by Bill Benzon

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

—Yeats

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

—Kafka

I woke up at 1:17 AM a couple nights ago, a dream on my mind. Which is unusual, because I generally do not remember dreams.

It was night and I was walking along the street outside an aged building where I occupied an apartment on the first floor. To my surprise and dismay the external wall along one side of my apartment was completely gone. It had been in bad shape and needed repair, but why hadn’t my landlord given me notice about the repairs? I’d been thinking of inviting my father to visit me, but I couldn’t do that now. And how could I protect my things from thieves? So I went to the rear of the building, clambered up an external wall and over the roof of a rear-facing porch and through a window into a second floor apartment. I looked around, went past the occupants, who were sitting on mattresses on the floor and paid me no mind, and entered the front apartment on the second floor where I did the same thing. So did they. I walked down the stairs to the first floor where I entered my apartment through the door. Now I was in my apartment and looking into the street through the wall that was no longer there.

That’s when I awoke. There was of course more to the dream than that, But I don’t recall it very well and, in any event, dreams and prose are such very different things that any account I give will be as much invention as recollection. So it is with that first paragraph.

The thing is, I recognized that apartment. It seemed that I’d been there in other dreams, dreams years ago. But that apartment also seemed like a diffuse and distracted amalgam of apartments I’d occupied in Baltimore, Buffalo, Troy NY, and even Jersey City.

I remembered that before I’d fallen asleep I’d been thinking of writing this piece. Not so much about Brexit as about a diffuse wandering state of mind. Start with Brexit and see where it takes me.

For you see, I’m not expert in any of the various things that would allow me to lay claim to serious insight into the referendum that just took place in Britain. It’s just one of the things that flows through my mind these days, along with Trump, Sanders, and Hillary; territorial disputes in the South China Sea; drone warfare; and just when are we going to see self-driving vehicles on the open road? I claim no particular expertise in these matters either, but they enter my mind where I entertain them. In the one case I’m going to have to vote.

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by Matt McKenna

More than the thousands of articles laboriously describing the apocalyptic state of American politics in 2016, the low-brow Kevin Hart comedy Central Intelligence is the most efficient and accurate portrayal of the circus we’ve created out of our Presidential election process. In hindsight, it seems odd to expect long-read think-pieces in periodicals like the New Yorker to shed light on what is less of a democratic election and more of a reality show called “Who Wants to be the President”. Indeed, a run-of-the-mill summer comedy with the crass tagline “Saving the world takes a little Hart and a big Johnson” seems the more appropriate medium to comment on our equally crass election. So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that director Rawson Thurber’s Central Intelligence isn’t just reasonably funny, but it also provides a legitimate critique of American politics.

Central Intelligence co-stars Kevin Hart and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Hart plays Calvin Joyner, an accountant who is bummed out because he used to be cool in high school, but now he’s boring. Johnson plays Bob Stone, a CIA operative who was bullied mercilessly in high school, but now he’s super jacked. Because Calvin was nice one time to Bob in high school, Bob recruits Calvin to help him on some cockamamie save-the-world mission involving satellites, access codes, and Aaron Paul implausibly portraying a CIA agent. The story, of course, doesn’t make sense, nor was it designed to make sense, which is the first clue the film is actually commenting on American politics.

The humor in Central Intelligence stems from the conflict between the diminutive Calvin and the gargantuan Bob. Calvin is a stuck-up white-collar jerk, and Bob is an naive violence-loving semi-idiot. The film has therefore patterned its leads after the stereotypes of the two major political parties in America; Calvin represents Democrats with their politically correct, holier-than-thou elitism, and Bob represents Republicans with their inability to solve problems in a way that doesn’t involve applying violence to something. Neither party gets a pass in the film–Calvin is frequently the butt of the joke as he sheepishly runs from conflict and is unable to take care of himself. And though he is able to beat people up, the motivation for Bob to develop his physically dominating stature is his feeling emasculated as an adolescent.

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by Ahmed Humayun

“Mr. Obama's refusal to speak of “radical Islam” also betrays his failure to understand the sources of Islamic State's legitimacy and thus its allure to young Muslim men….Mr. Obama's refusal to acknowledge the real nature of the Islamist threat creates an opening for Mr. Trump's immigration ban. It suggests to Americans that the President is so hostage to political correctness that he might not be doing all he can to combat the threat.” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2016.

