by Samir Chopra

The American philosopher Ivan Soll attributed "great sociological and psychological insight" to Hegel’s remarks that "the frustration of the freedom of action results in the search of a type of freedom immune to such frustration," that "where the capacity for abstract thoughts exists, freedom, outwardly thwarted, is sought in thought."[1] The perspicuity of this insight of Hegel—one found in Nietzsche and Freud’s explorations of the depths of human psychology too—is visible in a species of literary and intellectual production intimately associated with physical confinement: prison literature. This genre is populated with many luminaries: Boethius, John Bunyan, Marquis De Sade, Antonio Gramsci, Solzhenitsyn, Bukharin, Elie Wiesel, Henry Thoreau, Jean Genet—among others. These writers found constraint conducive to creativity; the slamming shut of one gate prompted the unlocking of another; confinement produced a search for “substitute gratification”–whether conscious or unconscious–and the channeling of the drive to freedom into the drive for concrete expression of abstract thought. Like Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals these writers argued—by the act of writing their works—that if pathological repression is to be avoided, our drives must be appropriately and masterfully directed toward alternative, creative, expression. The prison writer thus demonstrates the truth of the claim—with which Hannah Arendt and George Orwell’s visions in The Origins of Totalitarianism and 1984 resonate—that the prison officials who place prisoners in solitary confinement convey crucial information to future oppressors: mere imprisonment of the political or moral gadfly is not enough; if confinement is to work as a mode of repression, it must aspire to totality.

The Peculiarities of Prison

The central irony of the prison—as the prisoner quickly discovers—is that it is a zone of legal enforcement and lawlessness. Prisoners confront unblinking, resolute bureaucracy, beholden to its procedures and their utter rigidity, all the while knowing their guards—the corrections officers who can ‘correct’ them at any time—can violate them with impunity. The incarcerated are always aware they are powerless, that their guards can exert all manner of power over them. Prisoners do not just fear other prisoners; they fear the lawless application of the law too. Any formal legal redress available will not diminish the terrifying powerlessness in the face of a guard exerting total and final control over body and mind. The long arm of the law rarely reaches out to accost a prison guard; the prisoner is at the guard’s mercy.

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by Dave Maier

Nowadays the term “postmodernism” is synonymous with a certain sort of trendy, obscurantist philosophical nihilism, the self-consciously radical negation of solid common sense (“Words have no meanings!” “There is no truth!”). This is a shame, as it seems that one might very well criticize certain aspects of the modern era in an effort to move beyond. Indeed, to the extent that one sees the fundamental presuppositions of the modern era as both questionable (or at least past their sell-by date) and feasibly revisable or replaceable, one’s thought would thereby count as “postmodern” in a purely descriptive sense.

But words do indeed have meanings, and vox populi has spoken in this matter. Still, we are allowed to stretch out a bit if we think it helps. Here, for example, a neutral sense of the term helps make sense of my title. For if “postmodernism” is nonsense, then clearly no one should be postmodern. On the other hand, if it’s simply (potentially) unobjectionable philosophical criticism of modern dualisms, then why shouldn’t we be, science critic or not? A neutral term leaves open the latter possibility (thus necessitating an argument for my title claim) while reminding us that such things can easily go very badly wrong (not to mention hewing more closely to actual contemporary usage).

By “science critics” I mean a broad range of people, from sociologists of science to creationists, as well as the sort who gave “postmodernism” its bad name in the first place. Each is worried in their characteristic way about the dogmatism they perceive in science’s self-conception as the royal road to truth. Science is, they may claim, overly obsessed with objectivity, or with its own characteristic method, or with knowledge for its own sake, or with its epistemological status relative to other kinds of inquiry or other human activities more generally, or the metaphysical status of the laws or entities its theories are concerned with. In reply, critics may emphasize the essentially human (i.e., discursive, embedded, embodied, perspectival, etc.) nature of scientific activity as a corrective.

At this level of generality, any or all of these correctives might be appropriate. We cannot simply rule such judgments out of court from the beginning. Let’s let the critics make their case at least, lest we confirm the verdict of dogmatism right up front.

