by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Even the most cerebral of us can deal in abstractions only so far. No matter how grand the statement, how magnificent the law, how awe-inspiring the philosophy, there comes a point when, inevitably, we ask: but what does it mean? ” An interpretation of the universe remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter,” wrote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Overarching principles condense the workings of this vast, varied — and often puzzling — universe, into a set of predictable patterns, but order alone is seldom enough to satisfy us. We want to make sense of things – particularly those we cannot control. When exerting influence is not an option, often our only consolation lies in understanding what is, and reframing it in a way that we can live with.

Time is one of the most fundamental concepts that forms the invisible scaffolding of our lives. It is woven inextricably into all our logical structures, all our ways of being; we are conscious of moving though it – or being swept along by it. “Time perception matters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality,' writes Claudia Hammond. The arrow of time sets the direction in which our stories unfold, we comprehend the world by sorting phenomena into causes and effects.

Time is always implicit in our study of natural phenomena; the basic tenet of most physical theories is the ability to make predictions, to forecast the future, to trace the evolution of a system. Through the centuries, even as we constructed equations that employ and exploit time, we continued to ponder the true nature of this ubiquitous, slippery commodity.

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Death of NGC 2440

although you are distant

distant

distant

I can see by your last aura
against a black further distance,
the most distant distance…

I can see by your billowing
halo of expanding gasses
fluffed like god’s pillow
that you are ruled by laws
that also rule terrestrial things

I see the colors of your vast radiant shedding
and realize the force behind that shedding
is a predicate for everything
that’s blown apart, comes apart
falls apart, dissipates, uncomplicates,
is broken down, pulled down
……….. undone

it’s hard to wrap your mind around
the truth that this is where all things
—every brilliance built and done,
fought and won— are heading

except in tiny human scope
which mounts a natal
counterforce of hope

Jim Culleny
11/13/16
.

by Thomas R. Wells

The relationship between our electoral institutions and our democratic ideals is surprisingly obscure. Many systems rely on counting votes, but only in such a way that each vote does not count equally towards the final outcome (as in America's electoral college or in parliamentary constituency systems such as Britain's). But even where each vote is counted equally, the idea that the result represents the will of the people is undercut whenever the minority is substantial. Britain's Brexit referendum was 52% to 48%. My new prime minister has declared this a revolution, and that she intends to govern for the 52%, but what about the rest of us? And what can she even know about the 52% from their binary choice?

One defense of vote counting is just that it works. Politics is about managing conflicts of interest and ideological disagreements in a way that is seen to be legitimate. Because everyone (except Trump of course) accepts the rules of the electoral game in advance as a way of deciding the fundamental political question ‘Who's in charge here?', we have a moral responsibility to accept the results however much we dislike them. And a liberal democracy ensures the right of the minority to keep their own opinions and try again in a few years (again, something Trump's ‘lock her up' promises seem to undermine – but that's enough about him now). In this way, electoral democracy allows us to disagree about particular issues while retaining our overall commitment to a political regime, the rules of the game. Unlike say China, we can be against our government without being against our country.

Still, if it isn't the decision process but its acceptance that matters, rock, paper, scissors could work just as well.

Two other arguments are advanced for the peculiar institution of adding up votes. First, that it is instrumentally effective because of the wisdom of crowds, and second that universal suffrage is intrinsically valuable – a matter of respecting the equal dignity of all citizens. These contradict each other and our present institutions. Depending which we value most, we should either introduce a ‘driving-test' to screen out incompetent voters or we should convert the act of voting from a liberty right to a duty.

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by Genese Sodikoff

In this political climate of upheaval and uncertainty, writing about emerging pandemics seems, all of a sudden, off-topic. Why dwell on disease when the bedrock of liberalism is being pulverized? We are entering unknown waters on a rising tide of anger and fear. The United States, the second largest CO₂ emitter after China, is poised to back out of the Paris climate agreement, gut the Environmental Protection Agency, exploit public lands, and unfetter fossil fuel extraction. This means that in addition to sea-level rise, extreme weather events, drought, famine, jeopardized drinking water, and biodiversity loss, species and microbes will continue to be pushed into new geographic ranges, triggering more frequent disease outbreaks and what is likely to be a global pandemic.

