Contemporary public art is still in the process of defining its artistic and legal identity. Indeed to juxtapose the terms public and art is a paradox. Art is often said to be the individual inquiry of the sculptor or painter, the epitome of self-expression and vision that may challenge conventional wisdom and values. The term public encompasses a reference to the community, the social order, self-negation: hence the paradox of linking the private and the public in a single concept. A (...) goal of any general or jurisprudential theory concerning government sponsorship or ownership of art in the public context must reconcile, through state institutions and law, this tension between art’s subjectivity with hits potential for controversy and government’s need to promote the public good.This essay critically examines and discusses existing contemporary legal doctrine and its failure to accommodate or even adequately define the issues and competing values at stake in the public art context. Such failure may be attributed in part to the fact that neither legal theory nor art policy have been inspired by the vision of or located in the broader context of a sociopolitical public realm. Barbara Hoffman practices arts and entertainment law in New York and is counsel to the College Art Association. She is a former professor of constitutional law at the University of Puget Sound, and she has served as chair of the Public Art Committee of the Art Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and president of the Washington Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 230—233. A word about the quotation marks. People ask about them, in the beginning; in the process of giving themselves up to reading the poem, they become comfortable with them, without necessarily thinking precisely about why they’re there. But they’re there, mostly to measure the poem. The phrases they enclose are poetic feet. If I had simply left white spaces between the phrases, the phrases would be read too fast for my musical intention. The quotation marks make (...) the reader slow down and silently articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and with the stresses, I intend. They also distance the narrative form myself. I am not Alette. Finally they may remind the reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice: this is not a thought, or a record of thought process, this is a story, told.(1) We read (reread) the poems that keep the discourse with ourselves going. —Wallace Stevens We have to break open words or sentences, too, and find what’s uttered in them. —Gilles Deleuze “The Descent of Alette” “is an allegorical poem” “in four books” “first published” “in 1992” “by Alice Notley.” “In the Descent of Alette,” “the double quotation mark” “is wrapped around” “words, phrases, sometimes whole sentences, and utilized as bones for structure and tonality.” “The winged” “dbl quotation” “like angels or devils” “descending from elsewhere” “function as” “poetic feet.” “Distance” “in the text through the use of dbl quotes,” “according to Notley,” “was a way to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” I know someone who tattooed double quotes on her shoulder blades. In other words, the body is quotable. To be able to say that one is quotable. A body filled with other’s sayings. I never asked her what for, what is the double quote tattoo for and why on the shoulder blades? I prefer my own interpretation that keeps shifting every time I see her. First words of every poem in every book: Book One One ... On ... A ... There ... I ... We ... An ... A ... A ... I ... At ... A ... When ... When ... There ... I ... In ... At ... I ... Once ... A ... A ... In ... A ... A ... Two ... I ... I ... Eyeball ... In ... I... A ... I ... I ... On ... I ... There ... What ... As ... As Book Two I ... When ... I ... I ... As ... I ... I ... There ... I ... There ... I ... A ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I Book Three The ... Presently ... I ... I’m ... I ... We ... What ... My ... I ... Who ... But ... Lay ... My ... I ... The ... Your ... The ... I ... It’s ... As ... The ... Talon’s ... When ... We ... I ... Slowly ... I ... I ... The ... How ... The Book Four I ... I ... You ... The ... Now ... She ... The ... There ... As ... Then ... The ... All ... Let’s I ... You ... The ... Thus ... The ... I ... The ... I ... There ... Have ... The ... As ... The Defamiliar Object “Poetry is a defamiliarized language, whose formations, so far from being simply formations of meaning, are aesthetic structures...”(2) “The same can be” “irresponsibly associated” “with the use of punctuation.” “The dbl quotation as a measure” “of poetic feet” “is treated as such” “because the author” “injects artfulness into it.” “The dbl quote is an object—” “a joystick” “to control breadth” “(of breath.)” “To de-familiarize” “said sign” “is also to” “impart the sensation of [it] as [it is] perceived and not as they are known.”(3) “The dbl quote” “nests previous words, phrasings and sayings.” “How many have come and gone” “through the doorway of this punctuation sign.” “There are also air quotes and virtual quotes.” “There is emphasis and there’s irony.” “It would be aggravating” “or interesting” “to watch a reading of” “The Descent of Alette” “with someone” “raising and curling” “fingers” “bent out of shape” “in what could be used as” “peace signs.” “I am trying to avoid” “scare quotes.” “I looked up” “what they are” “and supposedly they arose” “in the early 20th century.” “The scare quote” “is a mark around a word or phrase to indicate that it doesn’t signify conventional or literal meaning.” “This isn’t how Notley” “intended to use them” “in The Descent of Alette.” “The characters, places, and things” “signify nothing” “beyond” “their literal meaning” “ within the allegory .” “I’d like to stress” “within the allegory;” “that’s why its” “italicized.” “It is told through” “the main character/voice of” “Alette.” “The author reminds us she is not Alette.” “The author marvelously found a way” “to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” “This was attempted” “by tonal and intimate” “affect of the dbl quote” “used as poetic feet.” “Its as though” “punctuation in this regard” “becomes a magical toy.” “Arguably, punctuation” “(as perceived)” “undergoes a kind of” “ defamiliar ” “make-over.” “The text” gently forces the reader” “to slow down,” “read slowly.” “At some point” “one begins to sense” “lines of text” “moving on its own.” “Broken words, phrases, and sentences” “shuttling left to right” “like a subway” “that stops” “from station to station;” “open quote to end quote.” Double Quote Occupied “There are two worlds; one above ground” “and one underground.” “The world above ground is where,” “the tyrant” “with a capital t” “lives.” “(The “T” gets tangled in the claws of the dbl quote.)” “Alette becomes an owl and kills him.” “In the last book the tyrant dies.” “ “...the tyrant” “a man in charge of” “the fact” “that we were” “below the ground” “endlessly riding” “our trains, never surfacing” “A man who” “would make you pay” “so much” “to leave the subway” “that you don’t” “ever ask” “how much it is” “It is, in effect,” “all of you & more” “Most of which you already” “pay to live below” “But he would literally” “take your soul” “Which is what you are” “below the ground” “Your soul” “your soul rides” “this subway” “I saw” “on the subway a” “world of souls” ”(4) “New York;” “the city of cities” “and its subways—” “worlds underground,” “above ground,” “& above the above ground.” “Skyscrapers,” “Wall Street,” “old money,” “new money,” “and falling further down a cleavage;” “the middle class” “slipping away.” “Contemporary artist ” “Ligorano Reece” “recently made” “a sculpture of ice ” “a block of ice” “carved to read” “middle class” “(in all upper case letters)” “and let it melt” “naturally” “for however long—” “hours,” “days.” “It didn’t take very long to melt.” A global uprise of mass demonstrations; a cacophony of bodies on the street, in parks and universities, on City Hall lawns, coastal ports, neighborhoods, etc., and for what? The reasons are endless and finite. Not a single body is unaffected by the movement even when not “occupying.” “Occupiers” “stormed into a Sotheby’s auction” “protesting” “via human microphone” “that the CEO takes home” “about” “six thousand dollars” “a day.” “(The a/Art market” “is not a reflection” “of a desire” “for a/Art” “but a reflection” “of a desire” “for money” “confused with a/Art.)” What could it mean to occupy that which has been written or said? Someone with double quotes tattooed on both shoulders attempts to reclaim the sign; re-invent it privately-publicly since the body is always split between both spheres. A genre of hide-and-seek; the speaking and silent body which can never mean what it says even while it so desires to mean something. To nest (and hold hostage) someone in double quotes is an act of violence; a gesture of displacement where one is arrested, dislocated, and scrutinized under a distant gaze. “The air quote” “also known as” “finger quote or ersatz quote” “supposedly” “harks back to” “1927.” “The brevity of this gesture” “ as something invisible” “like virtual money or credit” “doesn’t really exist” “though it take up space;” “its the ghostliest of all punctuation signs” “and one that requires the presence and appearance of a body.” “ “she made a form” “in her mind” “an imaginary” “form” “to settle” “in her arms where” “the baby” “had been” “We saw her fiery arms” “cradle air” “She cradled air...” ”(5) “The air” “gets occupied” “by one or two hands” “with thumb, forefinger, and middle finger” “which alternately could be used” “to shoot rubber bullets,” “pepper spray,” “tear gas.” “How three fingers” “could be responsible for so much:” “satire, sarcasm, irony” “and ultimately” “bruises, blood, death.” (“The violence of the dbl quote is to eagerly to place oneself inside a tornado.)” “The violence of this” “embodied punctuation mark” “stems from a discordance with others.” “Is the name, word, or phrase” “placed in dbl quotes” “heroic” “ or brave?” “An act of displacement;” “must there always be” “bright or negative lights—” “a leaderless act” “to inhabit, to occupy” “space removed” “from normative use.” “Of course” “I’m also wondering” “what it means to re-occupy” “public/private space—the street, neighborhood or page” “policed” “by laws, limits, and” “to some extent” “punctuation.” Echo, Mirror “There are first, second, and third voices interwoven.” “ “Braid of voices,”(6) ” “Some lines read as internal thoughts,” “dialogues,” “and scene descriptions,” “all of which make up the allegory.” “It seems appropriate” “for the word” “allegory” “to nest in dbl quotes” “for perhaps it might be” “a gesture to echo on and on” “eternally referencing” “whatever came before.” I notice the first tooth of the double quote, when paying too close attention, gets caught in the hook of the “f”. I space bar to untangle them; the f does not resist the closed bite of “deaf” and I resist to know what it could mean, because it could doubly mean nothing. “ “He looked” “so familiar” “to me...”(7) ” “The second-person” “echoes in one of two directions:” “further into” “or farther from” “me.” “Its as though” “the second-person amplifies” “or else the opposite” “in which he,” “who looks so familiar,” “retreats further” “like stars in a telescope.” “The dbl quote” “has this kind of affect” “concerning distance and dimension” “as also illusory” “as something twice removed” “and unreal” “in a similar way” “movie stars are unreal and far away.” “ “I entered” “a car” “in which I seemed” “to see double” “Each person I” “looked at seemed” “spread out” “as if doubled” “Gradually” “I perceived that” “each person” “was surrounded by a ghostly” “second image” “was encased in it” “& each” / “of those images,” “those encasings,” “was exactly the same” “each was in fact” “the tyrant...” ”(8) A daydream of a mirror-less world while staring through window blinds; a palm tree behind. It was dark with nothing there. A world with no mirrors “in my mind,” though my mind could only reflect what it knew: a palm tree. Naturally then, palm trees multiplied; a world of palm trees reflected the daydream with no mirror in sight. “The mirror” “(prior to obsidian manufacturing ca. 6000 B.C)” “was wherever water” “could be found.” “Its interesting” “mirrors have been around” “before humans—its funny” “animals and humans” “get born into” “a world of mirrors,” “therefore, simulation” “is always already” “a given—” “a sparkly consequence to be born with a dbl.” NOTES 1. Notley, Alice. “Author’s Note” in The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996) 2. Bruns, Gerald L. “ From Intransitive Speech to the Universe of Discourse” in Modern Poetry And The Idea of Language (New Haven & London, 1974), p.75 3. Ibid. p.77 4. Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996). p.3 5. Ibid. p.10 6. Ibid i. p.9 7. Ibid ii. p.16 8. Ibid iii. p.12. (shrink)

From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term "complexity" can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has (...) found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal's circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient--and lives 25% longer. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we need. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism's body. (shrink)

The true story of ten tough and tattooed bikers who rescue animals in danger Using their combined 1700 pounds of muscle, Joe, Johnny O, Batso, Big Ant, G, Angel, Eric, Des, Bruce and Robert stop at nothing within the bounds of the law to save animals, be they furred, feathered, or scaled, from life-or-death situations throughout the New York City metropolitan area. Working from tips from concerned neighbors and anonymous sources, they have rescued countless animals, including a dognapped (...) bulldog and 180 cats from the home of a hoarder. In between rescues, they've protested the barbaric practices of a horse slaughterhouse, visited schools to educate children about animal kindness and that "abusers are losers," and participated in Puppy Mill Awareness Day in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Former Newsday writer Denise Flaim chronicles their adventurous tales, detailing just what these brawny bikers, who will stop at nothing within the bounds of the law, can teach us all about respecting the creatures in our midst. (shrink)

