by Carl Pierer

In a time of rapid urbanisation, cities distil contemporary issues. By 2050, more than two thirds of the world's population will live in an urban environment (DESA, 2012). Social questions, political problems, and environmental concerns are increasingly raised in an urban context. In particular, due to the concentration of people and consequently economic activity, cities are large contributors to the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and responsible for 40% of GHG emissions from transport (I.E. Agency, 2008). This suggests that a greener organisation of cities can make a substantial contribution to mitigating climate change. The argument here is twofold. First, we present the argument for mitigating by changing the urban form, in particular to a dense and circular city. Secondly, we present the case of Curitiba, illustrating that urban form can significantly reduce GHG emissions from transport, even if the city does not conform to the ideal of high density and circularity.

The theoretical framework for modelling the city is relatively simply. The standard, classical economic model of the (monocentric) city supposes that there is a central business district (CBD) in which all economic activity occurs. City-dwellers commute to the CBD in the morning and back to their residences in the evening. Since this is an economic model, people try to maximise their utility given their income. The utility depends only on the size of living space and the length of the commute. Because a longer commute incurs higher costs to the commuter, the closer a place is to the CBD, the higher the demand from people wanting to live there. This in turn means higher rent prices, and so less living space for the same amount. The model is simplified by allowing a linear trajectory from each point of the city to the CBD. Consequently, the city according to this model is radially symmetric. If we look at the density of the city according to distance from the CBD, we see an exponential decay. That is, near the CBD the city is densely populated (meaning, in particular, high rising buildings), but further away the density is falling (bigger houses, fewer people, the classical suburb scenario).

Of course, this model is rather simplistic and many cities are not in line with the predictions. Some points along which this model has been developed include to allow for multiple centres of economic activity or for other desirable amenities such as distance to green spaces. However limited the model may be, it does illustrate nicely that the urban form is a major factor influencing certain sustainability issues (something that has been confirmed by empirical studies).

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Sughra Raza. Wall at Alfred P. Murrah building, Oklahoma City. 2015.

Digital photo.

by Emrys Westacott

In the beginning, there were only professors and students, and relations between them were very simple. A student would give the professor half of the fee for a course at the first class, and the remainder after the last class. A few poorer students, who could not pay the full amount in cash, would sometimes bring vegetables they had grown, or a fish they had caught, and the professors accepted these graciously. The widow of a former mathematics professor pickled the vegetables and salted the fish before distributing them among the faculty.

As the college grew, so did its reputation, and as more classes were needed, more professors came to teach. To make things easier for the professors, the widow began collecting the fees and depositing them at the local bank. She also began keeping simple records. At some point, no-one could remember exactly when, the professors agreed among themselves to pay her a stipend for the services she provided.

When the widow died, the professors decided to replace her with an experienced bookkeeper who was given a contract and a salary. This person also took on and standardized a few small administrative tasks that the professors, in an ad hoc sort of way, had previously performed for themselves. The college continued to flourish, student numbers increased, and in time the need for additional administrative assistance became pressing. To simplify things, the professors now agreed to become salaried employees of the college, and the larger decisions about the direction and operation of the institution were put into the hands of individuals who were good at that sort of thing.

The college continued to grow, and so did the administrative work required. More's Law states that in any institution, the closer an employee is to the power center where salaries are determined, the higher the remuneration they receive. True to this principle, the higher-level administrators began to be paid quite a lot more than the professors. As their work became more complicated, they found it necessary to increase the administrative tiers within the college, bring in more specialists and employ more assistants. They also found that they needed bigger, more elegant offices.

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by Brooks Riley

by Pedro Rosa Mendes

1.

It rained forever the whole night. There was no other sound other than a woman weeping or praying or begging,

“I did not, I did not, I did not“

in the house next to our miserable hotel, the Dokone, formerly the Florida before the war ravaged the old quarters of Mamba Point in Monrovia.

