by David Oates

Looking at this photo brings a rush of feeling ­­– complicated, lovely, heartbreaking: a simple still life captured from the churning reality of the sea and the shore, which of course means also the weather, the wind, the atmospheric chemistries and grinding tectonics and magmatic uplifts and erosions and all high things toppling and washing down to the sea, all far things brought to shore, all shores grinded and washed away – all accumulating here, in this moment of randomness.

And . . . that this is beautiful.

Why is this beautiful? What excess of indifferent cosmic love has so arranged our universe, that dead randomness be beautiful?

Can you stand on the shore and not feel it? Or under the starry night?

Our hearts are broken by beauty. And mended by it. And we are undone, truly, in feelings and cycles beyond resolution. All we can do is go mute. Wipe the tear away. Turn our faces to a loved one, to see if these runes might be written there too.

Sometimes they are.

But now, in 2022, how are we to think of natural beauty and solace? When the seas are acidifying, rising, heating up. The whole planetary heat-budget going haywire. Species dying, ecosystems crashing. And worse to come.

This is an essay about lost refuges. Can I still stand on the shore and be restored, spiritually renewed? Yes. But, Reader, it is very hard work. Hard, heavy work. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Saw this from my train window while entering Munich a couple of weeks ago.

by David M. Introcaso

In late January the United States Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee released a draft discussion of its COVID-prompted public health bill titled, “Prepare for and Respond to Existing Viruses, Emerging New Threats, and Pandemics Act” (PREVENT Pandemics Act). Patty Murray, HELP Committee Chairwoman and Washington State senator, defined the bill as one that would “improve the nation’s preparedness for future public health emergencies.”  We need to, Senator Murray stated further, “take every step we can to make sure we are never in this situation again.” The draft is fatally flawed because inexplicably the HELP Committee, the Senate “public health” committee, does not address much less recognize ever-increasing health harms caused by the climate crisis. As a result, the committee’s bill is what Orwell would term a “flagrant violation of reality.”

Preparing for “emerging new threats” appears unrelated to the Pacific Northwest’s recent 1,000-year heat wave, made 150 times more likely by Anthropocene warming, that killed 1,400 including Chairwoman Murray constituents, moreover seniors.  In sum, last year produced 20, $1 billion climate-related disasters.  Over the past five years these have cost Americans $750 billion.  Last summer’s heat dome also killed Senate Finance Committee Chairman constituents.  Unlike the HELP Committee, Senate Finance did hold, for the first time in nine years, a climate-crisis related hearing this session.  However, Senator Wyden defined the climate crisis exclusively as a tax policy problem.  In his opening statement, he argued, “Getting the policy right . . . is the whole ballgame.”  If only.  How does tax reform remedy the 58% of excess annual US deaths caused by fossil fuel emissions particularly when greenhouse gas emissions, moreover CO2, remain in the atmosphere for upwards of a thousand years. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Soon K.N.Raj gave up his Vice-Chancellorship and moved to his home state, Kerala, and started a new institution, Center for Development Studies (CDS). He tried to lure me (and Kalpana) to join the faculty  there, and even offered to get us land on which he’d persuade his friend Laurie Baker (a resident British-Quaker architect) to build us a low-cost, energy-efficient beautiful house (like his own). At CDS, he not merely provided intellectual leadership, he was the pater-familias for the group. After a whole day of teaching and seminars, in the evening he’d visit his colleagues’ homes, try to solve their multifarious domestic problems, while his wife, Sarsamma, will minister to their sundry medical needs. Once driving me to the airport, when I was all praise for the young institution and the community he was in the process of building, he asked me if I had any word of criticism. I told him it was too much of a “Hindu undivided family” for my taste. Raj corrected me and said it was not “Hindu” — he did not seem to mind the “undivided family” part.

While I did not join CDS, though visited it a few times, Raj did twist my arm to take up the only work I ever did in my life for any government anywhere — he got me to chair a commission of enquiry into Kerala’s plantations, appointed by the CPI government of Achutha Menon, a friend of Raj. Suresh Tendulkar, whom I brought as a co-member, and I worked hard to write a detailed official report, which by now insects must have chewed up in some ministry dungeon in Thiruvananthapuram, but this gave me an opportunity to travel up and down the countryside, have a closer look at Kerala’s remarkable society and economy, and the beautiful lush green landscape. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

SOCRATES: Dear sir! You seem to be an happy fellow, able to enjoy the mixed bitter and sweet fortunes of life!

DUDE: Oh, hey, man! Nice toga thing you got going on there. Let it hang, right?

SOCRATES: You are kind! And, indeed, perhaps too kind; for should one man compliment another on what is mere appearance, on the mere vestiges of one’s life?

DUDE: Oh, vestiges, right … What are you having there, old timer? Sangria? White Russian for me, Gary.

