Not just the facts—why framing matters

by N. Gabriel Martin

Garbage strewn on a beach
by Antoine Giret

It seems to make sense to start investigating any question by looking at the facts. However, often the question of what the facts are depends on what we decide is worth talking about.

In a second season episode of Mad Men the star of the show, philandering drunkard Don Draper, is enjoying a rare moment of happiness with his family at a picnic. Saying “We should probably go if we don’t want to hit traffic,” he stands up, chucks his beer away, and walks to the car. His wife, Betty, shakes out the picnic blanket, letting their trash loft into the air before settling on the well-kept lawn.

It is one of the most effective demonstrations of the difference between the show’s era and our own (the season is set in 1962). With the taboo against littering firmly instilled in me, as it is in any North American of my generation, I felt a twinge of disapproval at Don’s can toss, followed by horror at the trash strewn around the park by Betty’s careless flick of the picnic blanket. Betty and Don’s efficient and graceful motions came at my generation’s mores like a one-two punch. Don’s toss put me off balance so that Betty’s flick could deliver the knock-out blow.

The Dapers’ utter nonchalance convey that what they’re doing isn’t out of keeping with what is proper. The Drapers are anything but disorderly. In fact, good manners and hygiene have been the sole topic of the dialogue of the scene: Don tells Betty to check their hands before they get in the car; Betty tells her daughter that it is rude to talk about money. These are people who are hyper-aware of what is acceptable and what is not, but evidently there is nothing unacceptable to them about the most flagrant littering. Read more »

The Death of Waggy

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 »

Hard-Rock Existentialism: The Megalith As A Beach-Head Of Being

by Jochen Szangolies

Figure 1: The Utah monolith at its original site in the desert. Image credit: Patrick A. Mackie, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In November 2020, an odd news item cut through the clouds of pandemic-induced haze with a sharp metal edge: way out in the Utah desert, a strange monolith had been found, a three-sided metal prism (and hence, not quite aptly called a ‘monolith’, with ‘-lith’ coming from Greek líthos, meaning ‘stone’). Subsequent comparisons of satellite imagery of the area revealed that it must have been set up sometime between July and October 2016, having remained unnoticed since—which means that, in an age where few people can do so much as have coffee without immediately informing the whole world via various social media channels, somebody (or -bodies) drove out into the middle of the Utah desert, dragging power tools and sheet metal with them, and assembled the 3m-tall structure, all without apparently telling a single soul. Even the monolith itself bears no identifying marks—no artist’s signature, no fabricator’s stamp, nor any cryptic symbols or a message on how to ‘guide’ humanity after the apocalypse.

Encounters with objects such as the Utah monolith have a slightly uncanny quality. All of a sudden, the natural structure of the landscape is punctuated by clear lines signaling something artificial—something, we expect, that has a purpose, something created towards some end. Something made, as opposed to something grown, or otherwise the product of natural forces. Something that exemplifies a certain design.

The Utah monolith teases all this, but refuses to provide any answers—and thus, it embodies an element of the absurd: a work with no purpose, a means directed towards no discernible end. Some anonymous creator has expended considerable effort for no apparent reason other than to put a metal column in a place where few, if any, would ever see it, and has left us no clue as to their motivation, no means to wrap our heads around the sheer implausibility of the thing’s jutting right out of the bedrock, wedging itself into the world and our minds like a knife between the ribs.

Should we then just chalk this up to the random whim of some eccentric? To a long prank, played at the expense of whoever might eventually chance upon it? Was the creator just driven by the same sense of impishness that makes people strap boards to their feet to trample down crops, creating circles some take for evidence of alien visitation? Read more »

A UAE Style Guest-Worker Programme Is The Least We Should Do To Help The World’s Poor

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 »

A Mixed Metaphor

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 »

The justification of Idling

by Emrys Westacott

The work ethic is deeply ingrained in much of modern society, both Eastern and Western, and there are many forces making sure that this remains the case. Parents, teachers, coaches, politicians, employers, and many other shapers of souls or makers of opinion constantly repeat the idea that hard work is the key to success–in any particular endeavour, or in life itself. It would be a brave graduation speaker who seriously urged their young listeners to embrace idleness. (I did once hear Ariana Huffington advise Smith College graduates to “sleep their way to the top,” but she essentially meant that they should avoid burn out by ensuring that they get sufficient rest.)

There are, to be sure, some distinguished critics of the work ethic. In a 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness,” Bertrand Russell wrote that “immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous.” In his view, “the morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

But Russell doesn’t really praise idleness as that word is normally understood. True, what he advocates is less work and more free time so that people can spend most of their days doing as they please. But he clearly thinks that some ways of spending one’s time are better than others. He hopes, for instance, that, better education will reduce the chances that a person’s leisure time will be “spent in pure frivolity.” He prefers active recreation, like dancing, to passive recreation, like watching sport. And he strongly prefers cerebral to manual activity. He writes, for instance, that

moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were we would have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare.