If you follow the debate about terrorism, Islam, and anti-Muslim bigotry in America today, you will observe a small but strident faction fixated on American officials and leaders who do not use the phrase ‘radical Islam' to describe terrorist groups like ISIL, Al Qaeda, and others. This faction maintains that if you do not talk about terrorism through the prism of Islam, you are soft on terror, you lack moral clarity, and you are paralyzed by political correctness.

This is a heavy burden for one phrase to bear. The good news is that there is no evidence that American security and law enforcement agencies have been 'soft' on terror. Under the current administration, numerous operations have been conducted around the world to disrupt the operations of terrorist groups, even resulting in the capture of Bin Laden, the perpetrator of the September 11 attacks. The lack of use of the phrase ‘radical Islam' by our leaders has not prevented these operations from occurring or succeeding.

In fact, blurring the distinction between Islam and terrorism will hurt counterterrorism efforts rather than aid them. While it is true that terminology is important in this struggle, the Journal's editorial board has it exactly backwards. Consider that ISIL wants to be called the ‘Islamic State', and that it has previously threatened to cut the tongues out of people who refer to it as Da'esh. ISIL's leaders want the world to make no distinction between Islam and its brutish practices. They claim exclusive authority to speak on behalf of Islam, and they slaughter anyone else who has a different view. When we say that ISIL is Islamic, we concede their core contention at the outset. We can either deny our enemies what they want, or we can hand it to them on a silver platter.

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Eden

the 5 pm Magnolia tree
is flaunting its lemony green leaves again
lush as every rite of spring,
fresh, pregnant with light, it makes
the quaking Aspen near the hoop house tremble
its leaves aroused by breeze
as we all, in this utterly new ensemble,
excited as if on some brink, are poised,
unprepared for what comes next, but resolute,
pressed always by the force of nature
which ever sends the unforeseen
in the arms of the expected
to place it at our feet
often tangled (but replete)
to tease apart, to work it out,
to look at it from every angle
to find a way through every doubt
but canny, careful not to go for
every fruit it dangles

Jim Culleny
6/18/16
.

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

In the real world of political talk, getting the last word is often what counts most. This is especially the case where political talk is conducted in the limited space between commercial breaks. In such a forum, “getting the last word” does not mean what it means in a purely academic setting. In academic argument, one gets the last word when one articulates a decisive point, a point to which not even one's smartest and best informed opponents could object. In popular political talk, by contrast, “getting the last word” means being the last speaker to utter a coherent and self-contained thought. Statements of this self-contained variety tend to be received by one's audience as the “take away” from the exchange, and hence they are most likely to be remembered. The arena of national politics is high-stakes and highly-public; and the need to get the last word creates a strong incentive for a distinctive kind of conversational distortion, namely, that of derailing discussion. One derails a discussion when one speaks for the sake of creating a conversational disruption that substitutes the topic previously under consideration with some ambiguous and unwieldy alternative. Once derailed in this sense, conversation loses focus, and the disorientation leaves subsequent speakers unable to get the last word.

Derailing of course takes many forms. But one derailing strategy has become so prevalent in current political discourse that it is worthy of focused analysis.

The derailing strategy we have in mind may be called spitballing. At its core, spitballing works as follows: One makes multiple contributions to a discussion, often as fast as one can think them up (and certainly faster than one can think them through). Some contributions may be insightful, others less so, but all are overtly provocative. What is most important, though, is that each installment express a single, self-contained thought. Accordingly, slogans are the spitballer's dialectical currency. As the metaphor of the spitball goes, one keeps tossing until something sticks; hence it helps if one's slogans are tinged with something disagreeable or slightly beyond the pale. As the spitballer's interlocutors attempt to reply to what he has said, the spitballer resolutely continues spitballing.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

In April Donald Trump howled that the Republican delegate selection process was “rigged“. This was back when it looked like he wouldn't have a majority of the delegates going into the Republican convention. In the first round the delegates are required to vote for a particular candidate according to how they were allocated in their state's vote. If Trump didn't win a majority in the first round, then in subsequent rounds delegates would be free to vote for whomever they liked (Nixon 2016!). Now that he has a solid majority of the delegates, the fairness of the rules used in the arcane underworld of delegate selection no longer holds Trump's interest. Of course, if the “Anybody but Trump” cabal inserts a “conscience clause” in the convention rules to unbind Trump's delegates, he'll no doubt once again start screeching “rigged”. Trump's dire warnings of riots at the convention must be causing lots of sleepless nights among party bigwigs.

