Benjamin Franklin's invention of the lightning rod is the founding fable of American science, but Franklin was only one of many early Americans fascinated by electricity. As a dramatically new physical experience, electricity amazed those who dared to tame the lightning and set it coursing through their own bodies. Thanks to its technological and medical utility, but also its surprising ability to defy rational experimental mastery, electricity was a powerful experience of enlightenment, at once social, intellectual, and spiritual.

In this compelling book, James Delbourgo moves beyond Franklin to trace the path of electricity through early American culture, exploring how the relationship between human, natural, and divine powers was understood in the eighteenth century. By examining the lives and visions of natural philosophers, spectacular showmen, religious preachers, and medical therapists, he shows how electrical experiences of wonder, terror, and awe were connected to a broad array of cultural concerns that defined the American Enlightenment. The history of lightning rods, electrical demonstrations, electric eels, and medical electricity reveals how early American science, medicine, and technology were shaped by a culture of commercial performance, evangelical religion, and republican politics from mid-century to the early republic.

The first book to situate early American experimental science in the context of a transatlantic public sphere, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders offers a captivating view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment. In a story of shocks and sparks from New England to the Caribbean, Delbourgo brilliantly illuminates a revolutionary New World of wonder.

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders : Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America

If the pope thought the Muslim faith were better than the Catholic faith, he’d be a Muslim. To say that you have beliefs and that they are equal to everyone else's beliefs all the time is to devalue the concept of belief.

I'm a Christian for a variety of reasons. Maybe because it’s easy.

For God and Country - Questions for John Ashcroft

The second annual New Yorker Town Hall Meeting, with Omar Ahmad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mahmood Mamdani, Azar Nafisi, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, and Lawrence Wright. George Packer, moderator.

Islam and the West | The New Yorker: Video

Decius wrote:

This is interesting but I think its unfair. Can I trust anyone who talks about "real faith" to present an objective view of a competing philosophy?

No one re-recommended my post on George Packer's article, The Moderate Martyr, in a September issue of The New Yorker.

This article is predominantly a study of Islam from the inside, from the point of view of would-be reformers, past and present.

This is how the article ends (abridged slightly):

The hollowness at the core of Sudan, and the widespread cynicism about Islamist rule, with its enforced ideology and rituals, is reminiscent of Eastern Europe in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if you spend time in an Islamic country you soon realize that the Communism analogy runs dry. For Islam, unlike Marxism, is deeply rooted and still present in everyday life in profound ways. ... The Islamic revival, and its attendant struggles and ills, is less like the eighteenth century in Europe than like the sixteenth, the age of Luther ...

... Ever since the night Naim attended Taha’s lecture as a young law student, he has believed that Muslims must find a way out of the predicament in which their own history has placed them—if not by accepting Taha’s vision, then by working toward another.

"I don’t really have high hopes for change in the Arab region, because it is too self-absorbed in its own sense of superiority and victimhood," he said. His hope lies in the periphery—West Africa, the Sahel, Central and Southeast Asia: "They are not noticed, but that’s where the hope is." The damage done to Muslim lives under the slogan “Islam is the solution,” and Islamism’s failure to solve their daily problems and answer people’s deepest needs, has forced younger Muslims in countries like Indonesia, Turkey, and Morocco to approach religion and politics in a more sophisticated way. ... "The Future of Sharia" amounts to a kind of secularism: it proposes not a rigid separation of politics and religion, as in Turkey, but, rather, a scheme in which Islam informs political life but cannot be introduced into law by an appeal to any religious authority. Otherwise, Muslims would not be free. "I need a secular state to be a Muslim," Naim said. "If I don’t have the freedom to disbelieve, I cannot believe."

Two days after we spoke, Naim flew to Nigeria to give a series of lectures, based on the new book, in the northern states that have imposed a particularly harsh form of Sharia. He plans to travel next year to Indonesia and, if possible, to Iran. Two years ago, when he lectured in northern Nigeria, a quarter of his audience of eight hundred people walked out on him, and he had to slip away through a side door. He acknowledged that violence, even murder, might be the response this time. But Naim believes that, despite the ev... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

RE: Freedom: True and False - New English Review

Freedom is a word invoked constantly in America as a descriptive term for self-government and the concept of sovereignty of the people. Less understood is the fact that the mujahadeen are also fighting for freedom, but a freedom very differently defined.

The freedom Muslims are promised is of course entirely delusional for the reality of Islam is utter slavery -- physical, psychological and spiritual -- without balm, without rest, without peace.

Freedom: True and False - New English Review

Joan Didion on Dick Cheney.

In 1991, explaining why he agreed with George H.W. Bush's decision not to take the Gulf War to Baghdad, Cheney had acknowledged the probability that any such invasion would be followed by civil war in Iraq:

Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in.... Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists?... How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?