From one of my notebooks:

12 November 2003. There is no light. Wolf lyes flat in bed, on his boxers. He meditates. The woman stopped crying after I shouted

Stop it!

to the darkness and the rain. I shouted to the man beating the woman with a belt, or with a whip. Eventually, Wolf rises and sits. He starts recalling:

There was an offensive from the Northern Alliance against an area under Taliban control but which was not affiliated with their regime. There was a bizarre military alliance between enemies back then. General Dostum’s forces stormed the region, including the village from where my interpreter came from. Everything was brought down. When we reached the village, my interpreter looked for his house. Dostum’s men had killed is entire family. My interpreter had six children. From newborns to grown-ups, like a staircase. It was still possible when we arrived to the village to see where Dostum’s had crushed the children’s skulls. A stain… It looked like the victims had been grabbed by their ankles, or so I guessed, because one could still see purpled marks of hands printed on the babies’ legs. The heads… Just like that. Young skulls are soft. I entered one of the houses and there was the body of a girl. I couldn’t exactly understand what happened with her since her dress was folded back, covering her head. I mean, the place of her head. My interpreter cried out, desperate. He cried and cried and cried. I walked outside and raised my hands high:

how? How?…

It was winter. It was Winter 2001. Everything was frozen. I tried to dig a grave for my interpreter’s children. I didn’t succeed. Everything was frozen. I remained with him for three days.

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by Michael Liss

What moves the American soul?

We love arguments, contests, and elections. Love the drama, the passion, the polarizing candidates, the fake piety, the rank partisanship, the heart-felt and often appallingly disingenuous editorials, and the heavy dose of moral relativism.

It’s that time again. Baseball Hall of Fame ballots for the class of 2018 had to be postmarked as of Sunday, December 31, 2017. The final results will be announced January 24, but the angst is well underway. This year, in particular, the garden-variety question of who, on performance, merits induction, has been largely dominated by the public evaluation of a generation of original sinners, the steroid boys.

It’s been more than a decade since the first retired PED’s user came on the ballot, but this year’s discussion was juiced (sorry about that) by Hall of Famer Joe Morgan’s November letter to every member of the Baseball Writers Association of America (the voters) essentially begging them not to admit tainted candidates.

Morgan is right to be concerned. In a manner that mirrors the chaos and distrust in our political system, the fans and the writers are gradually turning towards acceptance of behavior that was once considered disqualifying. They aren’t alone—institutions and people in positions of authority are doing it as well. The Commissioner’s Office itself has a bifurcated approach—significant punishment for present users, but a queasy truce with the past. Retired offenders are no longer persona non grata. Fox Sports hired former litigant/third baseman Alex Rodriguez as a color commentator last season, and, if there was resistance from the league, it was very hard to hear. Other ex-players have begun to drift back into the game, and their presence no longer is seen as controversial. That couldn’t have happened without at least a wink and a nod from the Commissioner’s Office.

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More Legal by the Minute, More
Difficult to Fire

photo of a rightist with gun, FB 2016,
pistol pointed right at camera
barrel practically screwing the lens
bright silver halo at the business end
the moment the flash went off:
………………………………. lightning! lead
dressed in camouflage he was
neat.beard.militarish. intending
to be a threat maybe pretending
to be a threat who knows
what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
of course, the shadow knows
but that was then on the radio
and it was fiction in a way
but there he was in 2016
and probably still is a year later
more trumped up with a sense of reality tv on steroids
becoming more legal by the minute
and more difficult to fire
.
.
Jim Culleny
12/29/17

—the Shadow

.

by Dave Maier

A reader writes in to ask a question about skepticism. Enrique asks:

I get confused with the dream argument. It confuses me to read the argument of the dream because I see several interpretations. Do they refer to the dreams we all experience while sleeping? Or do they refer to a class of dreams that has nothing to do with our sleeping bodies?

Enrique goes on to note that philosophers like Barry Stroud seem to equivocate when they talk about this argument, saying both that the argument refers to ordinary dreams (that is, the ones we have while sleeping) and at the same time that ordinary dreams do not pose any particular skeptical problem (although "philosophical dreams" do). In either case it seems that the dreaming argument is not where the real action is.

