Tertiarymatt

Author: Debianfork majordomo
Date:  
To: Dng mailinglist
Subject: [Dng] [debianfork] Don't panic and keep forking Debian™!

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
 : :' :  Debian GNU/Linux    http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/
 `. `'   schroot and sbuild  http://alioth.debian.org/projects/buildd-tools
   `-    GPG Public Key      F33D 281D 470A B443 6756 147C 07B3 C8BC 4083 E800

With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion; against the unprevailing, they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation.

- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

The notion of academic freedom captures several distinct claims. It asserts that academic peers are best placed to judge scholarly competence and accordingly that on all such professional matters they should be granted autonomy. This component of academic freedom is designed to preempt extra-scholarly considerations from tainting employment decisions. Beyond the right to professional autonomy, academic freedom also asserts that pursuit of the life of the mind requires complete liberty of thought. Insofar as the academic community is devoted to attaining truth, its mission cannot be realized if barriers restrict the mind from meandering down paths of inquiry less traveled. The right of an academic to liberty of thought additionally means that outside the professional setting, scholars should enjoy the ordinary rights of a democratic citizen to speak their minds and accordingly that extramural utterances should not bear on the assessment of professional competence. Historically, the great battles over academic freedom in the United States were fought first to free university life from the hold of clerical bias (sponsored by private denominations, American colleges were originally the “ward of religion”), then economic bias (in particular, corporate interference),[i] and then political bias (the periodic Red Scares climaxing in McCarthyism).[ii]

Even if fully redeemed, academic freedom is not quite so unfettered as it might appear prima facie. Insofar as your colleagues decide your competence, you won’t survive the academic vetting process very long if they are of the decided opinion that your speculations, however copiously documented and compellingly advanced, lack scholarly merit. Ruling the roost, successful academics develop a stake in the intellectual status quo. In fields that are highly politicized, these academics, most of whom have reconciled with the reigning orthodoxy, reflexively quash or, at any rate, look askance at dissent.  In practice, professional autonomy and liberty of thought mean that, until gaining admittance to the community of arbiters, you can express heretical ideas in the academy so long as your advisors approve your dissertation; so long as refereed journals approve your articles for publication; so long as expert readers for university presses recommend your manuscripts for publication; and so long as, once entering the marketplace of ideas, your publications are well received among authorities in the field.[iii]

The most urgent problems regarding liberty of speech arise not from what can and can’t be said within the university but what can and can’t be said outside it.

I do not see how a university could function in the absence of such policing, but it would be unworldly naïve to deny that ego and political agendas often make a mockery of professional arbitration and free inquiry. The ultimate consequence of these police functions is that long before a tenure decision is made, most would-be academics have internalized the permissible limits of academic freedom. Consequently, few candidates are denied tenure on explicitly political grounds. However, inferring a high degree of tolerance in the ivory tower from the paucity of politicized tenure cases is an optical illusion born of focusing on the final stage of the socialization process. Such an inference fails to account for how many aspirants to the life of the mind inconspicuously and incrementally accommodate themselves to the rules of the academic game many years before they come up for tenure, or even land a tenure-track job. It also fails to account for how many leave academia from intellectual frustration. It was one of the exhilarating revelations of my graduate school experience at an elite institution how many colleagues in my entering class fancied themselves Marxists—truly The Revolution was imminent if even Princeton was replete with radicals—and one of the sobering revelations how many ceased to be Marxists once going on the job market.