GARY: Sure thing, Dude.

SOCRATES: Can you tell me, dear Dude, whether the unexamined life is worth living?

DUDE: Right, the … uh, how’s that again?

SOCRATES: The unexamined life. Pardon me, but I have noticed that you are not exactly a man who delves into the nature of life, of truth, or of knowing.

DUDE: “Delves”? No, I guess I’m not much into the whole delving thing.

SOCRATES: And yet you seem quite happy, Dude!

DUDE: Well, you know, you take what you can when you can, if you can. The Dude abides. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

You are waiting for Helen, and as she comes out of the underground, she blurts out, before saying hello or embracing you, as is her custom, the following sentence:

I decided to write to him on a boat

Yes, good idea, you say, followed by wait, what? what do you mean? and are you sure?! You are not being flippant, and you know full well who Helen is intending to write to, though you may be uncertain about what she might write; it is just that you find the sentence unclear. Or as a linguist would put it, the sentence is ambiguous, for it can mean two different things, depending on the intended meaning.

Helen may have taken the decision to write to the mysterious man while she was on a boat (perhaps she has just been on a boat trip) or she may have decided that she will do the writing while she’s on a boat (perhaps she’s planning a boat trip).

The ambiguity is syntactic in nature, as it is a matter of whether the phrase on the boat modifies the verb to decide or the verb to write – that is, it depends on the way in which these words and phrases relate to each other within the sentence. Linguists often use so-called syntactic trees to explicitly outline the structure of sentences, but we can make do with brackets here, as shown below (I’ll let you work out which intended meaning is which; I may or may not have changed the order in which I have described the possible meanings in order to confuse, though).

I decided to [write to him [on a boat]]

I [decided to write to him [on a boat]]

This phenomenon is rarely if ever noticed in conversation – no-one but a linguist would ever say to an interlocutor such a thing as I’m sorry, but that sentence you have just uttered is syntactically ambiguous, what do you mean exactly? This is because the overall context in which conversations take place usually helps hearers (and indeed readers) work out what the speaker/writer actually meant. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Kaamdani, Approaching Santiago, Chile, 2017.

Digital photograph.

by Brooks Riley

A view of Helsinki, Finland from an aircraft just before landing at the airport there. Photo taken on February 3, 2022.

by Tamuira Reid

The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies. In fact, in New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical help. If you’re white, you go right to the back of the line. —Donald Trump, January 2022

*In Memory of Neema J. (1945- 2020)

One
Neema could sing. Really sing. Thick songs with smooth edges, full of blood memory and knowing. I pressed my ear against the floorboards of our new apartment, the one we would shelter in during the height of a pandemic we didn’t know was coming. In-between moving boxes and piles of books, I lay listening, pressing my palms flat to the ground. The steam pipes rattling alive with each husky note.

Neema was also crazy, people in the building would tell me, in hushed, apologetic tones. “Not right in the head.” “Not all there.” “Gone.”

“Dementia,” the Super said flatly, after I called him in the middle of the night, called about the smell of something burning beneath me, one floor down. The smell of a slow burn, a deep burn. A castiron skillet left unattended for hours burn. Neema’s mind had become a slippery slope where important details often fell to the wayside.

Singing never left her, even as her mind closed shop. Songs took root like trees in her belly.

I learned if I turned the lights off, I could hear her better. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

From the gatherings at Ashis Nandy’s home, and particularly from my numerous discussions with him I learned to think a bit more carefully about three major social concerns in India.

One was that whenever we economists faced a socio-economic problem that the standard processes of the private market forces did not resolve justly or efficiently, our immediate recourse was the state. We, of course, knew how inept or corrupt the state machinery often was. But the Gandhian in Ashis pointed to many problems where even the best-intentioned or efficient state is inherently incapable of solving. Take the shameful dowry problem in Indian marriage markets. The Indian state tried to solve it by the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961. But the problem is rampant to this day. One needs social movements and community-level reforms in norms and behavior, more than state legislation, to make a dent in this enormous social problem. In such debates I have, however, argued that while the state is not sufficient, isn’t it often necessary for social change? A law enacted by the state after a process of public deliberation can act as a guiding or catalytic or coordinating force for dispersed social movements. In the US the civil rights movement acted in unison with some landmark federal laws (Civil Rights Acts) in bringing about major (as yet unfinished) social changes.

Second, I always knew that caste was important in Indian society and polity, but I used to think that in leftist areas like Bengal class had significantly overshadowed caste. Talking to the sociologists in the group (including André Beteille, a consummate Bengali with a French father) I realized how limited this perception about Bengal was. Over time I came to understand that the cultural dominance of upper castes in Bengal is so totally hegemonic that it creates the illusion that caste is less important there. Read more »