by Derek Neal

As an aspiring writer of fiction, I like to try and understand the mechanics of what I’m reading. I attempt to ascertain how a writer achieves a certain effect through the manipulation of language. What must happen for us to get “wrapped up” in a story, to lose track of time, to close a book and feel that the world has shifted ever so slightly on its axis? The first step, I think, is for writers to persuade readers to believe in the world of the story. In a first-person narrative, this means that the reader must accept the world of the novel as filtered through the subjective viewpoint of the narrator. But it’s not really the outside world that we are asked to accept, it’s the consciousness of the narrator. To create what I’m calling consciousness—basically, a feeling of being in the world—and to allow the reader to experience it is one of the joys of reading. But how does a writer achieve this mysterious feat?

One way may be to have the narrator use language that mirrors and reproduces their inner state. This is often easiest to see in the opening pages of a novel, as this is where a writer will establish a baseline for the story that follows. One such example is Teju Cole’s novel Open City, which begins mid-sentence: “And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.” It is a strange sentence with which to begin a story. The “and” implies something prior, but we are oblivious to what this could be. The “so” is a discourse marker, something we would say after a lull in spoken conversation, perhaps to change the subject. But once again, we’re unaware of what the previous subject might be. The effect is that we, as readers, are swept along with the narrator on one of his walks, beginning the novel in step with him, in media res not just in plot but also in terms of grammar. Read more »

by Dick Edelstein

Following Hulu’s release of “The United States vs Billie Holiday”, the singer’s musical career has become a topic of discussion. The docu-drama is based on events in her life after she got out of prison in 1948, having served eight months on a set up drug charge. Now she was again the target of a campaign of harassment by federal agents. Narcotics boss Harry Anslinger was obsessed with stopping her from singing that damn song – Abel Meeropol’s haunting ballad “Strange Fruit”, based on his poem about the lynching of Black Americans in the South. Anslinger feared the song would stir up social unrest, and his agents promised to leave Holiday alone if she would agree to stop performing it in public. And, of course, she refused. In this particular poker game, the top cop had tipped his hand, revealing how much power Holiday must have had to be able to disturb his inner peace.

Writing in The Nation, jazz musician Ethan Iverson noted that all three films based on Holiday’s life have delighted in tawdry episodes without managing to convey the measure of her musical achievement. Hilton Als, in a review in The New Yorker, was unable to conceal his disdain for the recent biopic, observing “you won’t find much of Billie Holiday in it—and certainly not the superior intelligence of a true artist.” Both writers insist that Holiday’s memory has been short-changed in the media, and it follows that the public cannot be fully aware of her contribution to musical culture. Iverson’s thoughtful piece analyzes her many innovative contributions to musicianship and jazz vocal interpretation, while here I propose to comment on only a couple of these. But first I want to call attention to the ineffable quality of Holiday’s singing, how her delivery of lyrics and free-flowing phrasing of melody tug at the emotions. Those effects defy analysis; you have to hear Billie Holiday’s singing to know the excitement it conveys. Feeling that emotion comes easily, but describing exactly how she generates it is impossible. Read more »

Wendel White. South Lynn Street School, Seymour, Indiana, 2007.

In the series Schools For The Colored.

“This meaningful effort features the architectural remains of structures once used as segregated schools for African Americans in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Wendel explains his focus on these states, “The project is a survey of the places that were connected to the historic system of racially segregated schools (broadly defined as “Jim Crow” segregation, in its various forms of de jure or de facto segregation) established at the southern boundaries of the northern United States. My particular interest is in the regions of the northern “free” states that bordered the slave states (sometimes known as the “Up-South,” just over the line to freedom) as regions of unique concentrations of black settlements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

The Schools for the Color project statement begins with a quote from W.E.B. Du Bois where he references being “shut out from their world by a vast veil”. This descriptive passage influenced the presentation of these structures, redacting the landscape surrounding the buildings as a metaphor for loss, separation and division.”

