Voices Choir concert in Bozen, South Tyrol.
Category: Monday Magazine
Though we are an aggregator blog (providing links to content elsewhere) on all other days, on Mondays we have only original writing by our editors and guest columnists. Each of us writes on any subject we wish, and the length of articles generally varies between 1000 and 2500 words. Our writers are free to express their own opinions and we do not censor them in any way. Sometimes we agree with them and sometimes we don’t.Below you will find links to all our past Monday columns, in alphabetical order by last name of the author. Within each columnist’s listing, the entries are mostly in reverse-chronological order (most recent first).
Cousin Bernie, Free-Range Professor, Part One: The Memoir Continues
by Barbara Fischkin
I remember the day I realized that my cousin Bernard Moskowitz—my father’s nephew—was nothing like my other relatives.
The realization came in a flash as I spotted a newly arrived letter on the dining room table at our home at 4722 Avenue I in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. Two pages. Typewritten. It remains in my mind’s eye. I recognized the scratchy signature: It was my “Cousin Bernie.” I went back to the first page because that seemed like it was from somebody else It was embossed with these words:
Moorhead, Minnesota.
Professor B.B. Morris.
My mother, her eagle eyes in play, gazed through the opening from the kitchen and walked up behind me.
“Is this…,” I said
“Yes,” she replied, smiling. “Cousin Bernie got a good job. Daddy is so proud.” She paused. A worried look took over her face. “He changed his name. Maybe they don’t like Jews there.” Another pause. More worry. “It must be very cold.”
I imagined my mother sending Cousin Bernie a sweater. Or two. Or ten.
What else? A Star of David tie clip? A Hebrew prayer book? The possibilities were endless. Read more »
Monday, June 17, 2024
Order Of The Day: Eisenhower And D-Day
by Michael Liss
Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, June 6, 1944
We had to storm the beaches at Normandy. There was no other way. None, at least, to loosen Hitler’s death-grip on Western Europe. One by one, proud peoples saw their countries’ armies overwhelmed by Blitzkrieg conducted with a speed and agility that astonished.
First Poland, with Germany’s partner of convenience, the Russians, which then rampaged through Eastern Europe, gobbling up prizes. Then, after a pause for the so-called “Phony War,” the Germans moved on to Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg. May 13, 1940, they pivoted, sent their troops over the River Meuse, blasted and danced past the supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line, and induced the mass evacuation at Dunkirk. The French Army, it could be said the French country, was in full physical and moral retreat. By June 22, it was over. The French were forced into a humiliating armistice in the very railcar in which Germany had accepted defeat in World War I. Hitler literally danced a jig.
Germany occupied roughly three-fifths of European French territory, including the entire coastline across from the English Channel and the Atlantic. Britain had survived the desperate Battle of Britain but stood alone. The Italians joined the Axis to grab some of the spoils for themselves, and, in early 1941, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania followed. In April of that year, the Germans crushed Greece and Yugoslavia.
“Fortress Europe,” essentially a massive buffer zone for the Germans, ending in a fortified Atlantic coastline, became a reality. The Nazis built the Atlantic Wall, a 2,400-mile line of obstacles, including 6.5 million mines, thousands of concrete bunkers and pillboxes bristling with artillery, and countless tank traps. Where there wasn’t a wall, there were cliffs looking over the beaches where Allied forces were expected to land, and, from those cliffs, German soldiers were prepared to rain down fire. Read more »
A Biden Paradox
by R. Passov
A few weeks back, I flew to Los Angeles for my 40th business school reunion. I went knowing it was going to be a hopeless affair. I was the odd man out forty years ago and remain so. I had stumbled into business school not out of some ambition to make a fortune on Wall Street, something I knew next to nothing about, but rather because I had stumbled onto a thin set of classes whereby one could get credit for just taking finals. I successfully employed that ruse across six years of undergraduate struggles to land a B.A. A significant number of those finals were taken in courses that constituted the first year of my MBA program. I completed my undergraduate studies on a Friday and started business school the following Monday.
I had no business being in business school. I lacked a rudimentary understanding of the business world. My only two significant sources of work experience were selling drugs and working in liquor stores.
I attacked business like a polished rube. I hit the books, blazing through my classes as though on an academic quest to Mt Olympus. While I went the extra mile solving differential equations to map product penetration rates, many of my classmates were at beer busts or “networking forever down Columbus Avenue.”
