“Filter bubbles” of news consumption reflect divergent values. If you believe that abortion is murder, the fact that major US media are not continually reporting on the issue, and on the efforts by fellow activists, must seem like a grave injustice. Personally, I don’t believe that abortion is murder, so I can’t agree with that concern.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan have given one of the best explanations I’ve ever found, looking at fetal brain activity as the chief characteristic that defines being human. Because, like them, I don’t recognize the claim to personhood in the early trimesters of pregnancy as even based in any kind of scientific reality, the grave consequences of denying women the right to make this decision on their own are the actual injustice deserving attention in my view:

• the fundamental violation of body autonomy that any state intervention represents;
• the association of the “pro-life” movement with terrorism against abortion clinics and doctors and intimidation/harassment of women
• the intended and unintended side effects of anti-abortion efforts on family planning and women’s health services well beyond abortion (e.g., contraceptive services, STD diagnosis and prevention, etc.);
• the increases in unwanted pregnancies (which in turn may lead to adverse outcomes for children and parents) and unsafe “back alley abortions”.

From that point of view, major media in the United States are not paying sufficient attention to the unholy matrimony between the Republican Party and “pro-life” groups (including associations with religious extremists who have endorsed anti-abortion violence). To the extent that media do report about the issue, it is usually about the work of politicians, not the real-world impact of their policy decisions. This creates a distorted picture.

If you share this perspective, then Rewire may be a welcome addition to your nonprofit news mix. Recently rebranded, it has been around since 2006, originally under the name “RH Reality Check” (archived contents). It reports chiefly on reproductive rights issues. With an ethos of intersectionality, Rewire does give some attention to issues such as LGBT rights, race and immigration, and economic justice.

Transparency and Compensation

RH Reality Check was part of the UN Foundation from 2006 to 2012. This may not be surprising once you realize that the UN Foundation (which is independent of the UN and supports its work) was CNN founder Ted Turner’s billion-dollar gift to the world. Turner is a long-time reproductive rights and population control advocate.

Rewire has since left the UN Foundation mothership and is now an independent nonprofit (tax returns). Like other nonprofit media, it is largely dependent on grants from foundations, which nowadays includes funders like the Packard Foundation, the Compton Foundation and the Ford Foundation [CSV file].

The Rewire website does not mention these sources of funding or provide a breakdown, and Rewire did not respond to repeated inquiries about funding and other matters. The tax returns do show a large increase in revenue from $1.18M (2013) to $5.95M (2014). At $181K, the compensation of President/Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson is not unusual for a nonprofit of this size.

There is no Annual Report or other statement of impact, and as such, it’s difficult to assess to what extent stories broken by Rewire have impacted real-world policy decisions or activist efforts.

Positioning

While stating its pro-choice positioning clearly, Rewire also identifies with the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. Commentary and news content are distinguished, though news stories don’t shy away from value judgments. This, for example, is from a news story about Donald Trump’s appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General:

Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans in Sessions’ confirmation hearings largely dismissed his abysmal record on a broad range of rights—including, but not limited to, voting, reproductive, and LGBTQ rights, all of which are intertwined. [Emphasis mine]

Politically, Rewire is most closely identified with feminism. In 2016, it published a column expressing concern about harassment of Bernie Sanders’ critics by online trolls (adopting the “Bernie Bro” term and drawing parallels to Gamergate), but far from being a pro-Clinton piece, the article is a pretty nuanced feminist take on the subject. Later in the campaign cycle, editor Jodi Jacobson expressed frustration with the possibility of a Vice President Tim Kaine given his poor track record on abortion.

Content Example: “False Witnesses”

Rewire’s primary focus is in-depth reporting on abortion, contraception, and women’s health. A section called False Witnesses highlights “pro-life” activists who are sometimes cited as experts, but who (according to Rewire) are promoting false information.

To take a closer look at an example chosen at random, Rewire calls Chilean researcher Elard S. Koch a false witness for his efforts to discredit the well-established link between anti-abortion laws and unsafe abortions which put women’s health at risk.

After being rejected without review by The Lancet, Koch published his study in PLoS ONE, a journal known for publishing, then retracting a paper referring to the human hand’s “proper design by the Creator”. (PLoS ONE uses an expedited review process which does not examine a paper’s importance.)

After taking a look at the Koch paper, the Rewire analysis, the Guttmacher Institute assessment, and the Koch reply, I agree that the Koch paper draws unwarranted conclusions from the actual findings.

To make a long story short, the combination of rising incomes / improving education, legal access to family planning (including contraceptives) and illegal access to abortion-inducing drugs have helped bring abortion-related maternal deaths in Chile down, in an environment that has never been very tolerant of abortion. The remaining extent of maternal deaths resulting from unsafe abortion procedures is unknown, because they are by definition part of a clandestine crime under Chilean law.