The main purpose of the study is to analyze the feasibility and necessity of an EU Constitution. Briefly, the history of the draft constitution is as follows: The draft treaty aims to codify the two main treaties of the European Union - the Treaty of Rome of 1957 and the Treaty of Maastricht of 1992, as amended by the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) and the Treaty of Nice (2001). The debate on the future of Europe is believed to have begun (...) with a speech by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in Berlin in 2000. The process began after the Laeken Declaration, when the European Convention was set up, chaired by former French President Valerie Giscard d'Estaing, with the aim of drafting a constitution. The draft contract was published in July 2003. After lengthy discussions and debates over the proposal for qualified majority voting, the final text was approved in June 2004 and signed by representatives of the Member States on 29 October 2004. The failure of the treaty in France and the Netherlands is a serious blow to the European Union because these two countries are considered to be loyal supporters of the European project. The text of the treaty was subsequently rewritten by the Amato Group, officially the Active Committee on European Democracy (ACED), a group of high-ranking European politicians. During the German presidency of the Union, a new treaty was proposed - the Treaty of Lisbon - to replace the original draft of the Constitution. On 12 June 2008, the Lisbon Treaty was also rejected in a referendum in Ireland. But if we want to look beyond history, we can ask - Why does the EU need a Constitution and how can the Constitution be the roadmap to an advanced future for the EU? The answers to this question can be found by analyzing several directions (these are the main points of the article): historical reflexivity; socio-cultural analysis of the philosophical concepts of well-known political and social philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, John Locke; the modern constellation through the prism of Jürgen Habermas and the decision to make a text as a Constitution which its aim is to reach the starting point of an entire community like the EU. Keywords: constitution, EU, philosophy, law, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Jurgen Habermas. (shrink)

The natural instinct for members of the Committee on Publication Ethics, which now number almost 12,200, as well as academia, is to assume that this organization works under strict and clearly defined ethical parameters, with a solid vision, and an independent mandate that is not influenced by power, think tanks, or partisan interests. Naturally, whistle-blowing and science shaming are not practices that one would usually associate with an ethics organization like COPE, because they involve ethically and morally questionable practices. (...) Despite this, ethical borders have become blurred between the objectives of Retraction Watch and PubPeer, two self-moderated science watchdogs that rely heavily on these questionable practices, in their efforts to grow and survive, and the values espoused by COPE. A Retraction Watch post, in which the former COPE Chair, Virginia Barbour, made a claim of apparent harassment, is the most striking example of the dangers when collaboration may take place between science-shaming websites, and an ethics organization, COPE. These bonds appear to have been in development for a number of years already, with the inclusion of Elizabeth Wager, the former COPE Chair, as a director of The Center for Science Integrity Inc., Retraction Watch’s parent organization. Retraction Watch was financed by, among other groups, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, whose leader, John Arnold, an ex-Enron trader, declared a “war on bad science”, which may naturally include the destruction of aspects of science as well. Retraction Watch embraces several infamous pseudonymous personas under the broad umbrella of freedom of speech, liaising thereby with PubPeer. There is no doubt that errors in the literature need correcting, but this apparent connection with COPE raises questions about the basic ethical foundation of this relationship. Are scientists to embrace this bond between COPE and science watchdogs and pseudonymous whistle-blowers as the new normal in the correction of the scientific literature? This opinion piece puts forward arguments why the author believes that the ethical compass of COPE has become skewed. (shrink)

The European Summer Schools in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) have been organised every year since 1989 under the auspices of the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different cities around Europe. The 24th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2012) took place at the University of Opole, Poland, during August 6-17, 2012. The organisation committee was chaired by Janusz Czelakowski and Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska (Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Opole) and the (...) programme committee was chaired by Andreas Herzig (University of Toulouse and CNRS). During two weeks, over 340 participants from 36 countries were offered a rich academic program of their choice from 9 foundational, 16 introductory and 17 advanced courses and 6 workshops. Just as in the previous years, the 17th conference on Formal Grammar collocated with ESSLLI. Besides the regular courses, a traditional highlight of the summer school were the 4 evening lectures by distinguished academics: - Johan van Benthem (Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC), Amsterdam and Department of Philosophy, Stanford University), "Computation as Agency''; - Melvin Fitting (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, City University of New York), "Reasoning About Games''; - Jonathan Ginzburg (UFR Études anglophones, Université Paris-Diderot (Paris 7)), "False starts, jokes, and music:semantics in the 21st century''; - Adam Przepiórkowski (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw), "Secret life of corpora''. Another traditional event was the student session, organised by a student programme committee chaired by Rasmus K. Rendsvig (University of Copenhagen): master and doctoral students presented 16 papers and 5 posters, and Michał Zawidzki obtained the best paper award and Raul Fervari obtained the best poster award. Moreover, the Beth Dissertation Prizes were announced at the FoLLI General Meeting and went to Andreas Kapsner (University of Barcelona) and Daniel R. Licata (Carnegie Mellon University). Apart from the busy academic programme, participants of the summer school were offered an exciting social program as well. In addition to the traditional ESSLLI Party and the famous Students vs. Lecturers Soccer Match (also called `Johan van Benthem Cup'), kayaking, and excursions to Kraków and Wrocław were offered. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Young Finley:Observations on Naiden, Perry, and TompkinsBrent D. ShawIn this cursory response, I reflect on the hard work done by the three colleagues on whose articles I am commenting. Their investigations have contributed to a better understanding of the complex academic and professional background of a man who was surely one of the more influential historians of Greek and Roman antiquity writing in the latter half of the (...) twentieth century. So it is to these colleagues that the reader should pay most attention. My comments are in part directed to some specifics in their papers, and in part they are thoughts provoked by first listening to two of the papers at the 2012 Association of Ancient Historians meeting, and then reading all three (now including Jonathan Perry’s) in written form the following year.My first observation made in reflecting on the detailed recountings of one individual’s past—ordered details that produce an apparently sensible and logical narrative—is to see less conscious and perhaps seemingly trivial factors in the making of the professional historian. These are easily ignored, but their long-term and situational impact was sometimes great. The first of them is boredom.1 After all, in accordance with his father’s wishes, in 1929 Finley began work in the legal department of General Motors after securing a Master’s degree in American constitutional law. Like his older brother Murray, he could have continued to serve usefully and profitably in this capacity, and might have entered the governing echelons of one of the great capitalist corporations of his time: what a concept! Why did he not stay with GM? By his own account in the interview with Keith Hopkins, glacial boredom drove him back to his avocation of history. Like the rest of us who have this fascination, he was intrigued by the past, and this compelling interest overrode other possible ways forward.2 Sometimes details like these just jump out of the [End Page 267] piles of facts, and sometimes they are important in defining the person. I remember standing in front of the large portrait of Finley at Darwin College, Cambridge, and saying to a friend of mine, standing beside me, "There’s something missing here." "The burning cigarette," he replied. He was right. And this, too, locates our man in a certain mode of past behavior.3A vivid scenario from the 1940s evoked in Fred Naiden’s paper (p. 250) features the divisions between the downtown and uptown communities in New York city that Finley somehow had to negotiate as part of his management of Russian War Relief. In one of the missives quoted about navigating his way between the shoals of these conflicts, I spotted the use of the adverb "flatly," and I immediately recognized our man: "I have flatly told the Landsmanschaft groups that..." he states in a 1943 memorandum warning that these groups should not deal with the Jewish Defense Committee (JDC), but rather with the Russian War Relief organization, in supporting Jewish communities that had been under Nazi occupation in eastern lands. As tiny a thing as it is, it is no surprise that this same absolute refusal is expressed with the same adverb in a much later 1975 letter to Pierre Vidal-Naquet, quoted by Naiden (above, p. 257): "It gives me no pleasure, as you can imagine, to turn you down flatly...," once again precisely in internal disagreement over strategy and Jewish identity, and in affirmation of Finley’s standoffish attitude to the new state of Israel. The two instances were linked. As the JDC people oriented themselves more and more towards Washington, lobbying the center, and away from New York, they became more pro-Israel. Meanwhile, the downtown left drifted away from such involvements. There are always these instances of movement. Like boredom, they signal changes and continuities.One is struck by the world of continuities, even as the Thirties were hurled violently into the Forties by the colossal forces of a global conflict. As seems increasingly clear from these three insightful and detailed pieces of research, however, the big discontinuity occurs immediately after the war, between 1946 and the end... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Patient Self-Determination ActElizabeth Leibold McCloskey (bio)What are the ethics of extending the length of life? We know that we cannot artificially end life (Thou Shalt not Kill), but how about artificially extending life? Is that always good, sometimes good?... In ethics, is keeping people alive the highest good? Should our priority be to keep people breathing?... What does basic religious ethics say about this?(John C. Danforth, letter to (...) the author, 19 August 1989)The Patient Self-Determination Act, signed into law as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA '90) last November, marks the first time that Congress has passed legislation concerning the ethics of life-sustaining medical treatment. The bill was spearheaded by Senator John C. Danforth (RMO), who has a special interest in this area. An Episcopal priest, Danforth was formerly an assistant chaplain at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and now sits as a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. Although Senator Danforth's legislative initiative was not a result of the Cruzan case, it was in his state of Missouri that the U.S. Supreme Court case involving removal of Nancy Cruzan's feeding tube arose (Cruzan v. Director of Missouri Department of Health, U.S. Supreme Court, 58 LW 4916, 26 June 1990). From his unique vantage point, he felt it was time to craft a legislative response to some of the difficult issues surrounding prolongation of life.The short answer to Senator Danforth's questions about when to artificially extend life is simple enough: people must be free to determine that for themselves. Common law and common sense dictate such a conclusion; living will and health care proxy statutes, enacted in almost every state, codify that right. The Catholic moral tradition teaches that one is not morally obligated to use extraordinary means to prolong life, a tradition shared both by the mainline Protestant and the reform and conservative Jewish community. Yet most people are unaware of their fundamental legal right to make such decisions, and as court cases from Quinlan (In re Quinlin, 137 N.J. Super. 227, 1975) to Cruzan demonstrate, few know [End Page 163] how to make arrangements for this right to be exercised if they become incapacitated.Meanwhile, health care practices are often driven by a denial of death. When Senator Danforth and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) introduced the bill on October 17, 1989, Senator Danforth said:More and more it is arguable that we play God by subjecting people to unwanted and sometimes unnecessary treatment, treatment that unnaturally prolongs the dying process. Our health care system has become obsessed with extending life, at times neglecting the caring component of medicine and trampling on the rights of patients.(Congressional Record 1989, 135:5.13566)The American Hospital Association estimates that 70 percent of deaths now occur after a determination to withhold or withdraw medical treatment. Many of those decisions are made without the benefit of an incapacitated patient's views, yet a Harvard study revealed that 95 percent of the population would like to prepare in advance for such decisions. Only 4 percent of hospitals have a systematic method of asking patients if they have an advance directive. Family members confront painful choices in the face of uncertainty about their loved one's wishes and it can be even more painful when a family knows the patient's desires but providers and the courts act otherwise because clear evidence is lacking.The Patient Self-Determination Act is rooted in the belief that people should be given information that enables them to specify the extent of medical treatment they wish to receive should they become incapacitated. The public should be educated about applicable state laws that protect the individual's right to make such choices through the use of an advance directive.The Act moves toward that goal by promoting knowledge of state laws. It requires every hospital, nursing home, home health agency, hospice, and health maintenance organization that participates in Medicaid or Medicare to routinely give all adult patients information about advance directives. Patients will also be given information on the... (shrink)

