“On Friday morning, the author Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the neck as he stood onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, in western New York, where he was scheduled to give a lecture. The motivations of his attacker were not immediately clear, but Rushdie—one of the most celebrated contemporary writers—had lived under the threat of violence for decades. In 1989, the year after Rushdie published “The Satanic Verses,” a novel that imagines a fictional version of the Prophet Muhammad, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a decree, or fatwa, calling for Rushdie’s death.” —The New Yorker, 8/12/2022
______________________________________________

Last Day of Federíco García Lorca

“The writer died while mixing with the rebels, these are natural accidents of war . . .”
—Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco, Authoritarian

“The country has to toughen up … part of the problem …is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?”
— US president, Donald Trump, Authoritarian

…….. Federico in pajamas and blazer died at night
…….. wearing the sudden-death clothes of a poet killed
…….. because there’s nothing more dangerous to despots
…….. than an artist who tells the day’s truth
…….. because some force within insists.
…….. Accepting death for being one’s self
…….. is life’s condition of being one’s self
…….. because to speak is to be.

…….. This condition applies to all in all times
…….. because nothing ever changes the insistence of love
…….. & witness under any sky or sun.
…….. Although the atmosphere of place and eras swings from
…….. heaven to hell on a dime before the head-count has time
…….. to blink, and because the intractable who paint Guernica
…….. or write Canto Libre or Satanic Verses
…….. (artists who dare) could well end with bullet-through-skull
…….. because, to a despot, silence is golden (long-lived or brief)
…….. because despots know that painters and poets,
…….. sculptors and dancers will always speak
…….. from momentary possession
…….. because they’ve found the straightway
…….. to brainsoul of human-kind,
…….. the place despots only enter
…….. by means of fear & blood
…….. which always mocks
…….. the divine

…….. Jim Culleny, 3/7/19

by Marie Snyder

A mandate isn’t necessarily tyrannical. It’s a rule that, in any good government, is devised to protect the people from harm so we can better live and work together. We must monitor legislation to ensure we stop laws that can harm people, but we also need to get involved when harm comes from a lack of legislation. A good mandate is put in place when harm can be prevented in an enforceable way. For instance, despite the fact that skin cancer costs many lives each year, and suntan lotion can prevent these deaths, using suntan lotion isn’t mandated. It would be nearly impossible to enforce its use. Seatbelts, on the other hand, have been mandated for decades. In the states, traffic collisions take about six times as many lives as skin cancer*, so seatbelts potentially save more lives than sun lotion. They’re also much more easily noticeable and enforceable. 

I was just 11 years old, when I was first forced by my mum to strap myself to a car with a 2″ vinyl band with metal clips that held me tight against the seat. It felt like wearing a straight jacket, and I protested the infringement on my freedom. I wasn’t the only one; in many places “resistance was the norm” to seatbelt laws. Mum was avoiding fines of $240 from our Conservative Premier Bill Davis (about $1,200 now), and she was further cajoled by ads on TV showing the aftermath of people thrown from a car. Children weren’t kept from these gruesome images, sometimes shown at school assemblies. Such was the level of care we could expect back in the 1970s. 

Kids today are being similarly traumatized, it’s suggested, as they’re made to feel suffocated by polypropylene or silicone masks that can cause sweating and sometimes acne. Well, they were, but now they’re free to breathe the unfiltered air in buildings everywhere in many countries despite the elevated chance of someone nearby carrying an infectious disease, which, in some areas, kills more than ten times as many people as car accidents.* Covid hasn’t finished with us. In Canada, recent hospitalization valleys are higher than previous peaks!  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

More poetry, my response to loss.
John Weir

It’s 1980, I’ve just had my first proper kiss, and the newspapers are announcing the death of love.

Well, not quite. But that’s how it would come to feel in retrospect: amid all the rumors, the myths, the half-truths, the superstitions, the warnings. The awful, racist, homophobic “jokes”. The abrupt, unheralded appearance in “family” media of discussions of practices previously not even acknowledged, let alone written about. The grainy, horror-film portrait of the deceased Québécois flight attendant said to be “Patient Zero,” stylized a Typhoid Mary for our times by the tabloids (all due, of course, as much to a misreading as to a witch hunt: the “0” noted in statistics, when Gaëtan Dugas’s infection was reported by the CDC, would eventually turn out to have been an “O”, for “out of state”). And then the wasting. And the protests. And the deaths. And the funerals.

It was during this same period, in the early 1980s, that John Weir arrived in Manhattan, from rural New Jersey by way of Kenyon College, to spend the next decade and a half (for starters, before eventually moving to Brooklyn, where he now lives) in one of the world’s great centers of gay life and culture, soon to become one of the world’s great centers of gay death and resistance. Weir was to live through those first terrible years of AIDS himself, and in 1989 he published The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, an almost unbearably light-hearted account of the vicissitudes of a young man in New York during this period, and of his eventual death of the syndrome; it won the 1990 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Debut Novel. In 2006 there followed What I Did Wrong, a roman à clef recounting the demise of Weir’s best friend, the “semifamous gay author” David Feinberg, afflicted by the same illness, and the repercussions in the protagonist’s later life of his agonizing, transfiguring death. Both books have recently been re-issued by Fordham University Press, in recognition of their germinal status as contemporary literature and as records of a period in the recent past whose repercussions we are still feeling (on which more later). Read more »

Read more »

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

I think of that title as like a carnival barker’s come-on to get people to enter the tent. The “tent” is where I display an idea from which that statement about human history and human nature necessarily follows.