The Koch paper doesn’t refute the well-established fact that countries which experience large numbers of maternal deaths caused by unsafe abortions could reduce those deaths by legalizing abortions. Its findings only suggest that the long process of reducing unwanted pregnancies through family planning/contraceptives, rising incomes, improving education, etc. can also contribute to doing so.

As a “pro-life” researcher, Koch overstates what can be learned from the data, and those who use it for their purposes likely overstate it further. Nonetheless, I did not find the Rewire piece especially helpful in piecing this together. For example, Rewire doesn’t mention legal access to contraception and doesn’t talk about illegal access to abortifacient drugs like misoprostol, both of which are important factors in maternal mortality. Its essay reads like a he-said/she-said that doesn’t quite warrant the classification of Koch as a “false witness”.

Indeed, unlike a fact-check scale like Politifact or Snopes, a classification system that personalizes ratings by labeling individuals “false witnesses” is strongly predisposed towards a one-sided portrayal. This is perhaps understandable given that both sides in the abortion debate are “fighting for human lives” from their respective vantage points, but it’s an example of a slightly sensationalist bent that may not serve the most truthful journalism possible.

Content Example: “Fake Abortion Clinic” Investigation

Rewire also does in-depth investigative journalism in a dedicated section. A recent investigation, “A Window Into Texas’ Publicly Funded Fake Abortion Clinics”, is a good example. It is based on public records requests regarding Texas’ “Alternatives to Abortion” program and makes the case (with input from health experts) that this program leads to women being preyed upon by organizations that promise health services, but that are primarily on a mission to minimize abortions rather than providing care.

Given its pro-choice premise and use of loaded language like “fake clinic” and “anti-choice propaganda”, Rewire’s investigation is unlikely to reach the large number of Americans who support access to contraceptive services but not abortion, and who might be shocked by the taxpayer-funded proliferation of “women’s centers” that don’t provide much more than an ultrasound and a prayer. Leaving this aside, the story is an example of quality investigative work that sheds light on the consequences of Republican health policies.

Design and Licensing

When it relaunched as Rewire, the site shed a dated look in favor of a clean, pleasant and mobile-friendly design. Color and layout are used effectively to meaningfully divide content by topics and content types (e.g., news vs. commentary). As with many good designs, there are multiple ways to go to the same place, aiding discoverability of the site’s content and structure.

A lot of content is loaded on-demand, which causes problems reaching links at the end of the page, since new content may be loaded before you can click on a footer link (a familiar problem with the “infinite scroll” design pattern). The on-demand loading of content doesn’t work when JavaScript is disabled, rendering the site partially unusable without JavaScript. There is no commenting system of any kind.

The site prominently advertises an email newsletter called Rewire daily. Each email contains headlines and summaries of stories, linking back to the main Rewire site. The email database is likely also used for fundraising appeals, though I have not received one yet.

Content is under conventional copyright, i.e. it may not be copied or re-used without permission.

The Verdict

Rewire is without a doubt a useful resource for anyone concerned about reproductive rights in the United States, an issue which is especially relevant given the onslaught of legislative attacks in many US states and the hostile environment for women’s rights under the Trump administration.

As a news site, its commitment to intersectionality is reflected in its selection of stories, e.g., an in-depth investigation of reproductive rights may be posted alongside an update on the Dakota Access Pipeline. The underlying assumption – that different movements’ struggles deeply relate to each other – may benefit from more explicit explanatory context in some cases.

I was disappointed by the lack of organizational transparency (no reporting on impact, no financial breakdown, only a “we will get back to you” response to an email inquiry without any further follow-up) and with a slight tendency towards sensationalizing in service of its agenda.

Because of these concerns, I subtract 1.5 points off its rating per the review criteria. This results in a rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, rounded up to 4 given that Rewire fills a niche of specialized journalism that is not currently occupied by other nonprofit news sources. As such, Rewire is now also part of the Twitter list of quality nonprofit media.

(March 13, 2017: re-worded paragraph in conclusion that relates to intersectional coverage)

(March 16, 2017: removed paragraph that referenced the #NoBanNoWall tag below the site’s logo; Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson clarified that it was a temporary placement as part of highlighting trending topics below the logo)

In his 2013 work The Bonobo and the Atheist, primatologist Frans de Waal lays out the evidence that morality is not a “thin veneer” covering our immoral animal nature, but that the brainier social animals (especially primates) have been equipped through evolutionary selection to act morally and with empathy for others.

Whether it’s the idea that we should get the same reward for the same effort, that kids deserve extra leeway for their inevitable infractions, or that certain behaviors must be met with punishment or ostracization, evolutionary selection has favored a “moralistic” view of the world. Humanity’s codes and beliefs are simply more elaborate expressions of this innate moral capacity and of what De Waal calls our “empathic potential”.

De Waal has studied bonobos extensively (they are closely related to chimpanzees and were long thought to be the same species) and recaps how bonobos de-escalate conflict and tension through sex. But he also explains that chimpanzees, in spite of their greater propensity for violence and aggression, also follow clear moral codes in their behaviors.

