by Mary Hrovat

One of the things that fascinates me about history is the different ways we know historical periods. We know the times we live through in a very deep way, not just the events and how they affect us, but the details of daily life. We know the slang, the jokes, the mid-list books; the forgettable songs and the ephemeral news; what the world smells like and how it tastes and sounds. It’s very hard to know another time period in anything like the detail we know our own: what people wore to work, what they did on Saturday afternoons, what all the machines did and why they were made.

However, it’s easier to see more distant periods of history as a cohesive whole, or a completed story. As details inevitably fade from collective memory with time, and most of the possible futures are abandoned, meaning and coherence can emerge. Distillation and compression over time reveal story lines, themes, and meanings that weren’t obvious in the rich confusion and immediacy of experience.

The meaning we find or make may be illusory, but we value it anyway. Galen Rowell, in The Inner Game of Outdoor Photography, says, “Minute by minute, year by year, details fall away as our mental imagery becomes more iconographic. That’s how we see; that’s how we think.” Perhaps it’s also how we remember, and especially how we form collective memories.

I can only guess how future generations will view the times I lived through. It seems obvious that the Apollo moon landings and the COVID-19 pandemic will loom large. It’s more difficult to say which politicians or writers or entertainers will be remembered (or for what), or even which disasters or events. I don’t know how things will turn out. It’s even harder to guess which books or paintings or films will survive, or how much anyone will know about, say, how we worked or vacationed or died. Read more »

Dandelions in our backyard in April, 2020.

by Charlie Huenemann

“Every country is going through these decisions, none of us are through this pandemic yet, but some countries are starting to look at slightly expanding what people would define as their household — encouraging people who live alone to maybe match up with somebody else who is on their own or a couple of other people to have almost kind of bubbles of people,” she [Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon] told BBC Radio Scotland.

“Want to join my bubble? This is what your future social life could look like”, Angela Dewan, CNN, April 29th, 2020.

A crisis, by definition, has dramatic effects. It changes how we behave, where wealth goes, what policies we enact, and what we hope. But it also can bring into higher relief features of our lives that have not changed, but turn out to be more important than we realized.

Like the fact that human life takes place in bubbles. This just means that humans like to form groups: somewhat closed networks of interactive relationships among a small number of relatives or friends whose principal job it is to care for one another. “Semi-permeable palliative social matrices” one could call them, but “bubbles” will work just fine. A bubble is an enclosed space, protected from the outside by a fragile boundary; all its points are equidistant from a center; it is almost invisible, but offers a hopeful shine when the light hits it right. All the same can be said of a circle of good friends. And all of human history has been built upon such bubbles.

This crucial anthropological insight has been explored in nearly inexhaustible depth by the contemporary philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, particularly in his trilogy Spheres. Humans are born from round wombs into family circles, sometimes gathered in igloos and tipis, or around a hearth, following a circle of seasons under the orbs of moon and sun, growing into adulthood before they start the cycle again. Read more »

I look at my grandchildren and know that, being so young, they have little
serious understaning of Covid and wonder what parts of it they’ll recall.
Or will it linger…? How vague a memory will it be. What sort of meaning
will it have, one like mine of world war?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Meaning of the Thing

             —May 8, 1945

Suddenly Mom ran out the door,
she’d yanked it’s stubborn latch-side free
bolting into open air
thick with sirens, bells,
the horns of cars, ecstatic yells,
everything that blew that May day free,
crammed with audible relief,
cacophonous confetti,
in a joyous requiem for war:
the death of hell

Mom sobbed kneeling in the drive
and thanked the god who’d just undone
his bloody recklessness by fiat & surprise,
suddenly, in May— coincidental with
when life re-bounds

and I said, Mom, what’s wrong,
what are you crying for?
 
—and she: It’s done!
 
—and I:  What’s done?

—and she: the War!

…… as if I’d known the meaning
of the thing at four

Jim Culleny
4/21/20

by Liam Heneghan

When I was a child growing up in Dublin, a friend dropped her pet hamster on the kitchen floor. The animal survived but thereafter he could only walk in circles. As the hamster got older, the circles got wider but like a ship permanently anchored to shore it never got particularly far.

Like most children, I had taken a fall or two and because I was a worrier I felt concerned that like that hamster I would never travel very far. Though I did, indeed, travel and I am now thousands of miles from home, I still think of my life as occurring in a series of ever widening circles.

At first, I was confined to our back garden. We lived in the Templeogue Village an inglorious suburb on what at the time was a trailing edge of Dublin. Over the garden wall were farm fields and farther off were the Dublin Mountains.

Sure enough over the years, I explored the fields and when I got a little older, I would cycle into the foothills of those mountains.

Now there was one hill in particular that I was drawn to: officially called Montpelier Hill it is also called The Hell Fire Club. The story was that a structure built there in the early 1700s as a hunting lodge for delinquent aristocratic youth had also been used by them for somewhat darker practices. One night the devil himself showed up there at a card game. In the hubbub that followed, a candle was knocked over and the lodge burned to the ground. By the time I started to cycle there, The Hellfire Club was an innocuous forestry plantation. The burned lodge remains. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

One of the heartening ramifications of the otherwise devastating Covid-19 pandemic has been the public’s high level of trust in science and expertise. As a March 19-24 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center indicates, over ⅔ even of low-trusting people surveyed trust public health officials to do an excellent or good job in dealing with the outbreak.

In fact, even corporate Twitter accounts for shaved meat products can boost their following by amplifying the experts:

This increased trust in scientific expertise is part of a growing trend. A Pew Research study in 2019 found that, since 2016, when less than ¼ of the public had “A great deal” of confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public, by 2019 more than ⅓ of the public expressed “A great deal” of confidence in the actions of scientists.

The rising levels of trust in scientific expertise stand, however, in stark contrast to the current UIS Administration’s flagrant disregard of science. Indeed, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund have tracked 417 “government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information” since the 2016 election. Read more »

Rasheed Araeen. In the Midst of Darkness 1, 2012-2013.

More here, here and here.

Thanks to Anjuli Raza Kolb.

by Samia Altaf

My son, it was reassuring to talk to you. We’re lucky that communication has become so easy, though I’d rather hold your dear face in my hands.

They’re quite a miracle, aren’t they, these phone calls, especially in these terrible times when one does not know what is going to happen to us, and to this country, this world. When we were in college in the U.S. in the late seventies, to talk to parents in Pakistan you had to book a call three weeks in advance. When your name came to the top of that line, you had to sit around the phone (there were no cell phones then) for ten hours. The call was expected to get through at any time during that window, for it had to be bounced over a satellite or some such complicated technological thing. What I recall most vividly about those moments is the excitement in the operator’s voice when the connection eventually happened. “Go ahead, ma’am/dear/hon,” they’d say, a triumphant edge to their tone, “your party is on the line.” I imagined the operator standing astride the Atlantic, a colossus holding the phone line up above her head out of the water just for the three minutes of my booked time so I could talk to my mother.

My mother, my “party,” was invariably in the kitchen when she was called to the phone. I could almost see her wiping her hands on the edge of her dupatta as she hurried over to scream How are you? into the phone. We’d talk about what she was cooking and other ordinary things. The world was safer then. No need to worry about face masks and sanitizers and such. The phone system that you laugh at did not seem too cumbersome then or too difficult—just normal for that time, even advanced. We thought we were lucky to be able to get to talk to folks back home, ten thousand miles away, on the other side of the world. Even grandma, Baiji, half deaf and half zonked on meds, was brought to the phone, and allowed to say Who? What? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

As many of us head into our second month of shelter in place orders (or not in some cases), we are looking to the past for guidance on what comes next. Unsurprisingly, many wonder when does “normal” return. It’s a hopeful question, as after all, this is hardly the first devastating disease that humanity has wrestled with historically. Those previous pandemics brought out massive disruptions, sometimes for centuries after. Events like the Black Death in the 14^th century, the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, and more recent scares such as swine flu, ebola, and zika, all had (or are still having) long lasting impacts—the aftermath was not back to normal, but a world transformed. But even the more recent public health emergencies seem distant problems to some.