Having said this, it is nonetheless my impression that academia is a relatively freewheeling place so long as one’s opinions are kept within university confines. Rightwing commentators who declaim against liberal bias in many (if politically the most innocuous) departments of higher education are not far off the mark. If you stick to speaking only at academic conferences, publishing only in academic journals, and being formally deferential to your academic colleagues, pretty much anything goes, at any rate, at non-elite academic institutions, where faculty opinions have no public resonance. Just as the number of persons denied tenure each year on political grounds is, in my opinion, greatly exaggerated, so are the allegations of “academic McCarthyism” and assaults on academic freedom. If many choose along the way to forsake the academic track, it is not because they feel intellectually stifled, but because they prudentially decide that the sacrifices are not worth the meager rewards (not least in salary), and because academia is such a petty place rife with cliques and cabals, backbiting and back-stabbing, preening and posturing. Probably the only true thing Henry Kissinger said was, “University politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

The most urgent problems regarding liberty of speech arise not from what can and can’t be said within the university but what can and can’t be said outside it. Apart from the constraints that professional autonomy imposes on intellectual inquiry, the social status conferred on academics may also impose limits on what they might say. Put otherwise, what you utter in your civilian life might be, or appear to be, so offensive to current sensibilities, so unbecoming your professional stature—so uncivil—that it will jeopardize your right to teach. If such a conflict rarely arises nowadays it is because most self-described dissenting academics inhabit a politically correct cocoon world, where the more bizarre one’s personal orientation, the more protected one is, especially if one loudly complains how oppressed one is. But if an academic steps into the public sphere and gives vent to genuinely heterodox opinions, it is at his or her peril.

It is highly improbable that the Israel lobby would have waged such a vicious campaign to deny me tenure had I restricted myself to an academic milieu. In fact, by the current standards of the ivory tower my opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict are quite tame: I do not oppose a two-state settlement, I do not extenuate Palestinian terrorism, and I do not define myself as anti-Zionist. What provoked the national hysteria was my political activism. I wanted and was able to reach a fairly wide audience while, worse still, appearing reasonable. Meanwhile the lobby’s arsenal of conventional smears—“anti-Semite,” “Holocaust denier,” “crackpot”—wouldn’t adhere: I was Jewish, my parents survived the Nazi holocaust, and my professional credentials withstood scrutiny. In an earlier epoch but on a truly grand scale, the eminent British philosopher Bertrand Russell too endured the tribulations of a dissident public intellectual.

The Bertrand Russell Case

In 1940 Russell was appointed to the philosophy department at the College of the City of New York. Almost immediately the Catholic Church and rightwing forces orchestrated a witch-hunt on account of Russell’s heretical opinions on religion and morality expressed in publications geared to a popular audience. A lawsuit was filed against the City of New York to rescind Russell’s appointment on the grounds of his being “lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful and bereft of moral fiber.”[iv] In short, he was alleged to be a pervert. Despite an outpouring of support from his former students, leading lights of higher education, and the liberal public, the court decided against Russell. “This appointment affects the public health, safety and morals of the community,” the judge stated in his opinion,

“and it is the duty of the court to act. Academic freedom does not mean academic license. It is the freedom to do good and not to teach evil. Academic freedom cannot authorize a teacher to teach that murder or treason are good…The appointment of Dr. Russell is an insult to the people of the city of New York…in effect establishing a chair of indecency.”[v]

Morally serious faculty members feel obliged to justify public statements or actions that appear outrageous rather than wave off criticism as “none of your business.”

Russell’s advocates pursued two seemingly complementary but really contradictory lines of defense. Some, such as John Dewey, mainly argued that the accusations were false and defamatory, Russell’s actual opinions having been grossly distorted by the court.[vi] His advocates said that he was of unimpeachable character in every respect. Others, such as Russell himself, mainly argued that his opinions on religion and morality were beside the point because he was hired to teach mathematics, logic and the philosophy of science. In other words, it was of no account even if his opinions were perverted.