The book is strongest in these descriptions of primate behavior, which are well-sourced and explained through clear examples. The rest of the book tries to make the case that any attempt to displace religion must address the emotional gap it fills in people’s lives.

De Waal anchors much of the essayistic book in his perspective on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, repeatedly referencing parts of the triptych (which overflows with symbolism and bizarre images) to underscore his arguments. Some readers may enjoy these passages; I found them ultimately overbearing.

In his moral argument, De Waal is very critical of the “neo-atheist” movement he identifies with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, accusing them of pointless and needlessly confrontational advocacy. There is little nuance in this criticism. For example, he briefly references Hitchens going after Mother Teresa, as if it was self-evident that such an accomplished figure should be above criticism, in spite of, e.g., her relentless crusade against abortion and contraception.

This reflects De Waal’s own upbringing, which he briefly recounts: having grown up under liberal Dutch Catholicism, he writes that he departed religion gradually and still appreciates its cultural legacy in music and art. The idea that this might give him a somewhat rose-colored view does not, however, seem to occur to him. Instead he is quick to conversely diagnose outspoken atheists as the victims of trauma. Is it not possible that some of those critics have simply taken a more rigorous look at religion’s effects than De Waal has, irrespective of its effect in their own lives?

While De Waal acknowledges the danger of religiously motivated anti-science efforts like creationism, his view is that science and religion can and do inform each other, while our morality is at its core defined by our biology and environment, not acquired through reason. He identifies dogma in all its forms, not religion per se, as the biggest impediment to human progress.

I find it hard to disagree with that, but a core argument by atheist advocates is that the failure to intellectually challenge moderate theism or deism alongside its more extreme manifestations gives religion too much of a pass in public discourse, makes it more difficult for a deep understanding of the world to take root, and creates fertile ground for extremism to continually re-emerge from the same scripture quoted by moderate believers. This is an argument De Waal does not acknowledge.

I also missed a more explicit discussion of the interplay between beliefs and the development of empathic potential. Doctrines like “Spare the rod, spoil the child” are far from mere abstract beliefs; they are direct recommendations for specific parenting actions with specific psychological effects. But De Waal makes no effort at an empirical assessment of how religion could perpetuate beliefs that have a limiting effect on our capacity for empathy.

Most importantly, in spite of the word “humanism” in the book’s title, there is in fact very little discussion of humanism as a philosophy and practice. It’s fair to argue, as De Waal does, that atheism is not an especially interesting philosophy by itself, but many atheists embrace secular humanism as a system of values today. They view atheism simply as a necessary foundation of their moral outlook, not a sufficient one.

Humanistic charity and relief work, community events like Sunday Assemblies, emphasis on pluralism and rejection of dogma, awe and wonder as sources of inspiration, and so on – these are all pillars of humanism today. De Waal’s book could have given voice and visibility to this growing global effort to create an expansive, inclusive humanism; instead it barely acknowledges its existence.

The Verdict

In short, De Waal offers a decent summary of primatological findings that are in fact entirely consistent with atheistic and humanistic philosophies, while adding little insight beyond that. On balance, there may be better uses of your time. For a closer look at the empathetic capabilities of animals beyond the primates, I recommend a look at Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (reviews).

Exactly 38 years ago, Khomeini returned to Iran from his exile in France, and set in motion the Islamic Revolution of Iran.

A little over a year ago, I devoured Ryszard Kapuściński’s short book “Shah of Shahs” (rendered into very readable prose by translators William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand) in a single day.

Kapuściński was a hard-boiled journalist, a kind of Polish hybrid of Indiana Jones and Hunter S. Thompson, except far more daring than the latter, and, um, an actual person, unlike the former.

He made it his business to be in Teheran in the late 1970s, just before and during the Khomeini revolution. In the book, he tells the story of the rise of fall of the Shahs, and the Islamic revolution he witnessed in real time.

I cannot recommend this book enough. I took plenty of notes while reading, and, employing my famous Structured Procrastination<tm> technique, I finally found time to process them and offer this (still messy) digest of impressions and quoted passages.

Kapuściński can compose striking sentences, even in translation. E.g. what a poignant use of the phrase “last seen”:

“They must have marched in the front ranks of the demonstration, right into the machine-gun fire. Or sharpshooters on nearby rooftops picked them off. We can suppose that each of these faces was last seen in the gun-sight of a soldier taking aim.”

Or this, about the elder Shah (in the 1950s):

“But at this moment the father is assuming power with all his inborn energy and drive. He has an acute sense of mission and knows what he is after — in his own brutal words, he wants to put the ignorant mob to work and build a strong modern state before which all will beshit themselves in fear.”

And he is insightful, in real time (remember, he is writing as Khomeini’s revolution is taking place), observing simply:

“But the abuses of power and the lawlessness of the palace made the mullahs into advocates of the national interest.”

