by Charlie Huenemann

In his middle to late thirties (over the years 1679-85), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent more than three years in his visits to a silver mining region in the Harz mountains. He believed he could devise new and more efficient ways of pumping water out of the deep shafts, enabling miners to dig even deeper and extract more silver from the earth. Had he succeeded, he would have doubled his salary and freed himself from the drudgery of his service to the House of Brunswick.

But this effort wasn't just a ploy to gain financial independence. He had a bigger plan in mind. Indeed, Leibniz always had bigger plans in mind. He was born into the aftermath of the Thirty Years' war and he believed his genius could go some way toward healing Europe's countless fractures. And so he wrote theological works aimed at convincing Catholics and Protestants that the differences among them were not so big after all; he wrote political works advocating for unity across Christendom; and he wrote logical and scientific works aimed at truth, or course, but also aimed indirectly at supplying a common foundation to learned societies across Europe.

The project in the Harz was meant to play an instrumental role in these ambitions. Had it succeeded, the money would have gone to support one of Leibniz's greatest dreams: the development of a characteristica universalis, a rigorous calculus of pure concepts that would itself be a lasting theoretical framework for constructive dialogue among scientists, philosophers, theologians, and politicians across the planet and, indeed, for all time.

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by Mara Naselli

In an introduction to a seminal collection of Faulkner’s work, published in 1946, Malcolm Cowley called William Faulkner’s story “Spotted Horses” “wildly funny”—“the culminating example of American backwoods humor.” The collection resurrected Faulkner’s career and made his work teachable, part of the American canon. Nearly forty years later Cowley called it the funniest story he had ever read. “I was lecturing at Stanford once,” Cowley recalled, “and a very bright young woman in the class said, ‘Professor Cowley, referring to ‘Spotted Horses,’ why did you say this story was funny? And I said, ‘I don’t know what funny is, but let me read you part of this story,” and I read part of it where the horses had broken loose and were running through the town and one sailed through the house over that boy, and the class was in stitches. And I said, ‘Now do you think it is funny?’ She kind of flushed and said, ‘Yes.’”

There isn’t anything more embarrassing than not getting the joke, but I admit, in this case, I don’t. The story teems with violence. A string of feral horses, tied together with barbed wire around their necks, is driven to Frenchman’s Bend in Yoknapatawpha County. They are beaten with wagon stakes, grabbed by their nostrils, fed enough corn to kill them, and move with such fury that no one can handle them. They are brought to town by a stranger in cahoots with Flem Snopes. Snopes, who arrived in Frenchmen’s Bend about thirty years after the Civil War, is so tricky, said one of his neighbors, he “don’t even tell himself what he is up to. Not if he was laying in bed with himself in the dark of the moon.” “Spotted Horses,” which was first published in 1931, set the writing of the Snopes trilogy in motion.

Humor needs tragedy, and the genius in “Spotted Horses” is the strong presence of both. “The hard and sordid things of life,” wrote Mark Twain, “are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence.” Twain might be saying that we need humor to withstand the cruelty in the world. Or, that we need humor to see it.

There are two ways to read “Spotted Horses,” as if it were one of those trick paintings that is both a duck and a rabbit at once. You can read the people or you can read the horses.

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by Brooks Riley

You can’t take it with you. That’s what they always tell you about possessions. When you die, everything you own will be left behind: Good-bye, beloved steel chair; farewell, feline; adieu, artichoke; bye-bye books, and so forth. All those objects, great and small, animate or inanimate, will exert their protracted existence on some other visitor to the kingdom of life, after you have moved on.

Like a going-out-of-business sale, everything must go. Everything? Not everything. There is something you’ll take with you when you go: memories. Whether you’re actually going somewhere is a question not only to be avoided here, but irrelevant.

