by Madhusudhan Raman

All of human life is quite literally coded into two long, complementary strands of genetic material that fold themselves into a double helix. When cells divide, copies of this genetic code must be made – a process that is known as replication. The double helix unwinds, and a “replication fork” makes its way down the helix in much the same way that a slider separates the teeth of a zipper. Once separated, enzymes get to work on replicating them. Except, only one of the strands is replicated continuously. The second strand is replicated piecewise first, and these pieces – called Okazaki fragments – are then fused together.

Biography, too, is an act of replication. The biographer takes a life and sets out to write its ink-and-paper twin. And while most biographers transcribe life continuously, following the natural flow of time from birth to death, Charles Seife courageously swims against the current. For in Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, we are treated to an Okazaki-esque biography: one that is discontinuously told, pieced together and related in reverse.

In his twenties, Stephen W. Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disorder that caused him to progressively lose control of nerve cells that allow for movement. His disability, which soon necessitated the use of a motorised wheelchair and a computerised speech device, defined him in the eyes of the public, much to his disappointment. Hawking the Pop Culture Icon was in his element in the limelight, though, enjoying a celebrity status that afforded him cameos in Star Trek and The Simpsons, in addition to a number of other documentaries. Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi

Hassan Abbas’s  book, “The Prophet’s Heir: The Life of Ali ibn Abi Talib,” provides an excellent basis for much research, reflection and conversations.

For many of us this poetic verse feels as though it were a statement of fact:

Ghalib Nadeem e dost sey ati hey bo e dost
Mashgul e Haq hon bandagee-ey boo Turab mein

From the fragrance of the divine friend comes the scent of the friend
I am immersed in search of Truth in my devotion to Ali.

Who are these friends and what is that scent? The Message of Islam is revealed onto the Prophet Mohammad at age 40. Alongside Mohammad is his unwavering constant dearest companion—one of the first to accept Islam— and born in the Kaaba, his 9 year old kid cousin Ali ibn Talib whose mother and father raised Mohammad as their own child, long before Ali was born. For Mohammad, peace be upon him, Ali is the loyal adoring kid brother, the protege, and in age difference the son. The Prophet chooses Ali, as his example of the path of Islam the Shariah—-he recognizes him and entrusts Ali as the exemplary embodiment of what Islam means. The Prophet is the Messenger and his closest companion Ali, who pledged his loyalty to Allah and his Prophet and his message is the essence of Islam, he is the Shariah—- lived. The Prophet peace be upon him proclaimed this essence as:

Man Kunto Maula fa hazaa Ali-un Maula 

For whom ever I am Leader and Teacher, Ali is his Leader and teacher too.

For most of us gathered here today this essence translates to exquisite beauty lit by splendor achieved through love and loss and longing and struggle. This beauty moves us inexplicably, —moves us towards justice and generosity and kindness. Read more »

God gave names to all the animals,
in the beginning, in the beginning
…………………………—Bob Dylan

Cut to the Chaste

to be called anything,
to be called, Jim, for instance,
is to be tagged for life
unless you choose otherwise
and pull a new name from a hat—
a new you, say, Ed— which would amount
to a tangle of official undoing
as bureaucrats mined reams of documents
to remake an identity with digital white-out
in a shitstorm of confusion to fashion a new you
when it would be more direct,
though sweatingly more difficult
(wrenching perhaps, perhaps impossible)
to turn your heart and head
inside out, scour what’s feckless within,
cramped, sour, stained, into gleaming radiance
as when you slid new into the world
so that a new name would be uncalled for
and need never to be said

—or, cut to the chaste,
start young

Jim Culleny
9/16/20

by Eric J. Weiner

Border culture is a project of ‘redefinition’ that conceives of the border not only as the limits of two countries, but also as a cardinal intersection of many realities. In this sense, the border is not an abyss that will have to save us from threatening otherness, but a place where the so-called otherness yields, becomes us, and therefore comprehensible–Guillermo Gomez-Peña, 1986

