by Martin Butler

Shoshona Zuboff’s “The age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of Power” gives an impressive and comprehensive account of how the big tech companies gained their economic dominance, and why this is a problem.[1] We hear much about how these companies fail to pay their fair share of taxes, how they have become monopolies, and how they enable online abuse.[2] Zuboff’s concerns, however, are with a less obvious problem but one that is perhaps more insidious.

The main companies she has in mind are Google and Facebook, although the methods they have discovered are, she claims, spreading throughout the capitalist economy and giving rise to a new form of capitalism altogether, which she identifies as surveillance capitalism. This, she argues, is something so different from anything we have experienced before that we are completely unprepared to deal with it, and it has arisen so quickly and come to dominate so much about our lives that we are still like rabbits caught in the head-lights. Zuboff reminds us of a pivotal truth, easily forgotten, that despite the disingenuously user-friendly message they assiduously promote, these two companies are in essence platforms for advertising and this more than anything else determines what they do. Read more »

Burning Bush

At twenty I danced the tops of walls
Najinsky of the double top plate

bent in-two like an onion shoot
unbending up through an earthen gate

lifting sticks to be put in place
nailing their tails held against my boot

walking the wires of gravity’s net
as a spider commands the filament web

hung in the crotch of the jamb of a door
between one post and its lintel head

From the crow’s nest of my wall-top perch
poised to get the next piece set

in air as clear as a baby’s thoughts
surveying homes unlived-in yet

fresh-footed, balanced, without a clue
assessing my recent work and worth:

the shadows of studs plumb and true
lying like bars over up-turned earth

Sweatskin slickkening in the light
breath as sure as the bellows of god

biceps built by the truth of weight,
muscles doing their natural jobs:

arms of sinew, bone and grit
reaching to haul the next board up

to be lifted and laid wall to ridge
and fixed by hammer blows on steel

fueled by blasts of the burning bush
in the orchard of god that has ever spun

like the fire that made big Moses reel
the burning bush we call the sun

Jim Culleny
2/22/13

by Joseph Shieber

Optimism about the miraculous speed with which researchers were able to develop and test extremely effective anti-Covid vaccines is beginning to sour as vaccination rates slow down. These slowing rates raise worries about whether the United States will be able fully to defeat Covid-19, since a full return to normalcy would require high levels of vaccine compliance — much higher levels than we’re currently witnessing.

The challenge, as I’ve pointed out before, is that pandemics force us to recognize that our behaviors have implications beyond our own lives. Without sufficient vaccine uptake, we won’t be able to return to work, school and leisure activities with the same maskless nonchalance with which we pursued them in 2019.

This fact gives the lie to the framing of the vaccine on some media sites, framing that suggests that vaccine deniers are simply exercising their “personal freedom” in choosing not to get vaccinated. In a very real sense, my freedoms — my freedom not to have to wear a mask when I lecture in the classroom, to be able to send my children to school in an environment in which they don’t have only 10 minutes in which to eat lunch … no talking allowed! — depend on others’ willingness to get vaccinated. Read more »

Jorg Madlener. Elegy For Syria, 2020.

More here and here.

Thanks to Vicki Sharp for bringing this work to my attention.

by Jackson Arn

To ease the days’ constipation, I tried exercise. At first I jogged, but jogging was less interesting than the park I was supposed to jog through. I did pushups. These also proved less interesting than I had hoped. Sit-ups were an okay compromise between ignoring my phone and giving it my full attention, but after a while, say fifteen minutes, giving would take revenge on ignoring and the days would be re-constipate themselves and my apartment would feel smaller than ever.

I was smart enough to recognize that the problem was me. When I was in middle school, the object of my earliest non-nocturnal boner inspired me to get my dad’s barbells out of the basement. This went on for maybe three days. Apart from that, I’d never exercised on purpose. My powers of concentration are too weak. They’re the kind that inspire long articles about why America is doomed and there’s nothing we can do. My mom used to play me jazz and opera. Neither took. So it followed that I couldn’t exercise until I had become a different kind of person, and since that seemed unlikely it also followed that I was unlikely to exercise much. I concluded this in between refreshing my Bitcoin page. If civilization goes boom I won’t be able to outrun my neighbors but at least I’ll be a billionaire.

