California Literary Review

Vengeance Is Ours: Though we might wonder how Daniel’s society came to revel in killing, ethnographic studies of traditional human societies lying largely outside the control of state government have shown that war, murder, and demonization of neighbors have been the norm. Modern state societies rate as exceptional by the standards of human history, because we instead grow up learning a universal code of morality that is constantly hammered into us: promulgated every week in our churches and codified in our laws. But the differences between the norms of states and of Handa clan society are not actually so sharp. In times of war, even modern state societies quickly turn the enemy into a dehumanized figure of hatred, only to enjoin us to stop hating again as soon as a peace treaty is signed. Such contradictions confuse us deeply. Neither pacific ideals nor wartime hatreds, once acquired, are easily jettisoned. It’s no wonder that many soldiers who kill suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. When they come home, far from boasting about killing, as a Nipa tribesman would, they have nightmares and never talk about it at all, unless to other veterans. [New Yorker]

Is Your Daily Life Enslaved by the Electronic World?: Future historians may very well look back at the beginning of the 21st century as an era in which the human mind developed into a split screen, with one eye on real space and the other ogling the electronic mirror. This morning on a crowded bus I counted six people within my immediate view, texting, talking on the cell phone, checking e-mail, listening to iPods. In other words, they were trying to keep the bus from being their only space, their only reality. And what was I doing? I recorded what I observed in my laptop, of course. [AlterNet]

‘Disneyland’ comes to Baghdad with multi-million pound entertainment park: Llewellyn Werner, a California investor, admits he is facing obstacles most amusement park developers never have to deal with. Such as insurgent attacks and looting. But when the amusement park you’re building lies in downtown Baghdad, those risks come with the territory. [Times]