AIDS for many still remains a “gay problem” rather than an actual, ongoing public health problem that needs a systemic response. For many white, straight people it was a “non-event” in their communities, something they experienced via the news rather than in their daily lives. The ones further in the past seem even less impactful, with the Spanish Flu as a prime example. Most narratives of the Great War told to the public ignore or downplay the role of the 1918 flu in reshaping the world. Part of that is a failure to understand how complexity of historical cause and effect. We don’t think of the Spanish Flu as disruptive, as it came at the end of the War, which gets all the public attention. But the world was pretty radically altered by the events of both the War and the pandemic: “normal” never fully returned. People lived transformed lives in the wake of both events. Here I want to argue that “normal” as we’ve come to experience it will most likely not return. Whatever changes come out of this pandemic need not be a negative if we proactively address the real cracks being revealed in our system. To quote the great Leonard Cohen, “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” I argue we need to use that illumination to create a system of sustainability rather than one based on endless growth to nowhere. Read more »

After rain, a puddle on the road with a film of fine pollen from nearby trees, one of which is also reflected in it. In Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, at the end of April, 2020.

by Katie Poore

A few months ago, before the news had spiraled into an endless spiral of public health precautions and death tolls, I was scrolling through Instagram, thinking, as one does while scrolling through Instagram, of nothing in particular. It had been a long day, and I was eager for those ten minutes of blank-mindedness, a strange and temporary forgetting as one melts into a digital universe. News of COVID-19 had just begun to spike where I had been living in Chambéry, France, close to the northern Italian border, and although it didn’t feel particularly urgent, I felt, as I almost always do, unsettled by the endless news cycle and the catastrophic events that have become so commonplace that the word catastrophic has begun to feel itself quotidian.

The news was bad, but Instagram was mostly anesthetizing, and anesthesia is what I sought. Thoughtlessness.

But it didn’t last long. Rather quickly I stumbled across a few snippets of a poem:

Praise crazy. Praise sad.

Praise the path on which we’re led.

Praise the roads on earth and water.

Praise the eater and the eaten.

Praise beginnings; praise the end.

Praise the song and praise the singer.

This was my first introduction to Joy Harjo, who has recently been reappointed a second term as the U.S. Poet Laureate. It was posted on an account called The On Being Project, created and led by Krista Tippett, who might be most familiar as host of the On Being podcast. She excerpted Harjo’s poem, “Praise the Rain,” as a promotion for what was then the most recent episode of her latest podcast project hosted by Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, Poetry Unbound. A meditation on the spiritual nature of gratitude and of scrupulous attention (in another line, she says we ought to praise the “curl of plant”), Harjo’s poem was a perfect antidote to both my own mindlessness and the chaos that inspired it. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

Dedication

As an “intellectual in emigration,” Theodor Adorno wrote Mimima Moralia, his book of philosophical, sociological, cultural, and psychological reflections “from the standpoint of subjective experience, [which] means that the pieces do not entirely measure up to the philosophy, of which they are nevertheless a part.” I have always been fascinated by this book. As form follows function, he uses common aphorisms as a springboard for this particular advance of critical theory; each section is a short but deep dive into the very essence of the experience about which he ruminates. As an intellectual in quarantine away from my home, I felt some loose kinship to Adorno’s condition of displacement and found the form compelling as well as comforting. My mind and spirit are restless and conflicted; protected yet partially blinded by my shelter, I nevertheless try to see, understand and find a kind of educated hope in the fact that through critical reflection there are pedagogical moments in the present and past from which to learn and grow.

Part One

2020

Nothing is harmless anymore–Theodor Adorno

1

Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee–Often referenced as the shortest poem ever written, Muhammad Ali’s poem “Me, We!” captures in the most succinct way the challenges that the coronavirus pandemic presents to a species not quite ready for primetime. According to George Plimpton in the film When We Were Kings, after Ali completed his commencement address to Harvard’s graduating class of ‘75, a student yelled out from the audience, “Give us a poem!” I imagine “The Greatest” looking out from the podium over the congregation of overwhelmingly white faces—punctuated like an exclamation point by the occasional brown one—and spreading his famously long arms as if getting ready to accept the love of a neglected child. A grin widens across that beautifully regal face as he recites, “Me, We!”; a stinging jab, followed by a powerful overhand right.