(For a brilliant logician, this is an extraordinarily bad piece of reasoning. An activity could be one of the possible ends of human life without being the only end or the “highest” end. Equally remarkable, though, is the intellectual snobbery the statement betrays, suggesting as it does that writing a play is self-evidently a “superior” goal to any kind of skilled feat of craftsmanship or engineering.) Read more »

Monday, July 19, 2021

Sunrise at Monticello

by Michael Liss

We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists. —Thomas Jefferson, March 4, 1801

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1800. White House Collection/White House Historical Association.

Inauguration Day, 1801. John Adams may have beat it out of town on the 4:00 a.m. stage to Baltimore, but the podium filled with dignitaries, none more impressive than the man taking the Oath of Office. Thomas Jefferson, Poet Laureate of the American Revolution, former Secretary of State, outgoing Vice President, was standing there in all his charismatic glory.

As politicians have done, presumably from time immemorial, he pronounced himself awed by the challenge (“I shrink from the contemplation, and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking”), imperfect (“I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment”), and an obedient servant (“[r]elying, then, on the patronage of your good will…”). He made the obligatory bow to George Washington (Adams being absent both corporally and in Jefferson’s spoken thoughts), and called upon the love of country that stemmed from shared experience: “Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind.”

How very Jeffersonian. Inspiring, embracing, collaborative, worthy of his fellow citizens’ admiration and even love. Looking back over 200 years, allowing for the archaic language, and even the sense that this was not his best work, you can still hear in it the echoes of what drew people to him.

Jefferson was more than a symbolic change in direction from the Adams (and Washington) years. He was the physical embodiment of what he later came to describe as the Second American Revolution. The public had cast aside the old Federalism, stultifying and crabbed, with a narrow vision of what democracy meant, and had chosen to move towards the bright light of freedom.

You have to love the story. It fits with an image of Jefferson that many have clung to over the decades. Jefferson was more than a stick figure of stiffly posed portraits, policies, and speeches. He was a full-blooded, passionate person: Jefferson the gourmand; Jefferson the suave raconteur; Jefferson having a grand old time in Paris and at Monticello. He was the courtier abroad, and the master of house and estate at home—his days filled with fine wine, good conversation, books, music, and enchanting women. Read more »

The First Cell, Part 2: Transposed Heads

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 »

Of Gods And Men And Human Destiny

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 »

Charaiveti: Journey from India to the two Cambridges and Berkeley and Beyond, Part 1

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 »

Ennui at the Public Pool

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 »

Loading the Dishwasher

by Danielle Spencer

Dishwasher manual
GE Automatic Dishwasher Owner’s Manual, 1950

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 »

Meat and Pets: A Double Feature

by David Kordahl

Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des bêtes)

Georges Franju is perhaps best remembered for Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage, 1960), an oddly poetic entry in the body horror canon, but Franju’s most memorable film may be his first, Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des bêtes, 1949). The only documentary I’ve watched that comes close to its aestheticized brutality is Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1971), which presents forty minutes of silent autopsy footage from the Pittsburgh morgue. Some have suggested that Blood of the Beasts is a comment on the human capacity for cruelty, but I think that’s missing the point. Franju did not aim to accuse. Blood of the Beasts is unique not for what it uncovers about slaughterhouses, but for its pitilessness, for its ironic acceptance of everyday horrors.

The film is only twenty minutes long but seems much longer. It begins with the castoffs of a city—fragments of furniture heaped over a sparse landscape, a nude mannequin in front of a moving train, a pair of lovers kissing—all scored by a simple, nostalgic tune.

The camera lingers for a moment on a bust of A. Emile Decroix. Though the point is not made within the film, one can look up Decroix (1821-1901) to find that he was a military veterinarian who helped to end the ban on eating horses that was in place before the Siege of Paris, when food shortages became so severe that dogs, cats, and rats were also consumed. All the narrator tells us at the beginning is that although the gates of a municipal slaughterhouse are decorated with statues of bulls, it in fact specializes in horses. The tools of the trade are then presented theatrically on a cloth background: a reed, an English axe, a captive bolt pistol.

Into the gate trots a great white horse. The horse’s muscles quiver photogenically. He towers over his handlers. What happens after this is predictable in principle, but almost unbelievable to watch. A captive bolt pistol on the horse’s forehead causes the horse to fall suddenly into a fetal position, legs turned in, head bowed—dead. As the limp horse tips over, a man dives in and slits the corpse’s lip, then plunges a knife in its throat. Read more »

Thoughts on the passing of Terry Donahue

by R. Passov

I learned from reading Terry Donahue’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times he became head coach of UCLA’s football team in the same year I became a Bruin freshman. And we spent our formative years as neighbors but since we were 14 years apart, we never met.

