The fall issue of Nar­ra­tive Mag­a­zine includes a pair of excerpts from Amer­i­can Idol, the novel I’ve been writ­ing in fits and starts during this long slow slog through grad­u­ate school. The novel tells the story of an Amer­i­can anthro­pol­o­gist who lives South Amer­ica and stud­ies Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies, though the latter don’t appear in either excerpt here. I was espe­cially pleased and grate­ful to see that on their front page the good folks at Nar­ra­tive had nudged my mug up next to my friend and mentor Annie Dil­lard, whose stun­ning Pil­grim at Tinker Creek is excerpted in the issue as well. Anyway, check it out…

This week Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press is pub­lish­ing The Heart of William James, a selec­tion of essays edited by my friend Bob Richard­son. Bob is the author of a tril­ogy of tremen­dous biographies—on Thoreau, Emer­son, and James—and to cel­e­brate the pub­li­ca­tion of this new book he’s got a guest post up at The Second Pass today on James’s “war against war.” Here’s a bit from the start:

By 1910, James was against war itself. His notion of a “war against war,” as he puts it, had been build­ing for at least a decade. His posi­tion, unusual still today among peace advo­cates, rec­og­nizes that war is a deeply attrac­tive thing for many of us, and that we do not in fact want peace—at least not entirely. He wrote before D.H. Lawrence observed that “the essen­tial Amer­i­can is hard, iso­late, stoic, and a killer.” And long before Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or, the Poem of Force,” James noted that “the Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes, and Ajax, Sarpe­don and Hector killed.” It is the great­est strength of James’ argu­ment that he seri­ously rec­og­nizes the grip war has on us and will con­tinue to have. Rather than say we all love peace, let’s not fight, James instead tries to har­ness the war-​spirit and turn it against itself. We will have to kill war.

While you’re over there, be sure to check out the rest of TSP’s William James week. Good stuff.

Via Abu Muqawama, amaz­ing footage from a Nor­we­gian jour­nal­ist who embed­ded with the Taliban:

In Jef­frey Goldberg’s new “must-read” story about Israel and Iran, which I spent last night rant­ing about on Twit­ter, he con­cedes that “Israeli policy makers do not nec­es­sar­ily believe that Iran, should it acquire a nuclear device, would imme­di­ately launch it by mis­sile at Tel Aviv.” But he sug­gests that Israel might go ahead and bomb Iran anyway, and for three rea­sons. Prime min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu offers two of them:

“First, Iran’s mil­i­tant prox­ies would be able to fire rock­ets and engage in other terror activ­i­ties while enjoy­ing a nuclear umbrella. This raises the stakes of any con­fronta­tion that they’d force on Israel. Instead of being a local event, how­ever painful, it becomes a global one. Second, this devel­op­ment would embolden Islamic mil­i­tants far and wide, on many con­ti­nents, who would believe that this is a prov­i­den­tial sign, that this fanati­cism is on the ulti­mate road to triumph.”

The first reason seems at least min­i­mally defen­si­ble, even though it doesn’t take into account that deter­rence also affects con­ven­tional war­fare, since nei­ther side wants to see a minor scuf­fle get too far out of hand. The second reason, not so much: if mil­i­tant Muslim fanat­ics looked to the devel­op­ment of nuclear weapons as a sign from God to go more bat­shit bonkers than they already are—and that’s a big if—you would think they’d already found their clue in the com­ple­tion of Pakistan’s bomb. (And no, I don’t think the Shia/Sunni split helps the argument.)

But it’s the third reason Gold­berg cites that really caught my eye. It’s insane enough to need lengthy quo­ta­tion: