by Edward B. Rackley

To remark on how seamless our online and natural worlds have become is ho-hum these days, but last week as I slurped morning coffee and chatted online with a former Mai Mai rebel (whom I’ll call ‘Dikembe’) in turbulent eastern DR Congo, I found new reason to pause. Exchanging views on our perennial topic—solutions to Congo’s problems—felt as natural as the morning paper, but his statements resisted their usual meaning and tugged at me the rest of day. The part that recycled in my mind went a bit like this:

Dikembe: Things are bad in EDRC, Kabila [the president] can’t manage the situation.
Me: What does he manage? Nothing new there.
D: That’s why we reject him.

[pause]

D: So how many Congolese have to die before the international community pays attention?
Me: The int'l community is impotent, you’ve seen that countless times. You have a government, ask them. You elected Kabila, why did you choose him? Or are you saying the elections were a fraud?
D: Aha, now you understand me perfectly. We are hearing that even his own security forces are moving against him. Only the international community can save us now.

In a previous episode of Congo’s tumult Dikembe and I worked together disarming combatants and reintegrating them into civilian life. Many were minors, Dikembe’s former subordinates from different local militias. Our program offered vocational training and the tools to start new businesses but few ex-combatants took it seriously. Most went along with the programs to kill time, selling the clothes and tools they received for cash. A lesson for us was that the adrenaline of pillage and the instant authority of the gun had become integral to their identity, defining them long after the firing stopped. Many ex-combatants, especially children, remained fiercely loyal to former commanders, rejecting their families and all forms of authority. Psychologically they were listless and volatile, preferring the bustle and relative anonymity of towns to the monotony and awkward familiarity of village life. Dikembe was no hero, but sage enough not to follow the herd. I watched him adapt to civilian life in wartime, a humbling series of privations, as he resisted the lure of easy money and influence through armed crime and extortion.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Olympic excitement is in the air as the world’s best athletes get ready to take the stage. Many of them have been preparing for this for most of their young lives. It’s a shot at a gold medal and the glory that comes with it, and a chance to test their mettle against the very best in the world.

Perhaps we should qualify the term “best in the world”, though, since a lot of potential competition is eliminated rather unfairly before the games begin. A champion’s win is really only a fair victory over those who've had the same opportunity to develop their talents. There are about a billion people in the world who can’t afford to eat let alone participate in sports, and a lot more who can only afford to participate at lower levels.

It’s a privilege to be able to dedicate your life to achieving extreme excellence in a sport, especially since Olympic sporting activities tend to be of little practical value. Sure, sprinting skills might come in handy when you're trying to outrun a predator, and I guess you never know when you might need to row backwards across a lake really fast, but by and large, the utility of such skills doesn't justify the effort it takes to develop them. Watching events like javelin and race walking, it would seem that human beings will compete at just about anything, just for the sake of competing.

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by Hannah Green

Today I had the exact same argument that blog readers and comedy central watchers have been having all over the country, according to Louis CK. The argument about whether or not Daniel Tosh should have apologized for allegedly suggesting that it would be hilarious if a female heckler got raped by five guys right there in the club.* My position was that he should have (and he did, so good for him.)

If you disagree with me, this is where I’m coming from. Women in this country are taught to be scared of rape all the time, and it’s really annoying. We think about it when we decide what to wear, where to go, when to go there, who to go with, who to trust. While men can also be the victims of sexual assault, I find that in general their lives tend to be less restricted by the attempt to avoid it. Whether or not this is rational doesn’t change the fact that it’s inescapable because we’re socially programmed this way. And a lot of us have experienced situations where we really do feel directly threatened, and these are terrible. They make you afraid to even go out, and then they make you angry at yourself because you feel weak. I understand that my position and that of other women in this country is far from the worst in the world. But still, in this aspect of life my male friend and I, at least, are pretty unequal

So the first reason I got mad, while slightly unfair, I think is also understandable. I got mad because my friend, being a dude who’s spent his whole life living in the same safe place, never even had to think about this stuff. Not his fault, I guess, but also not fair. I told him this. He apologized sarcastically, “I’m so sorry you were born into a male dominated society,” he said, “I was born into it too, by the way. I didn’t choose it.” So the second reason I god mad, which I think is fair, is that when he hears about this woman and how she felt threatened at the suggestion that five guys rape her, and when I say that I know I would feel the same way, his first reaction is to talk about how irrational that woman was. I’m telling him all this stuff about my life that I would never have even thought about telling him, and he doesn’t even shut up to try to understand why, or reflect on the fact that his perspective comes from a place of privilege. He tells me he doesn’t believe I would really feel threatened, because that’s such an irrational idea. She was in a comedy club, obviously no one was going to rape her.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Like some eccentric prominent family, whose genius shades easily into the occult, the evil and the mad, Solanaceae, the family of the nightshade (so often prefixed by “deadly”), both contains several of our most ubiquitous food plants (typically of New World origin) and many of the multifarious toxins and deliriants beloved of witches, shamans and poisoners throughout history. The plants of Solanaceae are a dramatic-looking group, full of trumpet-like flowers that open at dusk and branches and stems that curl together like gnarled witches claws. They are also the source of eerie legends and origin myths, as exemplified by mandrake, said to grow from the ejaculate of a hanged man, and whose scream (when pulled out of the ground) will kill everyone in earshot.

To anyone who has ever shuddered at or been baffled by the thought that for most of history the Italians have had no tomatoes, the South Asians have had no chillies and no one in the Old World (including the Irish, the Germans and the Russians) has had potatoes, the gifts of Solanaceae are apparent. These are the bounty of the New World, plants that were brought over from the Americas by European explorers, introduced into their home countries and then spread to the rest of the world (many of the sins of the Portuguese colonists should be offset by their introduction of the chilli to India). Traces of this recency exist on the linguistic map, and several cultures label tomatoes and potatoes as some sort of eggplant or apple¹.

While the major Solanaceae food crops that we eat are from the New World, most of the family members used in the Old World were used as hallucinogens, medicines (in small doses) or as poisons (with the notable exception of eggplant). Both tomatoes and potatoes suffered from these associations, and it took a while before people became convinced that they were safe to eat. One is generally not responsible for one's relatives (except children), but there is some truth to this fear. The leaves and stems of tomato plants are mildly toxic, and potato sprouts can be quite dangerous (in recent years, much of this has been bred out of the plant varieties that we eat, though the same is probably not true for non-mass-market varieties). Once they broke through to acceptance, though, they spread widely and now both are cultivated widely all over the world. Potatoes in particular were an essential new source of cheap calories for the Industrial Revolution and were declared by Engels to be the equivalent of iron for their historically revolutionary role. They are thought to be responsible for a significant fraction of Old World population growth in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, with the downside that potato crop failures lead to severe famines.

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by S. Abbas Raza

This post is dedicated to my wife, Margit Oberrauch.

A couple of weeks ago I came upon a Ghalib couplet in Urdu which evoked pangs of recognition in me. Ghalib captures so simply and so well a discomfort that I like to imagine nearly everyone has experienced: that of having to ask a favor from an enemy, a rival, a cruel person, a nemesis, or even the object of one's unrequited love. Reading (or hearing) it one immediately and viscerally and empathetically feels the immensity of Ghalib's effort in overcoming embarrassment and shame, having recognized the necessity of doing it, and this is complicated by other layers of agonizing sentiment generated by the imminent exposure of vulnerability, having to act obsequious, as well as the risk of further public insult if the person refuses to grant the favor. Having to ask for help is bad enough when the person being asked is not someone you hate (or hates you). (It reminded me a bit of Nabokov's Pnin.)

It is truly masterful, a fragile gem of a couplet in Urdu, in the sense that not only can it not be improved, changing a single word anywhere destroys it. (Yes, I had the temerity to try.) But when I tried to explain the meaning of the couplet to my wife I found it near-impossible to translate into English in any straightforward way. I hemmed and hawed and went into a ten-minute lecture on what it is about but never managed to say in two decent lines of English what Ghalib has said so easily in Urdu.

Here is my transliteration into Roman Urdu:

Kaam uss say aa paraa hai keh jiss ka jahaan mein

Layvay nah koee naam sitamgar kahay baghair

And finally, here is the best I could do as an English translation, using three lines:

I am obliged to seek help from him

to whom no one in the world refers

without also referring to his cruelty

I invite you, if you speak Urdu, to suggest your own translation.

by Rafiq Kathwari

HIMALAYA

After Iqbal

O Himalaya, tell of that time when man first lay
in your lap. O let me imagine that dawn
unstained by red. Run backward, circle of
day and night, ancient eras a moment in your lifetime.
You are a poem whose first verse is the sky.
Your bright turbans dazzle the Pleiades.
Lightning across your peaks sends black tents wandering
above the valley. The wind polishes the trembling mirrors
at your hem. Streams cascade down your forehead,
your cheeks quiver. As morning air cradles intoxicated
roses and the leaves are silenced by the rose-gatherer's wrists,
so speech is silenced in the roar of falling water.

Mohammed Iqbal (1877 -1938) one of the two great South Asian poets of the 20^th Century (the other was Faiz Ahmed Faiz) advocated ceaseless endeavor, writing with equal ease in Persian, Urdu, and English. He was knighted by the British but is rarely called Sir Mohammed.

Translated from the Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.

by Haider Shahbaz

(Note: The theme of one sketch was suggested by fellow 3 Quarks Daily columnist Rishidev Chaudhuri after a night of his delicious summer drinks. As always, I am grateful.)

I (Thirty five dollars and seventy two cents)

Once he nailed her to the floor he moved back assuredly. He briskly – yet noiselessly – moved his bulk from the kitchen to the common room. He stepped around the Ikea furniture. He was unfazed by her desperate gaze. She was beating her heels against the shiny hardwood floor. Her arms were stretched straight above her head. The palms of her hands were nailed into the shiny hardwood floor by a Stanley TRE550 Brad Nail Gun. It cost him twenty seven dollars on Amazon. The Stanley SWKBN625 nails cost him two dollars and eight cents. The blood was dripping and congealing. Never was life like this on the shiny hardwood floor. He had taped her mouth using Scotch 920-BLK-C 1.88-inch by 20 yards Duct Tape. The tape cost him four dollars and fifty three cents on Amazon. It had three out of five stars in the customer review section. When he returned from the common room, he was carrying a medium sized deep-blue bucket. The half a gallon of diesel that was sloshing inside the bucket cost him two dollars and twelve cents at Shell. He doused the diesel on her and around the kitchen. He took out matches from the back pocket of his brown khakis. The matches had a deep blue cover with a red stripe across the bottom and a shining diamond: diamond matches. The matches cost him nothing. He lit one, flicked it at her, and walked out. He walked through the neatly pruned garden towards his Prius. The pink house with a rectangular body and a triangular top painted against the taut canvas of a New England sky was slowly burning. He started his car and drove down to highway I-95 drinking Dunkin´ Donuts coffee. He gulped large amounts of air from the open window. He turned his car lights off. The sun was coming out behind the birch trees.

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Time Loops
.

“I don’t think I ever was a child.”
……………. –Coleman Hawkins, top sax jazzman
Jazzman

I
don’t think
I ever was a child

Was
I a child?
I don’t think—

If
I ever was a child
I’d know. …..I
don’t.

I
don’t even know, jazzman said
if a child ever was

Child,
jazzman said,

I don’t just think
I play jazz man

Halberg's Rooster

Up the road Halberg’s rooster,
descendent of dinosuars,
croaks his 4 syllable hello to the sun

while mighty We
dumb as rooster ancestry
imagine we shall always be

Sad and Serene

Sad’s the man who says
on the day he ends,
I could have done more

Sad’s the man who
on that day says,
How come?

Sad’s the man who says
on the day he ends,
What’s the score?
.
Serene’s the man who
on that day says,
I think it was a worthy run

by Jim Culleny, 2008-2012

by Mara Jebsen

The photograph on the right was taken when I was six, on a boat speeding through Lake Ontario, in Henderson Harbor, New York. It was in the village of Henderson, a good six hours north of New York City, that an ancestor of mine (one more interested in fishing than fashion) built five houses in the early 1900’s; one for each of his children.

Four of the houses are on the water, and one looms on the hill across the road. A lakefront house right in the middle got sold before I was born, and the poor souls that live there now built a high fence around it to keep my family from swarming across their property. We no longer miss that house, but we do still call it by its old name.

Everything about the remaining four is somewhat irregular—they are all in different styles, of different sizes, and each is attached to a different-sized patch of property. The one that belongs to my branch has the least land, and is the biggest and most decrepit. It is best suited to being filled by at least two nuclear families. Probably its best asset is a cobwebby porch built directly over the water.

The lake itself is sea-weedy, green. Zebra mussels cut your feet. The labour of living by it —dragging the boat in, wresting bins of garbage up the stone hill in a wheelbarrow, washing a hundred plates three times a day—is more intense than you expected when you were child. There is always someone watering and pressing the clay court, or hanging up endless clumps of wet bathing suits and towels on lines. There is a mass production of tomato and chicken sandwiches, and by the time the last child has had their lunch, the first child is thinking of his dinner. In one area are bunches of children engaged in archery, over there are some more playing chess. Several grownups are off somewhere, sailing. All activities are tinged with competition, and a little danger. The tennis is downright ferocious.

