Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Column written for the weekly Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . To oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the patriotic motive is foolish, because the same motive may heed the drumbeat of our invasion of others. To oppose the death penalty out of pity for the victim is insufficient, because the soft person is unstable and easily becomes a bully in a mob of bullies. War and legal execution of criminals are acts of violence on different orders, but they share the same element of cruelty, and so must be hated by the genuine liberal. This is just one lesson I took away from reading Judith N. Shklar's 1984 book  Ordinary Vices , recommended to me by a dear friend. Born in Riga, Latvia, of Jewish parents, she fled persecution during World War II with her family to Canada. Later, she became the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard's Government Department.  Ordinary Vices  is written with an eye not on fellow academics but on the ordinary reade...

After Adrienne Rich's "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law" 1. "You, once a belle in Shreveport" The tallest of your secondary one class, you posed against the older boys, front double biceps, back lat spread, side chest, taut postures you studied in magazines while stroking your little flared cock. You were only half surprised when you won. Though the other boys had more to show, you threw your hardest punch into the hand you raised. You crushed your abdominals as if jumping on a soda can you tossed. You were still flushed the next morning when an older boy, the one with strawberry lips, grabbed and congratulated you, Muscleman! Your arm jerked back before you could smile, quicker, stronger, than you could catch. 2. "she hears the angels chiding, and looks out" The angels fell silent after you left the church, the boxy Baptist church converted from a cinema, where you learned the parts of sinner and saint with a cast of ten thou...

frm Barbara J. King's review of Gregory Radick's The Simian Tongue: The long debate about animal language , and Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature : In his zoo work, [Richard] Garner invented what we would today call the primate playback experiment. . . . This re-emergence [of the playback technique] is mainly due to the work of the British ornithologist-turned-primatologist Peter Marler. . . . The Amboseli vervets made scientic history. When the vervets heard a played-back call originally uttered in the presence of an eagle, they fled into the bushes. For leopard and snake calls, they responded in distinct but similarly adaptive ways. Seufarth, Cheney and Marler proved that the calls contained not just high-arousal cues but specific information about the environment. * "Linguists," [Pinker] writes, "call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them 'conceptual semantics'. Conceptual semantics--...

From Christopher Reid's review of Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group at the Tate Britain: The more likely truth is that Sickert was simply the first painter in a long tradition to point out that the reclining nude, a standard compositional trope, had a lot in common with the inertia of a corpse, and the scrutiny of the artist with the calculating gaze of the malefactor. *** From Fernando Cervantes' review of Marjorie Trusted's The Arts of Spain: Iberia and Latin America 1450-1700 : In the 1920s, Jose Ortega y Gasset attempted to counter these myths with the argument that Europe was not the creation of the sovereign nation state but, rather, the result of a piecemeal and laborious cultural fusion of what he called the "Germanic" and the "Mediterranean" elements. What particularly interested Ortega was that this fusion had been attained Iberia earlier and more permanently than in any other part of Europe, so that the presence of those very elements th...