It must be said that, however much the judge might have hyperbolized, Russell’s opinions on sexual mores did—by the public sensibilities of his time—constitute an outrage. The claim of Russell’s defenders that the court lifted all his opinions out of context was disingenuous. “Exhibit A” for the prosecution and the judge was Russell’s book Marriage and Morals (1929; reprinted, New York: 1970). Alongside many lyrical passages on love and sex quoted by his defenders, one could also read:

“this law [barring homosexuality] is the effect of a barbarous and ignorant superstition, in favor of which no rational argument of any sort or kind can be advanced” (pp. 110-11);

“it is good for children to see each other and their parents naked whenever it so happens naturally” (p. 116);

“uninhibited civilized people, whether men or women, are generally polygamous in their instincts” (p. 139);

“where a marriage is fruitful and both parties to it are reasonable and decent the expectation ought to be that it will be lifelong, but not that it will exclude other sex relations” (p. 142);

“I do not think that prostitution can be abolished wholly” (p. 148);

“I think that all sex relations which do not involve children should be regarded as a purely private affair, and that if a man and a woman choose to live together without having children, that should be no one’s business but their own” (pp. 165-66);

“I should not hold it desirable that either a man or a woman should enter upon the serious business of marriage…without having had previous sexual experience” (p. 166);

“No doubt the ideal father is better than none, but many fathers are so far from ideal that their non-existence might be a positive advantage to children” (pp. 196-97);

“Adultery in itself should not, to my mind, be a ground for divorce. Unless people are restrained by inhibitions or strong moral scruples, it is very unlikely that they will go through life without occasionally having strong impulses to adultery” (p. 230).

In addition to these politically incorrect opinions for his time, Russell also expressed many politically incorrect opinions for our time:

“during [the 19th century] the British stock was peopling large parts of the world previously inhabited by a few savages” (p. 245);

“one can generally tell whether a man is a clever man or a fool by the shape of his head” (p. 256);

“The objections to [sterilization] which one naturally feels are, I believe, not justified. Feeble-minded women, as everyone knows, are apt to have enormous numbers of illegitimate children, all, as a rule, wholly worthless to the community….it is quite clear that the number of idiots, imbeciles, and feeble-minded could, by such measures, be enormously diminished” (pp. 258-59);

“In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one race to another. North America, Australia and New Zealand certainly contribute more to the civilization of the world than they would do if they were still peopled by aborigines.  It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from questions of humanity) would be highly undesirable” (p. 266).

It must also be noted that, following Dewey’s line of defense, if what was alleged about Russell’s opinions were true, it would be grounds for stripping him of his academic post.[vii] Russell himself could not have been pleased with this inference because it hit too close to home, which is perhaps why he primarily based his defense not on the court’s mangling of his opinions but on their irrelevance to his academic calling:

“I claim two things: 1. that appointments to academic posts should be made by people with some competence to judge a man’s technical qualifications; 2. that in extra-professional hours a teacher should be free to express his opinions, whatever they may be.”[viii]

And yet more emphatically Russell wrote, in a letter to The New York Times that lent him only tepid support, “In a democracy it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged.”[ix]

How tenable is Russell’s position? In my opinion, not very. A collection of articles in defense of Russell included this sober reflection of a school administrator, which merits lengthy quotation:

As a reductio ad absurdum, think of trying to retain on any faculty teachers who openly advocate … the assassination of the President. …[T]here is always a limit. The teacher who thinks that this limit does not apply to him is not facing reality. The administrator must necessarily take this fact into account in employing and retaining faculty members. He must recognize that neither students nor the public will segregate a man’s teachings in one field from his general teachings, his statements in class from his public pronouncements, his philosophy from his life. He must recognize that, whether or not it ought to be so, students and public consider that the appointment of a teacher places a stamp of approval on him as a whole; it invests him with a prestige which seems to justify youth in considering him an example whom it might be well to follow. The teacher must be considered in his entirety. This does not mean that he must be a plaster saint, but it means that his assets must clearly outweigh his liabilities.[x]

I find it hard to quarrel with this opinion either as a factual statement—for better or worse a professor will not be judged only on his professional competence[xi]—or as a normative one—because students often defer to the moral authority of a professor and because the title professor carries unique moral prestige, a professor ought to acquit himself in a morally responsible fashion.  It cannot be plausibly maintained that a scholar, however gifted, who advocates the desirability of “lynching niggers” would, or should, be granted an academic post. Indeed, ought not professors take pride in the social capital invested in them and conduct themselves in a manner commensurate with this honor? Every responsible professor intuitively understands this. It is why we are embarrassed by a faculty member who in word or deed demeans the stature of the profession—i.e., carries on in public like an ass. It is also why morally serious faculty members feel obliged to justify public statements or actions that appear outrageous rather than wave off criticism as “none of your business.” The realistic and responsible question then becomes: What sorts of conduct should be reckoned unacceptable and accordingly liable to censure and sanction?

