by Pranab Bardhan

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

The gully cricket I played in my neighborhood also had a tournament, where different neighborhoods of north Kolkata competed. I once played in such a tournament which was being held in the far north of the city, some distance from my own neighborhood. I don’t now remember the game, but I met there a savvy boy, somewhat older than me, who opened my eyes about Kolkata politics. When he asked me which locality I was from, he stopped me when I started answering with a geographic description. He was really interested in knowing which particular mafia leader my neighborhood fell under. Finding me rather ignorant, he went on to an elaborate explanation of how the whole city is divided up in different mafia fiefdoms, and their hierarchical network and different specialization in different income-earning sources, and their nexus with the hierarchy of political leaders as patrons at different levels. After he figured out the coordinates of my locality he told me which particular mafia don my neighborhood hoodlums (the local term is mastan) paid allegiance to. I recognized the name, this man’s family had a meat shop in the area.

Since that day my whole outlook to local politics changed, and soon after I saw a newspaper photo where this mafia don was sharing the dais in a political rally with the chief minister. This was the beginning of my academic interest in gangster politics and its role in the power relationships in different parts of the world. Later when I read Mario Puzo’s Godfather (before the movies based on it came out) I realized that this was a feature of metropolitan politics in rich countries as well. Now, of course, there is a whole industry on this, in literature and TV (in India, more on the Mumbai underworld, less on Kolkata’s).

I started closely observing the methods of operation of the local mastans, how they work out their demarcation of the business of extortion (sometimes the system broke down, and violent turf wars took place, like when we heard loud boom-boom noise of explosions coming from the street where the brothels were), how they mesh their organization with that of the political and cultural mobilization by the local politicians. Two of their characteristics immediately struck me as a young observer. Read more »

by Azra Raza

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

On May 31^st, 2021, I sent an email to John Pawelek, Senior Research Scientist at Yale University, requesting a zoom meeting. When a week went by without a response, I decided to call. Searching for his number, I came across his Obituary instead. John Pawelek died on May 31^st, 2021. Alas, I missed my chance to speak to a knowledgeable and accomplished scientist.

I had been reviewing the literature on metastatic spread of cancer and Pawelek’s work stood out, confirming the proposal of Otto Aichel from way back in 1911, that metastasis occurs when a tumor cell fuses with a blood cell. Fusion means good things for both cells; for the tumor cell, cozily ensconced inside a normal blood cell means it can now evade attacks from the immune system, and, as an integral part of a blood cell, it becomes mobile. Cloaked in secrecy, it can now travel all over the body with impunity. As for the blood cell, fusion with the cancer cell brings with it the ultimate gift; immortality.

Pawelek’s animal experiments and the direct evidence he provides of fused, hybrid cells in human cancers in support of Aichel’s hypothesis, are hard to ignore. The issue of symbiosis, a fundamental principle of biology, permeates non-biologic disciplines; fiction abounds with stories of interdependence, synergy, acts of cooperation, often with startling consequences for the individuals involved. Read more »

Quantum Angel

I call you
Quantum Angel
because you’re so unbelievable
not even physicists can pin
you down
the way you
flit through atoms
you must have wings
the way you punk time
your wings must be turbocharged
the way you fling particles
we can’t keep up
where do you get so many
tiny spinning things?
you must have a secret source
or you’re a maestro of illusion
a tall-tale provider, a teller
who tells in sparks and quarks
the most fundamental things,
mere things almost,
in super hadron mist
colliders

Jim Culleny

—Drawing: A Quantum Angel Spinning Off Particles
Jim C.

by Jonathan Kujawa

Some years ago I twisted the arm of an old friend and got him to visit Oklahoma to give a talk to several hundred high school students. Any reasonable person would be terrified at the idea of facing a crowd of teenagers to tell them the wonders of mathematics. Gladiators in the Colosseum had better odds. Fortunately, Michael Orrison is not a reasonable person. He handled the job with aplomb.