Here are some of the things I’ll be taking with me: all my phone numbers since childhood (memory is a senseless hoarder); the time I threw my peas on the floor from my highchair, when the cook threatened to tell my mother; my fall down the steps of the Palais de Chaillot; the sudden whiff of Paris on the corner of Madison Ave. and 61^st Street; accidentally meeting a childhood sweetheart on the roof of a lockhouse on the Panama Canal; the infra-red glow of instruments before dawn on the bridge of an ocean liner; the two courting praying mantises who flew into my Manhattan apartment and stayed for days; the moonlit pair of flying swans I mistook for UFOs; the baritone whoosh-whoosh of their wings as they flew over me; the opossum who watched me practice piano at night from its perch on the wisteria. I won’t go on. There are millions of them, most of them like confetti–tiny, colorful and insignificant.

Then there are the ones with heft (morsels for a memoir manqué), like the time the headmistress of my grade school told me I’d never be a writer (I was 12); or the two times Eisenhower waved to me from a limousine in Paris (when I was 6 and when I was 14); the time I stopped the orchestra during Act 2 of Tristan und Isolde (like stopping an oncoming train); the time I argued with Max Frisch at a dinner party over who composed ‘An die Musik’ (I was wrong, oh the shame); the time Jean-Luc Godard tricked me into acting in his test footage; the time I wept over Wagner with Susan Sontag during an intermission of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Met; Abel Gance’s devilish compliment. There are hundreds of these, weightier than confetti, more like stones collected on a beach—some smooth, some rough, all memorable, to me at least.

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by Michael Lopresto

It's commonplace today to think that the argument for design, with the aim of rationally establishing the existence of God, was refuted by Darwin in 1859, with the publication of The Origin of Species. This view is not only held by evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins, but also top-notch philosophers such, John Mackie and Elliot Sober (and to some extent Arif Ahmed). Against this commonplace, the philosophers Simon Blackburn and Graham Oppy object that on logical grounds, David Hume (1711 – 1776), the great philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, dealt the argument for design its fatal blow. This was done in Hume's magnificent and delightful Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, but written over the middle years of the century.

So, what exactly is the argument for design? It's an argument intended to demonstrate the existence of God—and here we're concerned only with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God who's defined as being omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good—from the observation that there is apparent design in the world. The term “observation” is crucial here; the argument's not intended to proceed purely from the armchair like the ontological argument is, for instance, which seeks to deduce the existence of God from the mere concept GOD (the being which no greater can be conceived), and the ancillary premise that existence is a perfection. Indeed, the world could be any way at all—it could contain much more gratuitous evil, say, and the ontological argument wouldn't claim to be any less valid. This is because the ontological argument is purely a priori: it's an argument that proceeds independently of experience (observation) of the world.

The argument for design isn't like this. Rather, it's an a posteriori argument, deploying contingent truths about apparent design garnered from experience. Indeed, the argument can't even be deductively valid, as there is no valid inference from apparent design to intentional design. So the argument needs to be empirical in nature, namely, an inference to the best explanation (explanatory inference for short), which is an empirical inference par excellence (I think it's also probably the central inference of philosophy, but that's another story). So the argument for design, for the existence of God, is that the best explanation (philosophical premise) of apparent design (empirical premise) in nature is that nature was intentionally designed by God.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

I came to the United States from India in August 2000 to start graduate school in engineering. I had just finished a college degree and had no idea of the history of any place, including India. I did not, for example, know that Judaism referred to a religion, let alone the religion of the Jews. Many students get radicalized, develop a political and historical consciousness during college. For some reason, during my own college years in the town of Trichy in south India, I did not develop an interest in either India's past or the world.

The milieu in the United States, in the sprawling desert city of Phoenix, Arizona, was a curious one. On the one hand, graduate school was full of highly motivated students from all parts of Asia. On the other, the neighborhood I lived in, a ten minute walk from the university, was home to immigrants from indigenous or mixed race communities in Mexico and Central America (the closest genetic relatives of the North American Indians). Many of the immigrants had made life-threatening journeys across the southwestern desert into the US, and now did restaurant and construction jobs, legally and illegally, for a living.

