by Emrys Westacott

Like millions of other people in the US, I often begin the day by listening to ‘Morning Edition,’ the early morning news program on National Public Radio. Sometimes, though, I get so disgusted by the rubbish spewed by the politicians being interviewed, or so infuriated by the flimsiness of the questions put to them, that I just can’t stand it and have to take myself out of earshot. Friday was a case in point.

The topic, of course, was the partial shutdown of the federal government. Congressman Gary Palmer, a Republican from Alabama, came on to be interviewed. Here was the first question

“Both sides have to give in any kind of compromise deal… Where should the Republicans and the president be willing to compromise?”

Right there was where I’d had enough. It is simply nonsense that in every negotiation both sides have to compromise, moving toward some sort of shared middle ground. This is not the received wisdom when it comes to dealing with hostage takers. And that is exactly the situation the House of Representatives is currently in. Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

I met Arnie at a Cocaine Anonymous meeting the year before I got sober for the first time. I was high as fuck, eyes lit and hands fidgeting in my lap, then my jacket pockets, then my lap again. Maybe I thought being in a room full of non-high people would help even my scorecard with God. I had a lot of interesting thoughts back then, but I was usually smart enough to keep them to myself.

Arnie was wearing a neon orange trucker hat with the word “Grandma” scrawled above the brim in what looked like sharpie. His long, sixty-something body stretched out from beneath a threadbare track suit, and his sneakers were both untied. I remember being distracted by this, the laces calling my name, Tamuira, Tamuira! Come tie me! I would later learn, over our decade of friendship, that he was claustrophobic, and his feet needed so be able to “breathe better”.

And this was what I found most comforting about about Arnie; his weirdness, his eccentricities. He didn’t need drugs to take him into an altered state because he was already in one.

“Wanna get coffee?”

I rolled my eyes and lifted up my Styrofoam cup, thinking he was just another gross  old-timer in the program,  picking-up on a newbie.

“I have a sponsor already.”

“I’m not hitting on you, honey. I’m gay,” he said, grabbing a cookie off the table and breaking it in half. “Straight guys don’t do neon.”

“I’m not really sober right now,” I confided. Partly to get rid of him, partly to ease my guilty conscious.

“I can tell. Your jaw is like a goddamn meat grinder.” Read more »

by Samia Altaf

In October of 2014, a bunch of young men and women did their university proud. A couple of engineers, two finance graduates, a biology major, some finishing accounting and business degrees, and a clutch from the school of humanities and social sciences; Muslims mostly, two Christians, a lone Hindu, one Buddhist wannabe, and two oblivious to religion though aware of its place in other folks’ lives. They came together from Sahiwal, Karachi, Gilgit, Swat, Peshawar, Gujranwala, one from Quetta (non-Baluchi), and two from Delhi via the University of Texas. Though the majority of students and faculty stayed away, these young men and women with similar features and skin tones, in colorful flowing kurtas, chooridars, skinny jeans, funky T-shirts, and hijabs, got together to celebrate Diwali, a festival that celebrates Ram’s return from exile.

Diwali, along with Holi, if not officially banned, have been marginalized in Pakistan as “Hindu” festivals although in the multi-religious society of the colonial period they were celebrated with as much enthusiasm as Eid and Christmas. The largest Diwali celebration in Lahore was held at the famous Laxmi Chowk, home to the Laxmi building, a marvel of Indo-European architecture and once the throbbing heart of the local film industry. All citizens, men, women, children, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and Parsis gathered to celebrate the return of Ram to Ayodhya at Chowk with the adjoining building lit bright with lamps.

Almost seventy years on, these young people united in defiance to mark this heritage of their plural past. Ignoring looks of puzzlement and disapproval, they lighted the little lamps—diyas—fired with mustard oil as in the past, each lighted lovingly, one at a time, coaxing the hand-rolled cotton wick to sputter and then hold its own—quite like the event—knowing in their hearts that nurturing the flame symbolized a larger, more tenuous, goal. So they celebrated Diwali, and, I suppose, their own lives for the evening was mellow and they are young and alive and still hopeful. (Wordsworth: what a joy it was to be alive). They shared Mithai, music, poetry, thoughts, laughter, tears, and hopes and dreams for this land and its people wondering about their own place in it. They worried about the shape of tomorrow’s world and asked what they could do to make it better. It was a celebration of hope and harmony arrayed against a background of doom and despair—would there really be a return from the long exile? Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

A group of young women performing exercises at the ballet barre and an angry mob chanting “lock her up.” These two situations, where the exact same action is performed by a group of people, may have more in common than it appears at first. Kinesthetic empathy, a recent topic of research for neurobiologists, dance theorists and a range of scholars and professionals in between, offers an interesting perspective on this issue, since it points to the emotional effect of physical activities carried out in group settings.