A few days later, I realized there might be a loophole. I was checking my Bitcoins at the time, and the rectangle of my laptop filled with an almost-as-big rectangle. It was a pop-up for a workout class. The face of the class was a man called Dave, or a “man” called Dave, or a man called “Dave,” or a “man” “called” “Dave.” Dave, as I’ll call him, resembled a hard worker, but he never sweated. Whenever I got a look at his whole body it had that post-greenroom glibness, like it moved because some offstage somebody said so and not because Dave’s muscles clenched.

I didn’t go for the class since all my savings were tied up in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, but the basic idea of the ad seemed correct to me. My concentration was weak, but even I could stand in my apartment and imitate someone else’s exercise, even if they weren’t really in my apartment. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

A lyrical disaster movie? That sounds like a contradiction in terms, yet the Swedish collective Crazy Films delivered just that in 2018 with The Unthinkable, and it is arriving on American platforms this month.

The picture is a hybrid of Swedish family drama and low-budget but well-executed calamity, as though a late-career Ingmar Bergman decided to make a contemporary apocalyptic film with Roland Emmerich as an advisor. It’s toward the milder end of perpetual Hollywood bombast, which only makes it more effective because its moments of terror swoop in hawk-like and leave you dazed, just like the film’s protagonists. 

Crazy Films is five guys who have been making movies together since they were kids. Their previous works were shorts on YouTube, so the sustained, polished handling of on-set, model, and CGI mayhem here is really remarkable, as is the existential subtext and the unapologetically dour nature of its hero. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

The springtime glory of a farmhouse in Vahrn, South Tyrol, on a rainy day last week.

by Madhusudhan Raman

All of human life is quite literally coded into two long, complementary strands of genetic material that fold themselves into a double helix. When cells divide, copies of this genetic code must be made – a process that is known as replication. The double helix unwinds, and a “replication fork” makes its way down the helix in much the same way that a slider separates the teeth of a zipper. Once separated, enzymes get to work on replicating them. Except, only one of the strands is replicated continuously. The second strand is replicated piecewise first, and these pieces – called Okazaki fragments – are then fused together.

Biography, too, is an act of replication. The biographer takes a life and sets out to write its ink-and-paper twin. And while most biographers transcribe life continuously, following the natural flow of time from birth to death, Charles Seife courageously swims against the current. For in Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, we are treated to an Okazaki-esque biography: one that is discontinuously told, pieced together and related in reverse.

In his twenties, Stephen W. Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disorder that caused him to progressively lose control of nerve cells that allow for movement. His disability, which soon necessitated the use of a motorised wheelchair and a computerised speech device, defined him in the eyes of the public, much to his disappointment. Hawking the Pop Culture Icon was in his element in the limelight, though, enjoying a celebrity status that afforded him cameos in Star Trek and The Simpsons, in addition to a number of other documentaries. Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi

Hassan Abbas’s  book, “The Prophet’s Heir: The Life of Ali ibn Abi Talib,” provides an excellent basis for much research, reflection and conversations.

For many of us this poetic verse feels as though it were a statement of fact:

Ghalib Nadeem e dost sey ati hey bo e dost
Mashgul e Haq hon bandagee-ey boo Turab mein

From the fragrance of the divine friend comes the scent of the friend
I am immersed in search of Truth in my devotion to Ali.

Who are these friends and what is that scent? The Message of Islam is revealed onto the Prophet Mohammad at age 40. Alongside Mohammad is his unwavering constant dearest companion—one of the first to accept Islam— and born in the Kaaba, his 9 year old kid cousin Ali ibn Talib whose mother and father raised Mohammad as their own child, long before Ali was born. For Mohammad, peace be upon him, Ali is the loyal adoring kid brother, the protege, and in age difference the son. The Prophet chooses Ali, as his example of the path of Islam the Shariah—-he recognizes him and entrusts Ali as the exemplary embodiment of what Islam means. The Prophet is the Messenger and his closest companion Ali, who pledged his loyalty to Allah and his Prophet and his message is the essence of Islam, he is the Shariah—- lived. The Prophet peace be upon him proclaimed this essence as:

Man Kunto Maula fa hazaa Ali-un Maula 

For whom ever I am Leader and Teacher, Ali is his Leader and teacher too.

For most of us gathered here today this essence translates to exquisite beauty lit by splendor achieved through love and loss and longing and struggle. This beauty moves us inexplicably, —moves us towards justice and generosity and kindness. Read more »