CUER

“[A]s a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” For those of us way too familiar with this quote, a recent biography of Columbia’s favorite modernist by Julia Briggs examines Virginia Woolf’s troubled inner life. A quick quote from today’s Spectator:

Briggs’ exploration of Woolf’s writing also allows her to touch on the historical developments of that time, particularly World War II and the position of women in society. Woolf was a strong advocate of sexual equality. She constantly encountered critics who were convinced of male superiority, but bravely defied them both directly and indirectly with her letters, books, and speeches to young women. Woolf certainly saw herself as a peer of the great male writers of her age: she viewed James Joyce as a competitor and felt pressured by Ulysses to produce a work just as innovative and inventive, which resulted in one of her most seminal novels, Mrs. Dalloway.

For full article, go read “Inside the Lighthouse: Julia Briggs Expertly Examines the Illuminating and Invaluable Private Thoughts of Virginia Woolf” available here.

In “Mishandling Suicide Terrorism,” Scott Altran discusses why relative deprivation is more significant than absolute deprivation, as recent study shows that poverty and lack of education per se are not root causes of terrorism:

Support and recruitment for suicide terrorism occur not under conditions of political repression, poverty, and unemployment or illiteracy as such but when converging political, economic, and social trends produce diminishing opportunities relative to expectations, thus generating frustrations that radical organizations can exploit. For this purpose, relative deprivation is more significant than absolute deprivation. Unlike poorer, less-educated elements of their societies, or equally educated, well-off members of our society, many educated, middle-class Muslims increasingly experience frustration with life as their potential opportunities are less attractive than their prior expectations. Frustrated with their future, the appeal of routine national life declines, and suicide terrorism gives some perceived purpose to act altruistically, in the potential terrorist’s mind, for the welfare of a future generation. Revolutionary terror imprints itself into history when corrupt and corroded societies choke rising aspirations into explosive frustration.

For full article, go to Washington Quarterly from the Project Muse. The article is available in both HTML and PDF files.

The Netherlands ponders over diversity issues. An Economist excerpt from the March 31st, 2005 issue:

Faced with the challenge of absorbing immigrants from traditional societies–and drawing the right line between curbing extremism and fostering diversity–Dutch common sense will certainly help, but may not be enough. Like their American counterparts, the ideologues of the new Dutch right have won a wide hearing for the idea that values are important. They have yet to convince Dutch society that they have found the right means of upholding these principles.

For further reading, go read “The Dutch Model: Multiculturalism and Muslim Immigrants” by Jane Kramer in the April 3rd, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, in which there is another interesting article on the poverty identity. In Relatively Deprived: How Poor Is Poor?, John Cassidy talks about the idea called “relative reprivation”:

Introducing a relative-poverty line would help shift attention to this larger problem of social exclusion. Although few attempts have been made to address the issue, the results have been promising. A recent long-term study of Head Start, which began in 1964, as one of the original “war on poverty” initiatives, found that poor children who participated in the program were more likely to finish high school and less likely to be arrested for committing crimes than those who did not. And in another initiative, undertaken between 1976 and 1998, the city of Chicago relocated thousands of impoverished African-Americans from inner-city projects to subsidized housing in middle-class, predominantly white suburbs; researchers found that the adults who participated were more likely to be employed, and their children were more likely to graduate from high school, than their inner-city counterparts. (A more recent experiment, in which the federal government gave vouchers to poor residents in a number of cities, enabling them to move to wealthier neighborhoods, has failed to produce similar gains. Many of the participants chose to live near one another, which researchers think may account for the disappointing results.)