On the other side, the supporters of Bernie Sanders have vociferously argued that their guy is also the victim of a rigged system. For a party which claims the high ground of reason and adulthood, the Democrats have done their fair share of conspiracy theorizing: dark suggestions of voter suppression, frenzied freak-outs at the Nevada State convention, and ominous grumbles about “super delegates” subverting the process. Even now there are fantastical scenarios involving the super delegates spontaneously throwing their vote to Sanders and causing a contested Democratic convention.

It turns out democracy can be wickedly unfair.

The bizarreness of this election year aside, surely democracy will tick along and ensure the will of the people comes out on election day. After all, on November 8th the votes will be counted and the numbers won't lie [1]. Right?

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by Tamuira Reid

According to an article written by Therese J. Bouchard for the site, World of Psychology, there are “8 Ways to Help Your Bipolar Loved One Cope”.

1. Educate yourself. “Education is always the starting point. Because until a spouse or daughter or friend of a manic-depressive understands the illness, it is impossible to say and do the right thing.” -TB

I try to imagine your rage as something beautiful. Lightning raging across the sky. Wind raging across a thirsty desert. But all I see is you, Giant Man. Trapped in a body with a broken mind. What does it feel like? I don't recognize you in these moments, not even in the eyes. They go grey, flat. Like still water or trapped rain.

2. Learn how to talk to your loved one. “[He] doesn't say much when I'm clutching tissue paper, crying my eyes out. And he's hesitant to speak when I'm manic. When I don't want to get out of bed in the morning, he reminds me why I need to.” – TB

I feel like I've lost my mind, T.

Then let's find it.

It's not funny.

I'm not laughing.

Go fuck yourself.

3. Make some rules. “All those times the school administrators rehearsed what, exactly, would happen in the case of an emergency? Families of bipolar persons need them as well: a plan of action for those times when the bipolar person is sick.” – TB

You cut the deck and wait and cut it again. We open our Pepsi's and sit on the floor in our underwear.

We learned to play cards like this in rehab. To kill the boredom. To pass time thinking about anything other than how much we wanted to use.

When I went into treatment for my drinking problem, everyone warned me not to fall in love. Rehab booty is bad booty. Ridiculous, I thought. Who the hell finds love in a place like this?

It was my 25^th day. Morning meeting. Bunch of newly sober drones reading from the Big Book. I was knitting a scarf for Linda, because she finally kicked dope and was leaving and had no chance in the world really but we all liked to pretend she did. A scarf with blue and black squiggly lines. That's when I heard it. Your voice. It cut through the room on some silvery thread. I looked up and saw you, Giant Man, with a stream of light pouring down on you from a hole in the cabin ceiling. Perfectly illuminated. It was so cheesy and over-the-top but there you have it. Fuck, I remember thinking. Oh fuck.

If I could go back to that morning and change it all. Stay in my room instead of going to morning meeting. If I'd gone to the center by the beach instead of the rehab on the mountain.

Go fish, you say and smile.

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by Jalees Rehman

“The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.”

—Samuel P. Huntington (1972-2008) “The Clash of Civilizations“

In 1993, the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington published his now infamous paper The Clash of Civilizations in the journal Foreign Affairs. Huntington hypothesized that conflicts in the post-Cold War era would occur between civilizations or cultures and not between ideologies. He divided the world into eight key civilizations which reflected common cultural and religious heritages: Western, Confucian (also referred to as “Sinic”), Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin-American and African. In his subsequent book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order“, which presented a more detailed account of his ideas and how these divisions would fuel future conflicts, Huntington also included the Buddhist civilization as an additional entity. Huntington's idea of grouping the world in civilizational blocs has been heavily criticized for being overly simplistic and ignoring the diversity that exists within each “civilization”. For example, the countries of Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia were all grouped together under “Western Civilization” whereas Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Gulf states were all grouped as “Islamic Civilization” despite the fact that the member countries within these civilizations exhibited profound differences in terms of their cultures, languages, social structures and political systems. On the other hand, China's emergence as a world power that will likely challenge the economic dominance of Western Europe and the United States, lends credence to a looming economic and political clash between the “Western” and “Confucian” civilizations. The Afghanistan war and the Iraq war between military coalitions from the “Western Civilization” and nations ascribed to the “Islamic Civilization” both occurred long after Huntington's predictions were made and are used by some as examples of the hypothesized clash of civilizations.

