http://www.science20.com/news_articles/t...nge-155887

EXCERPT: Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated large portions of the Philippines in November 2013, killed at least 6,300 people. It set records for the strongest storm ever at landfall and for the highest sustained wind speed over one minute ever, hitting 194 miles per hour when it reached the province of Eastern Samar. It could become more common, according to a new model which factored in what controls the peak intensity of typhoons. The model finds that under climate change this century, storms like Haiyan could get even stronger and more common - as much as 14 percent, nearly equivalent to an increase of one category. Unusual upper ocean warming rates over the low-latitude northwestern Pacific have already intensified storms in the region since the warmer water provides more fuel for storm intensity. The study projects that by the year 2100, the temperature of the upper ocean will be more than 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than the baseline average of the 50-year period from 1955-2005.....

http://phys.org/news/2015-05-self-foldin...olves.html

EXCERPT: A demo sparking interest at the ICRA 2015 conference in Seattle was all about an origami robot that was worked on by researchers. [...] "An untethered miniature origami robot that self-folds, walks, swims, and degrades" was the name of the paper, co-authored by Shuhei Miyashita, Steven Guitron, Marvin Ludersdorfer, Cynthia R. Sung and Daniela Rus. [...] A video showing the robot in action showcases each move. One can watch the robot walking on a trajectory, walking on human skin, delivering a block; swimming (the robot has a boat-shaped body so that it can float on water with roll and pitch stability); carrying a load (0.3 g robot); climbing a slope; and digging through a stack. It also shows how a polystyrene model robot dissolves in acetone.....

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/...-mendelson

=EXCERPT=

Jonathan Derbyshire: [...] In his new book “Moral Agents“, the critic Edward Mendelson argues that the Olympian confidence of these pronouncements on the “crises of modern life” is entirely characteristic of the public utterances of a group of eight writers, [Saul] Bellow included, active in the United States in the middle of the last century. Mendelson examines the careers of “novelists, poets, and critics, who, in addition to practising their craft, seized for themselves the power and authority to shape literary culture.” According to Mendelson, Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, William Maxwell, Norman Mailer, WH Auden and Frank O’Hara all felt that they were in possession of gifts that made them “morally superior,” qualified, indeed “obliged,” to “lead others.” Last week, I spoke to Mendelson on the phone from New York, where he occupies a chair in the Humanities at Columbia University named after one of his subjects, Lionel Trilling....

JD: [...] One of the things that distinguishes [Saul] Bellow from the other writers you discuss in the book is his tolerance for metaphysical or “spiritual” ideas that others might dismiss as crankish—his enthusiasm for Rudolf Steiner, for example. That’s always struck me as a lapse on Bellow’s part—of taste, if not of intellectual rigour. What do you put it down to? You make the point that he was quite insistent that those metaphysical were central to his intellectual self-image.

EM: The surprise in writing about many of these writers is that they wanted to be religious thinkers and that they were embarrassed, to a great extent, by their wish to think in religious terms. I was struck by something Frank Kermode once said, which was that as they get older, critics tend to write about the bible. He was an example of that himself—he was not religious and had no religious feelings himself. But all he wanted to write about at the end of his life was religion and religious issues.

Bellow, it seems to me, had the admirable ambition to want to understand the great subjects, the largest issues and to connect his own personal experience to something that applied to the whole universe. And Steiner provided a method that was neither Jewish nor Christian. Many things that look crackpot are slightly distorted forms of things that would be admirable if anybody could figure out how to do them. But nobody has figured out how to do them, so they emerge only in these eccentric forms.

JD: This leads me to a question about [WH] Auden, who’s unusual in this company in using frankly and more traditionally religious categories.

EM: That’s right, but he’s constantly making clear that he uses them as metaphors. It’s interesting that he has no supernatural beliefs, that he can’t make himself believe in the Resurrection, that [he believes] that the idea of heaven is a Platonic idea not a Christian one. It seems to me that he and Macdonald are seeing the same things, only Auden is calling them Christian and [Dwight] Macdonald is not.

Auden has a late review of Orwell in which he says that Orwell hated Christianity probably because of his experiences at school, but that when he thinks who in the 20th century was the greatest Christian, he thinks of Orwell.

JD: And then in [Norman] Mailer, in his fiction at least, you get this Manichean obsession with evil and other vast cosmic forces at work.