Another memorable picture:

“So Iran quickly transforms itself into a great showplace for all types of weapons and military equipment. “Showplace” is the right word, because the country lacks the warehouses, magazines, and hangars to protect and secure it all. The spectacle has no precedent. If you drive from Shiraz to Isfahan even today you’ll see hundreds of helicopters parked off to the right of the highway. Sand is gradually covering the inert machines.”

Kapuściński is concise, and gripping. But he is also masterful at summarizing a whole period, or a complex of behaviors, in a single sweeping, vivid paragraph. E.g. about the first Shah:

“The army is the apple of the Shah’s eye, his great passion. The army must always have money. It must have everything. The army will make the nation modern, disciplined, obedient. Everyone: Attention! The Shah issues an order forbidding Iranian dress. Everyone, wear European suits! Everyone, don European hats! The Shah bans chadors. In the streets, police tear them off terrified women. The faithful protest in the mosques of Meshed. He sends in the artillery to level the mosques and massacre the rebels. He orders that the nomadic tribes be settled permanently. The nomads protest. He orders their wells poisoned, threatening them with death by thirst and starvation. The nomads keep protesting, so he sends out punitive expeditions that turn vast regions into uninhabited land. A lot of blood flows. He forbids the photographing of that symbolically backward beast, the camel. In Qom a mullah preaches a critical sermon, so, armed with a cane, the Shah enters the mosque and pummels the critic. He imprisons the great Ayatollah Madresi, who had raised his voice in complaint, in a dungeon for years. The liberals protest timorously in the newspapers, so the Shah closes down the newspapers and imprisons the liberals. He orders several of them walled up in a tower. Those he considers malcontents must report daily to the police. Aristocratic ladies faint in terror at receptions when this gruff unapproachable giant turns his harsh gaze on them. Until the end Reza Khan preserves many of the habits of his village childhood and his barracks youth. He lives in a palace but still sleeps on the floor; he always goes around in uniform; he eats with his soldiers from the same pot. One of the boys! At the same time, he covets land and money. Taking advantage of his power, he accumulates incredible wealth. He becomes the biggest landowner, proprietor of nearly three thousand villages and the two hundred and fifty thousand peasants living in them; he owns stock in factories and banks, receives tribute, counts, totes, adds, calculates — if a splendid forest, green valley, or fertile plantation so much as catches his eye, it must be his — indefatigably, insatiably he increases his estates, multiplying his enormous fortune. No one may even approach the borders of the Shah’s lands. One day there is a public execution: On the Shah’s orders a firing squad kills a donkey that, ignoring all warning signs, entered a meadow belonging to Reza Khan. Peasants from neighboring villages are herded to the place of execution to learn respect for the master’s property. But apart from his cruelty, greed, and outlandishness, the old Shah deserves credit for saving Iran from the dissolution that threatened after the First World War. In his efforts to modernize the country he built roads and railways, schools and offices, airports and new residential quarters in the cities. The nation remained poor and apathetic, however, and when Reza Khan departed, an exultant people celebrated the event for a long time.”

Or, again penetratingly observing, this time in a poetic, figurative passage:

“Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly up into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money. To discover and possess the source of oil is to feel as if, after wandering long underground, you have suddenly stumbled upon royal treasure. Not only do you become rich, but you are also visited by the mystical conviction that some higher power has looked upon you with the eye of grace and magnanimously elevated you above others, electing you its favorite. Many photographs preserve the moment when the first oil spurts from the well: people jumping for joy, falling into each other’s arms, weeping. Oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts. People from poor countries go around thinking: God, if only we had oil! The concept of oil expresses perfectly the eternal human dream of wealth achieved through lucky accident, through a kiss of fortune and not by sweat, anguish, hard work. In this sense oil is a fairy tale and, like every fairy tale, a bit of a lie. Oil fills us with such arrogance that we begin believing we can easily overcome such unyielding obstacles as time. With oil, the last Shah used to say, I will create a second America in a generation! He never created it. Oil, though powerful, has its defects. It does not replace thinking or wisdom. For rulers, one of its most alluring qualities is that it strengthens authority. Oil produces great profits without putting a lot of people to work. Oil causes few social problems because it creates neither a numerous proletariat nor a sizable bourgeoisie. Thus the government, freed from the need of splitting the profits with anyone, can dispose of them according to its own ideas and desires. Look at the ministers from oil countries, how high they hold their heads, what a sense of power they have, they, the lords of energy, who decide whether we will be driving cars tomorrow or walking. And oil’s relation to the mosque? What vigor, glory, and significance this new wealth has given to its religion, Islam, which is enjoying a period of accelerated expansion and attracting new crowds of the faithful.”