This change in my setting was as invigorating as it was confusing, a first glimpse of how complex the world was. Suddenly history, which I had long ignored and thought boring, became indispensable. I began to read a lot more. I remember what a revelation it was to learn that Muslims had been dominant in Asia, Europe and North Africa before the Renaissance; that Europe had experienced something called the “dark ages”, a fact that had once seemed unimaginable, and now somehow comforting; that Genghis Khan, a man born into a nomadic tribe, had through a combination of brutality, shrewdness, and military strategy, built an unimaginably vast Eurasian empire. I was equally surprised that India too supposedly had had a great past, a “golden age”, a claim that had earlier, living with Indian realities, sounded hollow and untrue. Without realizing it, I had, like millions of people the world over, internalized the idea of Western superiority. The fact that non-Western people could be dominant, that the fortunes of all regions and cultures fluctuated, was liberating.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Yes. Why not? You paying? Well then— make it a double. So let me return the favor by telling you a story—something I've been holding on to for a while. Well—who knows, anyway— I think it's interesting. Maybe you've already heard this but here goes—You know—-I said make it a double. So yeah—I heard it shortly after the war in Afghanistan took up were it had left off with a bit of change your partner—do si do. This guy that I met—where—yeah—where else— So this guy back in October 2001 told me about how he and the UN delegation he was with had met Mullah Omar—yeah Mullah Omar—about eight months earlier back in the bitterly cold winter of February 2001 in Kandahar.

Anyway this is what happened—it's a hoot! You're sure to get a good laugh: It was the dead of winter, people were dying of cold and hunger and there was a boycott on Afghanistan by the world because of the Taliban Government. A UN delegation was meeting Mullah Omar in his tent and he asked them for help: “My people are starving says Mullah Omar-They are freezing and there is a famine—please help us.” And then there's a back and forth—the Head of the UN delegation trying to explain the problems in being able to do this. And then finally the Head of the Delegation takes out the UN Charter—a thick document and says—”This is for us, like our Bible, we follow rules—Our charter on Human Rights”—-and then he says—”You know— We do precisely what is written here we follow these rules. You know? How you say—this is our Koran. It is, for us, how you say–carved in stone”. Mullah Omar is staring at the guy —bug eyed—with that one eye of his. The Head of the Delegation is thumping the document “You understand—Absolutely, certainly, but we cannot assist any country that violates our charter. And your Government has, isn't it so, violated, our charter of human rights—girls' education, war and so forth.” There is silence.

Again Mullah Omar repeats his plea—-“There is a famine, my people are dying.” The Head of the Delegation shrugs, sticks out his lower lip—thinks and replies “You are responsible for that. Are you not? Your actions are not our responsibility—you can change. Our hands are tied by you. We cannot do anything about that–Well I can't do anything about that—that is for sure—our rules, bible you know—Koran—as you know because of the attitude here, there is an economic embargo on Afghanistan. You must change your behavior.” There is silence. Mullah Omar stares at him.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

The ancients told us that it was the heart that mattered. Thinking too much, they warned, will only give you a headache. And this fact was backed up by the finest research of Medieval physicians and theologians. Aristotelian philosophy had imparted to the Medievals that the heart was hot and dry– often times burning hot; and that intelligence, emotion, and passion all originated there, in that heat. Ibn Arabi further refined this by adding that, if the mind thinks (考), then heart imagines （思・想).

We find ourselves back in a time when heart and imagination took center stage–and love was thought to move the stars and the heavens above.

Not surprisingly, it was a time when lovesickness was the most common form of heart disease. A veiled glimpse ignites a fire causing two people to circle each other as Lover desires Beloved; each seeking to know the Other. This all being something which took place within the topography of the heart itself. It was something imagined– over weeks upon weeks; months upon months. Imagined as “'spirits take bodies and bodies become spirits' something so powerful that European physicians of the Middle Ages declared that, if one wasn’t careful, lovesickness could lead a person into madness (see Averroes' study of love as affliction, for example).