100 ants are dropped on a meter stick. Each is traveling to the left or right with a constant speed of one meter per minute. When two ants meet, they reverse direction and head away from each other. When an ant reaches the end of the meter stick, it falls off. What is the longest amount of time it takes for all 100 of the ants to fall off the meter stick?

At first and second glance, this seems like a very difficult problem. There are 100 variables for the locations where the ants first land on the stick, plus another 100 variables recording if they first go left or right. There will be all sorts of ping-ponging back and forth and the ants will only slowly drop off the meter stick one by one. It isn’t even so clear that you couldn’t arrange a scenario where a few ants oscillate back and forth forever. With some thought, you can convince yourself that never happens. Still, it still seems like a very hard problem to compute how long it might take for the meter stick to empty of ants. Read more »

Sughra Raza. HAPPY BIRTHDAY JIM CULLENY!

May all the marvels of the world be yours to see. Warmest wishes for many healthy and joyful years ahead.

Digital photograph, Mt. Cinnamon, Sri Lanka, 2010.

PS: perhaps this will inspire a poem 🙂

by Varun Gauri

A few years back, The University of Chicago Magazine sponsored a David Brooks parody contest. Don’t you think this one was a winner?

Porn Stars in Paradise
By David Brooks
(and Varun Gauri, AB 88)

There are two kinds of Americans. You might be surprised to hear that the basic political division is not between Republicans and Democrats. Nor is it Tea Partiers versus Huffington Post readers, extremists versus moderates, nor even Bobos versus NASCAR fans. Rather, the central divide these days is between Americans who accept electromagnetic scans of their intimates at airport security lines (let’s call these people “Porn Stars”) and people who would rather have a uniformed and preferably leathered officer touch their privates (let’s call them “Johns”).

Porn Stars accept the scans because they trust institutions. Generally speaking, they do this because they have careers and occupy professions that advance the nation’s major institutions: doctors, lawyers, professors, school teachers, scientists, bureaucrats. To them, institutions are themselves and their colleagues and friends. What’s not to trust? According to a fascinating study conducted by Professor E. Reilly Vant of the University of Chicago, 89% of social science graduate students, when told that their private parts were being shown to an unknown colleague, exhibited heightened brain activity in MRI scans in precisely the same neural regions as they did when told that their article had been accepted by The Center Folds, a leading journal in the field. In other words, Porn Stars believe in society and desperately want to be appreciated by it. Their deepest fear is that no one will see them on the inside or the underside.

Johns, on the other hand, are deeply skeptical of institutions, especially scientific ones. Johns are people who usually work with their hands, such as mechanics, electricians, small business owners, and car dealers. To them, pictures and scans, and indeed, the media altogether, can misrepresent, distort, and disguise. To know something is not to represent it but to feel it. That is why they want their fellow passengers to be touched. Only then can you verify that nothing untoward is being carried onto the plane. Now, where this gets is interesting is that Johns are themselves alienated in their own way. According to Vant’s University of Chicago colleague, Professor Trey V. L. Booker, 94% of MBA students preferred managing a massage parlor to running a university, if the private returns were identical, because they believed in the social mission of a massage parlor more than a university. The breakup of the social fabric, driven by the very social forces and institutions that Porn Stars glorify, have left Johns in need of social contact. Their deepest fear is that they will be alone.

Where is society going? Who is going to end up on top, Porn Stars or Johns? It’s clear that there is every reason to believe that Porn Stars are winning, hands down. We live in a society that is growing more institutionalized, more scientifically complex, and more representational every day. That has its advantages. But really, we could all use a nice pat down now and then. We are all Johns now.

“Unidentified Objects”

Here we go again. A secret government investigation. Blurry pictures. Debunkers. He saw…/She saw…. UFO fever comes around at least every decade or so and, if you are old enough to remember earlier iterations, it’s deja vous all over again.

But “UFO” is a misnomer. How do we know these objects are really “flying”, anyway? Maybe, they’re falling. Or floating.