That approach seems appropriate because, while the carney barker’s line is quickly understood, the idea from which it necessarily follows requires traversing a series of steps. In other words, it takes a bit of work.

And when one adds to that work the boldness of the claim — to put the story of our species in a significantly different light — a reasonable person might think, “Probably a crackpot idea,” and walk on.

Hence the value of an appealing line that tells us that we are better creatures than our history makes us look. Appealing, in that it says something we’d like to be true. Read more »

Sunrise in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Bill Benzon

We in the West live in societies organized around the idea and practice of work, where work is conceived as activity undertaken for economic gain. While that activity may benefit the worker immediately and directly, as in the production of food or clothing for their own use or to be used by immediate family, more likely the activity is undertaken for money which may then be exchanged to whatever one wishes. The assumption has been that a single adult can earn enough money in 40 hours of work per week to support a family.

Charlie Keil and I argue, in Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature, that this assumption is no longer tenable. Too many people work for too long in return for a life that may be materially comfortable, but all too often is precarious, and, in any event, is not very satisfying. We suggest that the activity of music-making has much to teach us about living a satisfying life. This article is adapted from the opening chapter of Playing for Peace.

I stage the problem with a classic essay by the economist, John Maynard Keynes, in which he predicted that by now we would have a 15-hour work week. What happened to that? Then I take up music and dance as the fundamental basis of human nature. Then we take up the concept of a moralnet, which cross-cultural anthropologist Raoul Naroll argued was the fundamental building block of human society. We then conclude where we began, with Keynes. Read more »

Where The Mind Is Full of Fear, Head Is Bowed, a Lie Is Truth

by Rafiq Kathwari

Dapaan,
Rama saw Sita bathing nude
in Sitaharan, a spring near
the Line of Control in Kashmir.
It was lust at first sight.

Dapaan,
the demon king Ravana abducted Sita
to Sri Lanka to avenge a previous wrong.
Rama flew in anger south in his glitzy
winged chariot Made in Prehistoric India,
using indigenous materials.

Dapaan,
Hanuman, son of Vayu, God of the wind,
steered the chariot. Clouds cloaked it
to foil discovery by enemy radar.
Rama shot a divine arrow piercing Ravana
in the heart and killed him.

Dapaan,
Rama flew Sita back to Sitaharan where they lived
happily, until India partitioned herself on this day
75 years ago: first as Tragedy. Now, as Mythology.

***

Dapaan, a Kashmiri folkloric term, means “They Say.”

by Jim Britell

Rules of thumb

People by the millions don’t know the difference between a billion and a trillion.

To get an accurate remodeling estimate, obtain bids from three reliable contractors and add them together.

Big planets attract big meteorites.

Trustworthy people never say, “Trust me.”

A wild fox knows better than to pick a fight with a domestic cat.

No man can serve two bastards.

Old people and old houses always have one problem or another.

To get excellent medical care, develop interesting problems.

Don’t assume that someone who likes and forwards something actually read it.

People say, “going forward,” when they have no idea what’s coming next. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In 1998 when Amartya Sen got the Nobel Prize it was a big event for us development economists. Even though the Prize was announced primarily for his contributions to social choice theory (in particular, his exploration of the conditions that permit aggregation of  individual preferences into collective decisions in a way that is consistent with individual rights), the Prize Committee also referred to his work on famines and the welfare of the poorest people in developing countries. Even this fractional recognition of his work on economic development came after a long neglect of development economics in the mainstream of economics. The only other development economist recipients of the Prize had been Arthur Lewis and Ted Schultz simultaneously decades back.

As development economists we all grew up on the classic 1954 article by Arthur Lewis, which as a combination of economic theory and a sense of rich panoramic history still remains exemplary in the whole of economics. As someone born in the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean he was the first economist from a developing country to get the Prize. I met him at Princeton shortly after he got it. John Lewis, another professor at Princeton who was a specialist on development aid and on India, whom I had known for some years, took me to have lunch with Arthur Lewis, whom I found to be a simple and charming man. (I still remember him, with his suit and tie, lying down flat on the floor of the faculty lounge to show John a particular exercise that he was advising John to do to cope with his back problem). Shortly afterward I was invited, I think by Carlos and Gus Ranis at Yale to contribute a chapter in a book they were editing in honor of Arthur Lewis. In this chapter I formalized and expanded on an idea on some historical aspects of tropical trade that he had exposited in a set of lectures in 1969 in Sweden. Read more »