More here, here, and here.

by Omar Baig

In the Fall of 1959, Cora Diamond left a computer programming job at IBM to enroll at the University of Oxford’s philosophy department: despite earning a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Swarthmore College and an incomplete Master’s in Economics from MIT. After finishing a B. Phil in 1961, Diamond spent the next decade teaching at flagship universities across the UK: at Swansea (Wales), Sussex (England), and Aberdeen (Scotland). Diamond returned to America as a visiting lecturer at the University of Virginia’s philosophy department, from 1969 to 1970. They hired her as a full-time Associate Professor in 1971, making Diamond one of the few women to teach at UVa’s main College of Arts and Sciences—coinciding with the first incoming class of 450 undergraduate women.

From 1973 to 1976, Diamond posthumously compiled, edited, and published Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (1976), quickly becoming a pre-eminent scholar of New Wittgenstein, or ordinary language philosophy. In just a few years, Diamond branched out from this drier, more technical work—by building on two of Wittgenstein’s most prominent students, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch—towards her own non-moralistic and anti-essentialist approach to ethics. “Eating Meat and Eating People” (1978), for example, starts with a peculiar, yet indelible fact about the relatively few animals that humans deem edible vs. all the other species deemed non-edible. The near-universal taboo against human cannibalism means, “We do not eat our dead,” even in cases of accidental death or consensual cannibalism. Yet, why do these cases normalize the eating and salvaging of what may otherwise be first-class flesh? Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Santiniketan in my childhood used to attract a lot of foreign scholars, artists and students, which was a boon to a young stamp-collector like me. Every day the sorting at the small post office was completed by mid-morning and many of the residents used to come and collect their mail themselves. I, along with a couple of other children, used to wait there for the foreigners to collect their mail. As soon as one was spotted, we used to scream “Stamp! Stamp!”; they obliged us by tearing off the stamps in their envelopes. Soon I had a thick album of foreign stamps. I used to linger wistfully over every stamp and imagined things about those distant foreign lands. (I remember Swiss stamps said only ‘Helvetia’ on them, which I could never find in the only world map I had at home).

The other times I used to go to the post office was to mail my grandmothers’ frequent letters, which she had dictated to me the previous day. She was a marvelous cook, spent long hours in the kitchen despite her osteoarthritic stoop, and then after everybody has been fed, she’d sit down in the kitchen with her own food and call me to take the dictation of her letters. She was not illiterate, but she liked my ways of phrasing in an organized way the outpouring of her emotions and frustrations in those letters to her near ones. My skill at concise expressions of intense personal feelings, honed in my grandmother’s kitchen, was later tested once in a crowded Kolkata post office. There an illiterate migrant worker from a Bihar village approached me for filling the money-order form that he required for remitting a meager amount of money to his family back at the village. When it came to filling the measly little space at the end of the form where you are allowed to send a brief message, this worn-out man sat on the floor on his haunches and told me what to write there in sporadic bursts of raw emotion (an incoherent mixture of his affection, anxiousness, and longing) for his daughter and wife in the village whom he has not seen for many months, and my skill was sorely tested, and I think I failed, particularly because the language had to be Hindi, in which I was deficient. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Raji Jayaraman

We’d had dogs for as long as I could remember. My family had a pair of Labradors back in India when I was born. Blackie was black. Brownie was brown. My cousin, who inherited Blackie when my parents left the country, later got a ginger-haired Labrador. He named her Ginger. It was clearly in this family tradition that I named Waggy, Waggy.

He was a jolly fellow, always happy to see us. He’d race after the Land Rover as we drove into the driveway of our house in Somalia, wagging his tail, bounding up to greet us under the thorn tree where we parked the car. Although he was always ready to play, we didn’t often oblige because it was just too hot. That winter though, the winter Waggy died, the weather was exceptional. It was an unusually wet December. The temperatures fell with the rain. The dust settled and, with the thorns in the yard briefly buried, we played with Waggy outside until we could no longer bear the stench of ants that came with the rains. I just learned that although these ants’ genus is Paltothyreus, they are commonly known as the “African stink ant”. Clearly, more erudite people than I take the descriptive function of names seriously.

That year, we had a house guest. Anand bhaia was a Bengali-Fijian priest and, it being December, our parents adopted his Christmas traditions with gusto. We were unenthusiastic, but our parents insisted on our active participation. “Atithi Devo Bhava,” our mother explained. A guest is God. The irony of this Hindu foundation for her embrace of Christianity was not lost on her but, blinded by indignation, we mistook her generosity for hypocrisy. Read more »

The Novotel Hotel at the Franz Josef Strauss International Airport in Munich, where I stayed overnight in late June.

by Thomas Wells

Billions of people around the world continue to live in great poverty. What is the responsibility of rich countries to address this?