13th and 14th century scholars talked about something known to them as visual species. These were defined as “objects” (propogated through the air) that mediated between the physical and imaginal world by imprinting themselves on a person's imaginaton from a distance. It was the image as held in the body that caused the troublesome– and sometimes dangerous– overheating of the bood around the heart.

To pursue the logic of all this, because the “visual species” that caused desire and lovesickness were things originating outside the person, it followed that magic could also generate new species. And this is why love charms, amulets and the use of magical incantations in maters of love became fairly common. For romantic success, men were encouraged to write “pax + pix + abyra + syth + samasic” on a hazel stick and hit a woman with it three times on the head, then quicky kiss her; while Tristan and Iseult were undone by a love potion which they accidentally drank. People reported that like the other magical incantation– abbracadbra— that just whispering the words out loud “I-love-you” had the power to move mountains. It even had the power to cure gout–or maybe that was abbracadabra?

I told him that I wanted to employ a famous Medieval love charm at our wedding. Not surprising, the Eucharistic host played many different roles in various Medieval love potions. But my favorite was perhaps the simplest– a lady would slip the host under her tongue. Then, kissing her beloved with the host still in her mouth, she would ensure that he would love her forever.

He dismissed my plans, saying, he already knew he would love me forever so I didn't need to go through so much trouble.

I wonder, though, is the heart that knowable?

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Let's make one thing very clear. We do not do Valentine's. That would be horribly uncool. But we are not entirely cynical either. So in the interest of a critical, yet marginally hopeful view that can go beyond the intensely heteronormative annoyance of Hallmark madness, here is a post-Valentine post on the nature of the only grand narrative we have left in the world. Love.

And this is the one time of the year when I feel like rejecting it in its every form. Just because the stores, the streets, the movies, and the chocolates all plot in unison to cajole me otherwise. (Yes, the plot is neoliberal capitalism. Yes I know). Also, scratch the last part. I like chocolate.

But if I end up calling this grand narrative corrupt, and false, and superficial, and all those other bad words, then surely I must know what the real deal is? And this is the problem. I really don't. So when I claim that some forms of blatantly marketed coercive love make no sense, what I am really saying is that I prefer some forms of love-marketing over others.

So before you lose all patience, all I'm saying is this: Love is mediated.

Image © Paul James Gomes

(The above is an excerpt from Paul's fascinating work on the contemporary Bangladeshi film industry)

And yes, perhaps there are forms of love in the world that are less mediated than others. Babies and puppies. But I do not have the capacity or the patience to go biological right now. So bear with me. Love is mediated. And no, this is not a bad thing. Humans are mediated beings. We learn how to eat, sit, talk, listen, fear, shout, lean, lose, attach, let go, and hang on. We would be nothing without mediation. We adhere to form. In the loosest sense of the word, even as we produce form. And this gives us the capacity to a narrative, and a stance, and a sense of being in the world. We are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (Apologies to Geertz, but well, this could be the new definition for native ethnography). And stories need plots. And we cannot lose the plot.

So in random order, here are three important bits of mediation that structure my narrative. Things, and songs, and movies, and books that I am attached to because they tried telling me how and what to love. Some of these I have thankfully escaped, others lurk in the background.

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by Matt McKenna

If Tim Story's Ride Along was merely intended to be viewed as a film about a plucky security guard attempting to win the favor of his girlfriend's brother by becoming a full-fledged police officer, it would have been christened with any number of pun-laden titles to better suggest its goofiness and simplicity. For example, it might have been called Cop-in-Law or To Serve and Reject or maybe even Hey, Is It All Right If I Become a Cop and Marry Your Sister? But the movie is called Ride Along, and that is our first clue that the picture is more than just a sigh-inducing attempt to squeeze every last silly dollar out of actor Kevin Hart's burgeoning stardom. Hidden underneath the veneer of this two-chuckle-max comedy is an essay picking apart America's long-standing issue of class immobility, a topic whose popularity has reemerged during the preamble to the run-up to the early-stages to the beginning of the 2016 Presidential election.