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by Michael Liss

What happens when you get a bunch of lawyers together to discuss the possibility of a coup d’état? A Constitutional coup d’état?

Don’t faint. To the obvious disappointment of a journalist who attended, this wasn’t some Trotskyite meeting in a small room with nicotine-stained walls, but a conference at the Fordham University School of Law, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the 25th Amendment “Continuity in the Presidency: Gaps and Solutions. Building on the Legacy of the 25th Amendment.”

Lawyers being lawyers, there was a lot of talking and hypothesizing and arcana, spiced up with some name-dropping of the still and once-famous, and more than a little inside baseball. I can’t do justice to the whole story, but it makes for fascinating hearing: How Birch Bayh, then Indiana’s junior Senator and 99th in Senatorial seniority, managed to keep alive the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments without money or space (they met in a tiny converted bathroom) and apply his extraordinary tact to accomplish something people thought impossible. How the ABA, then a considerably smaller and less influential group still tainted by a prior obsession with Communists in the profession, saw this issue as both the right and strategically important thing to do, and provided support in Washington and critical infrastructure at the state level. And how John Feerick, as a lawyer in his mid-20s (later Dean of Fordham Law School, and a featured speaker at the conference), had an Orson-Welles-makes-Citizen-Kane moment when he managed to have published and distributed a Fordham Law Review article on Presidential Succession—in October 1963—and became an instant authority when national tragedy the very next month made it relevant.

Feerick’s issue was ripe and had been discussed for decades, but JFK’s assassination gave the reform efforts an energy that had previously been lacking. Yet success was also due in no small part to Bayh and Feerick’s insight that the enemy of the good was the perfect. They remained disciplined and focused on the two issues that were critical, filling Vice Presidential vacancies, regardless of their cause, and the voluntary or involuntary (but possibly temporary) replacement of the President due to incapacity. Because these were largely apolitical, freshly and painfully in the public eye, and perceived to be of national importance, the pair were able to convince many in Congress to put aside technical differences and turf disputes to reach consensus.

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by Akim Reinhardt

Factor 1: More than anything else in the world, more than having a happy marriage, more than raising healthy, well adjusted children, more than God, Mom, or Apple Pie, Donald J. Trump wants to be a WINNER.

Trump has always been hell bent on publicly proclaiming himself a winner. And for him, being a winner means not just being successful, but being the best. Better than anyone and everything at whatever he does.

It's not enough to be rich; he has to claim he has more money than he actually does. It's not enough to screw starlets and gold diggers; he has to "anonymously" phone the press so that everyone can know about it. It's not enough to host a long running, highly rated tv show; he has to claim it’s failure to win an emmy damaged the emmys’ credibility. It's not enough to win the presidency; he has to claim he won the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally. It's not enough to take the oath of office in front of the entire world; he has to claim more supporters showed up at his inauguration than for any other president, despite the all the aerial photographs revealing him to be a infantile liar. He can't help himself. He must lie and lie and lie, exaggerating every legitimate success and adamantly denying anything remotely smelling of failure.

No wonder then that of all the many insults that Trump lobs like handfuls rice at a wedding, in his mind the biggest, baddest one he can hurl at someone is calling them a “loser.” Because losing is sad.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

This is a true story.

I first noticed Marco a few years ago when he was playing in a local university orchestra here in town. It was around Easter. My mom happened to be playing as an extra second violinist in the orchestra since they didn't have enough student musicians. And while they were not the Berlin Philharmonic, still the musical director at the college had great style, and I had come to really look forward to seeing the group perform several times a year.

On that particular evening, Marco, as a graduating senior, gave a stunning final solo performance.

The kid definitely had the right stuff.

Coming out on stage, he casually carried his cello like a rock star.

I recall he played the Sonata for Solo Cello by Zoltán Kodály.

I had never heard that piece of music before and was delighted to hear the strains of Hungarian traditional music. I would call it gypsy music, and the technical skills required to play the piece meant that only the most skilled musicians need apply. And Marco did more than play it. He knocked the ball out of the park. I think what really grabbed me about him was the soulful quality of his playing. He nearly broke my heart that night. His playing was that beautiful.

