 30s has been oversold. Here’s what the statistics really tell us—and what they don’t.

China’s Atrocities Don’t Interest Americans. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

China’s Atrocities Don’t Interest Americans. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 18, 2013.

Behind Cry for Help From China Labor Camp. By Andrew Jacobs. New York Times, June 11, 2013.

China Dissident Says He’s Being Forced From N.Y.U. By Andrew Jacobs. New York Times, June 16, 2013.

NYU booting blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng amid Shanghai expansion. By James Covert. New York Post, June 13, 2013.

N.Y.U., China, and Chen Guangcheng. By Evan Osnos. The New Yorker, June 17, 2013.

Obama Looking for Love in Wrong Places. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Obama Looking for Love in Wrong Places. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 19, 2013.

Syria Spurs a Few Arabs to Rethink Israel. By Evelyn Gordon.

Syria Spurs A Few Arabs to Rethink Israel. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, June 19, 2013.

Syrian sent to Israeli hospital with note attached. By Judy Siegel-Itzkovitch. Jerusalem Post, June 12, 2013.

Gulf Shi’ites fear blame for Syrian conflict. Reuters. Jerusalem Post, June 12, 2013.


Gordon:

One surprising side effect of Syria’s civil war is that it’s causing a few people in the Arab world to question their society’s accepted view of Israel as evil incarnate. These people are still very much a minority: The majority’s attitude is exemplified by the Syrian rebel commander who, without batting an eyelash, last month espoused the delusional theory that “Iran and Hezbollah are cooperating with Israel” to support Syrian President Bashar Assad. Nevertheless, two notable examples of a rethink have surfaced recently.

One involved a seriously wounded Syrian treated at an Israeli hospital this month. He isn’t the first Syrian to be treated in Israel, but he was the first to arrive with a note from the Syrian doctor who treated him initially. “To the honorable doctor, hello,” it began, before launching into a description of his symptoms, his treatment to date and suggestions for further treatment. “Please do what you think needs to be done,” it concluded. “Thanks in advance.”

The Syrian doctor who wrote that note clearly didn’t view Israelis as enemies, but as colleagues who could be trusted to give his patient the care he himself couldn’t provide. It indicates that word has filtered out to at least parts of Syria: Good medical care is available in Israel, and patients who need it can safely be sent there.

Perhaps even more remarkable, however, was a Friday sermon given earlier this month by a cleric in Qatif, a Shi’ite-majority city in Saudi Arabia. Discussing the conflict in Syria, Sheikh Abdullah Ahmed al-Youssef informed his congregants that more Muslims have been killed by fellow Muslims than were ever killed by Israel.

That isn’t news to anyone familiar with the facts. As I noted last month, the Syrian conflict alone has killed more than five times as many people in just two years as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has in all of Israel’s 65 years of existence. And that’s without even mentioning the ongoing Muslim-on-Muslim carnage in places like Iraq (almost 2,000 killed in the last three months) or Pakistan, much less historical events like the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, which killed more than one million people.

But most Arabs aren’t familiar with the facts, having been fed delusional atrocity tales about Israel for decades by their media and their political, religious, cultural and intellectual leaders. Thus for a cleric to stand up in the mosque and tell his congregants this home truth borders on the revolutionary.

If this attitude spreads, it would benefit not just Israel, or even the elusive quest for Mideast peace, but above all, the Arabs themselves. This isn’t merely because Israel has much to offer Arab countries on a practical level (like water management technologies essential for agriculture in a drought-stricken region), but mainly because Arab society’s biggest problem has always been its habit of blaming outsiders–Israel and the West–for all its ills. By so doing, they not only absolve themselves of responsibility, but also nourish the belief that these ills are beyond their control, and hence beyond their own power to fix.

By recognizing that Israel is not the monster of their own imagining, Arabs can begin the process of recognizing that their problems are of their own making rather than the product of malign outside intervention. And only then can they begin the long, hard work of fixing them.

The Rise of Settler Terrorism: The West Bank’s Other Violent Extremists. By Daniel Byman and Natan Sachs.

The Rise of Settler Terrorism: The West Bank’s Other Violent Extremists. By Daniel Byman and Natan Sachs. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, No. 5 (September/October 2012).