Before turning to this question I want to enter a crucial caveat. In the ensuing remarks I will be addressing legitimate constraints on speech outside the classroom. Inside the classroom I am rather old-fashioned on what is and is not proper. A lectern should not serve as a soapbox, a classroom should not be a venue for indoctrination, a professor should not be the conveyer belt for a party/politically correct line. Plato said, “The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.”[xii] It is not the worst aphorism, although I prefer a slightly amended, less authoritarian version: The object of education is to teach us to love the mind at play—while minds fully realized will probably concur on the beauty of many things. On most topics in the social sciences—really, social ideologies—arguments can be made on both sides and it is nearly always a question of weighing and balancing, of preponderances, not absolutes. There might be consensus on the evil of violent genocide and the inhumanity of chattel slavery, but no such consensus exists on the evil of capitalism, which arguably causes millions to perish each year from hunger and preventable diseases, and the inhumanity of wage slavery, Chaplin’s Modern Times notwithstanding. Although the issue of torture once appeared closed, it has now been reopened. So long as an enduring consensus does not exist on a particular topic, a professor should feel obliged to make the best case for all sides and let students find truth after weighing and balancing for themselves. “The university educates the intellect to reason well in all matters,” John Cardinal Newman wrote, “to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.”[xiii] And the discovery of this truth “has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners” (Mill).[xiv] A professor must play both combatants—the advocate and the devil’s advocate. Insofar as the human psyche is so contrived that few are capable of playing a full-fledged devil’s advocate (i.e., making the very best case against themselves), it is vital that a student be exposed to those who are willing from conviction to play devil’s advocate. My primary responsibility in the classroom is to stimulate, not to dictate.

If invited to deliver a public lecture, however, I see my task as mainly to present my viewpoint, the results of my own process of weighing and balancing, just as others are invited to present theirs. The distinction might be analogized to the news pages versus the editorial pages of a newspaper.

Incivility in Public Life

I want to look now at varieties of incivility in public life. Consider first statements that might appear uncivil but which are nonetheless factually grounded. On the Charlie Rose television program, investigative journalist Allan Nairn claimed that the assistant secretary of state for Latin America during the Reagan administration, Elliott Abrams, should be prosecuted as a war criminal under the Nuremberg statutes, while Noam Chomsky has asserted that on the basis of the Nuremberg statutes every U.S. president since World War II would have been hung. In and of themselves such statements are no more objectionable than calling Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein war criminals.  It is an altogether separate matter whether the statements are factually accurate: Nairn and Chomsky might be guilty of misrepresentation, recklessness, or libel, but not incivility. Likewise, it is not ad hominem to accuse Jewish organizations and lawyers of turning the Nazi holocaust into a blackmail weapon, as I did in my book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering, or to accuse a professor of being a plagiarist and falsifier of documents, as I did in Beyond Chutzpah. Such allegations denote definite crimes and misdemeanors, the veracity of which is subject to proof or disproof.

Consider next statements which are uncivil but might nonetheless be warranted by the circumstances. I want to emphasize that I am referring to incivilities directed against those wielding power and privilege. I see no virtue in holding up to ridicule and contempt the poor and powerless, the humbled, hungry, and homeless. Again, Chomsky dubbed Jeane Kirkpatrick “chief sadist in residence of the Reagan Administration.”[xv]  Kirkpatrick was serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, where she whitewashed atrocities being committed by the U.S. government and its proxies in Central America. Such a turn of phrase might be uncivil but under the circumstances hardly objectionable. Young people in particular yearn for a respected moral figure to speak the impolite and impolitic truth, to give vent to the purity of moral indignation they feel the occasion warrants. There are moments that might require breaking free of the shackles imposed by polite discourse in order to sound the tocsin that innocent people are being butchered while we speak due to the actions of our government. The problem is not uncivil words but an uncivil reality; and uncivil words might be necessary in order to bring home the uncivil reality. An ad hominem attack should not be a substitute for reasoned thought—and no one would accuse Chomsky of failing to argue his case or footnote it—but neither should a cri de coeur, however astringent, be ruled beyond the ambit of legitimate public discourse.