Everything about this kid was unexpected.

First, was his name. He didn't look anything like a Marco, looking more like a Mark. He was good-looking by sheer virtue of his talent and charisma. I remember wondering how he would look without his cello. Stout, with a manicured beard and very light blonde hair, his pale skin was so thin you could see every passing emotion wash over him in flushes of color. My mom told me his face would turn as red as an apple during the frequent rows he had with the artistic director during orchestra rehearsals. It wasn't that his talent was unusual for our town but it was his charisma and the soulful way he played that took him into orbit beyond mere skills. He was out of place somehow. The school too was an unexpected place to find such talent. This was not Julliard but a private liberal arts university, known more for football than music.

Like a lot of young musicians in my mom's town, I knew Marco from his mentoring and volunteer work with the local youth orchestra. He was a dedicated volunteer mentor to the children.

So fast forward to maybe six months ago when a photo of Marco shows up in my newsfeed on Facebook. There he was in what looked like the desert wearing fatigues and holding an assault rifle. He had dark shades on and what looked to my eyes like a white and black keffiyeh tied around his neck. What? Mad Max in Kabul? He had joined the military maybe? What on earth was going on?

And no cello?

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by Evert Cilliers (original visuals by David Thall)

I want to suggest a new fault line that runs through the American psyche. It's not about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ideology (conservative or liberal, feminist or sexist), geography (north or south, east or west coast) or any of the attitudes about these basic differences.

It's about being cool or uncool.

Are you a cool American like Obama? Or an uncool American like Trump?

You can tell cool and uncool by how people walk.

Obama walks like a sleek panther, while Trump walks like a constipated duck.

Michelle walks like an athlete, while Melania walks like she's got a poker stuck up her back going all the way through her neck.

You can also tell cool and uncool from people's tastes.

When it comes to music, Obama listens to Jay Z and Florence and the Machine, while Trump listens to old-school rock 'n roll.

Obama is the first really cool president we've ever had (JFK was charismatic, but it's hard for a Catholic to be cool; Clinton was very personable, but too bubba to be cool).

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by Bill Benzon

Coal, by Alexander G., April 7, 2012

No, I wasn’t a miner. But the job WAS all about coal. And you know what? I for damn sure know more about the coal business than President Trump.

Let me explain.

I spent the first three or four years of my life in Ellsworth, Pennsylvania, but I don’t remember much, if anything, of that life. It was a “company town”, as they called it. The company was The Bethlehem Steel Corporation. My father worked for the mining division, Bethlehem Mines Corporation.

Ellsworth was a coal town. The steel industry used coal to make coke. Used coke to fuel the blast furnaces that turned iron ore into iron. From iron, steel. From steel, mighty industries. Jobs: the United Steelworkers of America, the United Mine Workers too.

It’s a brutal business, and a dirty one.

When I was four the company moved my father to its headquarters in Johnstown, Pa. You may have heard of it, flood city – three floods, 1889 (the big one, the one that put Johnstown on the map), 1937 (my mother – whose folks came over from Cornwall some time in the 19th century – lived through that one, though she lived in Westmont, a suburb high on a hill), and 1977 (by which time I was gone, so was my family). We settled in Geistown in Richland Township: 315 Cherry Lane. Like Westmont, a suburb. Whereas Westmont was high class, more or less, Geistown was middle class, a mixture of blue and white collar workers.

For a number of years our house was heated with coal. There was a coal bin in the basement, a small room with a hatch opening to the driveway outside. A truck would pull up and dump a load of coal down the hatch. It was up to Dad to shovel the coal into the furnace that heated the boiler that heated the house. I suppose Mom shoveled the coal when dad was away on business, as he often was – visiting coal mines and coal cleaning plants in West Virginia and Kentucky. Sometimes I’d help.

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by Brooks Riley

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. —Peter Ustinov

President Trump is no laughing matter. Paradoxically, he’s become just that, a side-splitting political earthquake triggering a tsunami of jokes and routines that fill the late-night air with barbs so sharp no ordinary ego might survive, the limits of humor now stretched way beyond the nagging of one’s mother-in-law, the Kardashians, the dating game, or the darndest things kids say, all ripe for a laugh or two in the past.