By January 2006, when the prescience of these questions was evident and polling showed that 47 percent of Iraqis approved of "attacks on US-led forces," and the administration was still calculating that it could silence domestic doubt by accusing the doubter of wanting to "cut and run," the Vice President assured Fox News that the course had been true. "When we look back on this ten years hence," he said, a time frame suggesting that he was once again leaving the cleanup to someone else, "we will have fundamentally changed the course of history in that part of the world, and that will be an enormous advantage for the United States and for all of those countries that live in the region."

Cheney: The Fatal Touch | NYRB

Nicholas Kristof explains why aid is hard.

In rural Indonesia, you see a cultural problem that aid can't easily address: pregnant women and babies going hungry, even having to eat bark from trees, while their husbands are doing fine. It turns out that the custom is for the men and boys to eat their fill first.

Discouraged, you move on to southern Africa. You see the very sensible efforts of aid groups to get people to grow sorghum rather than corn, because it is hardier and more nutritious. But local people aren't used to eating sorghum. So aid workers introduce sorghum by giving it out as a relief food to the poor—and then sorghum becomes stigmatized as the poor man's food, and no one wants to have anything to do with it.

William Easterly, in his tremendously important and provocative new book, The White Man's Burden, asserts with great force that the aid industry is deeply flawed.

Aid: Can It Work? | NYRB

Timothy Garton Ash on Islam in Europe.

Earlier this year, I visited the famous cathedral of Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris. I admired the magnificent tombs and funerary monuments of the kings and queens of France, including that of Charles Martel ("the hammer"), whose victory over the invading Muslim armies near Poitiers in 732 AD is traditionally held to have halted the Islamization of Europe. Stepping out of the cathedral, I walked a hundred yards across the Place Victor Hugo to the main commercial street, which was thronged with local shoppers of Arab and African origin, including many women wearing the hijab. I caught myself thinking: So the Muslims have won the Battle of Poitiers after all! Won it not by force of arms, but by peaceful immigration and fertility.

Just down the road from the cathedral of the kings, in the discreet backyard offices of the Tawhid association, I met Abdelaziz Eljaouhari, the son of Berber Moroccan immigrants and an eloquent Muslim political activist. He talked with fluent passion, in perfect French, about the misery of the impoverished housing projects around Paris—which, as we spoke, were again wracked by protests—and the chronic social discrimination against immigrants and their descendants. France's so-called "Republican model," he said furiously, means in practice "I speak French, am called Jean-Daniel, and have blue eyes and blond hair." If you are called Abdelaziz, have a darker skin, and are Muslim to boot, the French Republic does not practice what it preaches. "What égalité is there for us?" he asked. "What liberté? What fraternité?" And then he delivered his personal message to Nicolas Sarkozy, the hard-line interior minister and leading right-wing candidate to succeed Jacques Chirac as French president, in words that I will never forget. "Moi," said Abdelaziz Eljaouhari, in a ringing voice, "Moi, je suis la France!"

And, he might have added, l'Europe.

Islam in Europe | NYRB

Mr. Golden's book is the season’s barnburner because it cites specific donations, test scores and even essay topics that are linked to questionably qualified applicants. Their names are named.

Mr. Golden’s dishy, mean-spirited book delivers a mixed message: that although prominent institutions select students unfairly, applicants should still be fighting their ways into these same unscrupulous colleges.

Big expectations warp young prodigies. Some children who participated in IQ testing were randomly told they were gifted. That reduced both their ability to work persistently and their capacity for enjoyment.

Books About Education, Higher and Lower

1. SHOULD ALTERNATIVES TO EVOLUTION BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS?

Think how much it would improve our politics if students leaving high school had some understanding of the reasons why a deeply devout person might nevertheless prefer a tolerant secular state to a tolerant religious state, or why an atheist might think that public celebrations of religion were appropriate in a nation the vast majority of whose members were religious. Or if those students had been asked to consider what differences were morally permissible in a state's treatment of citizens and aliens who are arrested as terrorist suspects. Or if they had actually read and debated the opinions of Justice Margaret Marshall and Chief Judge Judith Kaye in the Massachusetts and New York gay marriage cases and, if they disagreed with those opinions, had been challenged to say why. Or if they had been invited to consider what made a theory scientific and whether the intelligent design theory of creation met whatever standard for classification as science they considered appropriate.

2. THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

As the Supreme Court has come to recognize in a series of awkwardly expressed opinions, there is precious little endorsement of religion in these public displays and nonbelievers can comfortably enjoy their secular significance with no more sense of inauthenticity than they feel when they spend a quarter.

3. GAY MARRIAGE

The cultural argument against gay marriage is therefore inconsistent with the instincts and insight captured in the shared idea of human dignity. The argument supposes that the culture that shapes our values is the property only of some of us—those who happen to enjoy political power for the moment —to sculpt and protect in the shape they admire. That is a deep mistake: in a genuinely free society the world of ideas and values belongs to no one and to everyone. Who will argue—not just declare—that I am wrong?

And when you're done:

Skinner: Uh oh. Two independent thought alarms in one day. The students are overstimulated. Willie! Remove all the colored chalk from the classrooms.

Willie: I warned ya! Didn't I warn ya?! That colored chalk was forged by Lucifer himself!

Three Questions for America