EM: He’s finding something that is not part of the Judaism he grew up with, which he thought was repellent. He told his mother how disgusted he was by having a Jewish marriage for her sake. Any variety of mysticism seemed [to him] like a way of getting in touch with the divine.

It’s hard to be a genius without some sense of a universe of meaning, however that’s expressed. It’s all over Virginia Woolf, for example. And it seems to me that the only way to understand Beckett sensibly is to think of him as spectacularly moral-minded. In other words, the man who went to work for the French Resistance even though he could have lived through the war as a neutral, the man who gave away most of his Nobel Prize, is not someone who thinks the world is meaningless....

JD: Your most important insight into the shape of Mailer’s career, it seems to me, is the following: “The same habits of mind that kept Mailer from writing a great novel made him a great journalist.” Could you unpack that a little? How did his novels go wrong and, conversely, where does the journalism and reporting go right?

EM: I’m grateful to you for noticing that sentence. Mailer seemed to me to be the only political writer who recognised the deep mythical currents in contemporary politics. When Jung was writing in the late Thirties there are some lectures in which he talks about—it’s a line which Auden quotes in “September 1, 1939”—waves of anger and fear circulating over the earth. He was thinking in archetypal ways about 1930s fascist politics. But then that style of thinking disappeared because it got associated with fascism.

Mailer’s genius, it seems to me, was in part to bring these ideas back without all the bad associations they’d developed. Mailer found a way of talking about politics in a mythical way that represented a lot of the reality of the politics of utopian fantasy. This full-throated sense of politics driven by mythical laws was something Mailer picked up on, and was already in his thinking as early as The Naked and the Dead, in those passages about deep, hidden, unknowable forces.

The trouble was that when he tried to write a novel about them, everybody became symbolic. You can’t represent a human being as representing something, because then you’re not representing the human being at all. You’re pushing aside everything in that human being that doesn’t fit the model you’ve created. Fairy stories can work with mythical figures, but the medium that Mailer was trying to write in was one that required recognising the particularity of human beings. And he was always being distracted into their mythical significance.....

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/0...oks-mallon

[...] In “Buckley and Mailer”, whose overstated subtitle is “The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties,” Kevin M. Schultz, a historian at the University of Illinois-Chicago, sets out to reconstruct an association [...] John B. Judis’s biography of Buckley says that he was “friendly with” but never “very close” to Mailer. Still, Buckley’s durable cordiality toward Mailer is more remarkable than his being amigos with Galbraith or belligerents with Vidal [...]

Show biz, for which both men had plenty of aptitude, first connected the two: John Golden, a young Chicago promoter, arranged to put Buckley and Mailer together in a public debate, on September 22, 1962, which quickly sold out.

Mailer was several months away from turning forty. Having largely flamed out in fiction after the success of “The Naked and the Dead,” and lucky to have escaped a prison sentence for stabbing his second wife, he was still in the early, shaky stages of a comeback second only in that era to Frank Sinatra’s. It had begun with the self-referential miscellany “Advertisements for Myself” (1959) and was continuing with his Esquire pieces on the Kennedy candidacy (“Superman Comes to the Supermarket”) and Presidency. Another half decade would bring him to greatness with “The Armies of the Night,” which won a Pulitzer, and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.”

Buckley, only thirty-six, was the standout son of a large, rich, conservative Catholic family. (Vidal called them “the sick Kennedys.”) He had attracted notice for his own books (“God and Man at Yale,” “Up from Liberalism”) and for National Review, whose rearguard crusades appeared to have even fewer prospects of success than those being waged on the far-left side of the political greensward.

Posters for Buckley and Mailer’s Chicago bout promised “the Debate of the Year” between the “forceful philosopher of THE NEW CONSERVATISM” and “ ‘America’s angry young man’ and Leading Radical.” Abbie Hoffman was in the audience; folksingers provided entertainment during intermission; and Playboy held the rights to publish a transcript. As Schultz notes, Buckley had less to lose than Mailer, whom he had called, two years earlier, in National Review, a “moral pervert.” In the event, he came away from the auditorium impressed, telling readers of his next column that Mailer “doesn’t know what it is he wants to say, but his desperate anxiety to say it, fired by his incandescent moral energy, makes him very much worth watching.” There may have been, along with the grudging admiration, a tinge of envy. As Schultz notes, Mailer was a bold, quicksilver “philosopher,” whereas the far less introspective Buckley always tended to see himself as a mere “salesman” for certainties he was duty-bound to make obvious to others.