American comedy on TV has hummed along for years at the same apolitical level of mild, affectionate offense, with some notable exceptions like Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory or Chris Rock, who etched their humor with the acid ironies of racism, or Jon Stewart, a retiree from political comedy before his time.

Now we no longer laugh at what we used to laugh at, mainly ourselves and sometimes our culture: Now we roar at a man who borders dangerously on a joke—a man who, significantly, can’t take a joke. The more he can’t take a joke, the more we howl. When he doubles down, we double over.

The moment of truth, a memorable one in our early awareness of outsider Trump, came at the annual White House press dinner in 2011, a must for movers and shakers in Washington and wannabe candidates. When President Obama lobbed a few comic jabs in his direction, followed by Seth Meyers with a few more, the camera zoomed in on Trump. Instead of laughing at the jokes at his expense—something that might have made him just a teensy-weensy bit likeable—Trump sat stone-faced, wounded, angry. This should have been the first warning sign that this dark horse, whose quadrennial run for the White House was itself a running joke, would eke revenge on the man who mocked him, dragging a whole country down into the pathology of his grudges and vindictiveness as he goes about systematically dismantling not only Obama’s legacy but that of our founding fathers. We don’t have to ask ourselves why Trump refused to take part in this year’s White House Press dinner.

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by Dwight Furrow

When I first encountered the claim that our perception of wine was influenced by the music we listen to while imbibing, I was skeptical. It would seem to have all the hallmarks of a magic trick–barriers to accurate perception due to the vagueness of wines' properties and subject to the power of suggestion. However, the considerable empirical evidence amassed to support the idea has made the thesis impossible to ignore, and I'm persuaded not only by the science but by my own experience that there is something to the idea, although discovering the explanation of how this works remains a challenge.

Winemaker and wine consultant Clark smith started the ball rolling in the mid-1990's testing the relationship between wine and music and carrying out seminars on the subject that continue today. More recently, experimental psychologist Charles Spence and his associates have performed reasonably rigorous empirical tests of the idea (summaries here, here, and here), and there now seems little doubt that there is something going on beyond mere personal association.

The earliest experiments in psychology were testing cross-modal correspondences—the associations we make between features of one sense modality, taste, and the apparently unrelated features of another sense modality, sound. In simple, matching tests, where subjects are encouraged to choose which of two wines, a white and a red, best matches music chosen specifically to "go with" each wine, there has been, consistently over many tests, statistically significant agreement about the best matches. In some cases the agreement was up to 90% of the test subjects. Such evidence, of course, does not tell us what the basis of the matching is. Is there some perceptual similarity between the wines and the music or is the music perceived to be complementing the wine independently of any similarity just as olive oil goes with tomatoes?

There is now a large body of research showing that sweetness and fruit aromas are matched with musical sounds that are high in pitch, notes that are connected smoothly together (legato), as well as consonant harmonies, and instruments such as piano and woodwinds. Sourness tends to match very high-pitched sounds, fast tempos and dissonant harmonies. Aromas of musk, wood, chocolate, and smoke along with bitter tastes match brassy or low pitched sounds. Loud music also seems to be associated with taste intensity.

What explains these perceptual correspondences between sounds and tastes?

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The author as a student at Kinnaird College

