by Rafaël Newman

Fatherhood and motherhood are always a compromise between a form of Nazi eugenics and a compulsion for repetition. —Paul B. Preciado

If it were up to certain contemporary authors, the title of arch-villain—or rather, Worst Person Ever—might go collectively to a particular category of human normally held up as a model of nurturance and care: viz, to anyone who has willingly and consciously engaged in the act of procreation, whether by “traditional” means, or with scientific assistance. Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh have written very different, equally angry indictments of parents, while those who appear in the works of Jenny Erpenbeck and Deborah Feldman give the Grimm Brothers a run for their money. And Paul B. Preciado, the gender theorist of my epigraph, is joined in his radically downbeat appraisal of human reproduction by Junot Diaz, who has accused dating apps like Tinder of propagating a species of selective racist breeding.

The convention of decrying rather than celebrating parenthood, of course, did not first arise with the Millennials, or even Generation X. In 1818, Mary Shelley chose as the epigraph to Frankenstein Adam’s surly question to God in Paradise Lost (1667):

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

—a complaint that places culpability for the travails of life squarely on the shoulders of progenitors, who carelessly indulge their arbitrary, self-centered whims (or allow free rein to their rampant libidos) at the expense of hapless future generations. Read more »

by Danielle Spencer

As we look toward wending our way out of the COVID-19 global health crisis, what tools can we use to make sense of what we are experiencing? For if there is anything self-evident in our current predicament, it is that any given field—medicine, sociology, political science, psychology—are insufficient in isolation. “Pandemic,” from the Greek πάνδημος, means of or belonging to all the people; and the challenges of this pandemic compel us to take a pan-disciplinary approach.

As it happens, the need for an inclusive and transdisciplinary approach to healthcare is one which has been expressed with regularity. In the U.S., for example, there have been a series of movements in the last 50 years or so; from the biopsychosocial model to patient-centered care, these reforms seek various ways of enacting Francis Peabody’s dictum that “the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.” “Patient-centered care” should be a redundancy—like food-centered eating, or text-centered reading, or air-centered breathing—but it’s an important corrective to the reductive proclivities of western biomedicine. In a similar spirit, the field of bioethics, arising in response to terrible abuses in research practices, is an intentionally interdisciplinary tent, inviting ethicists, clinicians, epidemiologists, researchers, and everyone with a stake in what happens to our bodies to join the dialogue. Just how inclusive and effective these efforts have proven to be is of course another matter entirely.

In more recent years my own home field of narrative medicine has emerged to join the effort. In part nourished by the late-20^th-century “narrative turn” in many humanities and social sciences disciplines (some might be surprised that we were ever estranged from narrative—but some of us certainly were) the field centers the importance of narrative competence in training clinicians and empowering all persons to engage with the narrative complexities of healthcare, striving for greater equity and justice. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

It is time to go home. You can pull down the window shade for some relief; then it’s only 100 degrees. An Air Burkina Fokker F28 has sidled up to join us on the tarmac in Bamako, Mali. Not quite home yet.

“Pull the strops around your west,” explains the flight attendant.

We’re leaving now though, en route to Dakar, rumbling along a bumpy, corrugated taxiway. We pull up to wait, curious about the glint of the other jet coming in. Turns out it’s full of whoever comes to Bamako on Royal Air Maroc.

Mali is scrub. It’s brush. It’s Sahel, hot as hell. We lumber into the air around eleven o’clock and we have spent one hour and seventeen minutes in Mali. Look down on Gambia and what do you see? Gambia the river glinting below the wing, Gambia the country a pelt of land on either side, itself gobbled up by Senegal, except where the river debouches to the sea. Read more »

Reflections in a shop window in Bozen, South Tyrol, this past Saturday.

by Bill Benzon

The purpose of a book review, I suppose,  is to tell the reader enough about the book to decide whether or not they would find it worthwhile.