I agree with Enrique that the dream argument does not seem to get at what is really driving the skeptical worry. It’s true that a lot of philosophers address that argument specifically, which makes it look more important than it is, but Stroud is right that that’s not the real issue. And indeed there are a number of perfectly good answers to the dreaming argument in the literature, none of which put to rest the skeptical problem as a whole. So I advise noting the historical importance of the argument, but not to take it (or its refutations) too seriously. But since understanding the skeptical dialectic is essential for understanding modern philosophy, let’s go past that particular formulation to say more about skepticism in general. (See also an earlier post on the subject.)

One way of making progress here is to distinguish different kinds or aspects of the Cartesian commitments driving the modern skeptical dialectic. First, of course, we know that traditional Cartesian metaphysics divides the world into mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), and we naturally think of the epistemological puzzles as following from that: if we are constituted as knowers by one sort of substance, how do we come to know about another sort of substance entirely? We are used to regarding our senses as delivering knowledge about the physical world, and indeed how could we not? But on Descartes’s mechanical conception of the physical body, our senses themselves are physical processes outside the mind, and thus on the other side of the metaphysical (and thus epistemological) gap. This is one thing making it look like dreaming is a good example: our purported sensory perception during the dream is itself (as it happens, and as we see when we wake up) a merely mental process – one which is, unfortunately for our knowledge, subjectively indistinguishable from “real” perception. But of course as we’ve noted this way of thinking of it leads to further puzzles.

We might do better to put the metaphysics to one side for now (but bring it back in at just the right time). The skeptical conclusion seems most dramatic when it concerns our knowledge of an “external world”, but its lasting significance has depended on considering it purely as an epistemological puzzle – that is, independently of what exactly it is that we seem both to know and (thanks to skeptical considerations) not to know. After all, the ancient skeptics didn’t need Descartes’s dualistic metaphysics to get their argument going, and they didn’t attack knowledge of the “external world” in particular.

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by Thomas Manuel

In both academia and in the minds of the general reading public, there seems to be a hierarchy when it comes to fiction. ‘Literary’ fiction is (infuriatingly) deemed to be more noteworthy than genre fiction, for example. Similarly, within the supercategory of genre fiction, there are some subtle, mystifying hierarchies. Most readers identify genres as sets of tropes, archetypes and milieus and know they’re employing purely subjective preferences when picking one set over another. But at the hands of many literary theorists, thought leaders and my mother, obscure aesthetic principles are deployed to bolster these hierarchies – such as the claim that science fiction is somehow more redeemable than fantasy fiction. This has gotten my one-horned, fire-breathing goat.

Dragons and faster-than-light travel

Science fiction possesses the heady connotations of science-ness, extrapolative thought experiments and futurism. Fantasy, on the other hand, seems to lack any logical rules whatsoever and is thus relegated to the dustbin of escapism. Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, opened one of the show’s episodes with the claim that science fiction was the improbable made possible and fantasy was the impossible made probable. While framing the dichotomy as the improbable versus the impossible is cool, it’s also completely wrong. As China Miéville once wrote, “a certain generic common-sense… has allowed generations of readers and writers to treat… faster-than-light drives as science-fictional in a way that dragons are not, despite repeated assurances from the great majority of physicists that the former are no less impossible than the latter.”[i] Science fiction’s embrace of the language of science and technology makes it seem particularly rational and forward-thinking but on closer inspection, exceeding the claims of science – being irrational – is one of the key features of the genre. And that’s okay.

If this fact has to be elided over at all in the popular discourse, it’s because the benevolent dictatorship of our Silicon Valley saviours depends to a certain extent on the blurring between the idea of science and technology – that iPhones somehow take us closer to Mars. The reputation of technology as the only thing that still works in a nonsensical world that’s choking on itself is propped up by a lot of questionable assumptions. A similar situation exists with the industry of futurism. These institutions never seem to like science fiction for the complex philosophical and moral questions it raises about the world as it exists today. How strange.

While space is cool, it’s the philosophical and moral weight of science fiction that makes it such an affecting experience as a child. We definitely come for the robots but we stay for the humanity.