This essay takes the view that the best we can do is the least we ought to do, but also that the best we can do is heavily constrained by political feasibility as well as logistics. In a democracy the best we can do is what the majority are willing to go along with, and this is something quite different from what purely moral arguments would suggest. For example, rich countries could increase aid programmes from their current pitiful level of $160 billion (less than 0.2% of global GDP). However this would be unpopular since that money could have been spent on more nice things for their own citizens, and lots of rich country governments are already worrying about how to raise the taxes to pay off their Covid debts. Hence that idea fails the political feasibility test. For another example, rich countries could reduce their trade barriers so that poorer countries can access more economic opportunities. Since trade benefits all parties (by definition) this would be a net benefit to rich countries and so it should be politically feasible even though industries threatened with competition would complain. However, rich countries already have very low or zero tariffs on almost everything that is easy to send around the world, so the impact of further liberalisation would be rather tiny.

But there is something else quite obvious that rich countries could do which would have a dramatic impact on global poverty while also having the political advantage of making rich countries even richer. Globalisation has achieved the (more or less) free movement of goods and capital between countries and this has made the world much richer. But people are mostly still stuck behind political borders. Why shouldn’t labour also be allowed to move to wherever it can earn the best price, i.e. to wherever it can be most productive? This would allow rich countries to get cheap low-skilled labour (e.g. to pick our asparagus and care for our old people) while poor people would get access to higher productivity working environments (and hence higher pay) than they could find in their home countries. According to a 2005 calculation by the World Bank, if rich countries globally used migrants to expand their labour force by just 3% this would generate $300 billion in gains for the migrants’ countries (via remittances) and would also save the rich countries more than $50 billion. In other words, rich countries would get even richer while doing far more good for the world than anything else they could try! Read more »

by Jackson Arn

The best thing about a painting is that no two people ever paint the same one. They could be sitting in the same garden, staring at the same tree in the same light, poking the same brush in the same pigments, but in the end none of that matters. The two hypothetical tree-paintings are going to turn out different, because the two hypothetical painters are different also.

Because the paintings are different, it stands to reason that one is likely to look better than the other. Not certain, but likely. Granted, if the two painters are five-year-olds lacking fine motor control and knowledge of linear perspective, their trees are bound to be equally bad. And granted, if the two are Leonardo and Picasso, their trees will be equally good—different in style, of course, but alike in goodness. Art is subjective, but like everything else subjectivity has its limits. Most of the time, one person is better at painting.

The person who paints the better tree is not necessarily the more careful painter. One person could sit in the garden all afternoon working on a leaf, wait 20 hours for the planet to roll back around, work on leaf the second, and so on for months until the painting is complete—and completely awful. The other person could show up hungover and underslept, sit for fifteen minutes, stand, and leave behind a better work of art. It’s probably worse the other way around. One person could show up at the crack of dawn, paint with brisk, efficient brushstrokes, and be off in time to fix their kids breakfast, such is their dedication to the twin deities of Art and Family. The second person could arrive weeks later, work for months while their children starve, and paint the better painting, and the only thing the world would care about is that the painting is better. All the advantages person two had, all the time person one was forced to sacrifice—nobody cares. All they care about is who painted the better tree.

Yes, I’m right—it’s much worse that way. And not just because of the starving children.

*

I am not a painter, but I probably could have been. Until very recently, I was a solar engineer. Science always came easy. I never loved it, never got so much as a squirt of dopamine from biology homework or an A plus on a physics exam. It’s just that I was incapable of not getting A pluses in science classes. That was my curse. My unrequested gift.

I can’t remember much about the things I painted back then, but I remember the joy they brought me. Nothing, not even the events of last year, can take that away. All careers in the arts begin with joy. It’s the acorn from which the oak of greatness grows. Inspiration is also needed, and perspiration, and dedication, and luck. But joy is the acorn. Read more »

by Azra Raza

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

Ninety percent cancers diagnosed at Stage I are cured. Ninety percent diagnosed at Stage IV are not. Early detection saves lives. Unfortunately, more than a third of the patients already have advanced disease at diagnosis. Most die. We can, and must, do better. But why be satisfied with diagnosing Stage I disease that also requires disfiguring and invasive treatments? Why not aim higher and track down the origin of cancer? The First Cell. To do so, cancer must be caught at birth. This remains a challenging problem for researchers.