Take, for example, wild aquatic birds, many species of which are already endangered by the loss of watery habitats and climate warming. Population ecologists have modeled how global warming disrupts the innate choreography of bird migrations and the availability of marine food sources. When the timing is thrown off, wild and domestic birds come into more frequent contact where previously they may have bypassed one another. In terms of sheer human self-interest, migratory waterfowl pose a risk to our meat sources. Wild birds are reservoir hosts of influenza A, and they can carry it their intestines without getting sick. Through excretions landing in soil and water or through direct contact, wild birds can transmit the virus to domestic birds and trigger outbreaks of the highly pathogenic “bird flu” (H5N1). The disease devastates commercial poultry flocks, and although human infections are relatively uncommon, they are often fatal.

Bird flu (H5N1) gained notoriety during the 1997 outbreak in Hong Kong, but its existence was known as early as the late 1870s. Since then, outbreaks have occurred in Korea, Thailand, Viet Nam, Japan, China, Cambodia, Laos, and then extended into Europe, the Middle East, West Africa, and the United States. When flu is detected in a farm bird, whole flocks must be culled. From December to May 2015, nearly 34 million birds died or were culled across 15 states in the Midwestern United States due to outbreaks of three different strains of bird flu. The gravest danger lies in viral mixtures and re-assortments. If the avian and swine influenza viruses meet inside a pig's body, the viruses can combine to create a new subtype that transmits easily mammal-to-mammal via airborne droplets.

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by Richard King

“So, the first question we must ask ourselves is, what is a Boggart?”

Hermione put up her hand.

“It's a shape-shifter,” she said. “It can take the shape of whatever it thinks will frighten us most.”

“Couldn't have put it better myself,” said Professor Lupin, and Hermione glowed. “So the Boggart sitting in the darkness within has not yet assumed a form. He does not yet know what will frighten the person on the other side of the door. Nobody knows what a Boggart looks like when he is alone, but when I let him out, he will immediately become whatever each of us most fears.”

—J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

So here we are, standing before the wardrobe, pens at the ready, waiting … Intermittently the heavy doors fly open to reveal – what? A crisis of US democracy. A crisis of neoliberalism. The disgrace of the mainstream media. Racism. Misogyny. Thus does the election of Donald Trump assume the shape of the thing we most fear, or the thing that most obsesses us. Again and again it shoots from the gloom. Showbiz values. Class war. Fascism.

It is with a certain diffidence, then, that I offer my own analysis, which I'm aware says as much about me and my politics as it does about the rise of the Donald. But everyone else is having their say, so I'll be buggered if I'm going to deny myself mine. This result was about a lot of things – all of the above, in fact. But we won't begin to understand it unless we understand as well the profound limitations of identity politics and its proper place on the ideological spectrum, which is to say the right.

Is it true, as some commentators have averred, that Trump's election represents, in part, a rejection of Clintonite posturing on issues of equal rights and diversity? Yes, it is. Does it follow that equal rights and diversity are regarded as marginal or unimportant by everyone who rejected that posturing? No, it doesn't. There is clearly a nativist, misogynistic strain that runs through Trump's supporter-base; but there is also a large constituency of people who regard Hillary Clinton's stand on these issues as self-serving and even fraudulent. If progressives are serious about building a movement to unseat Trump at the next election they should begin by considering whether they might have a point.

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by Omar Ali

Trump has been elected President. Having participated in a week-long social media freakout to deal with this shock (a fact I did not recognize about myself until a couple of days ago), I have some thoughts and I would like to put them out so that I can be enlightened by feedback. It is the only way to learn.

Very qualified people have written some good pieces already about the why and the how. I am posting links to them below, along with some random thoughts about the articles. They are not the whole story (what is?) but I think all these articles are must reads. My own comments are more like invitations to tell me off, or tell me more…

After these links and comments, I sum up my own thoughts and end with some questions.