…I’ve seen them in commercials sailin’ boats and plain’ ball, Pourin’ beer for one another cryin’, “Why not have it all?” Now I saw the ghostly progress as the wind around me blew, Till I felt the urge to purchase a BMW
All the salad bars were empty, all the Quiche Lorraine was gone. I heard the yuppies crying as they vanished in the dawn. Calling brand names to each other, as they faded from my view. They’ll be networking forever down Columbus Avenue
—”Yuppies in the Sky”, Peter, Paul and Mary
So, why did I go to that reunion? I went because it’s rare to have the opportunity to follow the routes of so many lives across forty years. I also went because my cohorts and I swum in the currents of the Reagan revolution. We left B-school at the zenith of Regan’s influence. When the ‘Chicago Boys’, those now well-known, hard-charging, un-forgiving right-of-center academics were making much of the western world into a capitalistic democracy, where the ‘free market’ knows best. Read more »
Monday Poem
Art
Here is this tree before me
whose skin is as fissured and split
as the landscape of the Rockies as if
a network of rivers had, for centuries,
by force of friction, sculpted canyons
into its surface; bark beaten by
torrents of rain, dried by torch of sun,
torn by whip of wind, but
remaining steadfast as Everest
despite every onslaught, for
well beyond what will be its
natural life, as it is
…. framed in this canvas,
…. or in the length of these lines,
…. or in the music of the spheres,
…. or in the dance of gypsies,
all meant to share with others
the strength and miracle
of its character.
Jim Culleny, 6/14/24
Two Dots
by Rafaël Newman
It was my birthday last month, a “round” one, as anniversaries ending in zero are known in Switzerland; and in gratitude for having made it to a veritably Sumerian age, as well as for the good health and happiness I am currently enjoying, I threw a large party for family and friends. Then, not quite one week later, I flew off to Albania, a land I have come to associate with the sensation and enactment of gratitude.
Albanians in official capacity are fond of giving each other elaborately worded certificates of gratitude, presented in velveteen dossiers at formal ceremonies. I know this because I have attended several of these ceremonies. I have even received such a certificate myself—for, although not a native of Shqipëria, I have now twice been invited to participate in Albanian cultural affairs.
The first occasion, in 2019, was a literary festival in Pejë, in northwest Kosovo, where I joined a host of poets from across the Balkan region and beyond to read poetry in memory of Azem Shkreli (1938-1997), a local man of letters. During the closing ceremony, surrounded on the stage of Pejë’s municipal theater by the many poets in attendance and congratulated by various Kosovar dignitaries, I was handed my certificate by the woman who had invited me to the festival, my friend Entela Kasi, president of the Albanian PEN Centre. Read more »
Red, Write, and Blues
by Claire Chambers
Introduction
Hari Kunzru has recently completed the third novel in his three colours trilogy about race, class, and the arts. White Tears concerns music and was published in 2017. Red Pill deals with literature and came out in 2020. And Blue Ruin zeroes in on fine art, having just been released last month, in May 2024. All of the novels examine racism and evoke various upheavals in the present moment. The titles of this tripartite sequence of novels figure forth the American or British flag, signifying the fractured state of these nations. Paul Gilroy rightly claimed in the title of his 1987 book that ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’, and Kunzru’s storyworld also highlights the strife amid the stars and stripes.
In this essay, I am interested in how a sensory studies perspective can enrich discussions of Kunzru’s trilogy. I discuss sound (and, to a lesser extent, touch or its absence) and a need to listen to other voices. The key issue here is whether, and to what extent, the tolerant should be tolerant of the intolerant. In White Tears, Red Pill, and Blue Ruin, Kunzru makes a conscious effort to listen to the repugnant politics of white supremacists, alt-right provocateurs, and QAnon or ‘plandemic’ conspiracy theorists. Trying to understand their views without either endorsing or criticizing them (while subtly forming judgements), Kunzru trains his ear on loathsome conversations and does some radical listening. Read more »
Perceptions
LaToya Ruby Frazier. Mom and Mr.Yerby’s hands, 2005.Taking a Good Hard Look: Teapots and Bronzes
by Leanne Ogasawara
1.
All I wanted, I told him, was “the perfect teapot.” Just one would be enough, I said, but it had to be perfect (1) — as if a teapot could make everything else in the world okay. A seemingly simple task, and yet finding it was elusive as any great chase.