Cancer is a silent killer. To sight its diverse neonatal guises and behavior, we need to get more creative. Maybe change direction and look for the earliest stages of carcinogenesis in people who don’t have cancer yet but are at high risk of developing it. But what should we be looking for? Among many possibilities, one answer is Giant cells. This installment of the series on cancer is devoted to how, when and why these weird distended, strikingly abnormal looking gigantic cells appear in tumors and in the blood of cancer patients.

Giant cells: Hiding in plain sight

First identified in 1838 by Muller, and described with beautiful accompanying illustrations by Virchow in 1858, bloated giant cancer cells with many nuclei, have been regularly seen in tumors and labeled as dying or degenerating cells, incapable of dividing, and therefore of no importance. Besides, in fully formed cancers, they are extremely rare, close to negligible. Their number increases during relapse of cancer after treatment has destroyed the majority of tumor cells. Giant cells appear when there are no other cancer cells and disappear when cancer cells reappear.

A pair of coincidental happenings led me to conclude that cancer might originate in two cells that fuse and cooperate for mutual benefit, forming a Giant cell. Most likely, an exaggerated response to stress in the organ (infection, toxic exposure?). Read more »

by Usha Alexander

[This is the eleventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

In the beginning, the god of the Biblical creation myths makes the Earth and sky. Over the next several days, he makes the sun, moon, and stars, grasses and fruit trees, most of the animals, and rain. Then, scooping up a bit of fresh mud, he molds a being who looks much like himself, a man, and into this homunculus he breathes life. As a dwelling place for this newborn Adam, he plants a lavishly abundant garden, filling it with beautiful and delicious plants. The creator tells Adam, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Then, realizing that Adam might feel lonely, the deity gives him cattle, fowl, and all the “beasts of the field.” Yet none of these quite seems a suitable companion, so from one of Adam’s ribs, god fashions a woman.

Quite pleased with his handiwork, the divinity instructs his new humans on how to live. He tells them they must increase their population. They must also replenish the Earth, and in doing so, subdue it and exercise dominion over all its living things. The almighty then leaves the newlyweds alone to get on with their business of eating, procreating, replenishing, and dominating, which they apparently take to just fine. Indeed, neither of the pair has any memorable comment on their situation, until the day Serpent piques Eve’s curiosity, telling her that if she and Adam were to eat from the one forbidden tree, rather than die, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Now Eve takes new notice of this tree, understanding that it could make her “wise.” Enticed, she picks a fruit and munches it. Whatever she discovers then—new knowledge or wisdom or just fine flavor—is simply too good not to share with her husband and, despite their creator’s clear injunction to him, Adam follows his wife’s lead. Yet soon the hapless couple realize that this new state they find themselves in—their eyes having been opened—is indeed problematic. They seem to have transgressed some cosmic order and find themselves possessed now of a discomfiting self-awareness, of moral judgments and political motives, just like the god who made them—and distinctly unlike the beasts they lived among. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In long plane journeys I do not sleep well. But some years back in one such journey I was tired and fell fast asleep. When I woke up, I saw a little note on my lap. It was from the captain in charge of the plane. It said, “I did not want to disturb you, but from our computer log I could see that your total travel so far with our airlines group just crossed 3 million miles. So congratulations! It seems you travel almost as much as I do.” I made a quick calculation, 3 million miles is like 6 return trips from the earth to the moon. With a deep sigh I chanted to myself, as our plane was hurtling through the night sky, a word from an ancient Sanskrit hymn: Charaiveti (keep moving!)

There was a time when, for me as a young boy, a rare trip from one part of my city to another was a breathless adventure. I grew up in the mean streets of Kolkata (then known to others as Calcutta), spending much of my boyhood and youth in a cramped rented house on a narrow by‐lane of north Kolkata, with no running water or flush toilet, and all the rooms packed with refugee relatives from East Bengal, recently displaced by the violent Partition of India. My father, as an educator, was not very poor by Indian standards, but for a time he had to support most of those relatives. He had no savings as whatever was left of his paltry income he spent on good food and books. Very early in my childhood he instilled in me an appetite for both, and also the habit of rational, irreverent thinking and a deep sense of irony. Read more »

Helina Metaferia. The Empress returns, 2018.

