The New York Review of Books: The Popular Connoisseur

In the early years of the twentieth century, art history was still in its infancy in Britain. Since relatively little was known about even major painters of the Renaissance, the foundation of art historical knowledge was connoisseurship and specifically a method of attribution developed in the mid-nineteenth century by an Italian historian, Giovanni Morelli. By looking at thousands of works of art and concentrating on minute details (an earlobe, a big toe, fingernails) the connoisseur trains the memory to recognize an artist’s “hand”—and in doing so builds up a coherent picture of his or her artistic personality. [...]

In most of his articles, books, lectures, and broadcasts from the late 1920s onward Clark synthesized formalist and iconographical approaches to the study of art with historical understanding to create a method of inquiry that is uniquely his. He first asks who, what, when, and where the work was made, then questions why and under what circumstances the artist made it—and, crucially, how it was understood by those who first saw it. Clark always relates an artwork to its historical precedents and assesses the degree to which it conforms to or departs from earlier representations of the same subject. [...]

The first thing he did at the National Gallery was to install electric lights—forty years after Bond Street picture dealers began the transition from gas to electricity. Visitors could at last see the collection on fog-bound London days, and the building now stayed open three evenings a week. Clark also rehung the entire collection, taking immense care to select sympathetic wall colors, arrange the pictures by school, and declutter galleries that hadn’t changed much since before the Great War.

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The New York Review of Books: A New Dawn in Uzbekistan?

NATO officials have long confirmed that there are hundreds of Uzbek and Tajik fighters in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and many of them are now returning home to their countries of origin. Together with ISIS and the Taliban, these fighters are trying to create bases in northern Afghanistan and infiltrate back into Central Asia. In early March, ISIS released a video in which its fighters boasted of establishing a “caliphate” in northern Afghanistan. Another ISIS and Taliban goal is to capture Kunduz, a city on the Uzbek border that fell to insurgents last year but has since been recaptured by Afghan Army forces.  [...]

Everyone expected Mirziyoyev to continue the same repressive regime as his predecessor, but instead, he has surprised even his own countrymen. Under Karimov, the jails were packed with an estimated 10,000 political prisoners, and international humanitarian organizations were banned from visiting the country for years. Last year, though, a thaw became apparent when long-time political prisoners and journalists in detention began to be released from jail. This included one of the world’s longest-serving political prisoners, the journalist Muhammad Bekjanov, who was freed after eighteen years of hard labor. Releasing prisoners was possible only after Mirziyoyev dismissed his much-feared rival and powerful head of the secret police, Rustam Inoyatov. Since then, Mirziyoyev has removed other high-ranking officials, replacing them with political allies. [...]

After years of maintaining an aggressive posture toward its neighbors, Uzbekistan is using this week’s conference to project its image as a more friendly and responsible state. Already, Mirziyoyev has visited all the countries in the immediate region, promising to work with them closely. In March, he traveled to Tajikistan and pledged to scrap an unpopular visa system that prevented family visits on both sides. Uzbek officials have also stopped haranguing Kyrgyzstan for its political liberalism. All the Central Asian states have excessive apparatuses of centralized control and repression and are effectively still police states—with the exception of Kyrgyzstan, which has a parliamentary form of government and is the most democratic country in the region. Uzbekistan, by comparison, has a long road to reform. Only two dozen political prisoners have so far been released, and thousands of Uzbeks remain on a security blacklist as potential enemies of the state. The secret police and judiciary need a complete overhaul, and the press remains fully under state control. The country has never held a free and fair election.

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Jacobin Magazine: No, Israel Is Not a Democracy

Local military governors were the absolute rulers of the lives of these citizens: they could devise special laws for them, destroy their houses and livelihoods, and send them to jail whenever they felt like it. Only in the late 1950s did a strong Jewish opposition to these abuses emerge, which eventually eased the pressure on the Palestinian citizens.

For the Palestinians who lived in prewar Israel and those who lived in the post-1967 West Bank and the Gaza Strip, this regime allowed even the lowest-ranking soldier in the IDF to rule, and ruin, their lives. They were helpless if such a solider, or his unit or commander, decided to demolish their homes, or hold them for hours at a checkpoint, or incarcerate them without trial. There was nothing they could do. [...]

The perpetrators of the massacre were brought to trial thanks to the diligence and tenacity of two members of the Knesset: Tawaq Tubi from the Communist Party and Latif Dori of the Left Zionist party Mapam. However, the commanders responsible for the area, and the unit itself that committed the crime, were let off very lightly, receiving merely small fines. This was further proof that the army was allowed to get away with murder in the occupied territories. [...]

There is further evidence that Israel was not a democracy prior to 1967. The state pursued a shoot-to-kill policy towards refugees trying to retrieve their land, crops, and husbandry, and staged a colonial war to topple Nasser’s regime in Egypt. Its security forces were also trigger happy, killing more than fifty Palestinian citizens during the period from 1948–1967.