Empathy is a blanket term for a wide range of interpersonal phenomena: it is probably most commonly understood as an other-oriented feeling of concern or compassion. Empathy can also be defined as an ability to imagine what the other person is going through, or as an intuitive understanding of another person, including an understanding that is more physical than mental. Mirror neurons in the brain—for example, those firing both when we itch our foot and when we see someone else itching their foot—are probably involved in such a body-mediated and body-motivated awareness of the other.

It is remarkable that we can also feel empathy towards a fictional character, say in a book, a film, or in the theater. The latter situation is especially interesting because by understanding how audience members relate emotionally to what they see onstage we may gain access to how the audience as a gathering of disparate individuals becomes a group, a collective whose emotions and reactions can be manipulated and controlled. When the aesthetic medium is dance, the nexus of emotional reactions and physical experience is more obvious, even if not easier to parse; for it is through the body and without the mediation of words that we are “moved.” Read more »

by Joan Harvey

I no longer remember how or when I stumbled on Concertzender.nl, an internet radio station located in Utrecht, but it has been with me through changes in location, partners, through raising a son: it has been with me from before they had an English translation on the website and before people from overseas could make donations, before they had an app. According to the website, “Thirty-four years ago, a group of music lovers shared the strongly felt urgency to create a sanctuary where everything revolves around music, music and musicians having the highest word, music in (almost) all its facets can be listened to as it is intended, no boundaries are drawn between genres and styles, almost every music lover comes into their own and no concessions have to be made to non-musical secondary goals.”

Max Roach. Contemporary Korean music. Electronic female artists from around the globe. Artie Shaw. Italian “infernal industrial” band Satanismo. Schnittke and Ustvolskaya. “Theremin genius” Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. Bach. Abbey Lincoln. Gregorian Chant. Songs by Kurt Weill. Music for the oboe family. Chanson. Motets. Makossa, the popular urban music movement originally from Cameroon. Mudhoney. Hummel. Liszt. Psychic TV. Frank Bridge. The Swans. Songs about refugees. Gogol Bordello. Bollywood Bhangra Disco Masala.

The is just a tiny fraction of the variety of music to be found on Concertzender. One click opens up a vast musical world. Read more »

by Michael Liss

What is it about immigration that causes us to lose our minds?

I’m not even referring to the absurd spectacle of toilets overflowing at national monuments and hundreds of thousands of federal workers going without pay. In theory, at least, there’s a reason for that: The President promised his supporters a magnificent structure across the Southern Border, and the Democrats don’t want to advance Mexico the money to pay for it.

I’m talking about the insanity of not addressing the root issue—actual immigration policy. Let’s be honest with ourselves, a few billion dollars for something that seems to be morphing in composition and cost every day doesn’t solve our immigration woes. It doesn’t build a Wall, either. We would be taking on the largest infrastructure project since the build-out of the national highway system, lasting many years and including enough eminent domain (because a considerable amount of border land in Texas is in private hands) to cause conservative heads to explode. A few billion is barely seed money for the lobbyists.

So, let’s talk about what we should be talking about: Immigration policy. And let’s start with a hypothetical: The nation has decided to make you Immigration Czar. You have the absolute power to determine policy for the next two years. What do you want to do with it? Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

For millennia, humans have had a tradition of introspection and meditation. The Buddhist Dhammapada says that when a monk goes into an “empty place” and calms his mind, he experiences “a delight that transcends that of men.” The ancient Greeks exhorted one to know thyself. Montaigne wrote that the “solitude that I love and advocate is chiefly a matter of drawing my feelings and thoughts back into myself.” This was not so easy even in quieter times, but in the wired era, it has become almost impossible. When Bertrand Russell wrote his essay “In Praise of Idleness” in 1932, the threat to downtime and self-fulfillment was work: “I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.” This is still valid, as we work more than ever despite skyrocketing productivity thanks to technological advances. The trouble today, however, is that even our supposed leisure hours are spent on the grid, essentially ensuring that we never get a moment’s rest.

Over the past few years, numerous books and articles have sounded the alarm on how our online habits are affecting our mental health. Even individuals in the tech industry–including Tim Cook, the Apple CEO who prefers that his nephew not use social media, and Tristan Harris, former Google employee and founder of Time Well Spent, a group advocating for more sensible use of online tools—are joining the chorus. Against this backdrop, physicist, novelist, and essayist Alan Lightman has added his own manifesto, In Praise of Wasting Time. Of course, the title is ironic, because Lightman argues that by putting down our devices and spending time on quiet reflection, we regain some of our lost humanity, peace of mind, and capacity for creativity—not a waste of time, after all, despite the prevailing mentality that we should spend every moment actually doing something. The problem is not only our devices, the internet, and social media. Lightman argues that the world has become much more noisy, fast-paced, and distracting. Partly, he writes, this is because the advances that have enabled the much greater transfer of data, and therefore productivity, have created an environment in which seemingly inexorable market forces push for more time working and less leisure time. Read more »

Fireworks Makers, covered in gunpowder, as they prepared for New Year’s eve, 2019. Bulacan, Philippines.

