Archive for 2007

Kanishk Tharoor, "terror and democracy" editor of the blog openDemocracy, reflects on the "asphyxiation of political space" in Pakistan.

The first in a series on Pakistan: our guest Sabahat Ashraf is a technical writer in Silicon Valley, a prolific blogger, and perhaps a key to the global chatter and global stakes in his homeland.

Conductor Craig Smith, world famous especially for his cycle of Bach Cantatas, leads this cheerful introspection on music as "a way to live." Smith died on November 14, 2007. This program is adapted from a WGBH television documentary from 1992.

Jonah Lehrer in "Proust was a Neuroscientist" makes the case for artists (Walt Whitman, Igor Stravinsky, George Eliot, Paul Cezanne et al.) as the real pioneers in grasping and revealing how our minds actually work.

There’s a case to be made — and Paul Elie makes it elegantly in his Slate review of Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia — not just that Oliver Sacks is his own most interesting patient in his journal of musical symptoms, but that himself, the patient with 70-plus years of soaring, passionate musical memories, is more interesting than himself, the observant clinical neurologist.

The aura around the Palestinian pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar -- performing, teaching and talking at Brown this weekend -- suggests a major musical career coming into bloom, and at the same time a world-historical conversation being extended to a new generation. Young Abboud Ashkar, just 31, could be the late Edward Said's successor in the exquisitely tantalizing dialog with the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. In counterpoint and close harmony, they are teasing out the implications of music for a world at war.

My friend Kanan Makiya was the most influential Iraqi advocate in America of the war to "liberate" his country five years ago. Today he is the most articulate casualty of his own fantasy. Kanan is famous now mainly for telling President Bush, face to face two months before the US invasion, that the American troops "will be greeted with sweets and flowers in the first months..." He had the rhetorical magic in those days to get away with arguing that invading Iraq was the moral choice even if it had only a "five percent" chance of success. Astonishingly, writers like George Packer of The New Yorker and David Brooks of The New York Times made Kanan Makiya's dream of US power sound like a plausible bet. Kanan wrote in the New Republic in the spring of 2003 that the bomb-bursts in Baghdad rang like "church bells" in his ecstatic ears.