Alan Jacobs

For now, most French intellectuals are offering their rote prayers to the French way of things, saying that the shock of the Paris attacks means that French values must be deepened. But after so much investment — financial, political, and spiritual — in these universal values and the European project, what will happen if Islam reveals them to be as parochial and historically contingent as the singing of La Marseillaise? What steps into the void when the gentle gods of French universalism die as an irrelevance?

— Michael Brendan Dougherty. This is a powerful and necessary question. The whole point of "Enlightenment values" — the sole reason for preferring them to others — is that they are supposed to be universal rather than merely local, and permanent rather than "historically contingent." There is no place in the narrative of the French Enlightenment for going back, for finding the supposedly universal and permanent inadequate to human needs.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“780”] Processional cross. Bronze, tin, gold, amber, oak (now reconstructed around a modern core). Tully Lough, Co. Roscommon, Ireland, AD 700–900. On loan to the British Museum from the National Museum of Ireland.[/caption]

The customer is always right.

The Message: Our story is pretty incoherent, but we know you’ll forgive us because we have, in choosing our characters, ticked every possible box of gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity (but the smartest and bravest one is the white guy, don’t forget that).

The Memory Palace: This is a podcast for people who love history, as long as by “loving history” you mean looking for people in the past who anticipate all of our most progressive values, so we can praise them while denigrating everyone who did not see the universe precisely as we do.

The Hidden Brain: Today we’re going to share with you some absolutely fascinating, amazing, brilliant research about the human brain that will be retracted in a few weeks, but you’ll never hear that from us.

Gin and Innovation: We talk to some really interesting people, but if you want to hear those interesting people you’re going to have to spend at least ten minutes listening to us ramble incoherently about the weather, how we’re feeling, and what we’re drinking (and don’t expect any editing, either).

TLDR: We don’t do stories about anyone we can’t feel really virtuous for sneering at.

Welcome to Night Vale: You people liked the jokes and riffs we did in the first two episodes so much that we just kept doing them for the next 75.

Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything: If you can’t tell how charmingly quirky I am by seeing how I spell my first name, just listen to my unbelievable caricature of a hipster voice for ten seconds, if you can bear it for that long.

[caption id=“attachment_15264” align=“aligncenter” width=“362”] Malcolm and me in our old house in Wheaton. I miss that spot — it was a pleasant place to work.[/caption]

I’m at the age at which articles like this profile of Michael Walzer are terrifying. Walzer’s scholarly and writerly career has effectively outlived his reputation. He can still get published, but no one under a certain age is paying attention. I’m about 25 years younger than Walzer, but I already can tell that there are plenty of people who have no interest in what I am saying because, and only because, of my age. I think this concerns me primarily because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

On the other hand: if you know that your audience is intrinsically and necessarily limited, why not forget about trying to increase its size? Why not just say whatever you think and take the consequences, even if the consequences are confinement to a “fit audience though few”?

It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down anyplace — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site — anyplace where radicals are being inspired. The bigger problem we have is our inability to find out where these places are, because we’ve crippled our intelligence programs, both through unauthorized disclosures by a traitor, in Edward Snowden, or by some of the things this president has put in place with the support even of some from my own party to diminish our intelligence capabilities.

So whatever facility is being used — it’s not just a mosque — any facility that’s being used to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States, should be a place that we look at.

That's Marco Rubio. I'm so sick of these damned liberals who have nothing but contempt for freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Thank God we have sound conservative Presidential candidates who respect the Constitution.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been going back and forth between this blog and my Tumblr, trying to figure out which one works best for me. I haven’t worried about doing that — haven’t chastised myself for inconsistency — because after all it’s all on the same internet and most people who read what I write get to it from Twitter anyway. (Though God bless those of you who employ the far superior technology of plain old RSS feeds and readers.)

The main reasons for using Tumblr are (a) ease of posting, (b) more readers — because of all the Tumblr users out there, (c) ease of re-posting for those who like to do that kind of thing.

The main reasons for using this blog are (a) it’s my turf, (b) some people read my stuff at workplaces where Tumblr.com is blocked, (c) it’s my turf.

Now that the Tumblr UI is getting worse and worse and worse the second set of reasons seems more powerful to me than the first set. So I’m coming back over here. Maybe for a while, maybe for good; we’ll see.

And so if the word is basically ‘ISIS’, but in Arabic, why are the people it describes in such a fury about it? Because they hear it, quite rightly, as a challenge to their legitimacy: a dismissal of their aspirations to define Islamic practice, to be 'a state for all Muslims’ and – crucially – as a refusal to acknowledge and address them as such. They want to be addressed as exactly what they claim to be, by people so in awe of them that they use the pompous, long and delusional name created by the group, not some funny-sounding made-up word. And here is the very simple key point that has been overlooked in all the anglophone press coverage I’ve seen: in Arabic, acronyms are not anything like as widely used as they are in English, and so arabophones are not as used to hearing them as anglophones are. Thus, the creation and use of a title that stands out as a nonsense neologism for an organisation like this one is inherently funny, disrespectful, and ultimately threatening of the organisation’s status. Khaled al-Haj Salih, the Syrian activist who coined the term back in 2013, says that initially even many of his fellow activists, resisting Daesh alongside him, were shocked by the idea of an Arabic acronym, and he had to justify it to them by referencing the tradition of acronyms being used as names by Palestinian organisations (such as Fatah). So saturated in acronyms are we in English that we struggle to imagine this, but it’s true.

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Images from our new post, a visual history of colour wheels, charts, and tables: from simple circles to multi-layered pyramids, from scientific systems to those based on the hues of human emotion. Explore more here: http://bit.ly/1NBtj1E