More here and here.

by Robert Fay

On the morning of August 20, 1968, the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel had a serious hangover. He was at his country home in Liberec after a night of boozing it up with his actor friend Jan Tříska, who would emigrate to the U.S. in 1977 and eventually appear in The Karate Kid III (I’m not making this up), while Havel went on in 1989 to became president of a free Czechoslovakia (equally astonishing). But on that summer morning, these two men were still just creatures of the Prague theatre world. They caroused at night with their artist and intellectual companions, slept-in late and then worked diligently on their respective crafts in the afternoons, much as their colleagues in London or Paris did.

But these familiar routines came to a halt promptly on August 20 when the Warsaw Pact nations, led by the Soviet Union, invaded Czechoslovakia, ending eight months of political reform and expanded social and civic freedoms that has become known as “The Prague Spring.”

In the popular western imagination, the Prague Spring has been both sacralized and completely mischaracterized. It’s been crudely lumped in with the 1960s political unrest in the West, something like: “The Summer of Love—Slavic Style.” But the anti-establishment, countercultural youth rebellions (sexual freedom, drug use, feminism, gay rights, etc.) that were visible in cities like Paris, London and San Francisco had little in common with the Prague Spring. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

Your numbers are off
I said your numbers are off
You forgot your watch
You forgot your glasses
You misread
You misunderstood
You’re missing the point
You’re naive
You’re irrational
You’re close minded
You’re vain
You’re shallow
You’re overly emotional
It’s wishful thinking
You’re too optimistic
You’re too pessemistic
You’re full of yourself
You’re self-serving
You’re self-conscious
You’re cliquish
You play favorites
I said you play favorites
You point fingers
You get personal
You’re taking it personally
You keep making it about you
It’s not about you
It is about you
You’re not that special
It’s not really about them
You’re clingy
You’re jealous
You’re judgmental
You’re a control freak
You’re manipulative and don’t even know it
You’re easily influenced
You don’t think for yourself
You shouldn’t speak for others
You didn’t do anything
The Devil’s in the details
You’re over complicating it 
You expect too much
You generalize
You fear meaninglessness
You fear the unknown
You crave explanations where there are none
You’re comfortable with you already know
You settle
You’re not discerning
You’re a creature of habit
You’re stuck in your ways
You’re really stuck in your ways
God damn, are you stuck in your ways
You’re stubborn
I said you’re stubborn
You already had your mind made up
Your head’s in the sand
You have blinders on
You’re shortsighted
You’re afraid to look in the mirror
Hindsight is 20/20
You’re looking at it backwards
It’s not too late
It’s later than you think
You’re not thinking straight
It’s not as bad as you think
There’s more to it
There’s a lot more to it
There’s not that much to it
You’re making excuses
You’re impatient
You’re in a rush
You have a short memory
You’re bad at history
I said you’re bad at history
Man, are you bad at history

Akim Reinhardt is a Historian.  And he’s usually wrong.  His website is ThePublicProfessor.com

by Bill Murray

John Allen Chau, the missionary killed in the Andaman Islands in November, reopened the ‘uncontacted people’ debate. An advocacy group called Survival believes “Uncontacted peoples make a judgment that they are better off remaining uncontacted and independent, fending for themselves.” Most everybody else wants in, missionaries on their missions, doctors preventing disease, linguists to study imperiled languages.

Outside the Amazon basin most of the world’s uncontacted people live in New Guinea. The world’s second largest island is divided between Indonesia in the west where – as far as we know – all remaining uncontacted people live, and Papua New Guinea in the east.

My wife and I took a peek into the interior of Papua New Guinea twenty years ago. To be clear, we sailed up the Sepik River, in the north of the country, a region that has had contact with Europeans since their ships scouted the coast in the late 18th century. European settlers pressed indigenous labor into plantation work on the north coast from the late 19th and then, in the 1930s Australian gold prospectors trekked into the interior highlands and climbed out with eyes big as saucers, having made contact with nearly a million previously unknown highlanders. (Here is a remarkable video.)

Apprehensive but with faith in the civilizing force of the five or six intervening decades, our upper lips stiffened by the hotel minibar, we flew into the highland town of Mt. Hagen, gateway to the interior. Mt. Hagen comprised a single downtown street, a rugby field, airstrip, unkempt housing and not much more. Read more »