La cultura fronteriza es un proyecto de “redefinición” que concibe la frontera no sólo como los límites de dos países, sino también como una intersección cardinal de muchas realidades. En este sentido, la frontera no es un abismo que deba salvarnos de la otredad amenazante, sino un lugar en el que la llamada otredad cede, se convierte en nosotros y, por tanto, es comprensible–Guillermo Gómez-Peña, 1986

Nelson Mandela, in a speech inaugurating the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Echoing his words, the authors of UNICEF’s Child Poverty Report write, “The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.” As people in the U.S. and throughout the world bear witness to other people’s children languishing in overcrowded facilities along the southern border of the United States, I think a more keener revelation of a nation’s soul and a measure of its standing is how well it treats other people’s children—their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved and valued.

Nelson Mandela, en un discurso de inauguración del Fondo Nelson Mandela para la Infancia dijo: “No puede haber una revelación más aguda del alma de una sociedad que la forma en que trata a sus niños”. Haciéndose eco de sus palabras, los autores del Informe sobre la Pobreza Infantil de UNICEF escriben: “La verdadera medida del prestigio de una nación es lo bien que atiende a sus niños: su salud y seguridad, su seguridad material, su educación y socialización, y su sensación de ser amados, valorados e incluidos en las familias y sociedades en las que nacen”. Mientras la gente en Estados Unidos y en todo el mundo es testigo de cómo los niños de otras personas languidecen en instalaciones superpobladas a lo largo de la frontera sur de Estados Unidos, creo que una revelación más aguda del alma de una nación y una medida de su posición es lo bien que trata a los niños de otras personas: su salud y seguridad, su seguridad material, su educación y socialización, y su sentido de ser amados y valorados. Read more »

ET Trigg. I Can’t Breathe, 2020.

More here and here.

Thanks ET!

by Jeroen Bouterse

“Why, during the seventeenth century, did people who knew all the arguments that there is a God stop finding God’s reality intuitively obvious?” This, says Alec Ryrie in his Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019), is the heart of the question of early modern unbelief (136).

Ryrie’s point is that arguments pro or contra theism, and the influence of philosophical and scientific developments upon these arguments, are not actually crucial to the possibility of unbelief. The currents that run underneath these arguments are instinctive, emotional, and these are what we should look at if we want to understand doubt and denial of Christian theism historically. The history of unbelief is not primarily the history of eighteenth-century Enlightenment radicals and nineteenth-century science warriors, but of premodern anger and anxiety.

This also means that it is a history internal to Christendom: atheism, to Ryrie (himself a lay minister in the Church of England), is not essentially alien to Christianity; especially post-Reformation, it is a bug in the system itself, one that at times almost looks like a feature. The very self-criticism and soul-searching that come to define a faithful believer can lead her to recognize that she believes in her heart that there is no God. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

Love is as strong as death, but no stronger.
The NewMen, “Uncle Leo”

On Saturday, April 10, 2021, in Fribourg in the west of Switzerland, Besuch der Lieder, the troupe of musicians with whom I serve as a dramaturge, staged its first performance after a hiatus of more than a year: for once, however, not, as our concept dictates, an in-house song recital in the fashion of the nineteenth century, but rather, COVID oblige, a live stream via YouTube. Annina Haug, mezzo-soprano, and Edward Rushton, piano, performed Lieder by Schumann and Strauss and mélodies by Fauré and Saint-Saëns; I commented on our choice of songs. What follows is our programme, with links to the texts sung in their original languages, interspersed with an adapted version of my remarks (given on the occasion, in honor of the bilingual character of the host canton, in German and French, as well as in English; translations of poems below are mine). The recital itself can still be “attended” here. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Sarah Firisen

I recently had a conversation with someone I know who is around 50 and has been out of work since the COVID-19 pandemic started. He’s had a challenging life over the last 20 years or so dealing with addiction. While he once had a successful career, since rehab, he’s been working pretty low-level jobs in catering, an industry that died during lockdown. I asked him what he’s going to do as lockdown eases, and he confessed that this last year or so has been the best year of his life. With his stimulus and unemployment money, he’s had the time to paint and write, and he’s loved it. 