[...] The Buckley-Mailer correspondence, not especially deep or voluminous, contains sprinklings of genial insult and even the record of a contribution Mailer made to the chronically empty coffers of National Review. Buckley’s fashionable wife, Pat, called Mailer Chooky Bah Lamb, an endearment she’d got from her Scottish nanny and which Mailer threw into his novel “An American Dream”; he called her Slugger. The Buckleys were occasionally, though not often, in the company of Mailer and whomever he was then married to, but the venues seem mostly to have been crowded ones, such as Truman Capote’s 1966 Black-and-White Ball, where Mailer got very drunk and had to be kept from assaulting President Johnson’s national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, over Vietnam.

The war was, for a time, a formidable obstacle to any deepening of fellow feeling between Buckley and Mailer. In 1965, Mailer demurred at the possibility of a personal get-together: “I think this is the wrong time for us to have dinner, because instead of having a nice calm quiet and lively conversation about the future of conservatism, my left conservatism and your right conservatism, there’d be too much pressure to have a screaming match.” In 1968, when both went to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, Buckley sided with the police as reluctantly as Mailer sided with the protesters. During that violent year, Buckley declined the chance to play a small role in Mailer’s film “Maidstone,” about political assassination; he was thus absent on the day that one of the actors, Rip Torn, struck the auteur with a hammer....

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-157145

=EXCERPT=

George Yancy: You have popularized the concept of speciesism, which, I believe was first used by the animal activist Richard Ryder. Briefly, define that term and how do you see it as similar to or different from racism?

Peter Singer: Speciesism is an attitude of bias against a being because of the species to which it belongs. Typically, humans show speciesism when they give less weight to the interests of nonhuman animals than they give to the similar interests of human beings. Note the requirement that the interests in question be “similar.” It’s not speciesism to say that normal humans have an interest in continuing to live that is different from the interests that nonhuman animals have. One might, for instance, argue that a being with the ability to think of itself as existing over time, and therefore to plan its life, and to work for future achievements, has a greater interest in continuing to live than a being who lacks such capacities.

On that basis, one might argue that to kill a normal human being who wants to go on living is more seriously wrong than killing a nonhuman animal. Whether this claim is or is not sound, it is not speciesist. But given that some human beings – most obviously, those with profound intellectual impairment – lack this capacity, or have it to a lower degree than some nonhuman animals, it would be speciesist to claim that it is always more seriously wrong to kill a member of the species Homo sapiens than it is to kill a nonhuman animal.

G.Y.: While I think that it is ethically important to discuss the issue of failing to extend to other (nonhuman) animals the principle of equality, we continue to fail miserably in the ways in which we extend that principle to black people, the disabled, women and others, here in the United States and around the world. What is it that motivates the failure or the refusal to extend this principle to other human beings in ethically robust ways? I’m especially thinking here in terms of the reality of racism.

P.S.: Although it is true, of course, that we have not overcome racism, sexism or discrimination against people with disabilities, there is at least widespread acceptance that such discrimination is wrong, and there are laws that seek to prevent it. With speciesism, we are very far from reaching that point. If we were to compare attitudes about speciesism today with past racist attitudes, we would have to say that we are back in the days in which the slave trade was still legal, although under challenge by some enlightened voices.

Why do racism, sexism and discrimination against people with disabilities still exist, despite the widespread acceptance that they are wrong? There are several reasons, but surely one is that many people act unthinkingly on the basis of their emotional impulses, without reflecting on the ethics of what they are doing. That, of course, invites us to discuss why some people have these negative emotional impulses toward people of other races, and that in turn leads to the old debate whether such prejudices are innate or are learned from one’s culture and environment. There is evidence that even babies are attracted to faces that look more like those of the people they see around them all the time, so there could be an evolved innate element, but culture certainly plays a very significant role.

G.Y.: Having referenced the slave trade, I think that it is important to keep in mind that it was partly constituted by a white racist ideology that held that Africans were sub-persons. There was also the European notion that nonwhites were incapable of planning their own lives and had to be paternalistically ruled over. As a white Australian, are there parallels in terms of how the indigenous people of Australia have been treated, especially in terms of sub-personhood, and paternalism?