He is a keen psychologist, well-schooled by Orwell (I am guessing), e.g.:

“The ubiquitous terror drove people crazy, made them so paranoid they couldn’t credit anyone with being honest, pure, or courageous. After all, they considered themselves honest and yet they couldn’t bring themselves to express an opinion or a judgment, to make any sort of accusation, because they knew punishment lay ruthlessly in wait for them. Thus, if someone verbally attacked and condemned the monarch, everybody thought he was an agent provocateur, acting maliciously to uncover those who agreed with him, to destroy them.”

And he is, of course, writing for and during communist Poland, so his observations aren’t only about Iran. E.g.:

“In this way terror carried off its quarry — it condemned to mistrust and isolation anyone who, from the highest motives, opposed coercion. Fear so debased people’s thinking, they saw deceit in bravery, collaboration in courage.”

Another masterful passage:

“Unfortunately, the monarch’s satisfaction is not to last long. Development is a treacherous river, as everyone who plunges into its currents knows. On the surface the water flows smoothly and quickly, but if the captain makes one careless or thoughtless move he finds out how many whirlpools and wide shoals the river contains. As the ship comes upon more and more of these hazards the captain’s brow gets more and more furrowed. He keeps singing and whistling to keep his spirits up. The ship looks as if it is still traveling forward, yet it is stuck in one place. The prow has settled on a sandbar. All this, however, happens later. In the meantime the Shah is making purchases costing billions, and ships full of merchandise are steaming toward Iran from all the continents. But when they reach the Gulf, it turns out that the small obsolete ports are unable to handle such a mass of cargo (the Shah hadn’t realized this). Several hundred ships line up at sea and stay there for up to six months, for which delay Iran pays the shipping companies a billion dollars annually. Somehow the ships are gradually unloaded, but then it turns out that there are no warehouses (the Shah hadn’t realized). In the open air, in the desert, in nightmarish tropical heat, lie millions of tons of all sorts of cargo. Half of it, consisting of perishable foodstuffs and chemicals, ends up being thrown away. The remaining cargo now has to be transported into the depths of the country, and at this moment it turns out that there is no transport (the Shah hadn’t realized). Or rather, there are a few trucks and trailers, but only a crumb in comparison to the need. Two thousand tractor-trailers are thus ordered from Europe, but then it turns out there are no drivers (the Shah hadn’t realized). After much consultation, an airliner flies off to bring South Korean truckers from Seoul. Now the tractor-trailers start rolling and begin to transport the cargo, but once the truckdrivers pick up a few words of Farsi, they discover they’re making only half as much as native truckers. Outraged, they abandon their rigs and return to Korea. The trucks, unused to this day, still sit, covered with sand, along the Bander Abbas-Teheran highway. With time and the help of foreign freight companies, however, the factories and machines purchased abroad finally reach their appointed destinations. Then comes the time to assemble them. But it turns out that Iran has no engineers or technicians (the Shah hadn’t realized). From a logical point of view, anyone who sets out to create a Great Civilization ought to begin with people, with training cadres of experts in order to form a native intelligentsia. But it was precisely that kind of thinking that was unacceptable. Open new universities and polytechnics, every one a hornets’ nest, every student a rebel, a good-for-nothing, a freethinker? Is it any wonder the Shah didn’t want to braid the whip that would flay his own skin? The monarch had a better way — he kept the majority of his students far from home. From this point of view the country was unique. More than a hundred thousand young Iranians were studying in Europe and America. This policy cost much more than it would have taken to create national universities. But it guaranteed the regime a degree of calm and security. The majority of these young people never returned. Today more Iranian doctors practice in San Francisco or Hamburg than in Tebriz or Meshed. They did not return even for the generous salaries the Shah offered. They feared Savak and didn’t want to go back to kissing anyone’s shoes. An Iranian at home could not read the books of the country’s best writers (because they came out only abroad), could not see the films of its outstanding directors (because they were not allowed to be shown in Iran), could not listen to the voices of its intellectuals (because they were condemned to silence). The Shah left people a choice between Savak and the mullahs. And they chose the mullahs.”

More psychologizing, this time on a national (and possibly overambitious or facile) scale:

“[The Shah is] talking to an engineer from Munich, a foreman from Milan, a crane operator from Boston, a technician from Kuznetsk. And who are the only Iranians in these pictures? Ministers and Savak agents guarding the monarch. Their countrymen, absent from the pictures, observe it all with ever-widening eyes. This army of foreigners, by the very strength of its technical expertise, its knowing which buttons to press, which levers to pull, which cables to connect, even if it behaves in the humblest way, begins to dominate and starts crowding the Iranians into an inferiority complex. The foreigner knows how, and I don’t. This is a proud people, extremely sensitive about its dignity. An Iranian will never admit he can’t do something; to him, such an admission constitutes a great shame and a loss of face. He’ll suffer, grow depressed, and finally begin to hate. He understood quickly the concept that was guiding his ruler: All of you just sit there in the shadow of the mosque and tend your sheep, because it will take a century for you to be of any use! I on the other hand have to build a global empire in ten years with the help of foreigners. This is why the Great Civilization struck Iranians as above all a great humiliation.”