I’ve written before around the question, “Does work have to be such….work?” I wrote,  “As automation creeps into more and more back and front office work, there’s a lot of understandable fear about loss of jobs. But in reality, a lot of automation will be…taking out a lot of the drudgery that most of us inevitably have in our daily work. ” The pandemic has allowed, in some cases, forced many people to reevaluate their lives and careers and consider what really makes them happy. We’ve all had reason to appreciate better the small joys in life: family, friends, being able to go out to restaurants and travel to see those we love. But, for many people, it’s also changed their relationship with work. Working from home has given many people a new freedom and flexibility that most don’t seem willing to give up as restrictions ease. 

There’s an interesting video from a few years ago called “Humans need not apply.” It raises the specter of automation decimating all sorts of industries, from transportation to the medical field. It challenges analogies to the industrial revolution. These analogies paint the rosy picture that the jobs destroyed were horrible, dangerous, low-paid jobs anyway. The video claims that such analogies don’t consider the sheer scale of the job replacement that this new automation will bring. The video questions the possible future where people can now spend their time doing more human endeavors, like writing poetry. The video posits that it’s hard to imagine a poetry-based economy that will help support all the theoretically now-unemployed and unemployable people. But what if this view of what a future without “work” for many people looks like is too narrow? Perhaps, we need a paradigm shift in thinking.  Read more »

by Bill Murray

They call it the Sargasso, this grass. It is the bane of Belize, an invasive floating weed that keeps pitchforks flailing along the waterfront. The Sargasso Sea, we know where that is. But this grass is from Brazil, Réné says. It’s a new challenge from a new place. It isn’t challenge enough just to weather a pandemic, he says. Now there’s this, too.

The hotel receptionist tries to convince a lady on the phone the grass isn’t so bad here. It’s worse other places, he suggests carefully, not to cast aspersions. Réné, a  snorkel boat pilot, might wonder where as he tends his Honda outboards like a Mekong longtail runner clearing water hyacinth.

Réné has a less sales brochure-oriented assessment: we’ve done this to ourselves. This nasty bit of seaweed is from Brazil, human caused, product of fertilizer, effluent from the Amazon. Look at this, he scoops a random handful into the boat. These are seeds, it breeds right here just floating on the water.

Welcome to other people’s problems.

We just returned from our first trip abroad in 14 months. Belize is feeling the strain of the lack-of-tourism, as I sense they do most things, gently. The smiles are there. No people could be looser, more easy-going, nicer, and it’s just as pretty as you hoped; Belize, and its gracious people, are lovely. Read more »

A shadow self-portrait shot in mid-March from a bridge above the river Eisack which roars through a gorge, with its melting mountain snows, through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Dave Maier

Podcast time! Eilean is one of my very favorite ambient labels, so I felt a retrospective would be in order. The project is finished, alas, but you can still pick up the entire series of 100 releases for a shockingly low price. Don’t be put off by unfamiliar names here, this is some great stuff. More to come!

Since many of these names were unfamiliar to me as well, I don’t have a whole lot to add, so I’ll be quoting quite a bit from the relevant webpages. Follow the links for more!

Widget below. Here’s the direct link if you can’t wait (or if the widget is cranky): https://www.mixcloud.com/duckrabbit/stars-end-annex-special-edition-eilean-records-part-1/

Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Enthusiasm for public philosophy, and public-facing scholarship more generally, is pervasive. As active contributors to the “public philosophy” genre, we hold that it’s valuable for academics to reach out to broader audiences. It’s good to think deeply about the issues central to living a meaningful life, and this activity shouldn’t be confined to the halls of academia.

