Changes in patterns of recruitment to ISIS show that profiles of recruits reveal more about changes in conflict dynamics than about the psychological vulnerabilities of certain demographics. Even when we focus on a narrow range of times and locations it is hard to detect a pattern among recruits to ISIS or al-Qaeda. But field studies show that it is the combination of holding a sacred value and being closely connected with your group of friends that motivates people to fight and die for their values.
bookreview
Eloise: The Feral Star
Eloise, the children’s literature star—she of the Plaza, Paris, and Moscow—was born of Kay Thompson, not otherwise an author. There’s currently an Eloise revival, in the form of a new museum show emphasizing illustrator Hillary Knight’s contributions, now at the New-York Historical Society until October.
Glossing Africa
When African writers talk about glossaries, we don’t just exchange tips—How long? How comprehensive? By whom? We talk about whether to include one at all, whether to offer glosses within the text or omit all glossing entirely. To gloss, or not to gloss? That is the question.
Charlottesville: Why Jefferson Matters
It was not necessarily Thomas Jefferson himself, but the ideas associated with him that mattered that night in Charlottesville, and warranted forming a protective barrier around his statue on the University of Virginia campus. I have no doubt that the people trying to keep the tiki torchers away from the statue know about the problematic aspects of Jefferson. Because he was at or near the heart of so many aspects of the American founding for such a long time—longer than any other member of the founding generation—we have had many occasions to ponder Jefferson’s complex nature and legacy.
In the Flower Garden of the Brain
It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that brain structures began to be uncovered, by a Spanish microscopist called Santiago Ramón y Cajal. As an undergraduate in neuroscience and then medicine I was given Cajal’s drawings to study—they have a timeless elegance and enduring value for students. A new book, The Beautiful Brain, collects some of his finest.
Loving the Vicious Race
Even those with no interest in bike racing might try watching the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and the Vuelta a España, which starts on August 19, on television: they are the best possible travelogues, with aerial shots of three countries ravishingly beautiful in different ways, landscape of mountains and valleys, meadows and vineyards, castles, cathedrals and churches, great cities and pretty little towns. It might make even the most zealous Brexiter or American Firster warm a little to the glories of Europe.
The Lonely Struggle of Lee Ching-yu
Lee Ming-che in a sense is like other political prisoners in China, a man stripped of rights, facing in solitary fashion the organized power of the Chinese state, but he is also different because he is from Taiwan. He is in fact the only Taiwanese ever to be charged with subversion of state power, and this imparts a special meaning to his case.
The Books We Don’t Understand
What is going on when a book simply makes no sense to you? Perhaps a classic that everyone praises. Or something new you’re being asked to review. I don’t mean that you find the style tiresome, or the going slow; simply that the characters, their reflections, their priorities, the way they interact, do not really add up.
Ending at the Beginning
Reiner Stach has a droll way with epigraphs, and in Kafka: The Early Years he heads his chapters with a selection of gnomic snippets from numerous ingeniously obscure sources. Chapter 1, for instance, has a tag from a song by Devo, an American rock band of the 1980s: “Think you heard this all before,/Now you’re […]
The City Strikes a Pose
Jamel Shabazz is a kind of anti-Walker Evans. Born in Brooklyn in 1960, he has documented New York street life, largely in the city’s black neighborhoods, with a cheerful guilelessness. A new collection of his work from his beginnings in 1980 to the present, displays Shabazz’s wish to honor and flatter, to fashion touching tributes to a certain kind of black, urban life.
Sig Nordal 