I began writing poetry on a campus of red-brick corridors, ancient oaks, belligerent crows, and sharp-witted, lively women who thrived on critical thinking— Kinnaird college, in Lahore, Pakistan. In my earliest writing, I seem to have tested truths, grappled with the abstract, as many young people do, building a dialectic between the sensory, cerebral and emotional, in an attempt to catch the elusive. And then, from my immediate surroundings, came news of an incident that shocked me out of my juvenile navel-gazing: it was the news of a campus staffer’s son committing suicide. Rumor had it that he had been unwilling to join his father’s vocation of managing the college café or “tuck shop” as we called it. To compound the matter, he had found the family’s Christian faith hard to reconcile in a society that unfortunately did not look upon minorities as equals. The young man’s father, “Chaudhry Sahab,” who carried himself as a campus elder and enjoyed well-deserved popularity among the students, may have missed the early signs of his son’s anxieties and aspirations, neglecting to acknowledge that he belonged to the new generation and rightly envisioned a life different from the one into which he was born. The details of the story were never clear to me but my emotions were— I wrote my first “protest poem.” This incident opened my eyes to other forms of social injustice and exploitation, as well as the dehumanizing effects of the war in bordering Afghanistan; I wrote about child labor, refugees, famine, about young women becoming war-widows and children losing their limbs in landmines.

And then I came to America, to study. I continued writing poetry in response to the news, but in this environment, I was the minority. As a young Muslim woman, I was not just any minority, but the one which perhaps bears the burden of a peculiar otherness signified by a foreclosed discussion more than any other minority group in America, one which is expected to be unable to speak for itself, imagined to have emerged from under a mountain of oppression. I found myself in the midst of people who not only knew nothing about Muslim women, but very little about Islam itself. I found myself confronting rigid stereotypes, at a loss to extract language from its Orientalist baggage, to decolonize my identity in an environment of little historical knowledge and a great deal of certitude about it, a culture of discussion and debate, yet a culture that insisted upon promoting, via a mammoth media, a preconceived, inaccurate narrative of who I was and where I came from as a Muslim. Here is when I asked the critical questions: where do I really come from as a Muslim? What is my place as a Muslim in the West?

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by Paul Braterman

The wise learn from everyone.¹ The freak success (half a million reads) of my recent piece How to slam dunk creationists, and the subsequent discussion, have again set me thinking about how to learn from creationists. It is not enough to say, as Dawkins notoriously said, "[I]f you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." Conversation is a two-way street, I have certainly learnt from creationists' attacks on evolution, and if I am learning from them it is at least possible that they are learning from me.

Types of comment

Comments I have had from creationists fall into three broad groups (and note that contrary to what Dawkins says, some of these are at least partly informed, highly intelligent, and completely rational):

1) Simple misstatements

2) Appeal to the Bible

3) Purportedly scientific arguments, some without merit, while others refer to important issues.

From simple misstatements, not very much can be learnt, except perhaps the source of the misinformation. Remember that if someone quotes wrong information, the burden of proof is not on you but on them. Leave it there, as in this actual exchange:

Creationist: Chimps are not our relatives. The genomic similarity between humans and chimps is only 29.8%.

Me: "The genomic similarity between humans and chimps is only 29.8%"; if so, I have been seriously misinformed. Please give your source for this information.

I am of course being disingenuous. I do not really think that I have been seriously misinformed, and I could have cited the standard literature value of over 98%. But much better to leave the burden of proof where it belongs. Meantime, I have (truthfully) presented myself to bystanders as open to new information, if only the creationist would supply it (he didn't).

What about the Bible?

When it comes to arguments based on Genesis, I have seen two different strategies employed: you can either

a) Denounce the Bible as the ignorant writings of bronze-age goatherds, or

b) Describe the Bible as the written and rewritten work of scribes and scholars, over many generations, doing their best with the knowledge they had at that time about how the world works, and constrained to express their beliefs in language that made sense to them and their contemporaries.

Which do you think is more likely to win new friends, and which, for that matter, is more accurate?

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by Katrin Trüstedt

Something like a culture war is raging around the "People's Theater" (Volksbühne) in Berlin. In the last act for now, new director Chris Dercon had the police remove a collective of activists from "his" theater who occupied the place during the last week. In the acts leading up to this occupation and its forceful dissolution, the theater's longtime director, Frank Castorf, who had run the place for the last 25 years with a diverse array of dedicated collaborators (directors, playwrights, actors, set designers and craftsmen solely employed by this theater) was ousted by Berlin politicians and replaced with Chris Dercon, the former director of London's Tate Modern. Outcries, protests, and petitions ensued, and almost the complete ensemble of actors and collaborators has left, as they refused working with Dercon and his team. Dercon, it was argued, does not know the Volksbühne and its place in Berlin; and, maybe even more fundamentally, he does not know much about theater in general. Nor do, needless to say, those who made the decision to have him replace Castorf. What had become an iconic radical avant-garde theater where the most interesting and most incalculable productions and ideas grew out of a very particular constellation of people, backgrounds, and techniques, is now set out to become a venue for a flow of guest performances, internationally acclaimed but developed somewhere else and suitable to work as events for the international tourists passing through the city.