Back then 14 years was a big difference. Reading he passed at 77, after having stepped away from coaching at fifty-two, surprises me. Seventy-seven is no longer a ripe old age. And, in ego-driven enterprises where success tends to breed personality cults, it’s rare to see a leader know when to go.

His many obituaries lionize his winning ways at UCLA where he led the football team in its last glory years (1976-1995), providing a salve against the pain of watching UCLA’s basketball program, once the winningest in all of college sports, fracture in the post John Wooden era. (From 1948 to 1975, Wooden coached UCLA’s men’s basketball to 10 NCAA titles. It’s been a struggle ever since.)

One of Donahue’s keys to winning can be found in his NYT obituary: “You need money, access to an aircraft if possible,” Donahue is quoted as saying before he goes on to describe the faraway places he went in search of players.

One of those faraway places was Sherman Texas where, in 1977, he found an oversized teenager who, under Friday Night Lights, was tearing up the gridiron.

Billy Don Jackson was a phenom.

Read more »

Past Perfect

by Rafaël Newman

History is the one true fatality: you can re-read it as much as you like, but you can’t re-write it. —Laurent Binet

One of my oldest friends, an economic historian who serves as the Academic Director of a museum of Jewish life in northern Germany, is, like me, a child of May; and, during our recent birthday month, as is our custom, we exchanged gifts by post. Since we also share a love of books and history and a taste for grand, occasionally outlandish theory, as well as an abhorrence for futuristic science fiction, the novels we sent each other were in equal measures fantastical and backward-looking: examples of counterfactual historical fiction, what has come to be known as uchronia, the imaginative remaking of a bygone era that is the temporal counterpart to utopian geography.

The birthday book I received from my friend, Der Komet (2013), by Hannes Stein, a German foreign correspondent in the US, re-imagines the 20th century without the colossal conflicts that grew out of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. “One billiard ball clicks against the next,” Stein writes, in an appendix detailing the events elided (or avoided) by his alternative history: “The shots fired in Sarajevo >> the First World War >> the Second World War >> the end of the colonial empires, since imperialism had become too costly for the colonial powers.” Stein’s intricate, multi-character novel is set in an Austro-Hungarian Empire still in existence in the year 2000, one in which the Polish and Ukrainian questions have been settled in a series of minor skirmishes and peaceful negotiations, and assimilated Jews pursue their careers unmolested by a fringe party of anti-Semites. Stein mingles nostalgia for the Habsburgs with an implicit and rueful recognition of the progress that was in fact born of war in the actual 20th century: not only the waning of colonial domination, which in Stein’s world is still carried out only by the “barbarian” Japanese in China, but also the spread of pan-European female suffrage, which in Der Komet has only come, with veritably Swiss tardiness, following the revolts of 1968.

Der Komet’s resuscitation of vanished empires is reminiscent of the encomia for imperial cohabitation that appeared in some otherwise liberal quarters when the USSR was disintegrating, and Yugoslavia was going up in smoke, in the 1990s. The Ottomans and the Habsburgs may have been bigoted and repressive, the argument ran, but at least they (and, in their image, the regimes of Gorbachev and Tito) had kept the inter-ethnic peace. And indeed, Stein, a naturalized American and right-of-center moderate who switched his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat only with Trump’s rise, has one of his novel’s more sympathetic characters preemptively eulogize the Austro-Hungarian Empire (spoiler alert!) as “reactionary, progressive, and humane”. Read more »

Film Review: ‘Ailey,’ Evocative Portrait of an American Icon

by Alexander C. Kafka

During the pandemic, my family binge-watched the National Geographic Genius miniseries about Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Aretha Franklin. We imagined ourselves the producers for such a project and considered whom we would select as geniuses to feature.

On my short list would surely be the choreographer, dancer, and entrepreneur Alvin Ailey, whose dance company has become a lasting juggernaut of artistry, entertainment, and pride. 

The entertainment aspect has sometimes bred jealousy and resentment. Some critics have focused on the company’s beautiful, athletic bodies they see as stereotyped, idealized symbols of the Black experience. Ailey scoffed at that critique. If his astonishingly skilled and conditioned dancers raised the physical bar for American concert dance, so be it. And if audiences could understand and relate to his work, all the better. 

“The Black pieces we do that come from blues, spirituals, and gospels are part of what I am,” he shot back. “They are as honest and truthful as we can make them. I’m interested in putting something on stage that will have a very wide appeal without being condescending, that will reach an audience and make it part of the dance, that will get everybody into the theater. If it’s art and entertainment, thank God, that’s what I want to be.”

The pride component is complex. Ailey’s work celebrates Black American pride, of course, but audiences around the world relate and respond to his themes of oppression, struggle, and transcendence. Ailey’s multiracial company became an international craze, through State Department touring, before it became an American one.  Read more »