What do you think would be in a book entitled Spacecraft? A catalogue of spacecraft, both real (e.g. Sputnik, Voyager, Apollo) and imaginary (the Enterprise, the Altair IV, the various ships in the recent Expanse novels and TV series)? A history maybe? Perhaps a focused discussion of, say, a dozen carefully chosen craft? Each of those implies criteria of judgment. Is the catalogue well-organized? Is the history coherent and easy to follow? Are the dozen examples well chosen, with each representing an important type?

Timothy Morton’s book, Spacecraft (Bloomsbury 2021), is none of those, though it contains aspects of all of them. What, then, is it?

The book might well be called Some Meditations on the Millennium Falcon. But how does one summarize and assess someone’s meditations?

What, by the way, IS a meditation? When I type “meditation” into a search engine, the return list includes, “meditations marcus aurelius,” “meditations in an emergency,” “meditations on first philosophy,” “meditations on the tarot,” “meditations book,” “meditations for anxiety”, and several others. If we combine emergency, first philosophy, tarot, and anxiety, with a discothèque and, I don’t know, Miss Piggy, and a fire cracker, we’ll be headed in the right direction. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

I was there when they first went up. From my south-facing bedroom on Morton Street in the village, I watched them grow, floor by floor, to a height unimaginable for that time. When they were finished, I began to measure their height against their distance from my bedroom. If they fell over, would they reach me? Not only was I ignorant of structural engineering, I never gave a thought to what would happen to the people inside if they did fall over. Years later I would learn that they didn’t fall over, they fell down. This time my thoughts were with those people inside.

The twin towers were not a pretty sight: In-your-face architecture for a nation with a chip on its shoulder, they served as metaphors for America’s perpetual declaration of might and size.

Their incongruous ground-floor gothic arches brought to mind to Joseph Campbell’s asserti0n that the height of buildings reflects a society’s priorities. For centuries, churches were the tallest buildings in a city. WTC and other 20th century skyscrapers exemplified the shift in a world gone secular and commercial. How appropriate that those arches, inadvertent homages to bygone beliefs, were the only things left standing after 9/11, looking eerily like the remains of a bombed out cathedral.

WTC-bashing was a perennial pastime in the early days. At Windows on the World, a restaurant on the top floor of one of the towers, I understood immediately why Frank Lloyd Wright considered the Harkness Tower in New Haven as the ideal place to live while he was teaching at Yale, because it was the only place in town where he wouldn’t have to see it.

Inside those towers, you didn’t feel grand and powerful, you felt small and insignificant, like one of the masses on those multi-storied cruise ships that have abandoned nautical elegance in favor of container ship utilitarianism.

After years away from New York, I landed in Newark late on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the 8th of September 2001. From the taxi into the city, I marveled at how those towers reflected the setting sun, their monolithic dullness transformed by light. One week later, I landed again in Newark and took another taxi into the city. The sun was setting, just as it had a week earlier. This time there was nothing left to catch the light. Then I wept.

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Sachin Chaudhuri, who lived in Bombay, came to know, I think from Binod Chaudhuri, about my teenage forays into writing political pieces, and he asked me to share them with him, and sent back detailed (handwritten) comments on them. A little later he started encouraging me to write for EW (copies of which he sent me every week). But I was too diffident; I was a neophyte Economics student, and I knew of EW’s sky-high reputation (Prime Minister Nehru had a standing instruction to his assistants that as soon as the weekly comes out it should immediately be at his desk). Many years later in my MIT days when I met Paul Samuelson, the great American economist, he once told me that he thought EW was a unique magazine, having topical columns on every week’s events and at the same time publishing specialized analytical articles, some quite technical. I found out that he, like many stalwart economists and other social scientists in the world at that time, had himself written for EW—this was partly a tribute to the magnetic personality of Sachin Chaudhuri which attracted some of the finest minds and created a rich intellectual aura around the magazine.

Finally I yielded, and my first EW article (it was a review article on a book by the Chicago economist Bert Hoselitz, the founding editor of the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change) came out while I was still at Presidency College. Since then over many decades I have lost count of the number of pieces I have contributed to EW and its successor EPW, some articles on quantitative analysis, some others straightforward opinion pieces. (Every time I have felt like paying a small part of my debt to Sachin Chaudhuri). Read more »