This culture war is about many things currently debated in many places of the world – gentrification, the economic exploitation of creative capital, and the contradictions of local and globalized culture. But it is also and decisively about theater as a distinguished art form, and its role as a public institution in a changing world. From the plays of Heiner Müller to René Pollesch's Kill Your Darlings, the Volksbühne has shaped a form of theater that was both more and less than traditional dramatic theater, but exactly in this way has remained theater in the full sense of the word. What happened at Berlin's Volksbühne was theater challenging itself instead of theater being replaced with something else.

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THE MORNING STAR

by Mohammad Iqbal

“I have the power of sight but cannot see,” Venus said,
“No refuge on the morning’s hem.
Is my destiny merely a bubble, a spark?”

“O, jewel on dawn’s forehead,” I said, “Don’t weep.
My thoughts spring from you to sustain a garden
where I am a gardener, my passion eternal like dew.”

Translated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari /@brownpundit

by Max Sirak

(Audio version available. Click here or scroll down)

Last month I told y'all about my five favorite things. "Timing" made my list. Specifically, how much I love it when events seem to fall in spacetime together by chance. For example, this past Friday, I was explaining to a friend the column I was going to write while on the way to see a movie I knew nothing about.

mother! – *spoilers!!*

(If you're planning on seeing the movie and don't want to know anything about it ahead of time – STOP HERE. …But bookmark the link, for later consumption…)

Darren Aronofsky has a new movie in theaters. He's a polarizing director who makes weird, uncomfortable, confusing, symbolic films. Pi, his first movie, was released in 1998. Requiem For A Dream, his year 2000 feature, is possibly the most disturbing thing I've ever seen on a screen.

The only thing I knew about mother! before going to see it came from a text. My friend, Adam, wrote: "Dude – I have no idea what I just watched but you gotta see it."

So I did.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The day you were born, the world died.

Died in glitter and grist, in skeletons and slogans.

Scenic Riverside Drive which bequeathed you to us.

Sparkling New York lent us its sordid dreams

To trample underfoot, like so many lost souls.

You were born of a merchant;

Of loathsome success,

Of a hurried past,

Whose pogroms pushed him into the future.

Precious, precocious little one

You lit up your mother's eyes.

Her arm you were coy about,

Gloved as it stayed, seemingly hiding

The misfortune of your future mischief.

Never to be spoken of

In that household of labored repute.

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by Christopher Bacas

We weren't out too long before a brief break and another personnel change. After a pre-dawn departure, I arrived at a Midwestern airport and staggered toward baggage claim. A man paced back and forth between carousels; long black hair hanging over the collar of a wide-open trench coat. Head down, he puffed aggressively on a cigarette. It was Doc, a saxophone player from college days. I hadn't seen him in 7 years. He was now the other tenor and my roomie. The manager thought, as schoolmates, we'd be a good match.

Well trained in the requisite skills, Doc had no problem with his book. In the room, he slept long and hard; really hard. I asked if he could smoke outside and he agreed. I tried not to wake him with my 5am yoga and bubbling saucepans. The hot plate got constant use with the winter squash, kombu (seaweed), carrots and burdock stored in my overhead. Lentils came out particularly tasty.

In the bathroom, early morning, soaking, waiting for my oatmeal, I heard the phone ring. Fully expecting Doc to pick it up, ten, twenty, then thirty rings passed. Annoyed, I rushed out with a towel on and snatched up the receiver. The preset wake up call was silent. I hung up. Standing over roomie, his face a mask, I got a hot flash of fear. No one sleeps with a ringing phone six inches away. He was dead. I started to prod him, gingerly, awkwardly holding my towel, still dripping water. Soon, I was shoving the rubbery body. His face never moved. Then, a mythical princess, he slowly opened his eyes. I felt tears spill over my eyelids.