It’s time to move past this stale framing. Forget about “Unidentified Flying Objects”, let’s talk about “Unidentified Objects”.

There are unidentified objects all around us. There are at least three on my desk right now. No, wait. That one is a hole punch. But who uses a hole punch anymore? Where did it come from?

My point is, why limit ourselves to things in the air? According to science, at any given moment we cannot identify with any specificity about half of the objects around us. Well, not science. But that seems about right to me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In my Kolkata neighborhood there was one kind of collective action that was unusually successful–this related to religious festivals. Every autumn there was a tremendous collective mobilization of neighborhood resources and youthful energy in organizing the local pujas for one deity or another, and on these occasions almost the whole community participated with devout dedication and considerable ingenuity (including openly pilfering from the public electricity grid for the holy cause—this art locally known as ‘hooking’).

These festivals had both religious and cultural dimensions, and Bengali society being highly politicized, politics was not far behind. In my childhood politics in my neighborhood was dominated by the Communist Party, and contrary to what you’ll expect, the communists were often enthusiastic participants in those religious festivals. The main difference with the pujas of non-communist localities was in the brochures they produced on these occasions (in our neighborhood they would, for example, invoke the goddess Kali, the fierce deity of destruction, to come and slay the forces of the evil demon of capitalism) and in the list of celebrity artists they’d invite for their cultural soirees, containing mainly those of leftist persuasion.

Many years later when my Italian classmates in England used to discuss Catholic Marxism in their country—on one occasion I even participated in a vigorous discussion with them on the famous film by the Marxist poet-director Pasolini titled “Gospel according to St. Matthew”—I told them about the communist Kali-worshippers of my neighborhood in Kolkata. I also told them of a communist activist Brahmin neighbor who combined, with touching sincerity, his daily activities as a mantra-chanting family priest in several households with his indefatigable party propaganda work every morning at the street-crossing near our house, trying to catch hold of passersby and apprising them of the evil doings of the ruling capitalist-lackey party and his marching in the streets in his lunch break from office work shouting slogans against American imperialism. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

There are momentary flashes in the aesthetic life of an individual which can’t be explained away by the exigencies of personal taste or the broader parameters of gender-biased inclinations. These random epiphanies may or may not have their roots in a psychologically identifiable pantheon of ‘likes’, but when they occur, they yank us from our routine expectations of a work and catapult us into a recessive-compulsive emotional terrain resembling infatuation—with a breathlessness induced by the sudden recognition of something strikingly familiar and yet completely unrelated to us.

It’s a given that the brain knows things we don’t know, even if it’s our own grey matter that’s withholding secrets from us. Forget the details of subliminal daily self-maintenance and logistics of being alive, whose rules hold little interest as long as everything is humming along. Consider the other, less tangible connections that the brain makes on its own, regardless of will, regardless of desire—in effect, regardless of me. At times, its affinities seem to have a life of their own, independent of my consciousness or even my history.

Not long ago, watching an emotional scene between two male Korean detectives in Beyond Evil, I was suddenly transported to Jean Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece La Grand Illusion, set during the First World War: Two aristocratic officers—Rauffenstein, the German commandant of a citadel for prisoners of war, and de Boeldieu a French captive there—are discussing the end of class-oriented military hierarchies and their own shared fate as a dying, useless breed of snobs in the new egalitarian world. Their acquaintance precedes the war, and transcends the level of hostility normally associated with enemies. Read more »

Railroad siding leading to the main Munich-Rome line in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. With a puddle with a reflection of a very tall cellphone antenna and a mountain. Photo taken last week while on one of my daily walks.

by Peter Wells

Beliefs tend to cluster in packages. It’s a fair bet that a member of the British Liberal Democrat Party will be an opponent of Brexit, and a supporter of Amnesty International, that doughty advocate of all good things. And one thing the Lib Dems, the EU, and AI have in common is that they all oppose the Death Penalty. However, package-deal thinking is not mandatory, nor universal. So perhaps one could call oneself a liberal (small <l>) and still contemplate the possibility of condoning Capital Punishment, especially as the great J S Mill (pictured) condoned it too (link).

