The more aggressive Trump’s posture in the Middle East becomes, the stronger the hard-liners’ argument against Iranian President Rouhani’s administration will be. This is not just about what the Iranian conservatives will win if Trump kills the nuclear deal, but what America will lose. The blow to Iran’s moderate forces will be far more consequential than Bush’s “axis of evil” declaration and the rejection of Iran’s 2003 bargain proposal. It will take years, perhaps decades, before anyone in the Iranian political elite will dare to suggest any accommodation with Washington.
Books
Consciousness: An Object Lesson
Manzotti: Perhaps it’s time to ditch the word “consciousness” and simply talk about experience….Your body is such a thing and when your body is there, an apple is there, too. Not an apple reproduced like a photo in your head. An apple there on the table, in relation with your body.
Parks: So, anything the body experiences as an effect—which is to say, anything it experiences—is an object?
Dialogue With God
What is the correct reaction when we open the Confessions? It should, perhaps, be one of acute embarrassment. For we have stumbled upon a human being at a primal moment—standing in prayer before God. Having intruded on Augustine at his prayers, we are expected to find ourselves pulled into them, as we listen to a flow of words spoken, as if on the edge of an abyss, to a God on the far side—to a being, to all appearances, vertiginously separate from ourselves. The measure of the success of Sarah Ruden’s translation is that she has managed to give as rich and as diverse a profile to the God on the far side as she does to the irrepressible and magnetically articulate Latin author who cries across the abyss to Him.
How Uber Stalled in London
Until London’s regulatory pushback, Uber had thrived in Britain. The interests of the public, as consumers, were understood to be intrinsically bound together with those of this Silicon Valley disrupter in a struggle against restrictive business practices. Yet the past now appears to be exacting its revenge. Or, to be more precise, the future may not look as laissez faire as Uber’s champions would have us believe.
Ireland’s Big Choice
It would seem that the ruling conservative party, Fine Gael, has already decided that there will be no great liberalizing of abortion laws in Ireland, no matter the unexpectedly liberal results of a recent Citizens’ Assembly vote. If this is indeed how it plays out, aside from the implications for women’s health, it will mean the party will have disregarded a meticulous exercise in deliberative democracy that it put in place (at considerable cost to the taxpayer), simply because it wasn’t satisfied with the results or because those results were not politically expedient.
Disarming the NRA
The Second Amendment does not stand in the way of better gun laws; the NRA does. The NRA can still count on an influential bloc of intense single-issue, anti-gun-control voters to sway members of Congress, and on the Trump White House to appoint justices committed to the expansion of gun rights. Yet just as electoral politics, rather than the words of the Second Amendment, is the source of the NRA’s power, the democratic process is how the NRA can be defeated. Change is possible. But it won’t come from gutting the Second Amendment. It will come from the same type of political mobilization that gave us the modern NRA.
The Adults in the Room
What does it mean to be an “adult” in Washington in general, or, in particular, under Donald Trump? What policies do the “adults” favor? Where do they come from, and what do they believe? Most importantly, what is the significance of the fact that most of Trump’s so-called grownups come from the military? To answer such questions, it helps to look at the history, both of the way the idea of “adults” has been used in Washington in the past and of the way military officers in the US have served in top civilian jobs.
Freud’s Clay Feet
Frederick Crews has a loyalty of preoccupation rare in a literary academic. His attacks on Sigmund Freud began way back in the mid-1970s with his publicly proclaimed conversion away from the Freudian literary criticism he practiced at the time. His new biography, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, damning and mesmerizing by turns, is about the young Freud. It marks the zenith of what has become Crews’s crusade “to put an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator” by stripping Freud of both his empiricist credentials and the image of a “lone explorer possessing courageous perseverance, deductive brilliance, tragic insight, and healing power.” The idealization of Freud the man that Crews is so keen to prove a blinding illusion is hardly prevalent.
Mapping Ancient Rome
To the Editors: Andrea Carandini stands out from other scholars who have studied ancient Rome over the last forty years in his enthusiasm for creating visual reconstructions of the early city and in his fascination with Romulus as a figure in history. Mary Beard had her hands full in reviewing The Atlas of Ancient Rome, and, on the whole, she ably rose to the challenge. I would like to offer two brief comments that may help to round out the story.
How The Terror Felt
To the Editors: Colin Jones, in his review of Timothy Tackett’s The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution, ignores the role of the popular movement on the left that opposed the dictatorship of Maximilien Robespierre and the Terror. Neither Tackett nor Jones is unusual in this.
Sig Nordal 