You are still crying wolf, from Slate Star Codex. (I don't think Trump is particularly racist or sexist (relative to most 70 year old males, of any ethnicity) and he is obviously socially liberal compared to traditional Republicans. But the possibility is there that this shallow man (more or less socially liberal, a conman, ignorant) will be manipulated by his newfound advisers into disasters (initially abroad) that could have endless branching and mutating unintended consequences here and abroad. That could be a truly transformative crisis… Racism and the rise of the KKK (real and imagined) are small potatoes compared to the storms that could potentially be unleashed in the world… Muslims, being intimately connected to the worldwide crisis in very direct ways, will likely face the consequences within the USA too; but the crucial point is that the whole shitstorm is likely to proceed along tracks that are occasionally parallel, but mostly completely unconnected with the identitarian postmarxist postmodern worldview that dominates the elite Eurocentric Left today… Incidentally, if the ordure does hit the fan (I hope it does not, i hope the much-maligned current world order survives or at least, has a soft landing), then Blacks and Latinos, like other citizens, will fight for America. I suspect that the fantasy worldview that emphasizes supranational and subnational identities well above national ones will prove very flimsy; flimsier even than “class solidarity” proved to be in the first world war…the elite Left's freakout about the KKK and the coming age of Jim Crow is not completely wrong, but misses the biggest threats and their likely consequences. Which is not to say that no connection can be made between racism and the international order, but the race-obsessed post-truth glasses of the new postmarxist Left do get them into endless wrong turns and dead-ends in terms of priorities to be tackled.

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by Humera Afridi

Gündüz Vassaf's latest book, What Can I Do, arrived like manna this past summer, a panacea for our times, urging action as an antidote to pessimism. The book's publication in Turkey coincided with the heightened and volatile political climate in the country in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup attempt. Its message couldn't be more pertinent. Certainly, post-election America, traumatized and rattled by aftershocks, could do with just such a guide. The need for an English translation of What Can I Do? feels ever more critical.

On November 4, 2016, days before the US elections, writing from Ortigia, Sicily, Vassaf dispatched a prescient letter to editors of several international newspapers, stating with clarity what's exactly at stake in the US elections: “It's not just who the candidates are. America is too important for the world. And the world is too important to be left to America.” Here we find ourselves now, inhabiting an altered reality post-election, and Vassaf's disavowal of pessimism in favor of action resonates powerfully, offering a means of harnessing our ability to create the change we want to see.

The idea of freedom is a leitmotif in Gündüz Vassaf's work. Freedom is something he is conscious of in all aspects of life, both visible and unseen. It's a subject he delves into in an earlier book, Prisoners of Ourselves. Freedom is, too, a practice he embodies daily, certainly through his creativity, upholding the ideal of a life liberated from artificial and internalized constraints. The day we met, I noticed with surprised delight that he prefers to walk barefoot around the island where he resides in the summer, utterly at ease traversing the stony ground without shoes. Moments after introductions were exchanged, Vassaf suggested a swim, and a small group of us waded into the blue-green Sea of Marmara, as if we'd been friends forever. I marveled at my own readiness to discard formality in Vassaf's company, noting his talent for opening the way to an honest, satisfying experience of reality, stripped of convention and inhibition.

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by Ali Minai

It is the worst of times. Period! The presidential election of 2016 possibly represents a hinge-point in American like no other since the beginning of the Cold War, though perhaps an argument can be made for 9-11. Indeed, September 11, 2001 and November 8, 2016 may be seen as two ends of the same massive hinge that has turned that entire course of American — and, therefore, world — history in a different direction.

Within the domestic context of the United States, it is hard to see the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency as anything other than the ignition of a new civil conflict along ideological lines. It is not a “civil war”, but the weapons involved will be no less destructive to the fabric of society.