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Daan Roosegaarde. Gates of Light. Windvogel. Glowing Nature. 2017.

Installations by Studio Roosegaarde.

by Leanne Ogasawara

It was 2011. I knew it wasn't going to be easy moving back in with my mom after all those years away. Two decades was a long time and now I had a little boy in tow.

But at least it was home, I thought.

My son would be going to the public elementary school I attended. He hardly spoke any English at all and couldn't read or write his own name, so he was a bit nervous on his first day. I decided to walk him over to make sure he found the room okay and didn't have any communication issues.

And it was the strangest thing. The suburban streets on the way to school were lined with big cars like the cars the secret service drives in the movies. Big and heavy-looking, they were everywhere. Wondering if something was happening, I asked in the office about it, but was told nothing special was happening that day. Then, later I told my mom about it only to be informed that no, those were the parents' cars of the kids being dropped off at school. She told me that everyone now in our neighborhood drove large minivans and SUVs. She hated the cars and hated what had become a big traffic jam every morning because of what she called "the drop off line."

So, let me get this straight, I thought. In the past twenty years, while people in Japan or Germany have been making use of light, fuel-efficient cars and public transportation, parents in the US started buying big cars to drive their kids to school everyday and wait in line while the car idle. Isn't that illegal? What about the bus?

Of all the things that I found myself unable to adjust to on my return, maybe the biggest shock of all was how little has changed in terms of the environment. Wait, let me rephrase that. people are talking about it a lot more. Maybe even talking in inverse proportion to lack of doing anything. A few things have gotten better but in general the consumption patterns are so much worse than I had even remembered. Today's hyper-consumerism: for me that is the bottom line.

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By Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Democracy is supposed to be OK. It's supposed to reflect the will of the people.

So how come our government has just passed a big tax reform bill that most of us don't like?

How come we've got a president whose approval rating is totally meh?

A president who is not only the biggest asshole of all presidents ever, but also the biggest asshole among all current world leaders, the biggest asshole among all current business leaders, the biggest asshole among all rich New Yorkers, the biggest asshole among all assholes from Queens, the biggest asshole sitting on any gold toilet, and maybe the biggest asshole among all contemporary members of the human race extant, with the possible exception of Ted Cruz?

How come our government is filled with assholes of immense assholicity — the president, his staff (how about John Kelly?), his cabinet (how about Jeff Sessions?), Congress (how about Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan?), the Supreme Court (how about Clarence Thomas?), etcetera into an infinite totality of utter assholicity?

Aren't we as a nation supposed to be better than these assholes?

Maybe not.

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by Brooks Riley

by Akim Reinhardt

"….Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart." -Donald Trump via Twitter (January 6, 2018)

Oh, that was good. But here's the thing. What exactly are his two greatest assets? Or yours? Or mine?

Trump's tweet is funny/horrifying not only because it's the exact opposite of correct, but because he has failed spectacularly at the most timeless and profound of human pursuits: to know oneself.

Socrates admonished us that the unexamined life is not worth living. But the world's most powerful man seems to live in open mockery of the ancient Greek. To gaze upon him is to be cast in the dark shimmer of a soul so thoroughly incapable of introspection that when Trump is on his deathbed, his "Rosebud" moment will be pronounced in tones of "Everyone says I'm the best," or "No one dies like I do," or "Bring me a diet Coke."

Thus, as if by sit-com writing formula, Trump's cavalier effort to engage the greatest of challenges was doomed to a banana peel slipup far more jaw dropping and painful than anything ever filmed by Buster Keaton or The Three Stooges. Give him the setup ("What are your two greatest assets?"), and he can't help but write the punch line.

For many of us, however, the grand quest for introspection is more tragedy than comedy, a tortured, unfinished novel rather than a furious tweet, the cruel taunting of unanswered questions as opposed to firm, imperial pronouncements from the White House bedroom as the Gorilla Channel booms in the background.

We are all quick to judge Donald Trump then, in part, because it seems so easy; his character is so achingly shallow, but also because it is always far safer to judge others.