Beyond being a vehicle to convey moral indignation, incivility might also serve to expose pretense, fatuity, and charlatanry.

It is also pertinent to recall that Chomsky’s caustic phrase appeared in a book pitched to a popular audience. It might be the case that in content and form a publication hovers on the juncture between the civility of the ivory tower and the tempestuousness of the town square, and an author might want to reach these two constituencies at once. There is no necessary contradiction between the stolid scholar who meets the most exigent standards of academic protocol and the scrappy scholar who leaps headlong into the public fray. Karl Marx appraised Das Kapital a “triumph of German science,”[xvi] while even conservative economists such as Joseph Schumpeter reckoned Marx an “economist of top rank.”[xvii] Nonetheless, as Frederick Engels recalled at his comrade’s funeral, Marx wrote not just for “historical science” but also for the “militant proletariat”; he was “the man of science” but “before all else a revolutionary.”[xviii] Indeed, Marx applauded the French publisher’s serialization of Das Kapital, for “in this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.”[xix]

It scarcely surprises then that Marx’s magnum opus seamlessly interweaves scholarly detachment and highbrow literary allusion with partisan polemic and lowbrow lampoon—or, in Schumpeter’s colorful phrase, “the cold metal of economic theory is in Marx’s pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own.”[xx] Bastiat is a “dwarf economist,” Young “a rambling, uncritical writer whose reputation is inversely related to his merits,” and MacCulloch “a past master…of pretentious cretinism”; Say’s standpoint is one of “absurdity and triviality,” Roscher “seldom loses the opportunity of rushing into print with ingenious apologetic fantasies,” while Ganilh’s tome is “cretinous,” “miserable,” and “twaddle.”  Even—and, in my opinion, inexcusably—Mill wasn’t spared Marx’s verbal rapier: “On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its ‘great intellect.’” As for the subject of Marx’s scientific treatise, “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” and came into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”[xxi] On the general question of partisanship and passion in scholarship, it merits quoting a top-rank intellect of vastly different temperament whom we have already encountered. “A man without a bias cannot write interesting history,” Bertrand Russell observed, “if, indeed, such a man exists. I regard it as mere humbug to pretend to lack of bias….Which bias is nearer to the truth must be left to posterity.”[xxii]

Beyond being a vehicle to convey moral indignation, incivility might also serve to expose pretense, fatuity, and charlatanry. Doesn’t the person proclaiming the emperor’s nakedness belong to an honorable tradition? When Steven Katz sets out to demonstrate that The Holocaust was “phenomenologically unique” in a “non-Husserlian, non-Shutzean, non-Schelerian, non-Heideggerian, non-Merleau-Pontyan sense,” it would seem fair game for the tag line, “Translation: The Katz enterprise is phenomenal non-sense.”[xxiii]

It is also cause for wonder why the clever, witty, or erudite putdown that is a staple of academic life should be preferred over incivility of language. Henry Louis Gates juxtaposes a pair of statements hypothetically addressed to a Black freshman at Stanford:

(A) Levon, if you find yourself struggling in your classes here, you should realize it isn’t your fault. It’s simply that you’re the beneficiary of a disruptive policy of affirmative action that places underqualified, underprepared, and often undertalented black students in demanding educational environments like this one. The policy’s egalitarian aims may be well-intentioned but given the fact that aptitude tests place African-Americans almost a full standard deviation below the mean, even controlling for socioeconomic disparities, they are also profoundly misguided. The truth is, you probably don’t belong here, and your college experience will be a long downhill slide.