Everywhere there is evidence of grandeur and decay.

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by Jeff Strabone

The electoral college is one of those things that few people understand all that well, yet almost everyone can tell you why we’ve been unable to get rid of it: the small states have blocked efforts to amend the Constitution to abolish it because they believe that it amplifies their voting power. As we all know, holding on to power trumps principles in the real world. However, as I will show using simple arithmetic, the small states are wrong about where their true voting strength lies. In fact, the electoral college more often than not dilutes the voting power of most small states. I hope by this article to stand conventional wisdom about the electoral college on its head and, thereby, change the national conversation about it so that we can move on.

Let there be no mistake about one thing: we will never be able to abolish the electoral college by constitutional amendment unless and until it is shown to the small states that it is in their selfish interests to do so. How could it be in their selfish interests when every expert on the subject says otherwise? Read on and you’ll see. The numbers do not lie.

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Questions Philosophers Ask:
#1-Why Does the World Exist?

there might just as well be nothing
instead of the risible sun which makes me laugh
whenever it comes up coincidentally
with the punch line of a joke that also
could not have existed had some
unknown condition not brought
a comedian to a point
in the cascading events of a
million million millennia
to imagine the humorous potential of bars
and the characters who might walk into them

which

in being fictional but true to life
rings a bright bell in our brains
and wakens the funny substance of ourselves
and helps us continue our desperate undoing
of the void that would have been
in the alternative
forever unknown to anyone
making the original question

moot
.

by Jim Culleny
7/8/12

by Hasan Altaf

The title of Joe Sacco's Journalism (Metropolitan Books, 2012) ostensibly refers simply to the book's contents, the collection of the author's shorter reported pieces. Filed from the Hague, from Chechnya and Palestine, from Iraq, they have been published over the past few years in various magazines and newspapers, including Details, Harper's and the Times Magazine. It hints, though, at larger ambitions: Journalism is about not just the individual pieces, but also about journalism itself, as a practice and an art, a profession and maybe even a calling.

As one of the foremost practitioners of comics journalism, especially focused on conflict (he is most famous for his reporting from Bosnia and from Palestine), Sacco has the unique perspective of one who has had to face down the entrenched traditions and prejudices of his profession. In this volume's “introductory fusillade,” a self-described manifesto, he takes on some of the myths and sacred cows of the field. In particular, he addresses the challenge of objectivity, writing that “…there is nothing literal about a drawing. A cartoonist assembles elements deliberately and places them with intent on a page.” The cartoonist, that is, chooses everything, is responsible for everything; if the reporting involves a “river,” a writer can simply say “river” and a photographer can simply take a picture, but the cartoonist must choose precisely how he or she wants to depict that river.

In all forms of journalism, of course, objective reality is subjectively interpreted: Photographers choose what to shoot and how to shoot it; writers can flip an entire story on its head by shading their adjectives. It's easy to forget this, though; it's easier to read a reported piece as objective truth than to try to remain aware of all the assumptions behind that objectivity. As Sacco says, “journalists are not flies on the wall”: The presence of a journalist changes the story automatically, and the particular character and background and attitudes of that reporter change it further. Comics journalism of this kind – it's self-conscious, deliberately; Sacco usually draws himself within his stories, interacting with his sources or as another actor in the scene – serves to highlight that fact, making it clear just how much the reporter is in charge of our understanding.

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by James McGirk

Hot, smoke-fouled air is a powerful mnemonic. As the sun set over New York City on the 4^th of July, my fiancée, Amy, and I took a break from comforting our shell-shocked cats, to stroll through our neighborhood. We live in a decaying industrial area perched on a scarp between the neighborhoods of Bushwick, Brooklyn and Ridgewood, Queens. By peering down one of the avenues we could just make out the puffs of incandescent orange exploding over the East River. We climbed the hill into Ridgewood. It was dark. New York had had one of its wettest summers yet, and a dank hot fug lingered beneath the foliage. All around us explosions rocked the city as families fired bootleg fireworks off their balconies, and the air reeked of sulfur and smoke.