Like Mill, I regret finding myself opposed to “those who are called the philanthropists,” those well-meaning people who are “so steadily and almost uniformly to be found on the side of right.” But Mill is convinced that in this case the ‘philanthropists’ have erred due to an “exaggerated application of [a] just and highly important principle.” Their ‘principle’ is to provide humane punishments, with opportunities for rehabilitation, for all criminals without exception. However, in the case of what Mill calls ‘aggravated murder,’ it leads them to opt for a punishment that is, in my view, and Mill’s, less humane than the death penalty: long-term imprisonment.

The arguments on either side of this hoary old warhorse of debating competitions are too well known to need rehearsing in detail. Supporters of capital punishment point out that keeping murderers jailed is expensive, and that the funds could be better used for the benefit of other members of our society. They remind us that prisoners can escape, and that even if they don’t, they can continue to do harm, especially to fellow-prisoners. They argue that there is a moral difference between a murder and a legal execution, and that the death penalty deters potential murderers.

On the other hand, opponents assert capital punishment to be morally indistinguishable from murder. They believe that there is no evidence that the penalty is an effective deterrent – rather the contrary. They point out that a wrong conviction is irreversible. As Mill himself remarks, “If by an error of justice an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected; all compensation, all reparation for the wrong is impossible.”

My contribution to the debate, for what it is worth, arises from reflecting upon two meanings of the word ‘life.’ Read more »

by Thomas Larson

If we include in an overview of JFK’s classical musical legacy, those compositional masterpieces that honored him after his death, two pieces jump out of the field for me: Leonard Bernstein’s Mass and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Mass was commissioned by his wife, Jackie, to open the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971. Bernstein used the venue’s function—performance—literally: he stitched together a transmedial work that combined the best of Brahms’ German Requiem, The Who’s Tommy, and his own Candide.

Mass’s subtitle was “a theater piece for singers, players, and dancers.” It featured a rock band within a full orchestra, forty blues, rock, and light opera singers, two choirs, dancers, strolling musicians, and tape sounds produced quadrophonically. Among its highlights for me was Bernstein’s pairing an irreligious element with a Bible-based piety, especially in the gospel/sermon “God Said.” One wasn’t sure how much this jagged little tune embraced the tradition of preaching the Holy Fire or made a parody of it. Most memorable are the choral lines: “And it was good, brother / And it was good, brother / And it was good, brother / And it was goddam good.”

The work is like a top, spinning madly, gyrating and tilting, ready to fall, only to be re-spun by Bernstein’s gift of musical invention—his theatrical blood pumping his multiple moods, which range from meditative to melancholic to bossy to sardonic to unabashedly poppy and sentimental, equally unafraid of the raw and the honest. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

Luxuriating in human ignorance was once a classy fad. Overeducated literary types would read Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, and soak themselves in the quite intelligent conclusion that ultimate reality cannot be known by Terran primates, no matter how many words they use. They would dwell on the suspicion that anything these primates conceive will be skewed by social, sexual, economic, and religious preconceptions and biases; that the very idea that there is an ultimate reality, with a definable character, may very well be a superstition forced upon us by so humble a force as grammar; that in an absurd life bounded on all sides by illusion, the very best a Terran primate might do is to at least be honest with itself, and compassionate toward its colleagues, so that we might all get through this thing together.

But classy fads fade. Indeed, one seemingly inviolable law of philosophical thinking is that any forthright declaration of human ignorance will be followed by a systematic explanation of that ignorance, decorated with special terms and diagrams. We just can’t let it go. Aristotle began his Metaphysics with the claim that all men by nature desire to know, and we would be right to quibble a bit: maybe some men do and some men don’t, and maybe some women also desire to know, and some don’t, and perhaps the most sensible thing to say is that many people like to pretend to know — which would have made for a much more promising beginning to his treatise, come to think of it. But we weren’t there, and Aristotle chugged on ahead as a man who desired to know everything except his own limits.