Long gone are the days when Ice Cube would swarm on any gentleman in a blue uniform. In Ride Along, Cube plays the role of Officer James Payton, a brash, rule-breaking cop on the hunt for a mysterious bad guy who has hatched an insidious plot to traffic weapons or something. Kevin Hart plays Ben Barber, a flip security guard with a heart of gold and a penchant for getting in over his head. These two diametrically opposed characters clash when Barber asks to marry Payton's sister, Angela. Payton, wearing the most twisted smile since the Grinch stole Christmas, tells Barber he can marry Angela only if he first completes a “ride-along” and demonstrates the requisite courage along the way.

And so we have arrived at the surface reason for calling the film Ride Along–indeed, Barber is riding along with Payton as he performs his duties as an officer of the Atlanta police department. But there is another, more consequential reason for the film's title. Barber is also riding along with Payton as he enjoys the privileges afforded to members of the film's upper class. While cops in the real world certainly don't have the advantages of Wall Street bankers and Fortune 500 CEOs, in the world of Ride Along, they are, in fact, the 1%. Cops drive nice cars. Cops commit crimes with impunity. Cops are the guys every other guy–Barber included–wants to be.

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by Fausto Ribeiro

The year that marked the tenth anniversary of Sergio Vieira de Mello's death in Baghdad was also the one in which his biographer, Pulitzer Prize-winning activist Samantha Power, was nominated as the American Ambassador to the United Nations. Now, 2013 is over and the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, whose efforts have been essential in the struggle against the Assad regime's chemical warfare. In light of this, one must surely wonder whether a turning point in international relations is taking place, after years in which irrational power-politics seemed to be the only available form of conflict resolution. As part of the effort to reflect upon that question, a reappraisal of Vieira de Mello's life's work may prove invaluable.

Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN diplomat whose peculiar background included a Sorbonne degree in philosophy and a stint as a quintessentially soixante-huitard Paris rebel, never ceased to look for a theoretical foundation upon which to base his notoriously active and adventurous career. In a 2000 lecture, for instance, the Brazilian diplomat claimed to experience a “tranquilizing fascination” with the Hegelian idea that the march of history is perfectible through the power of reason – an idea which dismisses the recurrence of human tragedies as nothing but superficial upheavals that do not prevent progress towards an idealized future. However, Vieira de Mello would also declare himself suspicious about that notion, “because the real of my experience has invariably inspired in me a great skepticism towards totalizing theories, given the multiple manifestations of the irrational that always contradict them”. Hegel's World's Spirit (Weltgeist) would be, in the diplomat's perception, akin to “a religious interpretation of the course of history, in the sense that conviction derives from faith, from purely abstract reason, and not from concrete facts, from the real”. To consider the World's Spirit an irrefutable theory would only be possible for des yeux des convertis – the eyes of the proselytes.

In numerous aspects, Vieira de Mello considered that the UN, with the creative duality and mutual support existent between its Security Council and its Secretariat, “had begun to prove that it may – and, therefore, must – exert the role not of the Spirit, but of the World's Conscience”. A conscience would differ from a spirit in that it is “anti-dogmatic, receptive, and tolerant, because it is enriched and formed by the discovery and recognition of its characteristics, by its particular values, and, above all, by its capacity to extract the principles and common interests from the brute mass of events and of our history”.

Before presenting this alternative theory of history, however, Vieira de Mello asked a question whose deep significance would only become fully clear one year later, on September, 11th, 2001: aside from nihilism, what is there left? The matter-of-fact manner in which nihilism was dismissed in the question clearly indicates that Vieira de Mello found this alternative to be so abhorrent that it did not even merit further consideration. It is therefore a grim irony that precisely such nihilism was at the core of the mindset that would lead not only to the destruction of the Twin Towers, but also to the 2003 attack that put an end to Vieira de Mello's life itself.