The Vestal Virgins are one of the most famous elements of Roman religion, yet despite their perennial appeal and the importance of some smaller scale studies of the priesthood, the priestesses have not received a monograph-length study since F. Giuzzi, Aspetti giuridici del sacerdozio romano. II sacerdozio di Vesta (Naples, 1968). Now we have books by R.L. Wildfang and M.C. Martini that could not be more different. The former offers a thorough survey of what the sources can tell us (...) about the priesthood in the period from the end of the Second Carthaginian War to the first century C.E. The latter is an analysis of early Roman historiography and the role the Vestals, in particular their periodic unchastity, played in the creation of the traditional account of the development of Rome. W's book puts forward two main arguments: (1) the Vestals were charged with the ritual purification of the city and with the storage and preparation of ritual materials, and (2) many aspects of the priesthood that have long puzzled scholars are tied to the Vestals' status as Roman citizens, but citizens who existed outside the traditional family structure. The book will be accessible to those new to the topic, but the notes will repay specialists. Ancient sources are quoted in translation, with original texts provided in an appendix. A second appendix provides a list of known Vestals. This slender volume could have been even thinner if the frequent repetitions were cut down. W's work might have been better as a hefty article, so little is there to know about the Vestals. The Classical Review vol. 58 no. 1 C The Classical Association 2008; all rights reserved This content downloaded from 204.235.148.90 on Sat, 26 Jul 2014 11:47:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 213 In the Introduction, W makes a welcome distinction among types of rituals often lumped together in discussions of 'fertility' rituals, with which the Vestals are often associated (p. 4). W reserves 'fertility' to describe only those rites that deal with the reproduction of people, livestock and the growth of crops. Harvest rituals are linked to the harvesting of crops, while another set of rites, 'storage rites', are tied to the preservation of the harvest. The final group, purification rituals, aim at the cleansing of an individual, place or object of 'all forms of pollution that would render it or them unfit to come into contact with the religious sphere'. The book is arranged thematically. The first two chapters lay out all we can know about the priestesses' ritual obligations performed in the seclusion of the temple and out amongst the people. While a reader may not find W's interpretation of each of the Vestals' actions equally persuasive, the overall argument that the priestesses' activities were, by and large, purificatory is convincing. Two of the more interesting aspects of W.'s discussion are her considerations of Vesta's fire and of the water required for some of her rituals (pp. 8-11). Fire was seen by the Romans as both a fertile and a sterile force, and scholars have emphasised one or the other, or the contrast between them, in their interpretation of the Vestals. W points out that fertile fire is always described in masculine terms and is associated with Vulcan. Vesta's fire, however, is always associated with sterility and purity, and so should be understood as having a purificatory significance. W points out that Vesta's fire was used only in the manufacture of ritually necessary items: roasting spelt for mola salsa, baking brine for muries and burning ashes from the fetal cow from the Fordicidia and the tail of the October horse, both of which were used at the Parilia. For other rituals, the Vestals were required to use water, the purificatory substance par excellence, drawn only from the spring of Juturna and carried only in vessels that could not be set down. These restrictions ensured that the water was always fresh, running water that never touched profane earth. Chapters 3-5 trace out the unique position the Vestals occupied in Roman society, arguing that they existed outside the standard Roman familial and other social structures, yet remained fully part of the Roman state. W suggests that the initiation rite of captio removed the new priestess not only from her family but, more importantly, from her family cult, thus avoiding any potential contamination of familial and public cult. Virginity was required for multiple reasons, the most significant being that such a status allowed the priestess to remain a full member of the Roman state, but prevented her from being a member of a traditional family structure. Throughout the book, W makes much of the idea of Vestals as represen tatives of Roman citizen women without ever really dealing with the question to what extent any Roman woman, priestess or not, was a ciuis. Though W is probably correct, it is not entirely certain to what extent women were citizens in the Republic, and at least a reference to some key ancient sources and to recent scholarship on this question should be made (e.g. L. Peppe, Posizione giuridica e ruolo sociale della donna romana in eta repubblicana [Milan, 1984]). The sixth chapter, 'The Vestals in the Romans' History', looks at the appearance of Vestals in the early history of Rome, refining the common assumption that accusations of, and convictions for, incestum arose only in periods of great stress and danger. W adds that a priestess's involvement, or her family's involvement, in one of the groups taking part in the conflict or struggle of the moment also played a role. This chapter traces changes over the course of 300 years in the attitudes of the priestesses and the Romans more generally toward the priesthood, its role in society This content downloaded from 204.235.148.90 on Sat, 26 Jul 2014 11:47:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 214 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW and its requirement of 30 years of chastity. The argument hangs on even less evidence than other sections of the work. In contrast to their central place in W's book, the Vestals play only a small (though crucial, in her interpretation) role in M.'s work. The basic argument of the book is that episodes of Vestal incestum are linked in the historiographic tradition to key moments in the development of the Roman state: the separation of augurium from regnum, the development of a mixed patrician-plebeian aristocracy, the creation of a monetary system and the expansion of the colonial system outside Italy. The history of Rome can be seen as alternating phases of stasis and transformation; instances of Vestal incestum mark the transitions (p. 95). The work falls into two parts that are not well integrated. The first is a useful discussion of the historiography of the Roman Republic, taking in turn each element of the story of the founding of Rome from the arrival of Aeneas to the death of Remus. M. traces how early Roman writers, especially Fabius Pictor, reshaped the tradition already present in some Greek authors, distancing Rome from the Greek world and adding an Italic element to the tale. This detailed analysis is well worth consulting and will be of interest to those working on many aspects of cultural life in the Republic. The second, larger, section of the book comprises a series of studies of the Vestals known to have been convicted of incestum during the Republic. After dealing with issues of dating and sources, M. links each case of incestum to a major event in Roman history. Not all the events are equally important for the creation of the Rome of the middle and late Republic. One wonders why M. chose to tie the conviction of Minucia, somewhere between 339 and 332, to the admission of plebeians to the praetorship in 337 rather than to the conclusion of the Latin War in 338. Some explanation is warranted. The connection M. draws is often very vague, as in the case of Sextilia (pp. 144-54), convicted and interred alive in either 275 or 274. M. sees this as marking the end of any meaningful distinction between patricians and plebeians, following as it does the first time a plebeian censor completed a lustrum. The gap of five or six years between Sextilia's conviction and Cn. Domitius Calvinus Maximus' censorship in 280 passes unremarked. Similarly, in discussing the three Vestals accused of incestum in 114-113 (pp. 188-210), M. steps away from the commonly accepted interpretation of the event as part of the continuing struggle between Gracchan and senatorial forces, arguing instead that it is tied to the establishment in 118 of the colony of Narbo Martius, Rome's first colony in Gaul. Here, as elsewhere, there is no evidence that any ancient author linked the founding of the colony and Vestal unchastity; the temporal gap makes an association even more unlikely. Ultimately, it is not possible to accept M.'s argument that Vestal incestum punctuated key stages in the development of the 'cosmo Romano' in the way she imagines. Even so, M.'s effort to reintegrate the Vestals into the larger narrative of Rome's history is thought-provoking, and it is to be hoped that it will spark further work in the same vein. The field is perhaps in a better position to undertake work on this scale now that we have W's careful and comprehensive collection and interpre tation of what there is to know about the Vestals. Yale University CELIA E. SCHULTZ celia.schultz(yale.edu This content downloaded from 204.235.148.90 on Sat, 26 Jul 2014 11:47:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions. (shrink)