2

You never forget how to ride a bike—Reuters, April 4, 2020, journalist Gabriella Borter writes, “Hospitals and morgues in [New York City] are struggling to treat the desperately ill and bury the dead. Crematories have extended their hours and burned bodies into the night, with corpses piling up so quickly that city officials were looking elsewhere in the state for temporary interment sites.” My nine-year-old daughter, on this same day, in a town about eighty-five miles from the crematories and refrigerated temporary morgues, learns to ride her bike. A northwest wind rips open several days of raw rain, ushering in chilly spring air, cerulean sky, and bursts of Goldenrod along the harbor’s edge. It takes just a short jog and gentle push from me to send her off into that magical moment in which velocity, gravity and centrifugal force mix with our human capacity, need and desire for balance; her triumphant laughter and hoots of delight are stolen by the wind as she pedals her bike farther and farther away from me. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

For C.J. Newman

My father is no longer at home.

He returned to Montreal, the city of his birth, on retirement from the University of British Columbia, and has been living in the bottom half of a duplex in the Mile End district since. Some time ago he decided to sell the flat to a friend and now continues to inhabit it as a tenant, an arrangement known as viager, or “life lease”. My father’s place is near avenue Bernard; the strip of that thoroughfare starting at avenue du Parc and intersecting Jeanne Mance, Esplanade, Waverly, and Saint-Urbain has undergone gentrification since he was young, and now features a bookstore specializing in graphic novels and a variety of trendy, ironically louche venues; farther afield there are the celebrated feuding bagel bakeries, St-Viateur and Fairmount, each with its coterie of hipster disciples. Beginning in the adjacent Outremont district and spreading across Parc and down past those four perpendicular streets (whose initials, Ouija-style, eerily spell the word J.E.W.S.), there is also a large community of Hasidim, whom my father enjoys addressing (and occasionally serenading) in the Yiddish of his childhood, which was spent not far from here in Montreal’s Plateau neighborhood, among Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement. Those early immigrants, my father’s extended family and their compatriots, have long since moved on, to more salubrious districts to the southwest, away from tenements and walk-ups and into modern high-rises; or out of the province of Quebec altogether, to neighboring Ontario and beyond. My father’s immediate family – my grandparents, aunt, and uncle – have all died, leaving him with only a handful of cousins nearby, from whom he is for the most part estranged.

None of these disappearances or displacements, however, is the source of my father’s current alienation, which is not physical, but rather spiritual. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Okavango Delta, Botswana, March 2015.

Digital photograph.

by R. Passov

Modeling in finance is done through the lens of mathematics. To put something into a model where you are not guided by observable constants, such as the speed of light, requires assumptions.

With so many models off the shelf a common understanding of assumptions is slipping by. If you go far enough back, most good finance text books bothered to explain the assumptions underlying the model. One such text – Modern Finance by Copeland and Weston – offers a comprehensive discussion of the assumptions necessary to argue that the world of asset pricing is mean-variant efficient (MVE.)

MVE underpins the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), the second most important model in all of finance; a model most students in business classes in western universities are exposed to; and something that simply can’t work. Much can be proven about what the model can say.

The most important of which is that there’s a certain portfolio of assets – the Efficient Frontier – that is better than all others.

But it turns out that while this portfolio can always be found in historical data, it can never be identified in the present.

But there are other models which can be derived from the same set of unrealistic assumptions. In 1997, The Nobel Prize committee awarded the prize in Economic Sciences to Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for their “… method to determine the value of derivatives,” – the Black Scholes Options Pricing Model (BS).

These two, along with Fisher Black who had passed prior to the award, solved the puzzle of pricing the right which affords its holder a specific time frame within which to purchase, for a set price, a risky asset. The right can be to buy (a call) or sell (a put) or otherwise manipulated in almost any fashion that mathematics allows, and still some form of the BS equation will arrive at a price.

The assumptions necessary for the options pricing model to mirror reality have never been met. And yet, pricing options and the reams of creative derivatives that spew forth is a several-hundred-trillion-dollar market.

The notional value of derivatives collapse, or ‘net,’ to a much smaller number as most activity is part of a giant zero-sum game. Still, options exist. Farmers have long since contracted in advance to sell yet-to-be harvested crop. It’s only in the past 45 years that a workable formula has been available to help someone negotiate a price.

The basic formula was derived in 1900 by a French mathematician. Read more »