Kapuściński does not shy away from the sordid:

“Shah Nasr-ed-Din ran up such debts in Paris brothels that, in order to bail himself out and get back home, he sold the French the rights to carry out archaeological expeditions and keep whatever artifacts they found.”

On the extrareligious value of mosques under the Shah:

“There are marked differences in the construction of a mosque and a Christian church. A church is a closed space, a place of prayer, meditation, and silence. If someone starts talking, others rebuke him. A mosque is different. Its largest component is an open courtyard where people can pray, walk, discuss, even hold meetings. An exuberant social and political life goes on there. The Iranian who has been harassed at work, who encounters only grumpy bureaucrats looking for bribes, who is everywhere spied on by the police, comes to the mosque to find balance and calm, to recover his dignity. Here no one hurries him or calls him names. Hierarchies disappear, all are equal, all are brothers, and — because the mosque is also a place of conversation and dialogue — a man can speak his mind, grumble, and listen to what others have to say. What a relief it is, how much everyone needs it. This is why, as the dictatorship turns the screws and an ever more oppressive silence clouds the streets and workplaces, the mosque fills more and more with people and the hum of voices. Not all those who come here are fervent Muslims, not all are drawn by a sudden wave of devotion — they come because they want to breathe, because they want to feel like people.”

Another universally-applicable musing:

“The causes of a revolution are usually sought in objective conditions — general poverty, oppression, scandalous abuses. But this view, while correct, is one-sided. After all, such conditions exist in a hundred countries, but revolutions erupt rarely. What is needed is the consciousness of poverty and the consciousness of oppression, and the conviction that poverty and oppression are not the natural order of this world. It is curious that in this case, experience in and of itself, no matter how painful, does not suffice. The indispensable catalyst is the word, the explanatory idea. More than petards or stilettoes, therefore, words — uncontrolled words, circulating freely, underground, rebelliously, not gotten up in dress uniforms, uncertified — frighten tyrants. But sometimes it is the official, uniformed, certified words that bring about the revolution.”

Kapuściński on the moment of revolution:

“Now the most important moment, the moment that will determine the fate of the country, the Shah, and the revolution, is the moment when one policeman walks from his post toward one man on the edge of the crowd, raises his voice, and orders the man to go home. The policeman and the man on the edge of the crowd are ordinary, anonymous people, but their meeting has historic significance. They are both adults, they have both lived through certain events, they have both had their individual experiences. The policeman’s experience: If I shout at someone and raise my truncheon, he will first go numb with terror and then take to his heels. The experience of the man at the edge of the crowd: At the sight of an approaching policeman I am seized by fear and start running. On the basis of these experiences we can elaborate a scenario: The policeman shouts, the man runs, others take flight, the square empties. But this time everything turns out differently. The policeman shouts, but the man doesn’t run. He just stands there, looking at the policeman. It’s a cautious look, still tinged with fear, but at the same time tough and insolent. So that’s the way it is! The man on the edge of the crowd is looking insolently at uniformed authority. He doesn’t budge. He glances around and sees the same look on other faces. Like his, their faces are watchful, still a bit fearful, but already firm and unrelenting. Nobody runs though the policeman has gone on shouting; at last he stops. There is a moment of silence. We don’t know whether the policeman and the man on the edge of the crowd already realize what has happened. The man has stopped being afraid — and this is precisely the beginning of the revolution. Here it starts. Until now, whenever these two men approached each other, a third figure instantly intervened between them. That third figure was fear. Fear was the policeman’s ally and the man in the crowd’s foe. Fear interposed its rules and decided everything. Now the two men find themselves alone, facing each other, and fear has disappeared into thin air. Until now their relationship was charged with emotion, a mixture of aggression, scorn, rage, terror. But now that fear has retreated, this perverse, hateful union has suddenly broken up; something has been extinguished. The two men have now grown mutually indifferent, useless to each other; they can go their own ways. Accordingly, the policeman turns around and begins to walk heavily back toward his post, while the man on the edge of the crowd stands there looking at his vanishing enemy. Fear: a predatory, voracious animal living inside us. It does not let us forget it’s there. It keeps eating at us and twisting our guts. It demands food all the time, and we see that it gets the choicest delicacies. Its preferred fare is dismal gossip, bad news, panicky thoughts, nightmare images. From a thousand pieces of gossip, portents, ideas, we always cull the worst ones — the ones that fear likes best. Anything to satisfy the monster and set it at ease. Here we see a man listening to someone talking, his face pale and his movements restless. What’s going on? He is feeding his fear. And what if we have nothing to feed it with? We make something up, feverishly. And what if (seldom though this may occur) we can’t make anything up? We rush to other people, look for them, ask questions, listen and gather portents, for as long as it takes to satiate our fear.”