This survey describes in detail ethics committees (ECs) at acute care hospitals in Upstate New York. It finds that in just two years (1984 and 1985), following the Baby Doe controversy and the Report of the President’s Commission, 40% of urban ECs and 37% of university ECs were formed. One half of rural ECs formed in 1992–1995, following the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) requirement of access to ethics consultation. Generally, ECs are committees of the powerful (...) within the hospital; the administration or the medical staff is the organizational parent of 73% of ECs. These groups appoint 80% of EC chairs and 79% of members; they constitute 45% of the membership. Most EC members (81%) lack even rudimentary formal training in bioethics, yet only 18% of ECs consider member education a major role. Many ECs are rather inactive: 53% meet less than every other month and 61% have fewer than six case consultations in the prior year. On the basis of this survey’s findings, suggestions are offered to improve the credibility of these ubiquitous committees as stewards of bioethics, rather than of the powerful within the hospital. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:700 BOOK REVIEWS certain violations of justice can be appreciated without " any back· ground of social conventions" (p. 95). The cases he cites-racial and gender bias and the failure to return kindness-may he unproblematic for us, hut is this not because we have been tutored by the institutions of modern liberalism? A strong case can be made, moreover, that our general agreement vanishes when it comes to particular (...) cases. This raises a larger question: can character ethics-with its repudiation of impersonal decision procedures-provide a basis for even limited universalism? A less impersonal route would be that of Thomistic natural law, but Kupperman's meager attention to personhood and his emphasis upon the self as a " metaphysical term of art" makes this an unlikely route. Kupperman seems intent on securing limited universalism as a nee· essary framework for pluralism; the view is central to his thesis that moral education cannot substitute values clarification for absolutism, at least not in its initial stage (pp. 174-78). It is not clear, however, that the primacy of the language of " values " is compatible with an emphasis on strength of character. Kupperman concedes that an "antiphony of values " may make the achievement of strong character more difficult. He fails, however, to entertain seriously the possibility that the pluralism of post-modern liberalism might well generate a society of Nietzsche's last men, with no more than a " qualified loyalty to anything " (p. 137). While the argument of Character may not he fully persuasive, it nonetheless marks an important contribution to recent Hterature attempting to show that liberalism need not be indifferent to questions of the good and of human excellence. THOMAS s. HIBBS Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts The Magic of Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites that Transform Our Lives and Our Communities. By TOM F. DRIVER. San Francisco : Harper, 1991. Pp. 270. $19.95. Tom Driver, former theater critic and author of hooks about theater and religion, is Paul Tillich Professor of Theology and Culture at Union Theological Seminary, New York. He is also an active leader in the Ritual Studies section of the American Academy of Religion. This engagingly written book reflects all of these vocations and interests. When he writes compellingly that we suffer from a void of ritual that could give shape and meaning to human life he critiques the view that BOOK REVIEWS 701 Christianity is primarily about theology and doctrine as well as the shape and content of the liturgy as presently celebrated in many Christian churches. On the one hand, this book is an apologia for the role of ritual in Christian life; on the other, it is a trenchant critique of what and how liturgical churches ritualize their faith. In the Introduction he states that by design this work is about the " deep human longing for ritual; to interpret it in the light of our physical, social, polemical, sexual, moral, aesthetic, and religious existence; and to urge a reform of our ritual life, especially in religion, so that our longing for ritual and our longing for freedom may come together " (4). He poignantly observes that the book is a response to "ritual boredom" (7) and that much Christian liturgical practice " has become moribund " (ll). The book's fairly evenly distributed three parts concern "ritual pathways," a cursory survey of animal, human and church ritual behavior (chapters l to 3), " modalities of performance," relating ritual to theater and reflecting on ritual's relationship to confession and ethics (chapters 5 and 6), and" ritual's social gifts," reflecting on the results of ritual: order, community and transformation of participants (chapters 7 to 9). In many ways the book's Conclusion and two Appendices betray Driver's slant on the state of contemporary Christian liturgy and ritual studies by offering critiques of the celebration of some Christian liturgies (Conclusion and Appendix A) and of the work of the ritual theorist Victor Turner (Appendix B). While there is nothing really new in this last part of the book, these sections offer a particularly clear view of where Driver stands, what his prejudices are, and how current his scholarship really is. Reading these last sections first would... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Eternal Present: Slow Knowledge and the Renewal of TimeDouglas E. ChristieA woman is seated in a chair at the center of a large, light-filled atrium. Across from her sits an adolescent girl, Asian or Asian-American, maybe thirteen years old. They are both perfectly still. They look intently at each other. That is all. Minute after minute passes. Neither of them moves. I look more closely. Utter stillness. (...) Not quite repose, for there is a sense of intentionality to their engagement with each other, but deep stillness and calm. I look around the room and see a hundred or so persons also taking in the scene. Everyone is silent, though there are occasional sounds—shoes shuffling on the floor, a cough, a sigh. It takes me a few minutes to understand what is going on, what I am seeing. I feel my own anxiety to place myself somehow in this scene, to find the appropriate categories for grasping what is unfolding before me. I ask a person nearby; he tells me: it’s Marina Abramovic. She is performing “The Artist Is Present,” part of a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.1 “Oh,” I say, “thanks.” It’s performance art. Got it. But knowing this only helps a little. What are they doing? What is going on here? What is my part, if any, in what is happening? My mind, as usual, is racing ahead trying to figure it out. Which in this moment I cannot do. So, I pause (inwardly), take a step back and try to reorient myself. I take a breath, then another. I look again at the two figures.Their stillness is uncanny. This is part of what is making me anxious, I think. They are absorbed completely in the simple act of gazing at each other. I smile, thinking at first of the “stare-downs” I used to have with my brother when we were kids. Who would flinch (and fall into uncontrollable laughter) first? It was a game of chicken. With the eyes. Usually it was of short duration, and someone had to lose. This is different. The quality of attention, in particular, feels utterly different. These two are not trying to knock each other off their chairs. No one is trying to “win” at anything. They are, it seems, simply giving themselves to the work of beholding and being beheld. Extraordinary. I am not sitting in the chair. But I feel a jolt run through my body as I begin to feel the depth and power of this moment. The sense of nakedness, of naked abandon, of vulnerability. What else? Tenderness. Yes, I sense a certain tenderness passing between these two figures. And not just between them. Also touching those of us gathered in the room watching them. How is that possible? We are all [End Page 13] strangers to one another after all. And yet within this space, for these few moments there is a remarkable and palpable sense of intimacy.I am not sure at how long I stand there. But after a while, I feel the need to move, to get some relief from the intensity of this exchange. I leave the room where the artist and her companion are sitting and walk into a nearby gallery. (Later I learn that anyone visiting the museum can occupy the chair opposite the artist and that over the course of the exhibit many, many people do just that.) I am not ready to look at anything else, not yet. I have to gather myself a little first.Eventually, I do begin to take in some of the other art in the museum. But my mind keeps returning to that room and to those two seated figures. During the next couple of hours, I return to the atrium several more times. Each time I do, I am struck by how still these two figures are, how alive. Also how still and alive I feel entering into that space. Those of us beholding the scene are respectful and quiet but also animated, exchanging brief whispers, glances, smiles. We are captivated, enthralled.Suddenly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Annual Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesMontreal, Quebec, Canada, 6 –7 November 2009Sandra Costen Kunz and Amos YongThe Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies (SBCS) sponsored two sessions in conjunction with the 2009 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. The first session was titled “The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity and Science.” The theme for the second session was “Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in an Age of Science.”The (...) first session, a panel discussion of The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity and Science, edited by Paul Numrich (Göttingen: Vandenhouek and Rupricht, 2008), considered the epistemological questions raised by Buddhist, Christian, and scientific insights on the inadequacies of conceptualization and language for understanding reality. The project that produced the book was funded by the Templeton Foundation, which also generously supported this panel.After a welcome by moderator Miriam Levering (University of Tennessee), the book’s editor, Paul Numrich (Theological Consortium of Greater Columbus), gave a brief overview of the volume, followed by reflections on their chapters by two contributors: Dennis Hirota (Ryukoku University) and Paul Ingram (Pacific Lutheran University). Amos Yong (Regent University School of Divinity) responded to Hirota’s chapter, and Sandra Costen Kunz (Phillips Theological Seminary) responded to Ingram’s. Hirota and Ingram each made a few remarks on these responses, leading into an open discussion including other contributors to the book: John Albright (Lutheran School of Theology), Roger Blomquist (Argonne National Laboratory), Tom Christenson (Capital University), and David McMahan (Franklin and Marshall College).Hirota’s paper, based on his chapter “Shinran and Heidegger on Truth,” examined the epistemology of Shinran (1173–1263), founder of the Japanese Shin Pure Land Buddhist tradition. Hirota noted that for both Shinran and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) [End Page 197] truth is less a matter of asserting propositions and more a matter of the recognition and turning away from prior perceptual distortion. This permits the emergence of a new structure of awareness, an emergence that parallels Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts in scientific understanding.In his response, Yong called for a greater role for different “particularistic or even confessional approaches” within “the religion-science discussion.” He thus noted with appreciation the grounding of Hirota’s paper in a Buddhist tradition that is not “broadly Tibetan,” like much work in Buddhist-science dialogue. He compared and contrasted Shinran’s teachings about the corruption and purification of human reason with those of the Council of Dordt’s five-point condensation of Protestant reformer John Calvin’s soteriology, pointing out that both have a salvific intention.Ingram argued that while science has amassed reliable information about physical reality, and Buddhist and Christian practitioners have amassed reliable knowledge about the structures of human experience, all three traditions confront epistemological boundaries imposed by their methods of inquiry. Questions arising at these boundaries form the foundation for a science-Buddhism-Christianity trialogue. Noting that science demonstrates that “nature is rooted in a realm... only half-translated into our phenomenal experience,” Ingram reviewed how scientists and Buddhist and Christian practitioners “work back from relevant experiences on the phenomenal level, and then ask what hypothetical reality might constructively explain these experiences.”Kunz pointed out that in his examples of “working back” from experience toward hypotheses, Ingram cites many reasons for epistemological humility. Noting her research on how methods of Christian spiritual discernment might yield hypotheses for reducing the ecological crisis, she argued that Christians who have ignored the boundaries of human knowledge have contributed to this crisis. She suggested that if Western Christians who teach spiritual discernment took Buddhist and current neuroscience insights about human knowing more seriously, their teaching practices might differ less from those of non-Western Christians.The second session, chaired by Amos Yong (Regent University), was a roundtable discussion of Paul O. Ingram’s book Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in an Age of Science (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). Respondents included Mark Unno, associate professor of East Asian religions at the University of Oregon; Nancy Howell, professor of theology and philosophy of religion at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri; Benjamin Chicka, PhD candidate in the philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University; and former... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 220-223 [Access article in PDF] Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like Care, by John McWhorter; xiv & 279 pp. New York: Gotham Books, 2003, $26.00. In 2002, the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks was marked in New York City by the reading of the Gettysburg Address. It was, as many (...) commentators noted, an odd choice of eulogy, comparing as it did the unwitting and innocent victims of a terrorist attack to the willing and active [End Page 220] participants in a bloody civil war. In Doing Our Own Thing, the Berkeley linguist John McWhorter asserts that this strange choice was the result of a decline in American public discourse. A "particular kind of artful English, formerly taken for granted as crucial to legitimate expression on the civic stage has" he argues, "virtually disappeared" (p. xiv). For McWhorter, this lack of contemporary public oratory is merely part of a broader linguistic decline that has affected all aspects of American life and culture.There has, he suggests, been a dumbing-down of the language. Whereas Americans once took care to craft their language, public and private, McWhorter argues, there is now a casualness to their speech and writing which affects all aspects of their existence. The nature of this decline is best captured by McWhorter's anecdote about his research into Gullah, an obscure Creole dialect. In response to his inquiries about local speech patterns, an elderly black woman in Greenwood, Mississippi responded: "Well, seems like most folks, they speak pretty good English, but some people, it seems like they just talk" (p. 2). Whereas Americans once spoke pretty good English, McWhorter believes, now, for the most part, they just talk. In Doing Our Own Thing, he seeks to identify not only evidence for his thesis, but also the causes and consequences of this decline.Evidence of linguistic decline is, McWhorter believes, to be found in our public discourse (as evidenced by the contemporary use of the Gettysburg Address), and in the rise of rap music and popular lyrics at the expense of poetry—he notes that as late as the 1960s, the poet Marianne Moore was a guest on The Tonight Show twice. Less intuitively perhaps, he identifies the same decline in the decreased popularity of piano bars, and the rising popularity of cell-phones. What all these examples of have in common, McWhorter suggests, is a turn towards an oral as opposed to a written culture. Speech has, he says, become something of a "dress-down affair" (p. 49), and this has infected both our written word and public oratory. The "modern American speech writer" he notes, "tends strongly to operate under a guiding imperative not to sound too high a note" (p. 47). McWhorter contrasts this with examples from the nineteenth-century—with letters from ordinary soldiers to their sweethearts, and with Edward Everett's two-hour plus address at Gettysburg—which show that "we live in an America with a distinctly different relationship to the English language than an America still within living memory" (p. 167).For McWhorter, the causes of this decline are clear. The 1960s counterculture, in its efforts to "Speak Truth to Power, abandoned the formal conventions of previous generations' speech, and adopted its own more casual approach to public discourse. Indeed, McWhorter feels confident enough to identify "a single year when America lost its love for its language": 1965 (p. 183). The consequences of this decline are, for McWhorter, similarly obvious. Among them, the shift to an oral culture is held to be responsible for: the election of George W. Bush—Al Gore's "studied articulateness is certainly one of the major [End Page 221] factors that blocked him from winning the presidency" (p. xxi); the decline of contemporary political debate—more formal written language is, says McWhorter, "a better vehicle for objective argument than speech" (p. 35); and the increasingly obtuse nature of academic language. Indeed, McWhorter asserts that Judith Butler... (shrink)

The European Union's interest in developing rules concerning maritime law and liabilities has gained momentum, particularly after the Erika disaster in 1999. The development of EU maritime law has taken place on an incremental basis and to a large extent it is closely associated with various EU institutions' knee‐jerk reaction to pollution disasters within EU waters, prompted, no doubt, by the extensive media coverage of public outrage following such oil spills. This chapter considers several relevant EU directives and regulations devised (...) particularly since the mid‐2000s, with a view to evaluating the effectiveness of these measures in achieving a uniform marine legal regime within the European Union in harmony with the international law. A new trend within the European Union is to incorporate provisions of international conventions into the EU legal order by duplicating them in EU directives and regulations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 12.2 (2007) 124-125MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]A Few Thoughts on the Future of Environmental PhilosophyLori GruenThe potential of Environmental Philosophy to serve as an interdisciplinary bridge seems to be as strong as ever, and focusing on ways to enhance and expand philosophical engagement in multi/inter-disciplinary environmental projects is important. Continuing to develop work on environmental justice and eco-justice both theoretically and practically is one rich (...) way to promote interdisciplinary engagement and expand the possibilities for environmental thinking more broadly. For example, environmental justice inquiry often attracts students to environmental philosophy and environmental science who would not ordinarily be interested in philosophy or science. Environmental justice issues also provide significant service-learning opportunities that can encourage students and faculty to develop more sophisticated ways of integrating theory and practice while working with local communities. Integrating service-learning projects into environmental philosophy/studies classrooms inevitably encourages the development of interdisciplinary skills that will serve faculty and students and allows for greater discussions of local environmental problems to be addressed both inside and outside the classroom.As discussions of global justice, human rights, transnational feminism, and egalitarianism continue to gain prominence in philosophy, political science, feminist studies, and law, it is important that environmental philosophers continue developing ways to contribute to the dialogue. Environmental philosophers can certainly help enliven and deepen the practical as well as theoretical significance of these discussions. The new area of "cultural environmental studies" is one place this might happen, but it is certainly possible for environmental philosophers to engage in these analyses in other contexts.Environmental philosophers have a tendency to look at large systemic issues, and as climate change becomes increasing pressing it is important not to ignore the particularity of risks and potential harms for different human communities as well as non-human animals who may be disproportionately impacted. Non-human animals are facing alarming dangers from anthropogenic environmental destruction. At the end of [End Page 124] 2006, the baiji, or Chinese river dolphin, went extinct in the polluted Yangtze River; early in 2007, the UN reported an "emergency situation for the orangutan" in Borneo and Sumatra and experts predict their extinction within the next 20 years; dramatic climate events have had increasingly worrying impacts on isolated populations, from the whooping crane to the Asian elephant; unsustainable logging continues to threaten great apes and other species in Africa as more areas are opened for the trade in bushmeat; global warming is threatening the polar bear with extinction; recreational boating is decimating the manatees; and we can expect the losses to mount. Attending to the biodiversity loss as well as animal suffering must be a priority.Lori Gruen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University where she also chairs the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and directs the Ethics in Society Project. She has published extensively on topics in ecofeminist ethics and epistemology, environmental justice, and feminist analyses of human relations to non-human animals. She is currently writing a book exploring the complex philosophical issues raised by our relations to captive chimpanzees. E-mail: [email protected] JournalContentsTop... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic that struck New York City in the spring of 2020 was a natural experiment for the clinical ethics services of NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP). Two distinct teams at NYP’s flagship academic medical centers—at NYP/ Columbia University Medical Center (Columbia) and NYP/ Weill Cornell Medical Center (Weill Cornell)—were faced with the same pandemic and operated under the same institutional rules. Each campus used time as an heuristic to analyze our collective response. The Columbia team compares consults during the (...) pandemic with the same period during the year prior. The Weill Cornell service describes the phases of the pandemic to depict its temporal evolution and subsequent ethical challenges. Both sites report that the predominant ethical challenges centered around end-of-life decision making, setting goals of care, and medical futility, all complicated by resource allocation questions and the ambiguity of state law under crisis standards of care. The Columbia campus saw a statistically significant increase in ethics consultations provided to Hispanic patients, perhaps reflective of the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 suffered by this demographic. While Weill Cornell and Columbia saw a surge in clinical ethics consultations, the two services assumed a more expansive role than one normally played in institutional life. Serving as intermediaries between frontline clinicians and senior hospital administrators, consultants provided critical intelligence to hospital leadership about the evolution of the pandemic, disseminated information to clinicians, and attended to the moral distress of colleagues who were asked to provide care under truly extraordinary circumstances. The COVID-19 surge in New York City revealed latent capabilities in ethics consultation that may prove useful to the broader clinical ethics community as it responds to the current pandemic and reconceptualizes its potential for future service. (shrink)