P.S.: Yes, unfortunately there are parallels. The early European settlers regarded the indigenous people as an inferior race, living a miserable existence. Because the indigenous people were nomadic, they were regarded as having no ownership of their land, which in British colonial law therefore belonged to nobody – the legal term was terra nullius – and so, very conveniently, could be occupied by Europeans. In some cases, when indigenous people killed cattle that were grazing on their traditional lands, Europeans went out in “shooting parties,” killing them indiscriminately, as they would animals. Some of the Europeans justified this on the grounds that the indigenous people, like animals, had no souls. Although such killings were never permitted in law, enforcement was another matter.

[...] G.Y.: [...] returning to what you said earlier, do you think that racism is innate or cultural? Even if there appears to be a proclivity toward a kind of xenophobic tribalism expressed within the human species, racism seems to be of a different order, yes?

P.S.: Racism is certainly different from xenophobia, or tribalism. Racism develops its own ideology and, as you pointed out, institutional structures. But if by “a different order” you mean that racism and xenophobic tribalism have distinct origins, I am not sure about that. It’s possible that xenophobia is the underlying impulse that, in different cultures, expresses itself in varying forms, and racism is one of those forms.

[...] G.Y.: To what extent do you think that biases against nonhuman animals are grounded within a certain unethical stewardship toward nature itself? Do you think that this is a specifically Western approach to nature where nature is conceived as an “object” over which we ought to have absolute control? Certainly, Francis Bacon seems to have had this idea. Of course, then there was René Descartes, who argued that nonhuman animals are mere machines.

P.S.: It is true that Western thinking emphasizes the gulf between humans and nature, and also between humans and animals, to a far greater extent than Eastern thinking, or the thinking that is characteristic of indigenous peoples. Yet it is also true that the treatment of both animals and nature is, today, generally worse in the East than in the West. Every visitor to Beijing has breathed in evidence of what China has allowed its industries to do to the air. Laws protecting the welfare of animals in Europe are far in advance of those in Eastern countries, including those with strong Buddhist traditions like Japan and Thailand. China still doesn’t even have a national animal welfare law. So if the domination of nature and of animals was originally a Western idea, the sad fact is that it is being taken up avidly in the East, precisely at the time when it is being vigorously challenged in the West....

Everyone in northern California is electrified by the Golden State Warriors' ascent to the NBA Finals for the first time in 40 years.

But not like Sweetie, the Warriors' oldest and dearest fan.

Sweetie is 105 years old, and will celebrate her 106th birthday during the series. She is still pretty independent and lives alone with her cat in the same Oakland house where she has lived since the 1950's. She got into watching the Warriors with her husband and they went to a few games. When he died in the 1990s, her whole life kind of started to revolve around her anticipation to watch Warriors' games.

One of her children, granchildren or great grandchildren will bring her dinner and make sure she's comfortable in front of the TV before a game. Then she loves to shout at the TV during games. Her cat just looks at her.

I'm not sure how the Warriors found out about Sweetie, but during the press conference after they beat Houston to get into the finals, Warriors coach Steve Kerr said he was happy for all Golden State's fans, but especially for Sweetie. He told her that if she was watching, this one was for her.

Sweetie says she couldn't believe it when he did that.

Then the world's media got wind of it and Sweetie has become a celebrity. The TV trucks are all outside her house. And there she was in her yellow Warriors t-shirt and some cool ear-rings that she must keep for special occasions. Sweetie was lookin' good.

Now the Warriors say that they are working out logistics to get her to Oracle Arena in Oakland for game one of the finals, if she's up for it.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1561001.ece

EXCERPT: [...] Personally, Keynes couldn’t stand most politicians, even as he charmed them as much as he charmed almost anyone he found interesting or open to him. [...] His apparent need to impress his personality on everyone was part and parcel of what Davenport-Hines correctly views as his perpetual exercises in persuasion. He recognized the importance of being one of the “ins”. But to get what he wanted, and what he thought was right, he also displayed many of the characteristics we associate with successful politicians, the sort of men he otherwise decried for their vulgarity, duplicity and boorish rabble-rousing.

Like them, Keynes flattered and cajoled. He could be ruthless too, though his ruthlessness was mostly intellectual and (once more) compartmentalized. Among his academic peers, he might be vituperative, sometimes full of rage, and often intellectually devastating. Bertrand Russell said that he feared argument with Maynard, likening it to taking his life in his own hands, while a loquacious Isaiah Berlin declared him the most intelligent man he’d ever met. During long, hard meetings with the Americans about debt financing during and after both world wars, however, his peculiar mix of mandarin speed and efficiency, mixed with high-wire intellectual acrobatics and intuition, all wrapped up in mellifluous argument, rubbed up against the grain of what he saw as cloudy American thinking and gridlocked administrative practice. The personal and the political clearly combined in Keynes’s presentation of self, but sometimes the realities of power politics trumped the power of his personality. The American century was coming, and Keynes could hardly stop it alone even if the magnetism of his character and intellect tended to win over all sorts of people.