Yet the practice of public philosophy occasions problems of its own. To start, there is the tendency towards cheapening and deforming philosophical reflection, which comes with selling philosophical programs as “life hacks” and self-help regimens. This tendency is often accompanied by an effort to monetize philosophy, which in turn of course makes it less “public.” We’ve already written on this problem (here and here). Setting this aside, there is an additional problem. Enthusiasm for public-facing work among professors has recently begun percolating up into university administration. This, in part, has been fueled by the insistence among the professoriate that public scholarship ought to be “institutionalized,” counted alongside strictly academic work for purposes of promotion, merit assessment, and other forms of advancement. In short, college administrators have begun warming to the idea that faculty ought to develop a profile of public outreach. In some institutions, that faculty will contribute public-facing work is a more-or-less explicit expectation, often tied, albeit vaguely, to benchmarks for promotion and other institutional rewards.

We’re suspicious of the proposal that public-facing scholarly activities should be institutionalized. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

Every institution has its founding myths. In mathematics, one of ours is that mathematical truths are unassailable, universal, and eternal. And that any intelligent being can discover and verify those same truths for themself.

This is why movie aliens who want to communicate with us usually use math [1]. The cornerstone of this myth is that mathematicians give airtight logical arguments for their truths. After all, Pythagoras knew his eponymous theorem 2500 years ago and it’s as true as it ever was. And it was equally true in Mesopotamia 3500 years ago and in China and India 2000+ years ago.

The idea of a “mathematical proof” is what makes math, math.

This semester I am teaching our introduction to mathematical proofs course. The not-so-secret purpose of the class is to help students transition from being mathematical computers to being mathematical creators. The students learn what it means to think mathematically. This includes how to take vague and ill-framed questions and turn them into mathematics, how to creatively solve those problems, and how to communicate those solutions in written and verbal form.

A huge part of the course is teaching the students what it means to give a valid proof. They learn about direct proofs (a direct logical march to the desired result), proofs by contradiction (if the desired result weren’t true, then one is forced to a logical impossibility), proofs by induction (using a recursive loop to verify the desired result), and more. They also learn some of the common pitfalls like pre-supposing the desired result and thereby begging the question.

The topics of the course are basic number theory, set theory, logic, functions, and the like, but the real content is how to read and write proofs. Read more »

Ekua Holmes. There’s No Place Like Home.

More here and here.

by David Oates

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next. —Saul Bellow

That quote hangs over my writing desk. Its purpose is to remind me of the urgency of writing. Not the correctness of writing, not its sentiment or fashionability or mild amusement: its urgency. Bellow wants what I want – what every reader wants: the book that is necessary and of the moment, now.

It’s what drives me as a writer. As a reader. And as a small-press publisher.

In the marketplace of books, it can be hard to find that next, necessary book. I keep a list of what to read next – lots of people do. But what is offered to me? Mostly big books from big names, published in editions up into the millions of copies (Michelle Obama’s initial print run for Becoming was 3.4 million, increased to 4.3 million because of demand). The big publishers want sure-fire bestsellers. . . but are these really the necessary books? The “Big Six” publishers who dominate the English-speaking book world have consolidated yet again – it’s the “Big Five” now – and they want a guaranteed return on investment. Until authors can guarantee sales – until they are already in some way famous – why would Penguin Random House give them a contract?

Profit is their necessity, but it’s not mine. I want what is of the heart and of the moment, not merely what is salable.

This disconnect is what has brought small publishers to the fore. They take chances. They can afford to look for excellence, freshness, that je ne sais quoi. I think they follow trends that no trends that aren’t trends yet. And they look above all for urgency. They give writers their first and second books. They edit, sometimes fiercely. They create for writers time and space to grow.

In the economy of creativity, this is how it works now. It’s the little presses who are performing these crucial services. While the big guys make money. Read more »