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by Samir Chopra

One fine morning, as I walked along a Brooklyn sidewalk to my gym, heading for my 8AM workout, I saw a young woman walking straight at me, her face turned away, attending to some matter of interest. She might have been paying attention to a smartphone, but it might have been kids or pets; the precise details of this encounter have slipped my mind. Unwilling to be run over, clothes-lined, or head-butted by this rapidly approaching freight train, one insensible to my presence, I nimbly stepped aside, infuriated that yet again, on a New York sidewalk, I had been subjected to the tyranny of the inattentive pedestrian.

At that moment of induced irritation, my thoughts were not inchoate, not just an incoherent mess of unresolved frustration; instead, they seemed to arrange themselves into a sentence-long expression of aggravation immediately comprehensible to some imaginary intended audience: “My least favorite pedestrian is the kind that walks in one direction with his attention diverted elsewhere, whether it’s smartphones, kids, or pets.” Or perhaps, “That’s quite all right; you should barge ahead on this sidewalk, your head down, unseeing and uncaring.” This reaction was instinctive; I did not stop to deliberate and compose my verbal reaction in sentence form; my brain responded like a trained machine, a well-primed one; a species of Pavlovian instinctive reaction had taken over my mind. It was not the first time that I had, on encountering something entirely weekday or quotidian, and yet, not unworthy of a mental response, suffered a brief emotional tic and found myself formulating such a summation of my feelings at that instant. The verbal expression of my thoughts did not suggest it was the starting point of a letter to a newspaper or an essay; it had to be concise and succinct.

This was not your garden-variety introspection; it was clearly intended for future public consumption, for a pithy display of my thoughts about a matter of personal interest to those who might be interested. I sensed my audience would be sympathetic; some would chime in with empathetic responses; yet others would add embellishments in their comments and annotations. I did not think this sentiment of mine would be greeted with disapproval; I anticipated approval. Indeed, that is why I indulged in that little bout of composition and drafting in my mind, framing the written expression of my thought to make it appropriately irate or ironic. Maybe the ensuing conversation would feature some cantankerous rants about the smartphone generation, about over-indulgent parents and pet-owners, all too busy texting, fretting over children and dogs and cats; perhaps some of my interlocutors would add witty tales of how, one day, in a urban encounter for the ages, they had stopped one of these offenders, and told them off with an artful blend of the scornful and witty. Perhaps someone would add a ‘horror story’ about how coffee had been spilled on them by someone just like the young woman; and more outrage would ensue. A little chat corner would have developed.

I had been drafting a Facebook status, a tweet.

The folks at Facebook and Twitter have achieved something remarkable: they have made their users regard the world as staging ground for inputs to their products. The world and its events and relations are, so to speak, so much raw material to be submitted to the formulation and framing of Facebook statuses and tweets. The world is not the world tout court, it is the provisioner of ‘content’ for our social media reports.

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by Ali Minai

A few years ago, while introducing my class of electrical engineering students to information theory, I said that we lived today in a world created by Faraday, Maxwell, and Shannon. Even as I said this, I was aware that, in my zeal for effect, I was omitting the names of many who had made seminal contributions in the fields of electrical engineering and telecommunications, but one name that did not occur to me then was that of Oliver Heaviside. Basil Mahon’s book, ‘The Forgotten Genius of Oliver Heaviside: A Maverick of Electrical Science’, is a valiant – and, one hopes, successful – attempt to remedy this situation where even those immersed in the field of electrical engineering do not know the achievements of one of its founding figures. To be sure, Heaviside’s name does live on in the simple but surprisingly important Heaviside step function H(x), which takes value 0 if x is less than 0 and 1 if it greater. This function, along with Dirac’s delta function, allows the calculus of discrete variables to be unified with the classical calculus of continuous ones – a fact of great utility in an age where everything is increasingly digital and thus discrete. Forgotten in all this is the fact that Heaviside invented the step function as part of a larger enterprise: An operational calculus that sought to solve the problems of calculus in a purely algebraic form. Though that calculus has left its imprint on many methods used by engineers to solve mathematical problems today, it is not taught explicitly in any curriculum and its name has mostly been forgotten by practitioners – a situation symbolic of the fate that has befallen Oliver Heaviside himself.