[...] The need was for men like Maynard to try and save Britain from America, Russia and Continental Europe combined, and from its own political masters when possible. His “class” had lost “sufficient confidence in the future to be satisfied with the present”, and Keynes, a proud Liberal, wanted to regain it. If his ambition had been steeled after the mind-shattering effects of the First World War, it allowed him to compartmentalize his multiple lives. And like this biography, they would eventually become more than the sum of their parts. Keynes’s life and work hinted at a partial fix in a world of incessant capitalist instability, one where economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty might be upheld for a generation or more and where intellectual clarity was a means for dissolving fear and ignorance. His remains an intoxicating vision, with a firmer grasp on the economic limits to modern politics than most contemporary political theory that dares to consider itself realistic, and a greater appreciation of the imperative for what Virginia Woolf memorably described as “thinking against the current”....

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-cul...protesters

EXCERPT: The great peculiarity of the PEN-and-Charlie Hebdo controversy earlier this month was a combination of ostensible agreement on values [...] and spectacular disagreement on facts. The protesters, most of them, wanted the world to know that, in regard to press freedoms, their commitments were absolute. Willingly they would defend the right even of Nazis to say whatever terrible things Nazis might say, as the ACLU once did in Illinois. But they honestly believed that Charlie Hebdo is a reactionary magazine, racist against blacks and bigoted against Muslims, obsessively anti-Islamic, intent on bullying the immigrant masses in France. A dreadful magazine. Nazi-like, even—therefore, a magazine not even remotely worthy of an award from PEN. On these points the protesters were adamant. Only, why?

[...] A modest heap of useful information about racism in France and the distinctly non-Nazi political nature of Charlie Hebdo and its cartoons did accumulate during the course of the affair, and the modest heap ought normally to have changed a few minds. Nobody’s mind seemed to change, however. Would an additional sprinkling of facts and authoritative endorsements have helped? I attended the PEN Gala and listened to the speeches and found myself wishing that my friends among the protesters, having boasted to the entire universe of their boycott, had sneaked in, anyway. They would have watched the leaders of PEN bestow the award on Charlie Hebdo’s surviving staffers, and this would have of course been galling, given what they believed about the magazine. They would have heard Charlie Hebdo’s editor utter his incisive mot, “Being shocked is part of democratic debate. Being shot is not,” which was impressive and true and maybe immortal, yet would have left them unmoved because it did not speak to their objection. But what would they have made of the speech by Dominique Sopo, who is the president of an organization called SOS Racisme? SOS Racisme is the liveliest and most prominent civil-rights organization in France, and its president’s speech was the liveliest moment of the controversy. The moment of maximum lucidity. At the Gala, Sopo did get a cheer.

[...] Yes, what would the protesting writers at PEN have made of any of this, if only their own boycott had not prevented them from hearing Sopo make his argument? Or if they had conducted a bit more research into Charlie Hebdo and its politics? They would not have enjoyed hearing Sopo deliver one remark in particular. “It is very important that we do not kill those who died a second time,” said the president of SOS Racisme. This meant: “You Americans who know nothing about the struggles of us immigrants and children of immigrants in France, you Americans who consider Charlie Hebdo to be unworthy of an award from PEN—you Americans should stop slandering our murdered comrades.” In sum, “Touches pas à mon pote.” I suppose the protesters would have shrugged this off, as they shrugged off the remarks of everyone else who tried to reason with them.

