If reason played any part in the American love affair with guns, things would have been different a long time ago and we would not have so many mass shootings like the one that took the lives of seventeen high school students in Parkland, Florida on February 14. Almost everywhere else in the world, if you proposed that virtually any adult not convicted of a felony should be allowed to carry a loaded pistol—openly or concealed—into a bar, a restaurant, or classroom, people would send you off for a psychiatric examination. Yet many states allow this, and in Iowa, a loaded firearm can be carried in public by someone who’s completely blind. Suggest, in response to the latest mass shooting, that still more of us should be armed, and people in most other countries would ask you what you’re smoking. Yet this is the NRA’s answer to the massacres in Orlando, Las Vegas, Newtown, and elsewhere, and after the Parkland killing spree, President Trump suggested arming teachers.
Books
A Hanging Matter
To the Editors: Your beautiful Jasper Johns cover—the painting “Summer” from his “Seasons” series of 1985–86—is part of the retrospective currently at the Broad museum in Los Angeles that Jason Farago writes about. But there’s a problem with the way that series is displayed.
Not Over Yet
To the Editors: Normally I would hesitate to correct a journalist of Charles Glass’s stature, but as a reporter who’s covered the war in Syria for several years now I have to point out some inaccuracies in his “Syria’s New Normal.”
Unforced Errors
To the Editors: The article by Paul Reitter, “The Business of Learning,” contained an egregious error. It reads that “hundreds of admissions offers [were] rescinded by UC Irvine on shaky grounds.” As of August 2 Howard Gillman, chancellor of UC Irvine, announced that the decision to withdraw admissions was “unacceptable”…
A Very Good Meal
To the Editors: In reply to Peter Green, Hayden Pelliccia writes that the “carcasses at Troy would have been picked over by carrion birds…not by birds of prey equipped to rend the living.” This is wildly wrong.
Disarming the Weapons of Mass Distraction
Attention is a limited resource: to pay attention to one thing requires us to withdraw it from others. But in today’s pervasive digital culture, technologies are transforming our patterns of attention, pursuing “those slivers of our unharvested awareness,” as Tim Wu puts it. Digital technology has thus provided consumer capitalism with its most powerful tools yet. Given current political anxieties about social mobility and inequality, how do we foster this most crucial and basic skill: sustaining attention?
Chairman Xi, Chinese Idol
I was skeptical at first when political analysts suggested that Xi might try to rule past a second term. One reason was that the Chinese political class has fought hard to institutionalize transfers of power. I wondered if Xi would want to risk alienating so many of his peers by taking such a step. Another risk is that this puts Xi in the crosshairs if his policies fail. And while it’s easy to imagine Xi steamrolling opponents until his health fails him, there are small signs of unease among people in China.
The Consciousness Deniers
Some thinkers have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. The Denial began in the twentieth century and continues today in a few pockets of philosophy and psychology and, now, information technology. It had two main causes: the rise of the behaviorist approach in psychology, and the naturalistic approach in philosophy. These were good things in their way, but they spiraled out of control and gave birth to the Great Silliness.
The Barbarism of Alabama’s Botched Execution
Every new “humane” way of killing—the guillotine, the rope, the chair, the gurney, the gas chamber—turns out, ultimately, to be as shockingly medieval as the last. The task of finding usable veins—in this case, on a cancerous, frail, and prematurely aged body—is now revealed as merely the latest chapter in this ghoulish history. Whatever one’s position on capital punishment, Americans can surely agree that no one should be tortured to death.
Africa, Latest Theater in America’s Endless War
From a small village in rural Niger all the way to the White House, the US military has increasing influence over American foreign policy in Africa. Niger is just one of the many countries in sub-Saharan and West Africa in which the US has trained elite military units in the name of counterterrorism. But while America is making war in Africa and military engagement morphs into a proxy for foreign policy run by the Pentagon, China is doing business.
Sig Nordal 