A vivid portrait of Heaviside emerges from the book. We see a brilliant and curmudgeonly character – willful but not unkind, except to those who challenge his well-founded theories with half-baked notions. After rather brief coverage of Heaviside’s background and childhood, the book moves to the beginning of his professional career as a technician in the telegraph service. Lacking a formal advanced education, Heaviside was fortunate to get this opportunity, in part through the efforts of his brother, Arthur, who was already employed in the service and – very importantly – the recommendation of the great inventor, Sir Charles Wheatstone, who was Heaviside’s uncle by marriage. For all the struggles that Heaviside had to go through to gain recognition of his genius, he was fortunate in one thing: He got into the field of electrical communication – the telegraph – at exactly the right time for a person of his aptitude. It was then a new technology, but had already established its utility. The desire to connect the world through telegraph was a major effort into which private investors and governments were willing to sink resources. And yet, everything in the field was being done through trial and error, without the benefit of established theory. The field was dominated by technicians rather than scientists, and the leading engineers of the time – such as Heaviside’s nemesis, William Preece – saw theoreticians as little more than ivory tower wonks with little to contribute to engineering practice. Heaviside was the first person to bridge this divide.

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by Thomas R. Wells

A natural disaster is a disaster because it involves a lot of human suffering, not because the event itself is especially big or spectacular. The destruction of an uninhabited island by a volcano is not a natural disaster, because it doesn't really matter to humans. A landslide doesn't matter, however enormous, unless there is a town at the bottom of it.

So what does the word ‘natural' add? We use it to demarcate the edges of responsibility. We don't use it very well.

Man-made disasters, like Chernobyl or Deepwater Horizon or Bhopal or Grenfell Tower, are ones acknowledged to have been brought about by human decisions. These disasters could have been avoided if certain people had made different choices. The suffering of a man-made disaster is therefore the responsibility of particular persons and institutions. They can be held answerable for their decisions: required to justify them and judged – and punished – if they cannot. For example, the investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire will scrutinise in forensic detail the reasoning behind the key decisions that permitted a containable danger to be transformed into mass death; such as the installation of a flammable cladding, the absence of sprinklers; and refuge in place instructions for residents. Some decision-makers may face criminal charges for negligence. They will certainly be vilified in the tabloid press and hate-mobbed on social media. Organisations like the local council and the company running the building will likely receive an official shaming, fines, and compulsory reorganisation or dissolution.

In contrast natural disasters are supposed to have been caused entirely by forces outside human control. They were inevitable. No one can be held responsible.

However, very few disasters these days meet the requirements for a natural disaster. It's not enough that a natural event was necessary to the disaster, i.e. that the disaster wouldn't have happened without it; that all those people couldn't have been killed by falling buildings if the ground hadn't been violently shaking. The natural event must also have been sufficient to bring about the disaster.

To understand the idea of a sufficient cause, it may help to think about imaginary but plausible worlds besides our own actual one. These are worlds in which everything operates by the same laws of physics, but particular histories may be different. For example, Hillary may be president instead. For one event to be the necessary cause of another, there must be no possible worlds in which event B (e.g. thousands of schools collapse) occurs without event A (e.g. magnitude 8.0 earthquake in Sichuan) also occurring. For one event to be the sufficient cause of another, it has to be the case that there must be no possible worlds in which event A (8.0 earthquake) occurs without event B (school collapses) also occurring. Only if it is true that in all possible worlds, if event A happens then event B also happens, is the language of inevitability justified.

Let's put that abstract point in the context of a real disaster. If the earthquake in Haiti had been the sufficient cause of the 200,000 deaths and vast infrastructure destruction that would mean that in any possible world in which an earthquake of that size had struck at that time and place, such massive destruction of human life would always occur.

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