Only, why? Is it really true that, in the ranks of PEN, one person after another is blinded by a provincial ignorance of everything not American, beginning with France’s language and ending with its cartoons? At the gala, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, Bob Mankoff, lamented into the microphone that, when it comes to cartoons, not everybody gets the joke; and it may be that, in regard to Charlie Hebdo, an American education does make it hard to get the joke. The Charlie cartoonists have worked up a double-entendre ironic style that amounts to a politically incorrect anti-racism. This is inconceivable, from a certain American standpoint; and what is inconceivable must not exist. In the Charlie cartoons, Arabs sometimes have hooked noses and big lips, not to mention the Jews, not to mention the blacks! This does not mean that Charlie Hebdo is Der Stürmer. The protesters at PEN believed otherwise. They were aghast. Nazi comparisons became a trope of their protest. The Charlie cartoonists sometimes cultivate a raucous style aimed at 16-year-olds. This makes the cartoons look even worse to Americans whose beau ideal is The New Yorker. We sophisticates adore the elegance of Jules Feiffer (and yet, in reality, the Charlie cartoonists command more than one style, and Luz, in his brand-new cartoon memoir, has drawn some dancing terrorists in a visibly Feifferian mode, and it is a mistake to underestimate the French arts).

But I don’t take the argument about American parochialism too seriously. PEN American Center may be full of odd ducks, as befits a literary institution, and there is always someone who enjoys waving a demagogic fist, but the odd ducks and fist-wavers (as I remember keenly from my years on the PEN board) tend to be well- and even polyglotically educated. Even today, if you spend enough time at one of the café tables lining the Boulevard Saint-Germain, a goodly percentage of PEN’s American membership will eventually give you the pleasure of strolling by, on their way to the American literary tradition that is the Brasserie Lipp. And everyone among the more prominent writers has French friends and publishers and translators and friends of friends—which means that, among the protesters at PEN during these last few weeks, something more than Uncle Sam know-nothing-ism must account for the peculiarly American upset over Charlie Hebdo.

[...] I think that panic has set in. The panic was of course provoked by the Islamists, beginning 10 years ago with the campaign against the Jyllands-Posten caricatures of Muhammad (and against Charlie Hebdo, too, after Charlie had loyally reprinted the Danish cartoons). And the panic has been unwittingly compounded, modified, and disseminated by the principal English-language news organizations, beginning in that same 2005 with their decision, poorly thought-out, to refrain from reprinting or broadcasting the Danish cartoons—this early decision that set the precedent for this year’s decision not to reproduce Charlie Hebdo’s post-massacre cartoon of the prophet. And the PEN controversy shows the consequences.

The terrorists launched their campaign against cartoonists because of the fundamentalist injunction against icon worship, combined with the grand supernatural conspiracy theory that dominates Islamist political doctrine.

[...] The major English-language news organizations compounded the hysteria by deciding to regard it as other than hysterical. Everyone knows that, in the cases of the Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo alike, and perhaps in a few other cases, too, the journalistic logic for reprinting or broadcasting the cartoons was and is overwhelming. The cartoon crisis has been a significant event in world affairs for 10 years now, and it is impossible to understand the crisis without seeing the cartoons. The news organizations, in justifying their decision not to reproduce the images, have not seriously argued otherwise. The news organizations have taken the position, instead, that, if they were to publish or broadcast the images, they would inflict a tremendous emotional wound on their Muslim readers and viewers—a wound so grievous as to counterbalance the public’s need to examine the cartoons, including everyone among the public who might be Muslim.

And yet, the cartoons are offensive or injurious only if you assume the fundamentalist injunction and the demonic conspiracy theory. Otherwise, nothing in them is illegitimate or especially offensive. The most famous of the Danish cartoons shows Muhammad as a suicide bomber with a lunatic look in his eyes and a bomb tucked into his turban, which is obviously a reasonable commentary on the deplorable uses to the which the prophet has been put. The Danish cartoon is even somewhat witty, given that, in Western art and poetry during the last few hundred years, Muhammad has been conventionally portrayed in the way you can see on the frieze of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., as a lofty and law-giving hero of world civilization. And here was the Danish cartoon to point out that, in the hands of the terrorists, Muhammad has lately been assigned an opposite role. The famous January Charlie Hebdo cover by Luz, entirely different, offers, of course, a defense of Prophet Muhammad against the terrorists themselves—in fine display of Charlie Hebdo’s nuanced instincts and sympathy for ordinary Muslims.

[...] I could go through the list of famous names among the American protesters, recording the insults they have tossed at the murdered French cartoonists and their colleagues, but I do not have the heart for it. I make a prediction, though. I predict that, next year, or in five years, some other novelist or memoirist or artist somewhere in the world will have the good luck to escape an Islamist assassination attempt or massacre. And when the terrified survivor comes limping afterward into Manhattan, in search of solace and friends, that person, too, will discover that, in some of the finest of circles of literary New York, everybody hates a loser, and the protesters have gathered on the sidewalk outside the hotel, and the vilification has begun....