It is difficult to assess the validity of Huntington's ideas because they refer to abstract notions of cultural and civilizational identities of nations and societies without providing any clear evidence on the individual level. Do political and economic treaties between the governments of countries – such as the European Union – mean that individuals in these countries share a common cultural identity?

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by Maniza Naqvi

They come for us five times a day. The azaan goes off with a bang as the loudspeaker switch is flipped on. It's so loud—I feel like I've been electrocuted—and there's a white light that goes off in my head—then the call to prayer which would have sounded lyrical, reassuring, soothing and calming at a different decibel now tears apart any peace or calm that might have crept in, might have tiptoed into this cold institutional facility somewhere in the heart of the Midwest. But instead it's like a kick on the side of my head— by army boots. Then just as the deafening noise ends, the guards, come in with their own deafening numbing vocal assault. Muscular women, heads covered in tightly wound hijabs, clapping their hands harshly, screaming, “Let's go! Let's go! Let's go ladies!' As if they were the TSA security at JFK or Dulles. Only now, after all that practice we've had, and they have too, they're shouting at us and we're not going anywhere, we're here, in a prison compound, “Let's go! Let's go! Salaat time. Salaat time. Now!”

And we are all forced, forced to get up and go say our prayers…what we call Namaaz…, those of us who have been Muslim longer than our guards ever have been—they are all new converts, all young, all, from Chicago, New York, LA, Kentucky and Tennessee. They are forcing us to relearn what we have taken as a given: as our flesh and our bones and our blood. They are determined to make Moss—LEMS, out of us.

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by Katalin Balog

I. Trump

In the last 30 years, I have witnessed, criss-crossing the Atlantic, first, my native Hungary's transition from communism to democracy and capitalism, and, for the past 6, its about-face: the sudden dismantling of the institutional system of liberal democracy, as well as the rapid spread of crony capitalism, the establishment of a “mafia state“. In 2014, its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, proudly called Hungary an “illiberal state“. The institutions of liberal democracy proved to be too fragile, the careful checks and balances too foreign to take root in Hungary, in a climate of growing corruption, mass unemployment, and rising inequality. So my state of mind has been, more than anything else, a shock of recognition at Donald Trump's precipitous rise and the rapid transformation of the culture of political discourse in the Republican party and beyond. This is how democracy has been lost in Hungary; it started with a profound transformation of political discourse. Trump's debasement of the public sphere, the normalizing of taboo-breaking racist, sexist, xenophobic speech, the defiant, hateful rejection of “political correctness” has strong echoes in the post-socialist political-cultural scene in Hungary. I have already been there.

Whatever you think of American foreign policy, or the Democratic establishment, or the breaking up of the big banks, and even if you think capitalism itself is unacceptable, you better realize that something fundamental is at stake that you ought to take a stand on: you ought not pretend that this is politics as usual.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

As people are moving, spaces are transforming. In the context of the European refugee crisis, schools, former airports, and hotels are turned into camps; south European islands that have developed an infrastructure for northern European tourists have now become border regions and immigration areas for non-European refugees. Artistic acts of transforming spaces can bring the transformations themselves into focus. The contribution of the Icelandic Pavilion to the last Venice Biennale consisted of turning the deconsecrated Church of Santa Maria della Misericordia into a mosque. While the function of this transformation was officially explained by the aim “to provide a platform for dialogue about and communication between different cultural positions”, it actually posed the question: what kind of a space did this transformation create? A place of worship? A place of art? Inside the mosque, a small sign that could easily be overlooked warned against “worldly talk and gossip in the Masjid [place of worship]”: “There will come a time upon people when they will talk about worldly affairs in the Masjid […] Allah Ta'ala does not need such people.” The mosque that cautioned against them was full of exactly such people: the international art scene crowd, discussing the Biennale and what they had or were going to see. The sign itself, being part of the mosque that was the Icelandic Pavilion in the Venice Biennale, was in fact part of the very art that prompted, contrary to the sign's request, much “talk about worldly affairs”. The artist Christoph Büchel, who created this piece, has formerly also transformed a museum into a swinger club. Is that the same kind of transformation? The same kind of art? Apart from being part of the series of Biennale Pavilions, “The Mosque” is also part of Büchel's transformation installations series.