During the 1980s, federal regulations transferred significant portions of the responsibility for monitoring the care and use of research animals from animal care programs to Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs). After a brief review of the history of the regulation of the use of animals in research preceding and during the 4 decades following World War 11, this article raises 4 problems associated with the role IACUCs currently play in monitoring the use of animals in research: (...) (a) lack of expertise, (b) diverted resources, (c) conflict of interest, and (d) restrictions of academic freedom. It is concluded that the care and treatment of animals used in research would be served better and organized more rationally if the day-to-day responsibilities for approving projects and caring for animals were separated more clearly from broader, oversight functions, with the former being assigned to animal care programs and the latter to IACUCs. (shrink)

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 32 features lectures given during the academic year 2011–2012 at the University of Michigan; Princeton University; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Utah; and Yale University. (...) This volume includes the following lectures:_ John Broome_, “The Public and Private Morality of Climate Change”_John Broome is the Whites Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. He has written six books. John M. Cooper_, “Ancient Philosophies as Ways of Life”_John Cooper is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. His books include _Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus _and _Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers_. Stephen Greenblatt_, “Shakespeare and the End of Life History”_Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize–winning _The Swerve: How the World Became Modern _and _Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare_. Lisa Jardine_, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: C. P. Snow and J. Bronowski” and “Science and Government: C. P. Snow and the Corridors of Power”_Lisa Jardine is a professor of Renaissance studies at University College London, where she is the director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in the Humanities and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. She has published more than fifty scholarly articles and seventeen books, including _Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory_. Samuel Scheffler_, “The Afterlife”_Samuel Scheffler is University Professor and a professor of philosophy and law at New York University. He has published four books in the areas of moral and political philosophy, including _Equality and Tradition_. Abraham Verghese_, “Two Souls Intertwined” Abraham Verghese is a professor of medicine and senior associate chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University. He has published widely across disciplines, including _My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story _and the novel _Cutting for Stone_. He is perhaps best known for his deep interest in bedside medicine and work in the medical humanities. (shrink)

The Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen undermines the ability of cities and states to regulate firearms safety. Nonetheless, we remain hopeful that firearm violence can decline even after the Bruen decision. Several promising public health approaches have gained broader adoption in recent years. This essay examines the key drivers of community firearm violence and reviews promising strategies to reverse those conditions, including community violence intervention (CVI) programs and place-based and (...) structural interventions. (shrink)

Most donated organs in the United States come from brain dead donors, while a small percentage come from patients who die in “controlled,” or expected, circumstances, typically after the family or surrogate makes a decision to withdraw life support. The number of organs available for transplant could be substantially if donations were permitted in “uncontrolled” circumstances–that is, from people who die unexpectedly, often outside the hospital. According to projections from the Institute of Medicine, establishing programs permitting “uncontrolled donation after circulatory (...) determination of death,” or uDCDD, throughout the United States has the potential to provide 22,000 more donation opportunities annually. In contrast, U.S. controlled donation after circulatory determination of death, or cDCDD, cases have increased progressively over the past decade from 87 to 848 donors, but currently account for only 10.6 percent of all deceased donors. Following the IOM recommendations, several projects exploring the feasibility of uDCDD were funded by the federal government, including a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that supported a pilot project in New York City in which the authors of this article participated.A key feature of our protocol, and indeed of many uDCDD protocols, is the initiation of preservation methods such as chest compressions and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation shortly after death in order to perfuse and preserve the donor's organs. Critics of uDCDD argue that the means of determining death deviates from generally ascribed principles. They assert that reinstituting circulation in order to preserve organs has the effect of “undoing” the prior determination of death. The result is that cDCDD is widely accepted and practiced routinely even though it only marginally increases the number of organs available for transplantation, and uDCDD is widely considered unacceptable despite being ethically embraced and proven to significantly increase organ donation opportunities in other countries. This article explores the evolution of this counterintuitive state of affairs and calls for a policy that, in line with the IOM report, allows for both cDCDD and uDCDD protocols. (shrink)

There is a nationwide resurgence of tuberculosis in the country’s urban centers; New York City stands at the forefront of this resurgence. The root causes are increased homelessness, drug addiction and poverty, all symbols of deteriorating social and economic conditions in the city. The inadequate level of public health resources devoted to TB has also contributed to its spread. Still, even with these factors, it is questionable whether the escalating number of TB cases in this country would (...) have occurred without the reservoir of immunosuppressed persons, who are less resistant to the disease, created by the AIDS epidemic. The fear and urgency of this public health crisis, which has been emerging since the beginning of the last decade, are fueled by the rise of TB strains resistant to the first-line drugs and by the disease’s contagiousness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:March 13, 2008 (7:35 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2702\russell 27,2 054.wpd 272 Reviews 1 See Brian J.yL. Berry and Donald C. Dahmen, “Paul Wheatley, 1921–1999”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (2001): 734–47. THE LIVES OF THOSE WHO WOULD BE IMMORTAL Richard Henry Schmitt U. of Chicago Chicago, il 60637, usa [email protected] David Leavitt. The Indian Clerk: a Novel. London: Bloomsbury, 2008; New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Pp. 485. (...) isbn 1-59691-040-2. £16.99; us$24.95 (hb). From the start, this novel interested me for two reasons. First, it attempts to tell us the personal stories of two individuals who were working at the highest level in a very abstract Weld, namely G.yH. Hardy (1877–1947) and Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) during their collaboration on pure mathematics between spring 1914 and spring 1919. Obviously the same problems would arise in trying to tell the personal story of Bertrand Russell’s supervision of Ludwig Wittgenstein in mathematical logic, which occurred at Cambridge University in the years just before the start of the Great War. It is a great challenge to try to tie personal dynamics and abstract thought into a single coherent narrative. There are implications for the philosophy of mathematics and the history and sociology of science. So, of course, we have to ask: how does author David Leavitt rise to this challenge? Second, a more personal reason: Paul Wheatley1 told me shortly before his death that he thought this period at Cambridge represented the highest accom- March 13, 2008 (7:35 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2702\russell 27,2 054.wpd Reviews 273 2 G.yH. Hardy, Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1940). Two lectures were presented at Harvard in 1936; the Wrst, a more personal recollection, was printed unchanged. The quote is from p. 2. The second lecture was expanded into the remaining published lectures, all considering speciWc mathematical topics. plishment possible for an academic institution: its fellows and masters had managed to attract and then recognize the genius of Ramanujan and Wittgenstein and to admit them to advanced studies without any real academic credentials. Wheatley had been the chair of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago; so, he knew something about such matters, as he did about many things involving humans, human settlements, and their arrangement in the world. Incidentally, Wheatley himself appeared as a character, Battle, in Ravenstein, Saul Bellow’s roman à clef about Allan Bloom. So, to the extent that Cambridge University just before and during the Great War plays a role here, we want to learn as much as we can about the atmosphere of the place. The Indian Clerk is a historical novelz—zin this case naming actual names, elaborating what we know about real people and occasionally adding Wctional charactersz—zall centered on the extraordinary mathematical genius Ramanujan and his equally extraordinary importation from India to Cambridge. The story is told largely in the third person, by an omniscient narrator, but repeatedly we also have the inner voice of G.yH. Hardy: there are a number of chapters with the indication “New Lecture Hall, Harvard University”, dated 1936, in which Hardy speaks in the Wrst person. In these passages David Leavitt uses parts of the published lectures, along with G.yH. Hardy’s private thoughtsz—zas imagined by Leavittz—zabout this “one romantic incident in my life” and about other matters that still haunt him.2 The novel is thus in some sense more about G.yH. Hardy and his inner life than it is about Srinivasa Ramanujan. The triumph of the novel is its ability to reconstruct and convey in a lively manner the circumstances of the time, the look and smell of the place, the crosscurrents, dynamics, and dislocations of people during these years. Leavitt has woven together a great deal, from many diTerent realms: pre-war meetings of the Apostles, the high table, the pre-war mathematics tripos, the method of collaboration between Hardy and J.yE. Littlewood, Cambridge as military training grounds and as hospital for the wounded, vegetarian cookery, feminism, Hindu... (shrink)

The ¿scrutiny of all the laws¿ that Andocides invokes in his defence On the Mysteries is usually interpreted as a recodification with the aim of barring prosecution for the crimes of civil conflict. This article advances four theses against that traditional reading: (1) In Andocides¿ argument the Scrutiny was designed for a more practicable purpose, not to pardon crimes unpunished but to quash any further action against former atimoi, those penalized under the old regime but restored to rights in (...) 403. In context, coming close upon the summary of Patrocleides¿ decree, ¿all the laws¿ means all laws affecting atimoi. (2) The other evidence from inscriptions and literary testimony, for the Athenian Amnesty and similar agreements, supports this reading: the oath that closed the covenants, mê mnêsikakein, functions as a rule of estoppel or ¿no reprise¿; it was not in itself a pledge of ¿political forgiveness¿. In regard to the Scrutiny, as in Patrocleides¿ decree, the oath means that old penalties, now cancelled, can never again be enforced. (3) The Scrutiny itself was a reauthorization of the old laws for summary arrest and other standard remedies against atimoi who trespass or violate their restrictions. As a corollary to this re-enactment, the statute of limitations was introduced, ¿to apply the laws from Eucleides¿: the rules punishing the disfranchised cannot be used against those whose liabilities were incurred before 403. (4) Teisamenus¿ decree for new legislation was prior to this revision; it is not the decree that Andocides read to the court as a document of the Scrutiny. An ancient editor simply inserted the wrong document. Teisamenus envisioned no alteration of the ¿Solonian Code¿; the decree for Scrutiny was an unforeseen but necessary correction. These measures were successive reforms sorting out the new hierarchy of rules, a process whose complexity is attested in Diocles¿ law. (shrink)

In the fall of 1956, President Margenau appointed a Committee charged to draw up proposals for a reorganization of the Philosophy of Science Association. This Committee eventually prepared a new Constitution and By-Laws, more in line with the present needs and status of the Association than were those under which it had until then been operating. That Constitution and those By-Laws were adopted by the members at the December 1957 election and are published in the January (...) 1959 issue of Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