My first demand was it had to be a Yixing zisha teapot. Valued since at least the tenth century in China, zisha pots are purple or reddish-brownish, unglazed stoneware that are so beautiful they will make you drool (2). The first thing I did was spend hours at the Flagstaff Tea Museum in Hong Kong. Studying the pots in their collection, I tried to narrow down exactly what I wanted in my own “perfect pot.” I learned all about the way zisha pots are hand-modeled out of what is extremely hard clay. Like any great Literati art, one artist alone is traditionally in charge of the entire process from start to finish, and therefore the artist’s seal will be affixed to the bottom of the pot as it is in every way that artist’s creation: one of a kind.
It was in Hong Kong where I’d first fallen in love with tea and stoneware pots. Even now, I never cease to marvel at how soft and warm stoneware feels in comparison to porcelain. Handling unglazed pottery is always a very sensual experience; porous and velvety, it’s like human skin. One of the reasons zisha pots are favored by Chinese tea masters is because the clay absorbs the fragrance and taste of the tea and over time the pot brings something of itself to every brewing, like antique oak barrels used for wine or the ground used in certain kinds of pickling. Read more »
Rethinking Atheism
by Akim Reinhardt
The turn of the 21st century saw a burst of atheistic declarations and critiques in the United States and Great Britain, led by a small group of celebrity atheists including Philosopher Daniel Dennett, Biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist Christopher Hitchens. I have always found this New Atheism, as the movement is often called, to be a mixed bag. It was long overdue, and many good (if obvious) points were made. However, there was also a fair bit of navel-gazing and even stupidity. And among some of the celebrity leaders, I believe, there was also a profound misunderstanding of religion, how it functions, and even its basic purposes.Below I identify what I see as two basic recurring problems in modern atheism. I then offer two approaches that I believe atheists should consider for understanding and relating to the religious.
Problem 1: Arrogance. Don’t be so sure of yourself. Even if you’re not laboring under a “God delusion,” you should still have the humility to recognize that you know next to nothing, and what few answers you might proffer aren’t anything anyone wants to hear. If humanism is to offer any benefits, it must begin with an acknowledgment of humanity’s vast ignorance and inability to learn much.
This sentiment will likely send some admirers of science into paroxysms. Surely, they protest, we’ve learned so much over the last century or two. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
The Art of Helping
by Marie Snyder
A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
~ Alexander Pope
Is it, though?
We’re in a mental health crisis and people need more access to help. How much learning is necessary to help one another, and is it dangerous to listen and offer another perspective or even some suggestions without an advanced psych degree? In old movies, people told their stories to bartenders, hairstylists, or cab drivers for the price of a beer or trim or trip to the airport. They just needed a captive audience willing to listen to their worries Now we want people with credentials as if that will provide more certain results.
But not all credentials are created equal.
Last year BetterHelp got in the news for allegedly sharing confidential health data to social media sites, and was fined $7.8 million. TV writer Mike Drucker wrote:
“EVERY BETTERHELP AD: ‘We’re like therapy but cheaper and easier! We have people for every problem so you get care just for you!’
ACTUAL BETTERHELP: ‘We’re going to set you up with a confused therapist that will ghost after two sessions. Also we told Facebook about your assault.'”
More recently, the New York Times had an article on scams in the wellness coaching industry, describing scenarios in which the new recruits were bilked out of massive amounts for “tuition” made up of a few hours of videos, and then were never helped to find clients. Read more »
Why I Am a Jew
by David Winner
Throughout most of my life, I periodically napped in the back sitting room of my parent’s house in Charlottesville, gazing at an enormous shelf of my father’s books.
Why I am a Jew was an unlikely title to find. Though my father was most certainly a Jew, he was fiercely disconnected from all things Jewish. He claimed that he only learned that he was Jewish after he left his Jewish mother and Irish American stepfather behind in Pasadena to go to a very antisemitic Harvard in the late forties. He hated Woody Allen, Larry David, Bernie Sanders, and all other public Jews, never set foot in a synagogue or at a seder dinner, and was skeptical about the state of Israel.
Perhaps being brought up by such a non-Jewish Jew has influenced my perspective. When the news broke about the Hamas attacks in the fall, Angela, my wife, was cross with me before I even opened my mouth because she was stunned by what had happened and feared what I would say. I’ve had a long history of disparaging Israel.