The arrival of this conflict is not a surprise since there have been hints of it for years, but its current modality is a huge shock. Tensions have been building up in the United States for decades as it turns inexorably towards becoming a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. Power has been siphoning away from the mainly white elite defined by tradition and becoming distributed over a more diverse elite defined by education and technical competence. The largest group “left behind” in this process is the non-elite largely white population that, long conditioned to accept the supremacy of the traditional elite, suddenly finds itself facing competition from unskilled Latin American labor and the ascendancy of a new diverse and global elite. Saying “I want my country back” is a natural response in this situation. It is impossible for this sentiment not to have an ethnic subtext — though it is an oversimplification to see the conflict as primarily racial, ethnic or religious. These factors are important signifiers, but the core issue is a fundamental difference in worldviews.

Add in the devastation of rural America by poverty and drugs, the stoking of religious tensions by 9-11, endless wars fought by soldiers from the lower economic strata, the disdainful attitude of the new liberal elites, and one has a toxic brew of resentment bubbling in the white working class (WWC) throughout the country. The only question was whether this boiling hot mess would subside as the cold water of demographic reality drizzled on it, or if it would come to a boil. Obama’s election in 2008 and 2012 seemed to suggest that it might be cooling down. Unfortunately, not so!

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by Paul North

The Anti-Christ—we know who he is.

Thessalonians says: “And then the lawless one will be revealed” (2:8).

The end arrives for human beings in the worst imaginable form, a demi-god who tears down the world they have carefully built. Wickedness and destruction overtake goodness and progress. Certainly he doesn't do this openly. He insinuates himself through spectacular deceptions. “He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie” (2:9). This is the moment that 2 John calls “the last hour,” because this fate, the destruction of everything, is also supposed to be the gateway to a new first hour, to final redemption. The coming of the Anti-Christ is the worst fate imaginable, but it also means that now things can only get better. “And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming” (2:8).

Before redemption comes of course, everything truly has to be crushed to smithereens. This bargain—total destruction for total restitution—belongs to the modern fate idea as well. The popular sayings: “things can only get better,” “every cloud has a silver lining,” and most directly “it is always darkest before the dawn” express and reinforce the idea that this is an inevitable trade off. We accept destruction because it leads to restoration. Thinking like this of course, some may be tempted to help hasten the decline. Martin Luther famously advised his colleague Melanchthon in 1521 to “be a sinner and let your sins be strong.” There is an insidious logic here. Without strong sins leading up to it, redemption can only be weak. The very idea of redemption—a strong correction in the course of the world—requires that the world be on a very bad course indeed. If the world just drifts, or remains at a low stage of decrepitude, it is hard to imagine it can be saved. One could thus turn this around and say that redemption thinking often leads to the acceptance of destruction as a necessary evil.

In any case, fateful thinking is a tranquilizer after catastrophic events. These sorts of thoughts bubble up: “it had to happen this way,” “the world is really like this,” or even “if we hadn't ignored the signs, this would not have happened.” But it did happen, our fatal flaw let fate take its course. In the wake of the terrible event, we write it back into the story of how things inevitably were going to go.

And when he is finally here, when the Anti-Christ arrives, the run of the mill believer is helpless. The great battle will be fought between Christ and Anti-Christ, opposed cosmic forces. We may not intervene. So we repeat those stock phrases, every cloud has…, it's always darkest…, and so on. The battle has been forecast from time immemorial and we are only along for the ride.

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by Dave Maier

On the afternoon of Election Day, I was in the local library doing a particularly nasty jigsaw puzzle (I like to do them at the library, because they have such big tables there that you can spread out as much as you want), and I happened to overhear a conversation among a man and two women, all strangers. All three were thirty-somethings with children (as became clear). The guy had been working at his laptop when the women, whom he knew, came in, and soon he was regaling them with a story of his morning spent dealing with this and that. He told it well, and was very engaging and likable, and his audience responded appropriately. They did not strike me as in any way deplorable (except possibly that they were talking loudly in the library).