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by Eric Byrd

…families like mine which owe everything to the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

—Rimbaud, “Bad Blood”

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where
Latin ashes and the dust of Greece
Mingled with novels, history, and verse
In one dark Babel. I was folio-high
When I first heard the voices.

—Baudelaire, “The Voice”

“The Voice” always reminds me that Baudelaire's father, a former priest, was the Directorate's Assistant Commissioner “for the selection of books from the libraries of convents, émigrés or condemned persons” – he dissolved, commingled and dispersed private libraries. Osip Mandelstam grew up outside the Pale of Settlement, in Imperial Petersburg, a middle-class Jew enrolled in the “military, privileged, almost aristocratic” Tenishev School. In The Noise of Time Mandelstam wrote that in the jumble of his parents' bookcase he could discern the strata of their different “spiritual efforts.” His father, a leather merchant born in a shtetl, owned Schiller, Goethe, and the Tieck Shakespeare — “all this was my father fighting his way as an autodidact into the German world out of the Talmudic wilds.” Mandelstam's mother was “the first in her family to achieve the pure and clear Russian sounds”; the household's Pushkin set was the prize-book of a proud schoolgirl.

Among my father's books there were no classics but Bunyan and the Bible – The Pilgrim's Progress in imitation leather, and a strange paperback printing of the New Testament called Soul Food, whose cover showed black teenagers gathered around a picnic table, grinning broadly under their afros. My father's library was a collection of atlases, encyclopedias, heavily illustrated histories, and glossy museum catalogues. A library of vicarious travel, of famed vistas. All that the photography of the time could capture and relay. The library of a rural youth, one of the last products of segregated Southern schooling; dyslexic, mocked, called retarded, ever-remedial, a Bible college scholarship athlete, a basketball recruit tutored by white girlfriends who upon graduation headed to Los Angeles, there to be startled by California's commingling of peoples, by revisions of textbook history heard on left-wing radio, by a trip across Europe – Paris to Croatian ports – and ever after given to lament all that he'd not been “exposed to” as a boy. He didn't hear about the Holocaust until he visited Poland. Whether he acquired his books as souvenirs of his exposure, or guarantees of mine, I could never tell. The gatherer of this expansive knowledge, this explorer's library, has been for decades remote, or when present, rancorous. He has ranted, and taunted, but he has rarely spoken.

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by Josh Yarden

There is nothing new under the sun
an age passes an age arrives
the earth forever endures

Nothing is ever quite as it was
adaptation the only constant
sustained in a dynamic universe

The eastern sun aspires
toward the western sky
the place where it will rise again

What does a person gain
endeavoring under the sun:
time for everything under the skies

So goes the wisdom of a Kohelet
recollecting evanescent moments
before memories scatter to the breeze

Vapor of vapors, all is vapor
according to the convener in Jerusalem
assembler of knowledge, gatherer of insight

The very essence of evanescence:
all human endeavor is fleeting
as a wisp of misty breath

All streams lead to the sea, yet the sea does not fill up
vapor rises, clouds condense, the rains come down
streams lead to their origins to well up again, and again

Rivers teem with life
and whatever else we pour in
not grasping what we wash away

Generation and re-generation
evolution offers opportunity
to rework and reshape

Wealth and power will eventually vanish
but a deed done, as an uttered word
cannot be withdrawn

Crooked cannot be justified
that which is missing cannot be taken into account
with knowledge comes pain that pleasure can assuage but not erase

Streams swirl with our every act
our deeds whirl in the winds
passing and arriving again and again

Toward the south then shifting north
blows the winding wind
catch a gust and travel against the stream

Explore—encounter—discover
the eye is never satisfied
the ear is never full

Experiment—create—examine
change is the way of time
nothing new under the sun

Tread lightly in the world
listen closely, instead of offering fools' prayers
… speaking as if they know no evil

* The Prophet (1974) Scultpted by Jacob Lipkin. On the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia.