Founded on May 14, 1939 by John Dewey and Sidney Hook, the Committee for Cultural Freedom (CCF) has been acknowledged as the most formidable anti-Stalinist liberal organization. Its first public statement of principles endeavored to demarcate the salient incommensurable conflict between democratic and totalitarian societies. Amidst a political climate, particularly in New York City, where Communist influence reached its zenith, the CCF dissected the core premise of the Popular Front by naming the Soviet Union a totalitarian state. (...) It proclaimed that, “in fear or despair they [Crypto-Stalinists] hasten to exalt one brand of intellectual servitude over another; to make fine distinctions between various methods of .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE DOMINICAN SCHOOL OF SALAMANCA AND THE SPANISH CONQUEST OF AMERICA: SOME BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES THOMAS F. O'MEARA. O.P. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana SALAMANCA, northwest of Madrid and Avila and not far from Spain's border with Portugal, preserves the atmosphere of a medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque university even as it develops the schools and clinics of a contemporary center of studies. There are associations with Teresa of (...) Avila, who spent the night there just after her reform was approved by Rome, with the young Cervantes, with Luis de Leon and Ignatius Loyola, and with John of the Cross, who was a student there. A bridge from the time of Trajan spans the river Tormes, and the Romanesque cathedral still reserves a chapel for the Mozarabic rite. The University of Salamanca The city brings to mind sixteenth century Dominicans like Francisco de Vitoria, often called the founder of international law, and Domingo Bafiez, confessor to Teresa of Avila. The Order of Friars Preachers, however, came to Salamanca in 1222 at the same time that Dominic's missions were taking root in·Paris and Bologna; the friars founded a priory and soon a school under the patronage of St. Stephen (San Esteban). The " Dominican School of Salamanca " means formally the line of great theologians reaching from Diego de Deza at the end of the fifteenth century to Tomas de Lemos, a main protagonist in Rome in 1607 in the controversy over grace entitled De Auxiliis. Today, after seven and a half centuries of existence, the Salamancan SSS 556 THOMAS F. o'MEARA, O.P. Dominicans remain a vital community, active m teaching, research and publishing. My attention was directed to the Dominicans at Salamanca by two volumes of essays reporting on congresses concerning the "Dominicans and the Discovery of the New World." My interest was not church history but the history of theologies of how grace might exist outside of explicit faith and sacramental baptism. The following report is a bibliographical survey of recent research on a theological era and school. Focusing on the thought of the theologians stimulated by the experiences of the missionaries in the Indies, it treats the Dominicans during the first decades after the voyages of Columbus. In the 1480s, as it entered its golden age, the University of Salamanca had a hundred professors and almost 7000 students. University records begin late, but they show that in 1546/47, one hundred thirty-four Dominicans were studying at the university, and in 1598/99, eighty. J. L. Espinel has written. a historical guide to the Dominican buildings and institutions.1 The great period of the Dominican school at the University began with Diego de Deza ( 1480-1486), professor and archbishop of Seville, and Matias de Paz (1518-1519), a professor of Scripture. Francisco de Vitoria (1526-1546) and Domingo de Soto (15321549 ) were its most gifted thinkers, but the school's achievements continued with Melchior Cano (1546-1552), Juan de la Pefia (1561-1565) and Domingo Banez (1581-1604). These t San Esteban de Salamanca, Historia y Gufa, Siglos, XIII-XX (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 1978); see also R. Hernandez, "Convento y estudio de San Esteban," La Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca: Universidad, 1989), pp. 369ff.; A. Martin Melquiades, "La Escuela de teologia de Salamanca," Atti del Congresso internazionale, Tommaso d'Aquino nel suo settimo centenario, Tommaso d'Aquino nella storia del pensiero, 1 :2 (Naples: Edizione Domenicane Italiane, 1975), pp. 242ff. A Salamancan Dominican of the 1930s, Vicente Beltran de Heredia, pioneered research in the history of the university and in the writings of the Dominican speculative masters. His writings can be found in past issues of Ciencia Tomista (CT), and some of his books and several recent collections of his most important essays are available from Editorial San Esteban. Similarly initial research in the United States can be found in the writings of Lewis Hanke. SALAMANCA AND THE SPANISH CONQUEST 557 are joined by lesser figures like Pedro de Sotomayor (15601564 ), Mancia de Corpus Christi (1564-1576), and Bartolome de Medina (1576-1581). The occupants of the chair in theology of the liturgical hour of prime from Vitoria in 1526 to Bafiez's... (shrink)

In the May, 1960, issue of the American Bar Association Journal (vol. 499), Morton Birnbaum, a lawyer and physician, argued for a legal right to psychiatric treatment of the involuntarily committed mentally ill person. In the 18 years since his article appeared,, there have been several key court cases in which this concept of a right to psychiatric treatment has figured prominently and decisively. It is important to note that the language of the decisions have had at least an (...) indirect effect in the recently enacted mental Hygiene Law of the State of New York. While I shall not seek to establish the historical thesis that Birnbaum’s article has been efficacious in bringing about both these court decisions and changes in statutory laws, I do want to examine Birnbaum’s article and some of the opinions for three cases: Wyatt v. Stickney (1972), Wyatt v. Aderholt (1974), and O’Connor v. Donaldson (422 US 563, 1975), in an effort to understand both the significance of these changes in our laws and the underlying philosophical and ethical notions of which they are an expression. Birnbaum observed that the notable feature of the legal situation at the time was that there had not been recognized a constitutional requirement that one who had been institutionalized for mental illness according to due process must receive treatment. Birnbaum argued that the effects of an omission of such a requirement to treat were that mental institutions typically offered only custodial care, that patients who were held only under custodial care typically did not improve, and that the result was that involuntary incarceration in a mental institution was, at least from the point of view of the patient, functionally no different than would be imprisonment for an unspecified period of time. Birnbaum argued for a recognition and enforcement in the courts of the right to treatment “...as a necessary and overdue development of our present concept of due process of law,” i.e., as required by the 14th Amendment to the U.S.. (shrink)

The history of market regulations provides an important perspective on the gendering of systems of food within the evolution of urban economies. This article addresses an important and distinctive period in this process, when New York shifted away from colonial and English-derived institutions in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. The legal status of women was unsettled during this time, introducing uncertainty into women's economic activities. New York City's public marketplaces were carefully regulated through a (...) network of ancient and sometimes arcane laws that inscribed particular activities within well-defined spaces while prohibiting them elsewhere. While these laws were derived from traditional English practices, enforcement was becoming increasingly legalistic rather than customary. While these market laws did not specifically invoke gender, they produced a system that was less navigable to women due to their problematic status as legal subjects. Because the system's navigability differed by commodity, these laws significantly shaped the gendered identity of foodstuffs, such as meat and fruit. Carefully delineating these legal constructions allows us to better understand how women navigated the real and conceptual spaces of the food system, and to see how the changing legal realities of New York impinged on women's employment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Instinct of Nature: Natural Law, Synderesis, and the Moral SenseRobert A. Greene“Instinct is a great matter.”—Sir John FalstaffThis essay traces the evolution of the meaning of the expression instinctus naturae in the discussion of the natural law from Justinian’s Digest through its association with synderesis to Francis Hutcheson’s theory of the moral sense. The introduction of instinctus naturae into Ulpian’s definition of the natural law by Isidore of (...) Seville in the seventh century posed a problem of definition for medieval commentators. Some said that it meant a universal and providential natura naturans; some defined it as the urge to self and species preservation in animals, degenerating in man into sensual and shameful impulses; some advanced the humanistic and paradoxical notion that it referred to a unique exercise of human reason in coming to know the natural law. The contemporaneous revival in the twelfth century of St. Jerome’s puzzling new term “synderesis,” and its gradual definition as the immediate apprehension of the first practical moral principles of the natural law, brought the two terms into proximity and loose association.A half-century later St. Bonaventure made explicit what had remained latent in the thinking of Thomas Aquinas by relocating synderesis in the affective rather than the intellectual part of man’s nature. Accordingly the moral discoveries of synderesis came to be spoken of as not only non-discursive but instinctive in nature—apprehensions for which no reason could be given, apprehensions somehow rooted in affective human experience. During the bilingual early modern period an increasingly secularized, internalized, and reified instinctus [End Page 173] naturae, together with its abbreviated vernacular cognate, “instinct,” came to serve as a substitute and synonym for the obsolescent synderesis. Edward Herbert’s attention to instinctus naturae in his De Veritate (1624), Sir Matthew Hale’s speculations about the place of rational instinct in the natural law, and Francis Hutcheson’s theory of a moral sense all exemplify this semantic legacy.The first entry in Justinian’s Digest has had a disproportionate influence on later speculation about the natural law. It begins a chapter that gives pride of place to general definitions of justice, law, jus naturale and jus gentium, and it is drawn from the writings of the Roman jurisconsult Domitius Ulpianus (d. 223), whose work constitutes forty percent of the Digest. Ulpian defines the natural law, with insistent repetition, as that which nature has taught to, or is common to, all animals:Jus naturale is that which nature has taught to all animals; for it is not a law specific to mankind but is common to all animals—land animals, sea animals, and the birds as well. Out of this comes the union of man and woman [male and female] which we call marriage, and the procreation of children, and their rearing. So we can see that the other animals, wild beasts included, are rightly understood to be acquainted with this law. Jus gentium, the law of the nations, is that which all human peoples observe. That it is not coextensive with natural law can be grasped easily, since this latter is common to all animals whereas jus gentium is common only to human beings among themselves. 1Justinian’s compilers gave Ulpian’s definition striking prominence at the beginning of the Digest and then in the same short chapter quoted the incompatible and more traditional definitions of his contemporaries Gaius and Paulus. They confined the operation of the natural law to mankind and spoke of reason as its source. 2 The compilers had been charged to eliminate just such conflicts; yet here at the very outset they set a conundrum that perplexed commentators [End Page 174] and invited explanation from Isidore of Seville to Hugo Grotius. Their selection of quotations suggests that as lawyers they regarded such general definitions as “for legal purposes no more than ornament to discussion.” 3 For those of a more speculative bent, however, the dilemmas could not have been more fundamental. How was the natural law to be defined in relation to those appetitive and self-preservative urges that man seemed to share with animals? Or did the term law apply only... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic swept through New York City swiftly and with devastating effect. The crisis put enormous pressure on all hospital services, including the clinical ethics consultation team. This report describes the recent experience of the ethics consultants and Columbia University Irving Medical Center during the COVID-19 surge and compares the case load and characteristics to the corresponding period in 2019. By reporting this experience, we hope to supplement the growing body of COVID-19 scientific literature and provide details (...) of the human toll the virus took on our hospitals and communities. We also aim to highlight the role of the clinical ethics consultant as well as areas of policy and law that may need to be addressed in order to be better prepared for a future public health crisis. (shrink)