I say this because, even before one of the women (later on in the conversation) said something like “I like the way he tells it like it is!”, I found myself with no doubt whatsoever that these were Trump supporters. In the aftermath of that disaster (by which I was not nearly as surprised as some, possibly because of this incident in the library), I have been wondering what to think about those on the winning side. I haven’t come to any conclusions, and clearly there are a number of different reasons one might have voted red this year; but if anyone needs more disjointed post-election ramblings, you’ve come to the right place. No doubt they say more about me than about the world; in any case, that’s all I’ll be good for for a while. Best of luck to anyone else trying to figure it out for themselves as well.

Why did I believe, or how did I know, that the by-librarians-unaccountably-unshushed trio were Trumpians, even before it was confirmed? They had not been discussing politics or culture or anything close to it; the guy’s mother couldn’t start her car, and the globalist elite was not apparently at fault. I think it was just their manner: they seemed somehow to revel in their just-ordinary-folks unpretentiousness, even though socio-economically they were clearly upwardly mobile middle-class citizens of our fairly upscale community rather than the economically stressed white working class we keep hearing about. I found myself with an uncanny impression that if they knew me they would regard me as perversely elitist, quite independently of my views themselves. Indeed I do regard the main appeal of Trumpism to otherwise non-deplorable people as a celebration of (what they perceive as) “ordinary” life and a salutary rejection of what in contrast is perversely unordinary. The latter need not be the obvious things; in fact I feel sure that if I were merely black or gay or Muslim or Latino, rather than white and straight and weird, they would be perfectly okay with me. But who knows?

For some perspective on this, let’s look at some other data points that have been bouncing around my head in the last week.

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by Michael Liss

We got our butts kicked, and kicked very hard. Adlai Stevenson, ruminating about the results of the 1952 Election, recalled Abraham Lincoln's reaction to an electoral loss: We are like the boy who stubbed his toe—it hurts too much to laugh, and we are too old to cry.

It's a few days later, and the damaged digit still aches, so let's take off the shoe and get a closer look. Nasty—swollen with punctured pride and inflated expectation. And, is that yellowish stuff pus?

There is no delicate way to describe why and how this wrenching event occurred. Nor is there any comfort in speculating just what our new leaders in Washington have planned for us. But we need to. If we don't dive in, take our medicine, and prepare for the future history will repeat itself.

We can begin the post mortem with the Clinton campaign's primary complaints: unfair coverage by the mainstream media, and James Comey's intercession. To that, I am going to add the dedicated Trump team at WikiLeaks.

Ah, the press, you can't live with them, you can't live without them. They loved Trump—even though he threatened and mistreated them, he was great copy, he made news constantly, which drew eyeballs and advertiser dollars. To balance out their reporting of Trump's excesses (all Trump had was excesses) they felt compelled to add an equal dollop of negative Hillary stories. To the Clinton's campaign's collective way of thinking, this constantly created a false equivalence of two sinners. Fair? Kind of. I give it 5 out of a possible 10 on the biased scale.

Comey? Very difficult to evaluate. I don't want to impugn his motives and I think he was genuinely conflicted. What we don't know is how many votes he moved because we don't have hard, reliable data. Even with that qualifier, we can't discount the impact of Comey's choices and the possibility that his decisions changed both the Presidential and down-ballot races. I think he is an honorable man—and, because he's an honorable man, he probably is losing sleep over this—and should. 8 out of 10, with the potential for an upward revision.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness. —Italo Calvino

Just a short walk down the portico-covered arcades of Via Roma leads to one of the most elegant Baroque squares in Turin– if not, in all the world…

We were in town to see a particular picture; for Turin is home to a precious painting of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata. Attributed to van Eyck, the picture has an exact –but much larger size– copy in Philadelphia; and art historians have gone back and forth over the years about which one is the copy of which. Both paintings were believed to have been part of the 1471 inventory of the will of none other than Anselm Adornes, the fabulously wealthy Bruges merchant (who happens to be a great obsession of mine).

It seems strange to have two identical paintings created, when the cost was so high to buy a van Eyck, but it turns out that back in the 15th century, the super wealthy sometimes had different sizes of a painting created so they would be able to bring the smaller version with them when they traveled or perhaps give one to a daughter on her wedding day. Why not, right? It is possible the smaller version of the van Eyck, held in the Sabauda Gallery in Turin, was created for just this purpose.