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by Elise Hempel

When I was twelve, the year some kids started “making out” and sneaking cigarettes, I walked to the drugstore alone and made a secret purchase, nervously doling to the cashier the money I'd saved up, then racing home with my heart pounding, clutching the brown paper bag as I bounded up the stairs to my bedroom, making sure the door was locked before I crinkled open the now-sweaty bag and pulled out … my new toy telephone.

I don't know what I was thinking, except that I'd never had one before, and … my family must never find out. My new phone was plastic, of course, thin and cheap, a lemony, too-yellow yellow no real phone would ever come in. The receiver, attached by a fake curly cord like a pig's tail, was hollow, both ends dotted with phony “holes,” and under the clear dial that jingled flimsily as it spun (an anemic tricycle bell), the numbers were only stickers. No way to plug it in, smooth and solid in the back, my phone was an imposter, connected to nothing but itself.

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by Chris Bacas

During a blaze across Florida, our leader hosted a band party; his way of saying thanks.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Wearing white, Hillary Clinton made her speech as the presumptive Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party after the California Primary as the one who would save us from Trump. But she is the one who has been saved by Trump. Wealthy warriors, Trump and she, members of the one percent, diverting America's attention from this fact and uniting America through fear, presenting fear as their net worth and credentials to the ninety-nine percent.

The same fear, that the specter of extremism would take over, had Americans marching on into war now has them marching towards Hillary who voted for the wars. Hillary Clinton didn't stand much of a chance (given her record on supporting war and her accumulation of wealth) in today's context of a deafening roar of protest about the rising poverty and the growing gap between the rich and the middle class the 99% versus the 1%. But then miraculously that context was trumped by Trump by his rhetoric of fascism. Trump has provided the theater needed to make Hillary viable and credible. The more preposterous he gets, the lighter and more bearable becomes, her very real baggage regarding trust and bad decisions. Hillary's trump card is Trump, in the game against Bernie Sanders.

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by Max Sirak

I spent my 20s working in bars and bookstores. Really, what this means is – I read a lot and I drank a lot. And, over the course of all this reading and drinking, I even managed to learn a thing or two. So, today we're going to talk about making a good drink and living a good life.

One of my favorite reads in my 20s was Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd's, The Time Paradox. One of my favorite drinks in my 20s was a well-crafted margarita. Now – I know what you're thinking, “A margarita? How pedestrian…” and “The Time Paradox? I've never heard of it…”

The book is all about how “attitudes toward time have a profound impact on your life and your world, yet you seldom recognize it.” (The Time Paradox) The drink, when done right, is about the most delicious thing you can put in your mouth on a summer's day. And – as luck would have it – the recipes for how to best think about time and how to best make a margarita are pretty damn similar.

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by Thomas R. Wells

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” John Kerry challenged Congress about the Vietnam war in 1971. There in a nutshell is the standard test by which democratic republics assess their military adventures: Is this cause worth dying for?

The idea of such a test is a good one. War is a question of politics, indeed the oldest question of political power: ‘Who's in charge here?' Specifically, governments contest each other's sovereignty – their ability to get their own way – by employing or threatening the means of extraordinary violence. Since war is defined by its terrible means, it can only be justified by some extraordinary purpose. Ordinary political goals will not do. Hence the need to find some measure that will be immune from the merely personal or factional interests of politicians or their hubris.

Nevertheless, Kerry's test is not quite right. The most ethically significant thing about war is not that our soldiers are ordered to risk their lives to further the interests of our state – or perhaps just our politicians – but that they are ordered to kill for it. The real ethical test of a war is whether our cause is worth killing for. If that is not satisfied then our soldiers are mere murderers and we are the ones who made them so.

This test turns out to be much harder to meet.

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