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openDemocracy: The struggle for humane drug policy in Georgia

On 5 March, the Georgian parliament once again postponed consideration of an amendments package aimed at improving “drug policy legislation”. Deputies are expected to take a more liberal approach to this issue. The need for change stems from the decriminalisation of the personal use of marijuana by Georgia’s Constitutional Court in November 2017.

The court made the ruling following relentless pressure from Georgia’s libertarian Girchi party and the White Noise activist movement. Having joined forces, Girchi and White Noise were able to cement public opinion around the idea that the country’s current drug policy is repressive. That the issue impinges on the lives of thousands of young people has been amply demonstrated by regular protests demanding a review of the legislation. The most recent large-scale demonstration took place in December 2017. In addition to rallies in Tbilisi, people took to the streets in Georgia’s other major cities – Batumi, Kutaisi and Zugdidi. [...]

Human rights activists believe that the police abuse screening procedures and exploit them as a means of intimidating citizens. All the players in the reform process, including the leadership of Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, agree with this assessment. The campaign’s supporters are also demanding that an unambiguous legal distinction is made between users and dealers.

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Like Stories of Old: Anatomy of the Dreamlike Romance – Call Me By Your Name vs. Before Sunrise

Wireless Philosophy: Promising Against the Evidence #1 - Ethics | PHILOSOPHY

In this Wireless Philosophy video, Berislav Marušić (Brandeis University) talks about promises to do difficult things, such as the promise to spend the rest of one's life with someone. Beri explains that such promises pose a philosophical problem: they seem to be either insincere, in case one doesn't believe that one will keep them, or irrational, in case one does believe it. He describes how exactly the problem arises and sketches five possible responses.

The Guardian: Atheists who bring logic to the Easter story are missing the point | Julian Baggini | Opinion

Smart people can have blind spots, but this quick and easy explanation does not do justice to the complexities of religious belief. If we genuinely accept that a believer in the resurrection can be intelligent, but also think that any intelligent person would find the idea of the resurrection preposterous, the most charitable explanation is that intelligent believers are as aware of the implausibility of their beliefs as anyone else. This is indeed what you tend to find if you bother to talk to a Christian. They don’t use the word “miracle” for nothing – they know their faith defies laws of logic and nature.  [...]

What atheists often forget is that many – perhaps most – religious believers are less than completely convinced anyway. Many of them are fully aware of the dissonance between what their faith and their rational mind tell them. Religion offers many tools to help manage this. It tells people that faith is superior to belief based on evidence. “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed,” Jesus told “doubting Thomas”, adding: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Religion also tells believers that doubt is to be expected, even welcomed, as part of the journey of faith, all the time reassuring them that God is beyond our understanding. The Easter story thus ends up rather like quantum theory: if you find it easy to believe, you haven’t understood it. Illogicality is a design feature, not a design flaw.

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The Guardian: Sex for rent … the rogue landlords who offer a ‘free’ room in return for ‘favours’

The offending adverts typically offer free room or bed share in exchange for “intimacy”, “benefits” or “fwb” – friends with benefits. While many appear in London, room shares in exchange for sex are advertised around the country through sites such as Craigslist. [...]

This was grimly illustrated in a survey carried out last year where people detailed their experiences. One woman told how a landlord wanted to have sex with her in return for keeping the rent down – while her six-year-old daughter was in the garden. “He was asked to leave. He did. Damp was never fixed. Asthmatic kid still needed hospital.” [...]

However, Kyle has become frustrated at the lack of prosecutions in the area. “We do not necessarily need new laws, I just want to see the existing ones applied. Advertising in this way is not against the law – only the actual transaction is. This makes prosecution difficult.”

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The Washington Post: For Israel, there’s little political cost to killing Palestinians

Israeli authorities claimed they opened fire in response to some protesters who had encroached near the fence, burning tires and hurling stones or molotov cocktails. Footage that emerged from the chaotic scene suggested Israeli soldiers targeted unarmed protesters, including some who were running away and were shot from a distance by snipers. [...]

The killings marked the worst day of violence in Gaza since the 2014 war between the Islamist group Hamas and the Israeli military, in which the United Nations said at least 1,462 Palestinian civilians died. And the aftermath of the protests underscored both the desperate futility of the Palestinian struggle and the relative impunity with which Israel can snuff out Palestinian lives. [...]

“These are the predictable outcomes of a manifestly illegal command: Israeli soldiers shooting live ammunition at unarmed Palestinian protesters,” said Amit Gilutz, a spokesman for B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based leftist organization that monitors human rights abuses in the occupied territories. “What is predictable, too, is that no one — from the snipers on the ground to top officials whose policies have turned Gaza into a giant prison — is likely to be ever held accountable.” [...]

Nor can the Palestinians look for much help from their neighbors. As we’ve discussed in this space, some of the region’s key powers — most notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia — have moved closer to Israel in recent years. It has become clear that while the stateless Palestinians garner tremendous sympathy from citizens across the Arab world, their plight is a tiresome nuisance for some Arab leaders, who are more keen to crack down on Islamist parties at home or confront Iranian influence abroad.

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