The tyrant’s downfall spiral:

“After this demonstration, the Shah felt better. He seemed to be getting back on his feet. Until then he had been playing with cards marked with blood. Now he made up his mind to play with a clean deck. To gain popular sympathy, he dismissed a few of the officers who had been in charge of the units that opened fire on the inhabitants of Tabriz. Among the generals, this move caused murmurs of discontent. To appease the generals, he ordered that the inhabitants of Isfahan be fired on. The people responded with an outburst of anger and hatred. He wanted to appease the people, so he dismissed the head of Savak. Savak was appalled. To appease Savak, the Shah allowed them to arrest whomever they wished. And so by reversals, detours, meanderings, and zig-zags, step by step, he drew nearer to the precipice.”

Like Thucydides’s infamous τα δέοντα (“the needful”; “what is appropriate”), Kapuściński volunteers to supply what is not available as hard evidence. He imagines what he laments was missing:

“The cameramen overuse the long shot. As a result, they lose sight of details. And yet it is through details that everything can be shown. The universe in the raindrop. I miss close-ups of the people who march in the demonstrations. I miss the conversations. That man marching in the demonstration, how full of hopes he is! He is marching because he is counting on something. He is marching because he believes he can get something done. He is sure that he will be better off. He is marching, thinking: So, if we win, nobody’s going to treat me like a dog anymore. He’s thinking of shoes. He’ll buy decent shoes for the whole family. He’s thinking of a home. If we win, I’ll start living like a human being. A new world: He, an ordinary man, is going to know a minister personally and get everything taken care of. But why a minister! We’ll form a committee ourselves to run things! He has other ideas and plans, none too precise or distinct, but they’re all good, they’re all the kind that cheer you up, because they possess the best of attributes: They’ll be carried out. He feels high, he feels the power mounting in him, for as he marches he is also participating, taking his destiny into his hands for the first time, taking part for the first time, exerting influence, deciding about something — he is.”

another perfect miniature:

“Further down Engelob Street is a baker’s that sells fresh, hot bread. Iranian bread is shaped like a big, flat cake. The oven in which these cakes are baked is a hole dug into the ground, ten feet deep, with walls of inlaid clay. A fire burns at the bottom. If a woman betrays her husband, she is thrown into such a well of fire. Razak Naderi, a boy of twelve, works at this bakery. Somebody ought to make a film about Razak. At the age of nine he came to Teheran looking for work, leaving his mother, two younger sisters, and three younger brothers behind in his village near Zanjan, six hundred miles from the capital. From that time on he has had to support his family. He gets up at four and kneels by the oven door. The fire is roaring, and frightful heat pours out of the oven. With a long rod, Razak sticks the loaves on the clay walls and sees they are taken out when they are done. He works this way until nine in the evening. What he makes, he sends to his mother. His possessions consist of a suitcase and the blanket in which he wraps himself at night. Razak continually changes jobs and is often unemployed. He knows that he can blame only himself. After three or four months he simply begins to long for his mother. He struggles against the feeling for a while, but he ends up getting on the bus and returning to his village. He would like to stay with his mother as long as possible, but he knows he cannot — he is the sole support of the family, and he has to work. He goes back to Teheran and finds that someone else has taken his job. So Razak goes to Gomruk Square, the gathering place of the unemployed. This is the cheap labor market, and whoever comes here sells himself for the lowest wages. Yet Razak has to wait a week or two before someone hires him. He stands on the square all day, freezing, soaked, hungry. Finally a man turns up and notices him. Razak is happy; he is working again. But the joy wears off quickly, the sharp longing soon returns, so he returns again to see his mother and returns again to Gomruk Square. Right next to Razak there is the great world of the Shah, the revolution, Khomeini and the hostages. Everybody is talking about it. Yet Razak’s world is even bigger. It is so big that Razak roams around it and can’t find a way out.”

Kapuściński on the resilience of structures:

“In every revolution, a movement grapples with a structure. The movement attacks the structure, trying to destroy it, while the structure defends itself and tries to extinguish the movement. The two forces, equally powerful, have different properties. The properties of a movement are spontaneity, impulsiveness, dynamic expansiveness — and a short life. The properties of a structure are inertia, resilience, and an amazing, almost instinctive ability to survive. A structure is rather easy to create, and incomparably more difficult to destroy. It can long outlast all the reasons that justified its establishment. Many weak or even fictitious states have been called into being. But states, after all, are structures, and none of them will be crossed off the map. There exists a sort of world of structures, all holding one another up. Threaten one and the others, its kindred, rush to its assistance. The elasticity that helps it to survive is another trait of a structure. Backed into a corner, under pressure, it can suck in its belly, contract, and wait for the moment when it can start expanding again. Interestingly, such renewed expansion always takes place exactly where there had been a contraction. Structures tend toward a return to the status quo, which they regard as the best of states, the ideal. This trait belies the inertia of the structure. The structure is capable of reacting only according to the first program fed into it. Enter a new program — nothing happens, it doesn’t react. It will wait for the previous program. A structure can also act like a roly-poly toy: Just when it seems to have been knocked over, it pops back up. A movement unaware of this property of the structure will wrestle with it for a long time, then grow weak, and in the end suffer defeat.”

