by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Some time in 1919, or so the story goes, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was asked whether it was true that only three people in the world understood relativity. Apparently, he thought for a moment and then asked: “Who's the third?” Depending on your mood, that can either sound witty or just plain arrogant, but once you have read his beautiful exposition of the theory, it is difficult to say that reply was unjustified.

Eddington has gone down in history as the man who led the solar expedition to Principe, verified that starlight was indeed deflected by the Sun, just as Einstein had predicted, and hence “proved” the general theory of relativity. That is how he is known, but I think his true claim to fame lies in his deep and intimate understanding of an obscure theory, and the elegance with which he was able to convey his impressions to the public. Eddington had a rare gift for arranging ideas in such a logical and clear order that the progression begins to seem almost inevitable. When you reach the rather surprising conclusion at the end, even though part of you is stunned by the statement, another part is thinking “Well, of course. What else could it possibly be?”

Despite the fact that he was quite a prolific writer and lecturer, for some inexplicable reason his works are not nearly as well known as they deserve to be. Having such an incredible resource available to us, and yet never using it, seems to me a great shame. And so, since to celebrate the centennial of the general theory of relativity, I thought I would walk you through Einstein's (still) revolutionary ideas, with some help from relativity's Other Man.

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by Matt McKenna

A Most Violent Year is a disappointing movie. The performances are good, the cinematography is beautiful, but the film adds up to a lot of nothing. For all the pregnant pauses, for all the threats of violence, and for all the moral conundrums the characters confront, nothing ever… happens. By the time the credits roll, a deus ex machina has ensured that absolutely no lessons are learned nor are any characters fundamentally changed, and the audience is left to wonder why it spent the last two hours watching these characters mill about. The same can be said about the recent hullabaloo involving Hillary Clinton and her use of a personal email account while serving as Secretary of State. What initially appeared to be a juicy political scandal involving Clinton withholding documents from the State Department ended up being, like A Most Violent Year, a major letdown. “Emailgate” therefore has the dubious distinction of being the first non-scandal scandal of the 2016 Presidential election cycle. Even though both A Most Violent Year and emailgate have interesting premises, the execution of each story evades their respective interesting parts and wastes their potential.

A Most Violent Year stars Oscar Issacs in the role of Abel Morales, the eye-rollingly honest owner of Standard Oil who attempts to run his business on the up-and-up despite the moral bankruptcy of his corrupt industry. Standard Oil's competitors don't appreciate Morales' success, however, and decide to intimidate him by hijacking his company's trucks and beating the drivers without mercy. There's an interesting story to be told under this premise, perhaps one that shows how Morales must figure out how to keep his employees safe in an environment where being on the right side of the law is both a business risk for himself and a health risk for his employees. But that is not what the film is about. Instead, the film's primary conflict centers around Morales' difficulties in securing a bank loan to buy a fuel oil terminal and obtain dominance in the industry. The safety of his drivers is only relevant to the plot insofar as that if the drivers start carrying weapons and engage their attackers in armed conflict, Morales' bank might back out of the loan. In terms of drama, this poses a problem: it's hard to care about the truck drivers' safety because the protagonist doesn't care about it. At the same time, it's hard to care about Morales' struggle to secure a loan and buy an oil terminal because–come on–it's a loan to buy an oil terminal.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” –Voltaire

In heaven, there will be no more sea journeys, says Virgil. For much of human history, to journey by ship across open waters was thought of almost as an act of transgression. It was something requiring great temerity and audacity. It was therefore something not to be taken lightly.

Crossing boundaries, such journeys often ended in ruin.

Shipwrecked.

German philosopher Hans Blumenberg explored the seafaring metaphor in his dazzling essay Shipwreck with Spectator. Utterly exquisite in its historical details; the writing is incredibly evocative.

Metaphors are Blumenberg's main philosophical project. According to Blumenberg, so fundamental to philosophy are they that they stand in for truth. He says:

The relevance of absolute metaphors, their historical truth . . . is pragmatic in a very broad sense. By providing a point of orientation, the content of absolute metaphors determines a particular attitude or conduct [Verhalten]; they give structure to a world, representing the nonexperienceable, nonapprehensible totality of the real. (Paradigms, 14)

That is to say, metaphors light up for us an irreducible and untranslatable truth about the “totality of the real.”

What about shipwrecks then? What is it about the metaphor of being shipwrecked that lights up our understanding of being? Or putting it another way, what essential elements of being human are being illuminated by this metaphor according to Blumenberg?

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by Eric Byrd

Orlando's biography spans five centuries but I think Woolf endows but two, the sixteenth and the nineteenth, with a full measure of her erudite brio and critical fantasy. Nothing in the novel surpasses the Renaissance fantasia of the first chapter – sixty pages of enchanting, festive, parti-colored prose. Orlando opens his/her eyes on the “Merrie” England young Yeats found in Spenser – the “indolent, demonstrative” England where men “still wept when they were moved, still dressed themselves in joyous colours, and spoke with many gestures.” The novel's conception as a tribute to Vita Sackville-West, as a semi-private jeu d'esprit, recalls that Elizabethan coterie classic, the Arcadia with which Sir Philip Sidney entertained his sister and beguiled his exile from court. Queen Elizabeth is the age's monstre sacré :

At the height of her triumph when the guns were booming at the Tower and the air was thick enough with gunpowder to make one sneeze and the huzzas of the people rang beneath the windows, she pulled him down among the cushions where her women had laid her (she was so worn and old) and made him bury his face in that astonishing composition — she had not changed her dress for a month — which smelt for all the world, he thought, recalling his boyish memory, like some old cabinet at home where his mother's furs were stored. He rose, half suffocated from the embrace. ‘This', she breathed, ‘is my victory!'— even as a rocket roared up and dyed her cheeks scarlet.