The article highlights the issues of nature protection in Halychyna region that have been arising since ancient times till1939. Inthe 20-30s of the XXth century the solution of this problem was considered in the search of separate valuable objects of nature, their expropriation from the sphere of economic usage and complete protection. In the hard interwar period, the Polish government, scientists and some land owners were doing their best to protect nature. This intense activity had a significant public basis, as (...) the main legislative basis of Poland of that time facilitated development and distribution of nature-protective activity in Halychyna region. Poland had a significant public legislative foundation for environmental protection and isolation of valuable natural areas/objects. First of all, since 1852 Halychyna had the valid Austrian law on forest conservation, according to which all forests, regardless of ownership form, had to be supervised by the State Forest Administration. In 1900 the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture issued the Circular concerning conservation of natural tracts and old trees. Later on, in 1927 the President of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth issued the Decision on the protection of forests that were not owned by the state; in1934 anew public law about monuments of nature was adopted in Halychyna, which greatly simplified and facilitated the procedure of conserving valuable natural objects in the country. In addition, Poland had a number of other valid laws on nature usage with the elements of environmental protection. In the 1920-1930s, nature conservation and isolation of national parks in Halychyna were performed by both the government authorities of Poland and numerous Polish academic-social entities, such as the State Council for Nature Conservation of Poland, Polish Committee for Nature Protection in Lviv city, the Polish League for Nature Protection, Department of Reserves of the Research Institute of State Forests, Nature Conservation Commission of the State Geological Institute. Apart from that, Poland also had various public nature protection societies of local history and natural sciences, such as the Copernicus Society of Naturalists, Society of Tree-Lovers, Society of Planting Local Hylads, Zoological and Botanical Society, Society for Animal Protection, 'Stowarzyszenia c.k. straznikow lasowych i dozorcow skladow', 'Straz Lesna w Kosowie', "Akademickiego kola Przyrodnikow wszechnicy Lwowskiej' and others. A number of protected state reserves have been created. In addition to the public ones, there were a lot of community nature reserves, which were bought by the Polish scientific-cultural societies and organizations, as well as private reserves, created on private lands by some land owners. Thus, in Halychyna region the issue of nature conservation was developing very actively in those years, yet under the auspices of the Austrian environmental organizations. Correspondingly, the new protected objects became Austrian or Polish state property. No Ukrainian natural reserves existed, and no national societies for nature protection. Therefore, the problem of nature protection in the 1920-1930s in the society turned from the purely ecological problem into the ecological-national one. Ukrainian patriots, uniting around their spiritual leader - the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, started a broad nature protection activity in Halychyna, focusing at conserving and multiplying the natural resources. First of all, they founded the Permanent Commission for Nature Conservation at the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society, which was carrying out an active nature conservation activity in the given region. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Barbarous On Either Side: The New York Blues Of Mr. Sammler’s PlanetStanley CrouchThere are no two ways about virtue, my dear student; it either is, or it is not. Talk of doing penance for your sins! It is a nice system of business, when you pay for your crime by an act of contrition! You seduce a woman that you may set your foot on such and such (...) a rung of the social ladder; you sow dissension among the children of a family; you descend, in short, to every base action that can be committed at home or abroad, to gain your own ends for you own pleasure or profit.... That man with yellow gloves and a golden tongue commits many a murder; he sheds no blood, but he drains his victims as surely; a desperado forces open a door with a crowbar, dark deeds both of them! You yourself will do every one of the things that I suggested to you today, bar the bloodshed. Do you believe there is any absolute standard in this world?—Vautrin, Père GoriotWe are now mightily perplexed by the vulgarity and the brutal appetites of our culture, which Mr. Sammler sees so, so clearly, startled from page to page and in passage after passage of Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel. The terrible children of our day, the worst of our politicians, and the rampant sleaze that slides up and down the classes, across the races and religions, from the cynical students to the unrepentingly jaded and old, can be traced back to the elements that are so alarming to the protagonist of Mr. Sammler’s Planet. As a well-educated man who has smelled the molten breath and felt the bloody teeth of European fascism, Mr. Sammler is obsessed with understanding what makes or breaks a society, what causes a civilization to embrace ruthlessness as the [End Page 89] best way to realize its ambitions and handle its fears. A veteran of World War II, he has seen killing and he has done it himself, which makes him a man for whom none of his questions exists in a speculative air unfouled by the odor of murder. His intellectual ponderings are thereby part of a drama in which he has seen the lowest the Western world has to offer. This lack of innocence makes him a hero and a thinker haunted by his past and startled to uneasiness by the present. Oh, yes: Artur Sammler knows firsthand how quickly the metamorphosis from the refined to the smugly savage can take place. “Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility it might collapse twice.”The very conception of Mr. Sammler is expressive of Bellow’s gift for bringing together the intellect, the passion, the spirit, and the flesh. The physical responses to stimulation are rendered with the same attention given to all of the many things that Mr. Sammler contemplates as he tries to get a grip on New York, America’s financial capital and the pinnacle of the nation’s culture. Mr. Sammler’s ideas are counterpointed by feeling and sensuality to such a degree that the thoughts are themselves elements of emotion, which is something only our finest writers can bring off, the literary condition of character so complete that every aspect of consciousness takes form within the container of a body equal in the life of its senses to the spirit it carries. We get the feeling of a human being in repose, in grief, in rage, in self-protective contemplation, in unsparing self-examination, in attentive motion through Manhattan, on foot, in public transportation, in chauffeured limousine.New York’s power over the country was central to why it was chosen as the place of action. Mr. Sammler could not be in a better setting if he were to wrestle with the identity of the United States. One part of it obviously has to do with the character’s Jewishness. Manhattan and Hollywood are the two places where Jews have made their deepest imprints on the country. Unlike the dream factory of Hollywood, New York is the city... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Kathryn Kein 671 Kathryn Kein Recovering Our Sense of Humor: New Directions in Feminist Humor Studies At the 2014 annual meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA), the Humor Studies Caucus held a panel titled “Female Comedians and the Critical Power of Laughter.” After listening to presentations on Gilda Radner, Lily Tomlin, and Black women comedians’ 1960s comedy albums, one (...) audience member asked the panel if the classic theories of humor—Freud’s theory of the joke, Bergson’s thoughts on laughter (all conceived of in relation to the work of men)—applied when analyzing female comedic performers. One panelist immediately responded that she found none of those theories useful to her work on female comedians, and that instead she used queer theory to aid her analysis. This exchange at ASA points to many of the questions that scholars of humor and feminism are currently facing as they work to address a dearth of scholarship dealing with women, feminism, and comedy. The nods in agreement around the room spoke to the notion that scholarship on the topic of women in comedy is not merely filling in gaps, but breaking new ground. With a few notable exceptions, scholars have been relatively silent on topics involving women and/in comedy.1 The meager 1. See Susanne Lavin, Women and Comedy in Solo Performance: Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, and Roseanne (New York: Routledge, 2004); June Sochen, ed., Women’s Comic Visions (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991); John Limon, “Skirting, Kidding: Ellen Degeneres and Paula Poundstone,” in 672 Kathryn Kein scholarly space devoted to feminism and humor is likely shaped by the fraught relationship women and feminism have had with humor in our cultural imagination. Women have long battled a perception that they, as a sex, are biologically not funny. Men have always vastly outnumbered women on stand-up stages and in comedy writers’ rooms. Former Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts recalled that star John Belushi, being of the “chicks-aren’t-funny” school, often requested that the women writers be fired.2 In her bestselling Bossypants, Tina Fey recalls that the gender imbalance of the sketch comedy teams at Chicago’s Second City were due to the fact that directors believed “the audience doesn’t want to see a scene between two women.”3 In his 2007 piece in Vanity Fair brashly titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Christopher Hitchens went so far as to call women and humor “antithetical.”4 In particular, feminist women have been painted as humorless and unable to take a joke. In The Promise of Happiness, Sarah Ahmed, defining her figure of the feminist killjoy, observes that “feminists are typically represented as grumpy his Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 2. For further accounts of women comedy writers’ and performers’ experiences, see Yael Kohen, We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy: A Very Oral History (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2012). 3. Tina Fey, Bossypants (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2011), 87. 4. Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair 557 (2007): 54 Books Discussed in This Essay All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. By Rebecca Krefting. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics. By Linda Mizejewski. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner. By Jennifer Reed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kathryn Kein 673 and humorless.”5 In a variation of the age-old joke, when a jokester asks, “How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” the respondent doesn’t say “How many?” but instead deadpans, “That’s not funny.” In different ways, the three books reviewed in this essay take up the conversation at ASA and tackle these same questions: How do we analyze humor produced by (and for?) women when our understanding of humor is decidedly male? What omissions have the gendered assumptions about humor caused in scholarship on feminism? How does humor work to address these assumptions? And how does the backdrop of these assumptions influence the comedy... (shrink)

Vaccine mandates played a critical role in the success of New York City’s COVID-19 response. By relying on evidence as a substantive basis for the mandates and adhering to procedural requirements and precedent, New York City leveraged its position and expertise as a local governmental authority to devise mandatory vaccine policies that withstood numerous legal challenges. New York City’s experience highlights the role of municipal government in mounting a meaningful public health response, and the (...) strategies adopted by NYC may provide a blueprint for municipalities around the world facing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of future public health emergencies. (shrink)

Nowhere in this nation is the return of tuberculosis more visible or more pronounced than in New York City. Fueled by poverty, homelessness and AIDS, tuberculosis has again reached epidemic proportions. New York City is at the forefront of the battle against this advancing disease. For this reason, and because the dynamics at work in New York City are a microcosm of those same forces at work in the larger society, what transpires here often (...) foreshadows the direction that other urban centers will take. It is in this context that our New York experience provides a valuable framework for learning and for action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 106-123 [Access article in PDF] The (Mis)Uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique C. Richard King At least since 1979, when W. Arens demystified what he termed "the man-eating myth," cannibalism, once a fundamental feature of the anthropological imagination and a primary trope for interpreting cultural difference, has become subject to serious debate and lingering doubt [see Osborne]. Even as some anthropologists have sought to recuperate (...) anthropophagy as a tangible symbolic, ideological, and ritual complex [Brown and Tuzin; Conklin, "'Thus are our Bodies'"; Forsyth; Harris, Good to Eat 199-234; Sanday], a constellation of scholarly projects and popular works has complicated cannibalism by relocating it in the West. Perhaps most visibly, Hollywood cinema has reclaimed cannibalism. Although a handful of films have revived well-worn clichés of dark-skinned savages preparing to consume Westerners, as in King Solomon's Mines and Crocodile Dundee, others have cast the Western subject as cannibal to grapple with the horrors of reluctant cannibalism, as in Alive! [see Fiddes 121-31], to work through the transgressive and terrifying desires associated with psychopathic cannibalism, as in The Silence of the Lambs [Fuss; Halberstam], and importantly to parody the normative beliefs and behaviors of white, middle-class, heterosexual EuroAmericans, as in Eating Raoul and Parents. At the same time, an array of scholars, artists, and activists have invoked cannibalism to fashion critical perspectives on Western cultural practices. In his film Cannibal Tours (1987), Dennis O'Rourke encourages his audiences to think critically about tourists who travel to the Sepik River Valley to encounter reformed cannibals, asking implicitly who the cannibals are, the Melanesians who formerly (were thought to/claim to have) practiced anthropophagy or the tourists who travel to New Guinea to consume them [see Bruner]. Others have pushed the metaphor. Michael Ames, borrowing explicitly from O'Rourke, uses the cannibal to reframe ethnographic museums and their practices. Similarly, Jane Tompkins asserts that "Museums are a form of cannibalism made safe for polite society" [533]. More generally, Crystal Bartolovich playfully glosses consumerism as the cultural logic of the late cannibalism; bell hooks speaks of the EuroAmerican desires for and incorporation of things ethnic as "eating the other"; and Rosalind Morris suggests that cannibalism is the essential metaphor for late capitalism. More telling, however, are a set of overlapping critical projects that offer detailed theorizations [End Page 106] [Begin Page 108] of contemporary anthropophagy. Here, I will examine three that have had an important impact on discussions of tourism, museums, cultural appropriation, and consumption. Dean MacCannell, in an exciting exploratory review of the documentary Cannibal Tours, makes explicit what O'Rourke left unsaid: we are cannibals, and contemporary capitalism is neocannibalism. Perhaps more radically, Jack Forbes argues that Western civilization fosters cannibalism as an embodied, psychosocial condition or psychosis rooted in exploitation and consumption. Inspired at least in part by Forbes, Deborah Root rethinks Western civilization as cannibal culture.Although I am terribly sympathetic with these perspectives, particularly their political commitments and theoretical creativity, I am disturbed by the practices and effects that animate them. Indeed, as powerful as this critical field promises to be, it is at the same time troubling and dangerous. Although it defamiliarizes practices of cultural production and consumption, it does not enhance understanding of the contexts in which individuals and institutions deploy them and does less to effectively challenge or undermine them. In reframing beliefs and behaviors to accentuate productivity and power, it reinstates and reaffirms binaries and, worse, often turns on the same forms of appropriation.* * *Arguably, flesh eating has always promoted the elaborations of differences. Works central to the Western canon mobilize cannibalism to make (sense of) the world. Herodotus offers an early anthropophagic distinction:These Scythian husbandmen then occupy the country eastward for three days' journey.... Beyond this region the country is desert for a great distance; and beyond the desert Androphagi dwell.... The Androphagi have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law. They are nomads and wear a dress like a Scythian; they... (shrink)

The New York Times receives more citations from academic journals than the American Sociological Review, Research Policy, or the Harvard Law Review. This article explores the reasons why scholars cite the NYT so much. Reasons include studying the newspaper itself or New York City, establishing public interest in a topic by referencing press coverage, introducing specificity, and treating the NYT very much like an academic journal. The phenomenon seems to reflect a mode 2 type of scholarship produced (...) in the context of application, organizationally diverse, socially accountable, and aiming to be socially useful as well as high quality as assessed by peers. (shrink)