Photo credit: Barbara (Petrick) Johnson

by Sarah Firisen

Odds are you’re on Facebook. After all, 1 in 6 people on the planet are on it, why should you be the exception? I think in my immediate circle of friends and family I know one person who isn’t on it at all. I know, I know, we overshare these days; we have no privacy; we allow ourselves to be marketing pawns for Facebook and their minions; we’ve welcomed Big Brother into our lives with open arms. But nevertheless, for most of us, it seems to be the case that if a fabulous meal is eaten and no photos of it are posted on Facebook for our friends and family to salivate over, then the meal never really happened.

So I’m going to go ahead with the assumption that almost everyone reading this, except my one friend, has been exposed to a huge number of their Facebook “friends” posting “Here’s my Facebook movie. Find yours at…” I have to admit that when I first started seeing these pop up in my newsfeed I was skeptical and resisted for a day or so. Then I watched a couple and they were cute and short. Even some of my more intellectually serious friends, including a certain 3QD editor, couldn’t resist. Finally I gave into temptation and had Facebook create mine. I was pleasantly surprised; it did a good job of choosing the highlights that I might have selected. There were a lot of photos of my kids, a few of the dog and one of me showing off a new haircut. And it ended with my New Year’s greeting to friends and family making a vague reference to the hard year I’d had because of my divorce and thanking people for their support. Seemed like a fitting end point.

For hundreds of years people kept diaries and they wrote letters. In these ways, they narrated their own lives and allowed others to follow them, in the case of letters, as their correspondents and in both cases as a record of the stories of their lives for future generations. Most of us don’t write diaries, if anything we write blogs and certainly, if the slow death of the US Postal Service is anything to go by, we don’t write letters. Increasingly, we don’t even send personal emails. These days, I don’t even keep in regular contact with many people via non Facebook email. Some people I text with. A few I used BBM or Whatsapp. Instead, the story of my life is documented on Facebook and for other people on Twitter, Instagram et al.

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by Grace Boey

Last year, I decided to stop eating animal products and meat, apart from some seafood. I’d felt uncomfortable about the facts of factory farming for quite some time, and finally resolved to take the plunge. Having enjoyed meat, eggs and dairy for all my life, it was initially a challenge adjusting to my new diet – while cutting meat was surprisingly easy, I mourned the loss of scrambled eggs for breakfast for at least a month. I still sometimes find it hard to resist certain desserts made with made with eggs, butter and milk. It helps, though, that I carry pictures like these around with me on my phone. The bright yellow hue of a lemon tart that comes from egg yolks doesn’t seem so appealing anymore after I call up pictures of filthy hens squished together in cages. I slip up sometimes, but on the whole, I’ve been pretty good about sticking to my diet.

The tougher challenge for me was, and still is, talking to others about my abstention. Ideally, I’d proudly announce my decision, and freely share my reasons for making it. But in reality, I avoid talking about it as much as possible. I almost never proactively tell anyone about my diet, and I don’t mention it unless circumstances make it necessary. There are few things that make me more physically uncomfortable than having my personal business suddenly put on the spot. I’m also hopeless at expressing myself verbally. And bringing up animal abstention tends to open up a conversational can of worms of the most squirmish kind. Okay, so I’m making my abstention public here – but it’s not too often I get to kick off a conversation by explaining myself in a couple thousand words, in my medium of choice, before the other party gets to respond.

Before I began abstaining from animals, I’d heard about the legendary amount of snark and hostility experienced by others who did. I’ve since gotten my fair share of this ugliness, which usually goes like this: someone will wrangle information about my diet out of me, and then proceed, entirely unsolicited, to say something f!#@ing rude about it. I’ve gradually learned to let idiotic comments like – for every steak you don’t eat, I’m going to eat three – slide. I’m still wondering how to respond to those who make a show of delightedly biting into chicken wings, right after I sincerely express my sadness over animals being tortured in factory farms.

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