(B) Out of my face, jungle bunny.

“Surely there is no doubt,” Gates concludes, “which is likely to be more ‘wounding’ and alienating.”[xxiv] He wants to illustrate the inherent inadequacies of politically correct speech codes, but the point might fairly be broadened to embrace the issue of incivility as well. I see no reason to prefer polished insults that, as Gates shows, might be more vicious and hurtful, to blunt language. Indeed, such stylishness is more often than not testament to a self-indulgent verbal pedantry and lack of a moral core.

In this regard the hypocritical use to which the incivility charge is typically put deserves mention. During my tenure battle Professor Alan Dershowitz posted on Harvard Law School’s official website the allegation that my late mother was—or I believed she was—“a kapo” who had been “cooperating with the Nazis during the Holocaust.” For the record, my late mother was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Maidanek concentration camp and two slave-labor camps. She lost every member of her family during the war and after the war served as a key witness at a Nazi deportation hearing in the U.S. and at the trial of Maidanek concentration camp guards in Germany. In a decent world Dershowitz’s crude and conscious defamation would, I think, be deserving of censure. He not only suffered no sanctions but then-Harvard Law School Dean (and current U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Elena Kagan refused to remove his posting from the HLS website.[xxv]

In a Haaretz interview, Benny Morris called the whole of the Palestinian people “sick, psychotic,” “serial killers,” whom Israel must “imprison” or “execute,” and “barbarians” around whom “something like a cage has to be built.”[xxvi] If directed against any other nationality, it is hard to conceive that Morris would not have suffered professionally. Yet his mainstream reputation as an objective scholar and commentator on the Israel-Palestine conflict survives intact and untarnished. It might be called Holocaust affirmative action whereby Jews wrapped in the mantle of the Nazi holocaust profit from moral immunity and impunity. It was also this affirmative action at work when Alain Finkielkraut—in France he is regarded as a philosopher of equal stature to Bernard-Henri Lévy, rightly so—told Haaretz that France’s soccer team “arouses ridicule throughout Europe” because it was “composed almost exclusively of black players,” and that colonialism sought only to “bring civilization to the savages.”[xxvii] It cannot but amuse how the spewing forth of such venomous hatred is seen as courage. Finkielkraut packaged himself in the interview a martyr “striving to maintain the language of truth.”

I have acknowledged that the extramural life of an academic is bound to be, and should be, subject to some constraints. There are forms of incivility that might degrade a position on which society has conferred prestige and on which its principal constituency—students—rightly have higher than normal expectations. However, in nearly all the examples I have adduced—which draw from politics, not the more problematic domain of social mores—I either exculpate or extenuate an alleged incivility.  Indeed, it is my opinion that the supposed incivility of political dissidents pales beside what normally passes for civility in academic life. When you consider that our best universities eagerly recruit indubitable war criminals—Henry Kissinger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Donald Rumsfeld; when you consider that many professors—as Edward Said put it, referring to the Vietnam War era—“were discovered to be working, sometimes secretly and sometimes openly, on such topics as counterinsurgency and ‘lethal research’ for the State Department, the CIA, or the Pentagon”;[xxviii] when you consider that a professor at one of our best universities advocates torture and the automatic destruction of villages after a terrorist attack: when you consider all this, it becomes clear that, however real, the question of civility—whether or not a dissident academic abides by Emily Post’s rules of etiquette—is by comparison a meaningless sideshow or just a transparent pretext for denying a person the right to teach on account of his or her political beliefs.

____________

***With permission from the author, this article was edited and adapted from an earlier version published in the South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2009. It was written after the author’s controversial tenure denial case at DePaul University in Chicago.***

Once upon a time, a handsome man was trapped in a tower overlooking the sea. To amuse himself, he built a magical instrument. It was constructed of wood and metal, but sounded like something one might hear over loudspeakers at the Tate, or perhaps an avant-garde sound installation in Bushwick. The instrument was lovely, but so cumbersome, it was impossible to imagine packing it into a taxi. And so the man gigged alone in the tower overlooking the sea.