Collaged paper.

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Anjuli Raza Kolb for the tip!

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

The day is a collision.

The day is a collision of the body with itself, of the body with the space in which it finds itself, of the body against the sunlight which only ever heralds bad news in a mind like mine. Restlessness seizes all four limbs (an inconsistent phenomenon, brought on today by antipsychotics and an iced coffee), and anxiety churns in the stomach, in the empty spaces of the chest. The eyes look but don’t see; the eyes rush around, from this corner of the room to that corner of the room. The floor is mopped, the bathroom scrubbed. But there is the kitchen to do and a pile of laundry on the bedroom floor. These are little matters. These should not bother so much, I tell myself: “You should breathe. You should listen to your father and refuse to sweat the small stuff.” But, the day is a collision. There is no past to this day, nor is there any future in it. There is only the day, its imbalance, its summertime mad feeling, its ennui. I try sleeping in late to run the clock down, but I don’t sleep. I try to watch a movie to block out the brightness outside, but my toes just tap-tap the floor. I walk the dog, and I feed the cat. I lie down again. But, the body collides with the body, twists and folds and tenses. This is summertime. 

You have had days of collision, I’m sure. They’re silly, really, on the other side of them. There is nothing silly about them as they happen however, and there is nothing silly about having the kind of brain which experiences collision less as a matter of the day as it does a matter of the season. I decide finally that what I’ll do is hit the daylight head on, that when it reaches late afternoon, and the day is at its hottest, I’ll go to the pool, Thomas Jefferson Pool on E 112th, in the park. My husband says he would rather nap, and secretly this is good: his day is not a collision; it has the normal dose of future and past in it, the normal dribblings of good cheer. “Why not go by yourself and get it out of your system?” he asks. When he says this, I know he means: get the desire to swim out of your system. I take it differently though. Out of the system, yes; something begs to be expurgated from the system. As I walk to the gas station to buy my summer padlock (you’ve got to have a padlock for the pool, and I lose mine every fall), in my husband’s Nike slides and cute trunks, a Dragonball Z t-shirt and bright pink knock-off Ray Bans, I recognize a kind of pilgrim feeling inside myself, the gentle hush that comes over those who march somewhere sacred. How funny to feel like the public pool is a shrine. I told you: days of collision are silly.  Read more »

by Danielle Spencer

My parents keep an official list of “Things We Disagree About.” There are many prerequisites for a disagreement to make the list, but the most important is that it must be both meaningful and intransigent. They tend to maintain a cheerful agreement about the list rankings, which evolve over time—though the number one slot is always the same: the designated hitter rule in baseball. My mother is anti, my father pro, and never the twain shall meet (though the twain shall probably never stop debating it).

Now, the DH rule doesn’t come up so often in everyday life, or at least not much in the off-season. But there’s one item that does arise all year round, one that’s part of their shared lives, every day. When we open this Pandora’s box and slide out the top drawer, we start plucking out matters of taste and preference; but if we reach in for the larger bottom drawer, we find ourselves hefting the unwieldy building blocks of their respective ideologies. This issue is a daily enactment of—and metaphor for—their lives together. It is a timeless debate: How to load the dishwasher.

In fact they do agree about some of the basics. To pre-rinse or not to pre-rinse: that is a question so fundamental that it’s hard to imagine how any couple can successfully straddle the divide. Thankfully my parents, for the most part, both come down peaceably on the no pre-rinsing side. But then what typically happens is that my father loads the dishwasher somewhat haphazardly, using perhaps half of the dirty dishes piled on the counter and absently adding some wood-handled knives. When, with blissful satisfaction, he starts to close it, my mother intervenes. “You can fit so much more,” she mutters, busily re-ordering and compacting the plates, adding all the remaining dishes from the counter and removing the knives. Of course she’s right—she can usually fit about twice as much as he does—but inevitably he stands in a pool of annoyance, watching her re-do his labors. Read more »