The Great Frost freezes birds in midair, herds on the roads, ploughmen in their fields, and “bird-scaring boys” struck stark in the act, “one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone raised to throw at the ravens who sat, as if stuffed, upon a hedge.”

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by Sarah Firisen

I haven't spent a lot of time in churches over the years, being born a Jew and becoming an atheist as a teenager, it’s not a common hangout place for me. But when I have, weddings, christenings, sitting in the back during mass at various European cathedrals, there’s been a solemn stillness over the place, most people quietly paying attention to the priest-like person at the front talking until the moment when it was time for the whole congregation to sing a hymn in unison. Sitting in the ladies gallery of the conservative synagogue – shul – where my cousin’s daughter was bat mitzvahed yesterday, I was struck by how different a Shabbat service is from a Sunday morning in a church; it’s not quiet. For almost all of the service, all the men daven (pray) along with the Rabbi. They do it at slightly different speeds, so there’s little synchronicity involved. But behind this chanting, prayer and singing, there’s the buzz of conversation; Jews are pretty noisy in shul. The women, banished upstairs and not part of most of the service, have very little to do but chat with their neighbors. But even the men walk the aisles, shaking hands, pretty openly having conversations. It’s part of the melody of the service that it be interspersed with an occasional loud “shhhh” which brings the volume level down for about 30 seconds.

These sights and sounds are ones I remember well from childhood. In fact, even though this shul was not the one I grew up attending, it could have been; everything about it reminded me of a childhood spent attending Hebrew school and Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah services. And despite an adulthood spent firmly rejecting not just my own religion, but all religion and belief in God, to my surprise these memories were very pleasant and comforting to me. I've always felt something in the melodic patterns of Jewish chanting and music that has a pull on my DNA, not just taking me back through my own childhood, but linking me to the history, joy and sufferings of generations of my family.

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by Bill Benzon

By the middle of the previous century anthropologists had come to argue that each culture has its own patterns and that those patterns pervaded its social practices, its practical arts, it’s beliefes and attitudes, and its expressive culture. The central expression of this conception can be found in Ruth Benedict's seminal study of Patterns of Culture. She argued her thesis by showing that the Pueblos of the American Southwest were Apollonian in their formality and emotional reserve, the Dobu of Melanesia were Paranoid in their bending of patterns of hostility into functioning social structures, while the peoples of America's Northwest Coast were Dionysian in their search for religious ecstasy. Cultures are not miscellaneous grab-bags of traits, they are patterned wholes.

So it is with European America and African America. Each of these cultures has a pattern, but those patterns have been blending and crossing for centuries. I have come to believe, for example, that the high tech world, though dominated by Americans of European descent, owes an enormous cultural debt to improvisational patterns of African American descent. Think of the difference between performances by a symphony orchestra and a bebop quintet. The orchestra is a large ensemble with a large number of well-defined specialists and it performs music that has been prepared beforehand under the direction of conductor who has ultimate control over every aspect of the performance. The bebop quartet is quite different, with much of the music made up on the spot. While one of the members more likely than not will be the leader, he (or she) does not dictate the performance.

In the next section of this “essay” I present a lyrical and impressionistic account of the America blending of Africa and Europe in the software world. Then I calm down and run through the same material in a more conventional matter, looking at basketball and football as embodying very different visions of organizational style and execution. At the middle of the previous century we have, for example, the steel industry and the automobile industry as examples of football-like organizational style. But the flourishing of software and related businesses in the last quarter of the century called for a more basketball-like style.

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by Sue Hubbard

It was an early spring morning. The sky deep blue and the wind cruel as journalists and international camera crews gathered for the unveiling of the tenth sculpture commissioned for Trafalgar Square's empty fourth plinth. A stylish coffee vendor on a vintage bicycle, peddling for all he was worth to provide the necessary power, was producing very slow cups of coffee to the freezing press throng.

The Fourth Plinth is in the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square and was originally intended to hold an equestrian statue of William IV. But in 1840 the money ran out before it was completed. For over 150 years the plinth's fate was debated. Then in 1998 the Royal Society for the Arts commissioned three sculptures intended for temporary display and the then, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith, set up an enquiry to elicit opinions from public art commissioners, critics and members of the public as to its future. The recommendation was for a rolling programme of temporary artworks. In 2003, the ownership of Trafalgar Square was transferred from Westminster City Council to the Mayor of London. This marked the beginning of the Mayor's Fourth Plinth Commission, which has been occupied over the years by artists such as Anthony Gormley, Marc Quinn, Yinkae Shonibare and Katarina Fritsch. Most have been British, with a smattering of Germans.

This new commission, Gift Horse by the German artist Hans Haacke, was unveiled by London's current Mayor, the colourful Boris Johnson, and the press scrum seemed every bit as keen to catch Boris's witty bons mots as his tousled blond hair blew in the wind, as to watch the statue's unveiling. The sculpture portrays a skeletal, riderless horse – an ironic comment on the William IV equestrian statue originally planned for the site. Tied to the horse's raised front leg is an electronic ribbon, like a birthday bow, which displays live prices from the London Stock Exchange. Its louring bronze frame is reminiscent of the dinosaurs in South Kensington's Natural History Museum, though the piece was, in fact, inspired by the engraving, The Anatomy of the Horse 1766, by that master of equine painting, George Stubbs, housed in the nearby National Gallery.

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