Wait. This is no fairy tale. The musician, Görkem Şen, is real, as is his instrument, the Yaybahar. (Its name remains a mystery to your non-Turkish-speaking correspondent. Google Translate was no help. Perhaps Şen explains the name in the patter preceding his recent TEDxReset performance…music is the only universal here.)

The Yaybahar looks like minimalist sculpture, or a piece of vintage playground equipment. It has fretted strings, coiled springs and drum skins. Şen plays it with a bow, or a wrapped mallet, nimbly switching between spaced out explorations, folk music and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.

After many years, a passing prince or princess was bewitched by the beautiful music that reached his or her ears from the tower. He or she braved the brambles to free Şen and his instrument. 

It’s also possible that Şen enlisted a couple of pals to help him muscle the Yaybahar down the steps, crying out when they bumped the precious instrument into the walls, struggling to get a decent grip. No good deed goes unrewarded.

At last, they left the confines of the tower. Görkem Şen lifted his face toward the Turkish sunshine. The Yaybahar stood in the sand. A noblewoman whom an evil sorceress had turned into a dog hung out for a while before losing interest. The instrument reverberated as passionately as ever. The spell was both broken and not.

You can hear more sound clips of Şen playing the Yaybahar below:

Related Content:

Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

Americans have been cooking Thanksgiving turkeys for more than 100 years. But it’s only the last few when a radical innovation in turkey preparation has started to become mainstream: “Spatchcocking,” or removing the backbone and flattening the turkey. This process—also known as butterflying, and common for preparing chickens—reduces the roasting time for a turkey from roughly three hours to around 45 minutes. Freeing up both oven and host, it’s a complete Thanksgiving game-changer.

Spatchcocking awareness—measured by Google Trends data, which represents search interest—grew modestly for years, until 2012, when it spiked. It has since become even more popular during Novembers, when Americans celebrate Thanksgiving.

Who’s to blame for this? Signs mostly point to one man: Mark Bittman, the long-time “Minimalist” food writer for the New York Times. Bittman’s “45-minute roast turkey” recipe first seems to have appeared in 2002.

Bittman repeats the process in a 2008 video, which is as funny as it is helpful. “I have forgotten to roast the turkey,” he smirks. “However, thanks to the patented Bittman 45-minute roast turkey method, I’m going to save the day. Watch this.” He slices out the turkey’s backbone, presses the bird flat, dresses it simply, and puts it into the oven. He then hangs a wall-sized clock around his neck. “I’m not kidding, 45 minutes is the time, and the time is 45 minutes.”

But I first learned about the 45-minute turkey in 2012, along with—it seems—most food enthusiasts. What happened that year that set things off? In my case, someone—probably my wife—sent me a link to Bittman’s video, and his 2012 edition of the recipe, “The 2-D Thanksgiving.” It worked great! And even better the next year.

But Bittman wasn’t alone to spatchcocking in 2012, and in fact, he tends to shy away from what he calls the “quaint” s-word, which dates to the late 18th century. The bigger performer seems to be this Serious Eats article, “How to Cook a Spatchcocked Turkey: The Fastest, Easiest Thanksgiving Turkey,” which spread widely on Twitter after it was published on Nov. 6. A week later, on Nov. 13, Alton Brown, the witty host of Food Network’s “Good Eats” and “Iron Chef America” went on NPR’s “All Things Considered” show to talk about spatchcocking. “It’s a fantastic word.” Bittman’s articles are dated Nov. 15.

“It seemed like ‘spatchcock’ was the word of the day this year,” web developer Jim Ray said in a 2012 Thanksgiving-recap episode of his cooking podcast, Salt & Fat. “There seemed to be some consensus that this was the way to roast your turkey. And—I didn’t do that this year—I think it’s probably the last year that I won’t spatchcock my turkey.” Today, Ray tells Quartz, “I’m all spatchcock all the way.” Along with, it seems, many people.