To judge oneself is to play Russian Roulette with your spiritual essence. Because for every laudable attribute there is a bullet or two of dark secrets, disappointing shortcomings, and crippling fears.

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Sughra Raza. Celebrate Symbiosis – Spanish Moss/Live Oak. New Orleans, Feb 2015.

Digital photograph.

by Katrin Trüstedt

"Next time Feminism will not be a tragedy, but a comedy"

—Carla Lonzi

Kottbusser Tor, Berlin. On the second floor of one of the large buildings surrounding this place you can currently find yourself in an exhibition by Ariane Müller and Verena Kathrein on comedy and feminism, entitled "Then I would like to make a happy end for once." This seems like an apt title for the end of this year. It has been a particularly intense year in many respects. Among other things, it has been particularly intense in terms of gender relations. There has been wide-spread outing of sexual harassment and sexual violence of all kinds and degrees. There have been various forms of criticism of this outing. There has been backlash. And there have been discussions about the nature and the future of gender relations.

The danger at this point, it seems to me, is that of reaffirming and hypostatizing the very gender categories that have been at the heart of the problem in the first place. The suggestion, for instance, that men, per se, are predators, that it is the very nature of male behavior to be sexually transgressive and aggressive; and that woman are, per se, victims, and dependent – such suggestions are in danger of reproducing the very problem they are addressing.

Acts of sexual harassment including many of those that have been outed in the past couple of months seem to show, on the contrary, that something like masculinity is not a given, but in need of constant performative reestablishment. To come back to something like a "primal scene" of the current developments – the Weinstein case, and in particular one piece of "evidence" that is out there, namely the audio from a wire tap – it seems like the masculinity in question here is in rather desperate need of violent performance with elaborate arrangements. Trying to bully Ambra Battilana Gutierrez into joining him in his hotel room by repeating what a powerful man he is, appears on tape as a pathetic attempt to performatively produce manliness as power. Not only does the repeated claim suggest the lack of what this performance is intent to prove ("I am a powerful man"). It also exposes the very need of this position to be performed, enacted, and reaffirmed by its other. Needing the woman to feed back to him what a powerful, powerful man he really is, he also needs to emphasize how powerless she is by contrast in this situation ("you don't want to ruin your friendship with me for five minutes").

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by Maniza Naqvi

Sue Hubbard's lovingly mapped novel Rainsongs is a gentle gem of quietly shimmering intellect. I read it twice to savor its sense of place. It is rooted in the abstractions of land and memory, the magical thinking of a bereaved woman.

Hubbard's expressive talent is in full display through her descriptions of the south western Irish landscape of Kerry, so that the reader feels a sense of belonging and a resonance with its emotional and social fabric. I read this book the week before the year changed, curled up in bed, tucked in against the winters bone-chilling cold outside, deeply aware that I was savoring a rarity, seeing through words a remote land. Seeing it through the eyes of the main character, Martha Cassidy who, herself not Irish, has returned after a period of decades of absence.

In the end of December 2007 Martha Cassidy is a woman in mourning who returns to her late husband's cottage in search of solace from grief. Rainsongs approaches the peril and remoteness of relief through the certitude of both storm and calm and its attendant pain on the journey towards consolation. Martha is a beautiful, mature-minded, self-assured woman in her fifties, focused on her own inner journey. Yet she is neither weak nor in need of comforting or saving. And perhaps because of her demeanor, is orbited by men who knew her husband and, as in the case of the young poet-musician, Colm Nolan, is the same age as her son.

Driving rain and wind are the song and silence of the inner drama where Rainsongs will take you. That place within yourself of sorrows, solitudes and solaces, the spaces you have been through, the ones you are passing through, the ones you surely will go through. That place is lit up momentarily like a revelation, then gone and, in the novel, searched out metaphorically through the beam of a lighthouse – beckoning, saving, warning – on Skellig island as it sweeps across the darkened sea and landscape on Bolus Head and shines into the room in the cottage where Martha sleeps. Periodically, as if a monitor for a heartbeat.

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