The painting does not disappoint and it was well worth the trip–but to say we got distracted along the way would only be an understatement.

For me, it started sitting in a cafe in the Piazza San Carlo. The piazza is, as I suggested above, possibly the most beautiful square in the world. Being the capital of the House of Savoy, the city is in many ways more French-feeling than Italian. With its standardized building facades made of huge pieces of cut stone adorned with tall windows and wrought iron balconies, the city evokes a more Northern, noble atmosphere. Like Paris, it is a city built for kings. But rather than in the grand boulevards one finds in Paris, in Turin, it is the piazza where the Baroque architecture dazzles.

And no where dazzles more than the Piazza San Carlo.

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by Evan Edwards

Sometime in November 1944, the U.K. based Vegetarian Society splintered slightly when several members—calling themselves “Vegans”—came to believe that simply abstaining from eating animal flesh did not go far enough in alleviating the suffering of animals. Vegans, if you don’t already know, argue that if one of the pillars of the vegetarian ethos is to not contribute to the death and suffering of animals, then to continue to take milk from nursing cows, wear leather stripped from their bodies, to subject hens to miserable living conditions for eggs, and so on, is in fact not to live up to stated ideals.

Never before in the long and complex history of vegetarianism had such a distinction been made. For thousands of years, philosophers and religious figures had made ethical and health-based arguments for not making one’s body “a tomb”—as Leonardo da Vinci reportedly put it—but the exact meaning and limits of this abstention were never quite defined. Some, thinking that fish were not really ‘animals’—in many romance languages, seafood translates most literally as “fruits of the sea”—allowed for their consumption, others like Pythagoras included legumes in the list of forbidden fare for reasons unknown. But due to reason or circumstance, the Vegan Society believed that this ambiguity about what constitutes suffering and cruelty was ripe for clarification.

Perhaps, on a grand historical level, the shift from subsistence farming to mass industrial schemes that accompanied the modern era had brought the evil of these forms of animal exploitation into focus. Perhaps it was due to a heightened awareness of the unfathomable depths to which suffering could sink, brought about by these individuals’ own subjection to a war that had been raging for nearly five years in their home country, a war that had brought the London Blitz, the bombing of Dresden, a total war that summoned as from hell itself the factory-like conditions of the Nazi work-camps, which had delivered more carnage than any war in history, and which had yet to show its greatest instrument of cruelty, the atomic bomb. Perhaps it was just coincidence or fate, because in 1994, to commemorate the break, the Vegan Society declared November “World Vegan Month,” ironically during the very time when over 50 million Turkeys are getting their last plump-up before their national slaughter in America.

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by Matt McKenna

A population of complacent optimists unexpectedly find themselves at the mercy of a ghastly ogre: Is this the story of the Democrats in 2016 or the plot of DreamWorks’ new animated film, Trolls? As liberal American adults come to grips with how their country could elect the relatively progressive Barack Obama to the Presidency twice in a row only to immediately elect the much less progressive Donald Trump, children around the world are watching Trolls, a hard hitting metaphor for the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.

The filmmakers deserve credit for coming up with a ninety-minute movie based on nothing more than the license for a brand of goofy dolls that was last culturally relevant back in the 1990s along with other collectibles such as Beanie Babies, Furbies, and Pokemon. To turn the toy line into a movie franchise, the screenwriters gifted the Trolls with a strange backstory: Within their songful, permanently optimistic society, the Trolls’ only problem is that they are hunted by the Bergen, a diseased-looking band of ogres who find happiness only in eating the little Trolls. Every year, in fact, the Bergen enjoy a festival called “Trollstice” in which the normally mopey, grumpy, and unpleasant Bergen feast upon the bodies of the radiant Trolls to attain momentary contentment. Unsurprisingly, the Trolls eventually tire of being eaten, and they escape Bergentown by hiding in a nearby forest. After a brief chase, all the Bergen–save one–give up looking for them, and the Trolls appear to be safe forever.

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