I emailed Bittman to ask if he takes credit for this holiday cooking revolution. “I suppose it’s fair, for this generation at least,” he replied. “I mean, I didn’t make it up. You spatchcock an eel, that goes back forever. Spatchcocking a chicken I learned, probably from James Beard. Spatchcocking a turkey I might have made up, at least I was doing well before 2008, although that was the first video.”

Congress can be…chaotic. Last Thursday night, President Obama unveiled plans for immigration reform, and literally challenged Congress to stop him. The next day, Speaker of the House John Boehner said that the GOP would be suing the White House over unconstitutional changes to the Affordable Care Act. It’s a mess.

But for science—and scientific research—there’s a silver lining. The House Committee on Appropriations, which bankrolls the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, recently appointed two relatively science-friendly chairmen to powerful subcommittee seats.

In D.C. parlance, subcommittee chairs are known as “cardinals,” and in the powerful Appropriations committee, cardinals decide when the government spends and where it cuts. On Wednesday, Appropriations Chair Hal Rogers announced that Tom Cole would take over as cardinal of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, and tapped John Culberson to be cardinal of Commerce, Justice and Science. Here’s what that means for science:

Representative Tom Cole (R-OK)

Tom Cole will be the cardinal in charge of Health and Human Services, which means that he’ll be one of the key people holding the purse strings for the National Institutes of Health. The NIH is the largest source of funding for biomedical research in the world, and it gets its budget almost entirely from Congress.

Cole’s appointment is a victory for the NIH. In 2007, Cole co-sponsored a bill to establish a national childhood cancer database, and in 2008 he voted in favor of the Lantos-Hyde bill, which funded efforts against global diseases like AIDS and malaria. This year, Cole threw his support behind a legislation that would remove funds from political party conventions and instead put them toward pediatric disease research.

His environmental voting record is decidedly less science-friendly. In the past, Cole has voted against protecting wild horses and authorizing the “critical habitat” title for endangered species. That shouldn’t affect biomedical research. But it is a bit worrying that Cole, who voted against environmental education grants, will be influencing the federal education budget.

Representative John Culberson (R-TX)

John Culberson will be the cardinal in charge of Commerce, Justice and Science. His appointment has the space community excited—Culberson is an outspoken proponent of a NASA mission to Europa. Culberson’s district is home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and his new position means that he now has quite a bit of say over NASA’s budget. On his web site, Culberson emphasizes his interest in advancing in spaceflight technologies, like the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle.

Commerce, Justice and Science also covers the National Science Fund, which backs more than 20 percent of the basic research conducted at universities in the U.S. Culberson’s NSF record is exemplary. Of note, Culberson once called science and technology funding a “national insurance policy” and said that Congress needs to “pour it on.” This, from a well-known fiscal conservative.

Unfortunately. Culberson’s environmental voting record is about as disturbing as Cole’s. That’s bad news for NOAA, which his subcommittee is supposed to fund. It is likely that the NOAA will continue to receive substantial government funding—Culberson has almost never cut scientific research—but it is also likely that the NOAA’s concerns about climate change will fall on deaf ears.

Culberson was, after all, the sponsor of a 2013 amendment that claimed that carbon pollution is zero and produces no harm and no costs. Yikes.

The Bottom Line: Who Wins?

The new cardinals are basically good news for scientific research, with a few important exceptions. To sum it all up, here are your winners and losers:

Space Science: Win

Culberson supports NASA, and loves Europa.

Basic Science: Win

Culberson supports the NSF, and loves basic research.

Biomedical Research: Win

Cole will almost definitely throw money at the NIH.

STEM Education: Tie

Cole hasn’t been enthusiastic about paying for kids to learn about the environment. At the same time, he has funded scholarship programs for low-income families in the past, and there’s inevitably some STEM in there.

Climate Science: Lose

At least for NOAA, there’s some irony here. Culberson will probably fund NOAA, and then throw their findings about climate change in the trash.

Image credit: Flickr/Colin Jagoe