Amy and I had met ten years before, almost to the day, and spent our first night together sitting side by side on a bench beside a power plant in Astoria, Queens, bathing in the ozone-saturated air, swapping stories about our adolescent pyromania, as fire trucks raced past us, to douse the flames from a blown transformer. She grew up as a pale redhead in Florida; so sensitive to sunlight she was forced to live most of her existence at night. She ran with a wild bunch, fled her home at fourteen and stopped going to school. They fired guns in the Florida Everglades and scorched colonies of sea oats and in retaliation for the pastel-hued scorn of their elders – who truly believed they belonged to an adolescent death cult – pelted churches with paint-dipped sanitary napkins and smashed stained glass windows.

My own pyro-maniacal peak came by accident. I grew up in India, and between the ages of ten and fifteen, belonged to an American Boy Scout troop stationed out of New Delhi. We would take short trips out of the city on weekends, go white-water rafting on the banks of the Ganges River (near Rishikesh, above the corpses) or trekking in the Himalayas or, in this case, rappelling down a cliff face near an artificial lake in Haryana. The trip had been a disaster from the get-go, word had gotten out that Americans were in the area, and we became a spectacle and were constantly chased by amused villagers, and were forced to bivouac on the grounds of a government rest house with high walls. Morale was suffering too. There were two patrols in our troop and one patrol had provisions from the American commissary and the other did not and this caused enormous resentment and a lackadaisical ugly attitude unbecoming of Boy Scouts and the sons of diplomats and the agents of multinational corporations.

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by Maniza Naqvi

I. Mass and Matter

II. Drywall

I. Mass and Matter

There is never, nothing. Nothingness is everything. What does it matter? Matter and meaning? Hurtling through life and hoping that it will amount to something—that it will take on mass.

This Higgs boson question of what gives matter mass? In this moment—two points in the collective ether: the Higgs boson and debt. The world is concerned about how matter—particles, become mass—how particles travel through the treacle of energy called Higgs boson. And the world is concerned about debt the one thing that has become the “be all” of human meaning—amassing—meaningless matter.

To travel, at a velocity, so great, and so often, as to stop mattering and to stop, having any meaning. To, keep on, leaving before accumulating enough meaning, enough evidence of existing. But if you can travel so far, and still keep going isn’t that evidence of something? Or does it mean that the further you go and keep on going, this can only happen without gaining substance or without gaining enough of it to stop the velocity—and then does that mean you don’t matter—you are incapable of gathering mass—becoming something? And then do those, who stay those who find it hard to leave, to part, those who remain to resist, those that accumulate, do they—matter? But to depart, to part is an article of inevitability isn’t it for a particle -it is the way a particle accumulates mass—As it travels through space that treacle offering resistance to the particle’s velocity sticking to it and assisting it in gaining mass. That treacle is existence—it is society offering resistance, termed responsibilities, saying stop. It is mass that stops velocity. Mass is when something offers resistance.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

When I first moved to a small town in the midwest in the summer of 1999, I walked downtown to check out and support the local businesses. I honestly cannot remember what I bought, but I do remember that the change the cashier made for that first purchase included a very worn 1907 Liberty Head nickel. I had never seen one before! It was one of those “Twilight Zone” moments: I could almost hear the repetitive four note musical theme, and half-expected Rod Serling to step out from behind an architectural column, cigarette smoke swirling towards the ceiling, to deliver a pithy introduction: “He thought he was moving to a new place but it was really another time.”

My thoughts alternated between delight and horror. What were the odds of this coin showing up during the very first purchase in my new hometown? If rare, was this some kind of auspicious sign? If common, where had I moved to? Did women have the vote? Had news of the repeal of prohibition made it here yet? (I later found out it isn't possible to buy alcohol before 1pm on Sundays). I haven't noticed any coins of similar vintage since, so I guess maybe somebody found it in their attic and put it back into circulation. I tucked it away as a memento and forgot about it.

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by Sarah Firisen

I look up to the heavens in prayer
Let Obamacare die now I swear
There's no words to berate
That evil mandate
And keep your hands right off my Medicare

Stop the death panels right now I cry
The government wants me to die
It's the private insurers
Who should be healthcare jurors
Only corporations won't send this awry

Jesus cured the sick and the lame
But today it's Democrats that he'd blame
And say each man for himself
I've a right to my wealth
If you're poor, well I guess that's a shame

Pre-existing conditions aren't nice
But we all take our roll of the dice
Some get sick, some are well
That I'm healthy is swell
Just try harder, that's my advice

You clearly have not done your part
Yes I know that you have a bad heart
The free market knows best
Some are lucky and blessed
Some our Lord has just set apart

So I'll make sure that I do my share
Vote for repeal of Obamacare
I have not one doubt
Of the private health route
And keep your hands right off my Medicare