The association between New York City’s all-over structure and the play that unfolds within it relative to difference and identity is very pertinent but is not specific enough, in my opinion. On the one hand, all of Mondrian’s neoplastic works are constituted by an opposition between the variable and the invariable . On the other hand, the type of identity produced in New York City relies on repetition, a principle which, we know, explicitly governs a (...) whole range of paintings predating neoplasticism. New York City differs from the “classic” neoplastic works, as well as from the 1918-19 modular paintings with which it seems to have a good deal in common. It is, in part, because he never discusses this last point that Masheck doesn’t entirely grasp the amplitude of the reversal that Mondrian effected in his New York works.In fact, as James Johnson Sweeney realized quite early, one must go back o the 1917 works, which gave rise to modular grids for the two years that followed, in order to understand what happens not only in New York City but also in the two Boogie-Woogie paintings.3Everyone is aware of the extraordinarily rapid evolution of Mondrian’s work during the years immediately preceding the foundation of neoplasticism: under the influence of Bart van der Leck, he dopted the colored plane and the black dash on a white background as elements of his composition for the two Compositions in Color, A and B . Mondrian, who had not yet found a means of perspicuously relating these diverse elements , tied both plane and dashes together by way of an optical dynamism, based largely on their superimposition. The immediate consequence was to make the background recede optically. The next step was the five Compositions , all entitled “With Colored Planes” . Here all superimposition was eliminated, as well as all “line.” In the last two of these canvases, the background itself is divided without remainder in to planes of different shades of white. The colored rectangles are on the way to alignment. In spite of this, the rectangles fluctuate and, consequently, the background is hollowed out behind them. 3. See James Johnson Sweeney, “Mondrian, the Dutch and De Stijl,” Art News 50 : 63. Meyer Schapiro made a similar remark, at about the same time, in his courses. 4. When I refer to a number accompanied by “Seuphor,” it refers to the “catalog by group” included in Michel Seuphor’s book on the artist. See Seuphor [Ferdinand Louis Berckelaers], Piet Mondrian; sa vie, son oeuvre, 2d ed. . Yve-Alain Bois is associate professor of art history at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published a number of essays on twentieth-century art, architecture, and criticism and is currently working on Mondrian’s neoplastic years and on a history of axonometric perspective. Amy Reiter-McIntosh is a lecturer at the University of Chicago. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was a translation of Ernesto Laclau’s “Psychanalyse et marxisme”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Skeptical View of IntegralismElizabeth CoreyNo observer of the American right could say that the past decade has been boring. In recent years, people who formerly called themselves conservatives have become integralists, "national conservatives," "common good" conservatives, and "postliberals." They reject the fusionism that formerly brought libertarians into alliances with paleo- and neo-conservatives. They argue that principles of limited government and individual rights no longer suffice in an age (...) that has suffered the left's Gramscian march through the institutions (Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, 1891–1937).Among the most prominent of the new dissenters are certain Catholic conservatives who argue not only that "liberalism" has failed, but that that the remedy for its failure lies in a reintegration of religion and politics. Many of these writers argue that liberalism itself is a religion, or at least a quasi-religion, that should be opposed by real religion, which is Catholic Christianity.1 Liberalism's political liturgy, they maintain, is one of individual rights, freedom, and unfettered choice; but liberalism is a bad religion that leads to moral decline. It must be resisted by holding to the true liturgy, an [End Page 919] authentically religious one of obedience to Catholic doctrine and a revival of traditional morality in the public square. Who is responsible for enforcing this new liturgy? Why the new theorists themselves, of course, who believe that they are the recipients of privileged gnosis.These theorists have no qualms about asserting the desirable unity of politics and religion. Indeed, their primary interest in government seems to be in prescribing a religiously inspired morality for those they would govern. No mere rule-of-law regime will do. As journalist Sohrab Ahmari has boldly asserted: "Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy."2The confidence of these former conservatives is remarkable, and they are in fact making converts of young men everywhere. The clarity of their moral vision is undeniably attractive to a certain kind of soul. If the highest good for mankind is salvation, as Christians believe it is, then why not strain every nerve to achieve it, not only in worship but also in political action? Chad Pecknold has summarized the postliberal integralist view as follows: "We must recognize that our cities simply are religious. Our most fundamental political conflicts are religious and theological. Thus, Christians who care about their neighbor must not be indifferent to the sacred bonds of the city, but must oppose civic sacrilege, and work to reorient the domestic and civic altars alike to God's heavenly city." He concludes with a rousing peroration: "As pilgrims with our faces set towards Christ, the bright sun of justice itself, our cause is just. We have a great hope even in this temporal order which is passing away; we have a high calling to order not only our souls, but also to order our cities rightly, on earth as it is in heaven."3 The only task that remains, on this telling, is to put this vision into practice.It is never easy to follow the words of Jesus himself in the Lord's Prayer. Yet the skeptic in politics might be excused for a bit of throat-clearing and perplexity about precisely what is being argued, and about how such a grand vision is to be accomplished, or whether it is even desirable. In the pages that follow, I identify an alternative way of thinking about politics that is significantly less exalted than integralism. This more "skeptical" alternative is potentially capable of achievement, given the political institutions currently in place in the United States. It is also significantly more respectful of the political and moral pluralism that now exists and seems unlikely to disappear. [End Page 920]Following the lead of British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, I consider two opposed ways of thinking about politics, which Oakeshott called, in On Human Conduct, "enterprise and civil association," and elsewhere "faith and scepticism." With this framework in mind, I consider the dark and pessimistic view of modern society held by the postliberal integralists. I... (shrink)

Modern dönemde faaliyet gösteren dini kurumları inceleyen Islamic Law and Society isimli eserde Emine Enise Yakar, Suudi Arabistan’dan el-Ri’âse el-’Âmme lil-Buhûs el-İlmiyye ve’l-İftâ (İlmi Araştırma ve İfta Genel Başkanlığı, Dâru’l-İftâ), Türkiye’den Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (DİB) ve Kuzey Amerika’dan Fiqh Council of North America (Kuzey Amerika Fıkıh Meclisi, KAFM) kurumları hakkında detaylı bilgi sunmuş, bu kurumların fetva verme süreçlerini açıklanmış ve bu kurumlar tarafından verilen fetvaları sosyal, kültürel, yasal ve siyasal konjonktürleri bağlamında karşılaştırmalı olarak tahlil etmiştir. Ülkelerdeki fetva mekanizmasının kurumsallaşma sürecini (...) inceleyen Yakar, bu çalışmasında bireysel ve kurumsal şekilde hazırlanan fetvalar arasındaki farkı açıklayarak kurumların toplum nezdindeki etkisine ve otoritesine değinmiştir. Çalışmada kullanılan metot, yöntem ve fetva gibi temel kavramların teorik olarak açıklandığı giriş bölümüyle birlikte eser beş ana bölümden oluşmaktadır. Suudi Arabistan’daki Dâru’l-İftâ, el-Müftü el-’Âmm, Heyet el-Kibâr al-Ulemâ ve el-Lecne el-Dâ’ime el-İlmiyye ve ‘l-İftâ olmak üzere üç ana birime sahiptir. Değerlendirilen fetvalar ağırlıklı olarak son iki alt birim tarafından verilen fetvalardır. Türkiye’deki DİB, Din işleri Yüksek Kurulu, Mushafları İnceleme ve Kıraat Kurulu, Din Hizmetleri Genel Müdürlüğü, Dini Yayınlar Genel Müdürlüğü, Din Hizmetleri Genel Müdürlüğü gibi çeşitli birimlere sahiptir. Yazar ağırlıklı olarak Din işleri Yüksek Kurulu tarafından verilen fetvaları incelemiştir. KAFM ise The Islamic Society of North America’nın alt birimi olmakla birlikte General Secretariat ve The Council Executive Committee olmak üzere iki ana alt birimden oluşmaktadır. Bu çalışmada ağırlıklı olarak The Council Executive Committee tarafından onaylanan fetvalar değerlendirilmiştir. Kurumsal bağlamda bir anlam karmaşıklığına sebep vermemek için yazar, eserin karşılaştırmalı olan kısmında kurumların alt birimlerinden ziyade kendi isimlerini kullanmıştır ve gereken yerlerde birimlerle ilgili açıklamalarda bulunmuştur. Bu kitap tahlilinde kurumsal anlaşmazlığa sebep vermemek için yazarın yöntemi benimsenmiştir. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"The Fittest Man in the Kingdom":Thomas Reid and the Glasgow Chair of Moral PhilosophyPaul Wood (bio)Paul Wood Paul Wood is at the Department of History, University of Victoria, PO Box 3045, MS 7381, Victoria BC V8W 3P4 Canada. email: [email protected] August 1996Revised January 1997Notes. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at a plenary session of the 23rd International Hume Conference held at the University of Nottingham. (...) For comments and/or references, the author wishes to thank Roger Emerson, Carol Gibson-Wood, Knud Haakonssen, Ian Simpson Ross, Stephen Snobelen, M. A. Stewart, and the anonymous Hume Studies referees. For permission to cite and quote from manuscripts, he is grateful to the Keeper of the Manuscripts of Scotland as well as to the Librarians of Aberdeen University Library, Edinburgh University Library, Glasgow University Archives and Business Records Centre, Glasgow University Library (Department of Special Collections), the Mitchell Library Glasgow, and Dr. Williams' Library.1. Although little information survives regarding Law's teaching, we do know that he discussed Pufendorf in his classes; see Christine Mary King [Shepherd], "Philosophy and Science in the Arts Curriculum of the Scottish Universities in the Seventeenth Century," (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1974), 177. Carmichael's edition of Pufendorf first appeared in Glasgow in 1718, and a second edition was published in Edinburgh in 1724 while Hume was still a student there.2. The surviving correspondence between the two men from this period is to be found in The Letters of David Hume, ed. J.Y.T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), I 32-35; 36-40; 45-48 (hereafter abbreviated as HL).3. The first detailed discussion of the 1745 election appeared in the introduction to David Hume, A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh, edited by Ernest C. Mossner and John V. Price (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967). This account has recently been challenged in Roger L. Emerson, "The 'Affair' at Edinburgh and the 'Project' at Glasgow: The Politics of Hume's Attempts to become a Professor," in Hume and Hume's Connexions, edited by M. A. Stewart and John P. Wright (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 1-22; and M. A. Stewart, The Kirk and the Infidel (Lancaster: Lancaster University Publications Office, 1995). For historically sensitive contextual analysis of Hume's philosophical relations with Hutcheson, see inter alia James Moore, "Hume and Hutcheson," in Stewart and Wright, 23-57, and M. A. Stewart, Warmth in the Cause of Virtue (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).4. In January 1752, "Mr. Smith read an Account of some of Mr. David Hume's Essays on Commerce" to the Society, and Hume was elected a member in 1753; see Notices and Documents Illustrative of the Literary History of Glasgow, During the Greater Part of Last Century, edited by W. J. Duncan (Glasgow: T. D. Morison, 1886), 132-133. Hume's failed candidacy is discussed in Emerson, "The 'Affair' at Edinburgh," 14-16, and Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 112-113. Smith's Glasgow colleague from 1751 to 1755, William Cullen, was also sympathetic to Hume's philosophy, as was John Millar, who was elected Professor of Law in 1761. On Cullen and Hume see J.R.R. Christie, "Ether and the Science of Chemistry: 1740-1790," in Conceptions of Ether: Studies in the History of Ether Theories 1740-1900, edited by G. N. Cantor and M.J.S. Hodge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 90-96.5. David Hume to William Strahan, 26 October 1775, HL II 301.6. See, for example, The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D., edited by Sir William Hamilton, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1854), 30n; James McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton (London: Macmillan, 1875), 36; James Veitch, "Philosophy in the Scottish Universities," Mind 2 (1877): 207-234 (209).7. John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (London and New York: Macmillan, 1895); William Robert Scott, Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900); idem., Adam Smith as Student and Professor (Glasgow: Jackson... (shrink)