A few days after the attacks, I came back to my house in Brooklyn to find Angela in conversation with our ultra-orthodox Jewish neighbors. They were in shock. Their seventeen-year-old son told us that Muslims had slated the following day for killing Jews around the world. Only Israel could protect us from the “animals.” The world, as he framed it, was overrun by an evil force out to get him and his community. Rather than confront his racism, I retreated inside. I didn’t think he would ever construct things any differently. Read more »
Monday Photos: Roadside Roses in Vahrn, South Tyrol
Toilet Train Your Tyrannosaur
by Paul Braterman
According to the anthropologist James Bielo, such places as the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter provide sacred infotainment, in which visitors imagine that their own lived experience is Bible-based. This requires an illusion of authenticity, with no concern for biblical accuracy. Thus, when Bielo sat in on the planning stages of the Ark Encounter video trailer, he found much concern over the appearance of the pegs being used to hold the Ark’s planks together, which looked like something you could buy at a modern DIY store. That mattered because it didn’t fit the illusion. But no one really cared that Noah was incorrectly described as “righteous,” rather than the highly ambiguous “righteous in his generation,” which is what the Bible actually tells us. Ken Ham had okayed the script, so it must be fine theologically. Ken Ham, founder and at the time CEO of Answers in Genesis, owner of the Ark Encounter, is zealous in his support of one particular version of biblical literalism, but such zeal does not leave room for even the possibility of ambiguity.
As infotainment, consider how the Ark Encounter describes the lives and lifestyles of Noah and his family on board. We are warned that the designers have used artistic license, but assured that nonetheless what we are offered is completely compatible with the biblical account. Technically, that may be true, but in spirit it is totally false. We are not being given an account of the Biblical ordeal, but scenes from a wholesome contemporary sitcom. There is a library, containing scrolls and tablets, where Noah relaxes and Shem studies. It contains a couch, which Noah built during the flood. There is also a commodious kitchen with a wood-burning oven, used for baking bread, rolls, and other things. An equally commodious dining room, where they can all relax in the evenings after having fed the animals. Read more »
Affective Technology, Part 1: Poems and Stories
This is the first in a series of three articles on literature consider as affective technology, affective because it can transform how we feel, technology because it is an art (tekhnē) and, as such, has a logos. In this first article I present the problem, followed by some informal examples, a poem by Coleridge, a passage from Tom Sawyer that echoes passages from my childhood, and some informal comments about underlying mechanism. In the second article I’ll take a close look at a famous Shakespeare sonnet (129) in terms of a model of the reticular activity system first advanced by Warren McCulloch. I’ll take up the problem of coherence of oneself in the third article.
Augustine’s shameful members
There is a passage in The City of God where Augustine complains about “bodily members” that are not subject to our will (Book 14, Chapter 17):
Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.” Their condition was different before sin…. because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man.
Augustine is obviously complaining about sexuality, and offering the interesting speculation that, before humankind’s fall from grace, sexuality was under the control of the will but only afterward, alas, was such control lost.
The problem is hardly confined to sexuality. One cannot become hungry at will, nor curious, affectionate, playful, angry, and so forth. One can fake many of these things, and more, and sometimes one can fake it until it becomes real, after a fashion. However, we can go beyond faking it. Though the use of literary or artistic means, we can exert indirect influence on our affective states. We deliberately, willfully, set out to read a poem, listen to piece of music, watch a movie, whatever, and our feelings change. Read more »
Monday, June 10, 2024
If We Can Keep it: Is the U.S. a Democracy or a Republic?
by Tim Sommers
I usually begin my “Ethics” course by asking, “What is the difference between ethics and morals?” I used to begin by literally asking the students that question, until I realized no one is happy about your very first question being a trick.
So, here’s the difference. “Ethics” comes from Greek, “morals” come from Latin. That’s it. Particular philosophers sometimes make some kind of (potentially) useful distinction between the two words, but the bottom line is, absent some stipulation with a theory behind it, ethics and morals don’t differ in meaning. The same goes for a “democracy” versus a “republic.”
During the recent Washington State Republican Convention, one delegate received a standing ovation for complaining that “We are devolving into a democracy,” and suggesting that “we should repeal the 17th Amendment” (Senators are to be elected by a popular vote, rather than appointed by state legislatures). Lest you think this a lone voice in the wilderness, the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, the person holding the second most powerful political position in our system of government, recently said, “We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a constitutional republic.” Utah Senator Mike Lee also says we live in a republic and that “Rank democracy thwarts” human flourishing.
Frankly, this is a worrying line. Read more »
Monday Poem
What are “forever chemicals” and why are they a concern?
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
Recently the Biden administration has clamped down on so-called “forever chemicals” which are thought to potentially cause diseases in human beings and damage to the environment. As with any molecule, the basic chemical structure and properties of these compounds are responsible for their function. In this video I break down some of the basic chemical features of these perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and talk about why some of the concerns might directly follow from these features.
Jaffer Kolb. Untitled, June, 2024.