The Iranian revolution compared to Kapuściński’s rich store of revolutions observed:

“Iran — it was the twenty-seventh revolution I have seen in the Third World. Amid the smoke and the roar, rulers would change, governments fall, new people take their seat. But one thing was invariable, indestructible, and — I dread saying it — eternal: the helplessness. These chambers of the Iranian committees reminded me of what I had seen in Bolivia, Mozambique, the Sudan, Benin. What should we do? Do you know what to do? Me? Not me. Maybe you know. Are you talking to me? I’d go whole hog. But how? How do you go whole hog? Ah, yes, that’s the problem. Everyone agrees: That is indeed a problem worth discussing. Cigarette smoke clouds the stuffy rooms. There are some good speeches, some not-so-good, a few downright brilliant. After a truly good speech, everyone feels satisfied; they have taken part in something that was a genuine success.”

Kapuściński’s theory of development:

“The Shah thought that urbanization and industrialization are the keys to modernity, but this is a mistaken idea. The key to modernity is the village. The Shah got drunk on visions of atomic power plants, computerized production lines, and large-scale petrochemical complexes. But in an underdeveloped country, these are mere mirages of modernity. In that kind of country, most of the people live in poor villages from which they flee to the city. They form a young, energetic workforce that knows little (they are often illiterate) but possesses great ambition and is ready to fight for everything. In the city they find an entrenched establishment linked in one way or another with the prevailing authorities. So they first learn the ropes, settle in a bit, occupy starting positions, and go on the attack. In the struggle they make use of whatever ideology they have brought from the village — usually this is religion. Since they are the ones who are truly determined to get ahead, they often succeed. Then authority passes into their hands. But what are they to do with it? They begin to debate, and they enter the spellbound circle of helplessness. The nation stays alive somehow, as it must, and in the meantime they live better and better. For a while they are satisfied. Their successors are now roaming the vast plains, grazing camels, tending sheep, but they too will grow up, move to the city, and start struggling. What is the rule in all of this? That the newcomers invariably have more ambition than skill. As a result, with each upheaval, the country goes back to the starting point because the victorious new generation has to learn all over again what it cost the defeated generation so much toil to master. And does this mean that the defeated ones were efficient and wise? Not at all — the preceding generation sprang from the same roots as those who took its place. How can the spellbound circle of helplessness be broken? Only by developing the villages. As long as the villages are backward, the country will be backward — even if it contains five thousand factories. As long as the son who has moved to the city visits his native village a few years later as if it were some exotic land, the nation to which he belongs will never be modern.”

Shin Godzilla, or Godzilla Resurgence is a 2016 Japanese movie, another in the Godzilla franchise. It’s a fun, fast-paced film that will surely satisfy monster movie fans and casual cinema-goers. To anyone else, a word of advice: it’s very silly.

It’s got it all: bad dialog, particularly off-putting editing, a soundtrack that doesn’t always match the moment, a googly-eyed, flailing gojira, two-dimensional characters, badly spoken English and a strange love for bureaucracy. It’s the kind of film that could be fun to watch with friends, as you make fun of its multiple deficiencies, but not really as a good monster film.

Maybe this reviewer’s Western eyes fail to capture some essence that made Japanese audiences love it: it was the highest grossing live-action Japanese film of 2016, helmed by none other than brilliant Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno. It seemed like it had everything going for it, but in the end it was a major disappointment.

Atribuição: Dornicke (CC BY-SA 4.0)

O Museu Nacional de Belas Artes é uma ótima atração para o fim-de-semana no Rio de Janeiro pros que gostam arte. O espaço é grande, mas não o suficiente para cansar demais as pernas do visitante, o que é ideal; além disso, contém obras clássicas de pintores e escultores brasileiros consagrados, com um acervo mais voltado para o século XIX, ainda que também existam exposições menores com arte moderna brasileira.

Dito isto, o museu parecia um tanto subutilizado à época da minha visita, com certas áreas fechadas aos visitantes. A falta de ar condicionado na maior parte dos salões também não ajudou a atenuar o forte verão carioca, que acaba cansando o público ao longo da visita.

Sempre é possível melhorar, mas num quadro de crise como o que vivemos, o museu acaba se ressaltando pela qualidade do acervo e da curadoria, assim como pelo bom estado de conservação do edifício e das instalações, todos acima da média em comparação com outros museus cariocas.

CC-BY-SA 3.0

CC-BY-SA-2.5 CA

CC-BY-SA-2.5 CA

CC-BY 4.0

CC-BY 4.0