These days we are more Aristotle than Kierkegaard, and not without some reason: the work in telecommunications and particle accelerators and medical labs suggests that we are not merely banging rocks together. But there is a sizeable gap between (a) separate individuals who, one after another, know quite a lot about baud rates, gluons, and mRNA, and (b) individuals who greedily stake their claims to species-wide knowledge of all these thing together, summed up into a comprehensive idea of the nature of reality as a whole. That is to say, it is not at all difficult to find books on the broad scope of human knowledge written by authors who really know nothing other than that there are other people who know a lot about many separate things. We might simply call these authors journalists, but truly they include people from all walks of life; really, just about anyone with an internet connection. And those with academic degrees are the worst offenders. (Hello, my name is Charlie.) Read more »

by Azra Raza

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

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman

When King Midas asked Silenus what the best thing for man is, Silenus replied, “It is better not to have been born at all. The next best thing for man would be to die quickly.”

Herein lies the essential contradiction; we begin to die from the moment of birth.  Walt Whitman not only embraces this existential incongruity, he asserts that being contradictory is a positive, desirable virtue: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).” If you don’t contradict yourself, you are leading a simple, unexamined inner life. His large persona contains opposing, conflicting, paradoxical “multitudes” providing opportunities for self-discovery, and for change. Change is a good thing. Whitman’s friend Emerson summed it up: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Enter cancer. The only known lifeform that defies mortality, surpassing the life-death contradiction by achieving man’s ultimate dream of living forever. But at what cost? The immortalized cells burn and blast their way through membranes and organs, scorching tissues, fracturing bones, leaving behind a bloodbath of death and destruction, creeping and crawling into local sanctuaries, swimming in blood vessels, riding in lymphatics, invading new sites, deforming, butchering, exterminating, annihilating, until, in a final act of genocidal-suicidal-homicidal carnage, consuming the mortal host and the immortal unwanted guest alike, a wasted body ends upon a funeral pyre with kilograms of tumor.

Cancer can be perceived as an independent life-form. It is not a parasite because it originates in the host tissue. It is not a “normal” tissue culture cell line that has been induced to grow in vitro, already half-way to transformation. And it is not like jellyfish and other lower order species that can revert to an earlier stage of their lifecycle under stress and restart as newborns. It behaves like a new animal that arises within an animal. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

“To bring attention to this sort of issues is to venture into the psychological factors that underlie nationalist beliefs…and here too the linguistic input is relevant”, I concluded last month, promising to return to this issue in four weeks’ time. And to promise is to send forth, so here we are now.

What else can the linguist say about the nationalist phenomenon, then? As I was at pains to stress last week, the generative approach to the study of language constitutes a cognitive as well as a psychological theory of cognition, and in this sense, its theoretical tools can potentially characterise other mental phenomena, especially those that may be similar to language in one way or another.[i] This seems to be the case for a number of cultural customs, some of which are rather central to the nationalist outlook. Speaking a common language is often the key to developing a national identity within a large population (and thus to properly establish a nation-state), but other factors can be as important.[ii]

The point of contact between language and culture as the linguist views these phenomena is the fact that the linguist’s is a story of how a collection of units and principles combine to yield a rich set of possibilities – mental grammars and the external languages these grammars produce – and something along these lines appears to be true of some forms of culture as well. A number of examples can be found in some of the fields linguistics has influenced over the years, from cognitive psychology and sociology to philosophy. In A Theory of Justice, that well-known classic of political philosophy, John Rawls draws an analogy between the moral judgements people entertain in day-to-day situations and what linguists call grammatical judgements, the also common-enough ability to judge whether a sentence is acceptable or not in one’s own language.[iii] And just as the linguist argues that the capacity to draw grammatical judgements is based on a rich underlying grammar that native speakers are not privy to and whose study require the skills of linguists, Rawls wondered whether this sort of approach was also necessary to account for our capacity to draw moral judgements. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Untitled. April 2021

Digital photograph.