by Edward B. Rackley

Why didn’t the momentum and exuberance of last year’s “Arab Spring” extend to African countries south of the Sahel? Sub-Saharan populations, many immediate neighbors of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, followed the drama with fascination and some envy. When we spoke, I was surprised how few colleagues and friends in sub-Saharan Africa were optimistic about a counterpoint “African Spring.” They claimed their societies “weren’t ready” to rally widespread discontent towards a political tipping point.

Historically, my friends were wrong—SSA has much experience with successful opposition movements, from colonialism to apartheid. But I took their resignation to mean that social fragmentation had secured the upper hand, proof that poverty and cynical governance were not just misanthropic but bitterly divisive as well. The process of overcoming deep social, generational and political divisions, with their common denominator of skepticism and self-interest, cannot simply be ignited like the proverbial box of tinder.

Internet connectivity was clearly an enabler for the Arab Spring, and SSA still lacks reliable connectivity and familiarity with social media. But coastal North African countries are different from their southern neighbors in infinite other ways as well. Despite non-western culture, values and religious beliefs, North Africa’s Mediterranean exposure imposes a definite political and economic orientation towards Europe, for ill or good. Solidarity in any form—security, economic, ideological—is almost non-existent between countries divided by the Sahel. Few North African countries look south for constructive economic or political opportunity. Exploitation of less developed southern countries (human trafficking, resource predation) is more the norm.

I’ve written here before about the Nile Basin Initiative, an internationally-funded effort to negotiate equitable use rights for the countries of the great river, killed by mutual mistrust in 2010. The late Colonel Gaddafi led Pan-Africanism, the only other north-south unification effort. His utopianism managed to defy open ridicule thanks to his hefty wallet, but never commanded serious attention. In hindsight it proved far more effective at ensconcing the dinosaur club of out-of-touch leaders, like Gaddafi himself, for decades. This retrograde model of leadership, widely practiced among newcomers to power, is arguably the continent’s greatest impediment to modernity.

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by Misha Lepetic

Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.
~ John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath”

Received wisdom relies on simple categories to survive and persist. In this sense, certain numbers are repeated until they are virtually canonical. If we could come up with a taxonomy of success for statistics, we might consider the convenience of numbers that freeze flows of population, money or goods into easily retained averages, devoid of the nuances of space or time. I may, for example, agree with the statement that “500 people arrive in Mumbai every day” if whoever responsible for this statement could point me to the set from which this average was derived – was this from 2000 to 2008? Or maybe it was from 1997 to 2011? Let’s consider other aspects that the datum is implying: Are these people migrants who are truly moving to the city, or are they on a long, seasonal loop that takes them back to their villages, or, even more inconveniently, other cities? And could someone please tell me where the city of Mumbai begins (or ends)? Inconvenient truths are both temporal and geographical, but when we are attempting to impress our audience we tend not to speak in graphs but in talking points. This is the peril of a successful statistic.

By the same token, “255 people born every minute” is a nice, smooth number, and not difficult to remember for those uncomfortable moments when the cocktail party conversation needs a nudge. The lazy acceptance of such a statement demonstrates our contentedness with the notion that this is something that is happening consistently, not unlike the comfort we get from looking at a flowing stream: every time we go back to the stream, there it is, still flowing. In a Heraclitean sense, if I dip my toe into that stream of newborns today, they will certainly be different than yesterday’s stream, but it will still be 255. This is comforting. Until, of course, it becomes 256, or 325. But we will have to wait to be told that, too.

Was the seven-billionth person born in Manila on October 31^st, 2011? Absolutely – if you are the parents of Danica May Camacho. Declared so by the United Nations, the organization did her the further favour of swooping down on her delivery room, scholarships in hand for the lucky newborn, like an international development version of Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. (Danica’s parents may want to take heed of the experience of Adnan Nević, the title-holder of Six-Billionth Person of this particular celebrity circuit, whose cradling by Kofi Annan at his birth hasn’t exactly led to a silver spoon in his mouth). But for those paying attention to the vagaries of demographic estimation,

Even the best individual government censuses have a margin of error of at least 1 percent, said [Gerhard Heilig, chief of the population estimates and projections section of the United Nations Population Division], which would translate in the global aggregation to “a window of uncertainty of six months before or six months after Oct. 31.” An error margin of even as little as 2 percent would mean that Monday’s estimate of seven billion actually was 56 million off (which is more people than were counted in South Africa).

By the same token, I am wholly prepared to believe the notion that, “as of 2008, 50% of the global population lives in cities,” if the United Nations could only define for me what constitutes a city (or was that fateful moment set to happen in 2005, as reported in 2005?). Is the city defined as its urban core, or does it involve the surrounding metropolitan area? Richard Saul Wurman famously defined Tokyo in (at least) six different ways, including boundaries determined by postal delivery, utility service, administrative districts, or population density, among other measures that, our intuition tells us, ought to line up together somehow, but instead lead to radically different geographic delineations. At least we can agree that Tokyo is a proper city – a mega-city, even. Ought we then define a “city” by the density of its population? In that case, Tokyo ranks only 50^th, and Mumbai reigns supreme – at least by some measures. But at what point does a city stop being a city?

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by Quinn O'Neill

At the Reason Rally held recently in Washington, Richard Dawkins made a rather provocative suggestion. He encouraged the crowd to ridicule and mock religious people for their beliefs.

Exactly how far he’d have his followers go with their ridicule isn’t clear. Jerry Coyne of the blog “Why Evolution is True” presumably considers Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion to exemplify the approach that Dawkins is advocating. He offers the converts' corner of Dawkins’ website as evidence of the approach’s effectiveness. It’s a collection of anecdotes from atheist converts who most commonly credit The God Delusion.

The book certainly can be credited for many conversions to atheism, but I think it constitutes an appeal to reason more so than an example of ridicule. In any case, what Dawkins advocated at the Reason Rally goes beyond what he’s done with any of his books. Ridicule can take many different forms, including well-crafted satire and cartoons like South Park, but Dawkins is suggesting that we make fun of people face-to-face. “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!” he instructs.

Ridicule can be an effective tactic, but it’s risky. J. Michael Waller makes this clear in a White Paper for the Institute of World Politics, in which he endorses ridicule as a tactic in the “war on terrorism”. Distinguishing ridicule from humor, he says:

Laughing at someone – ridicule – is another matter. It is the use of humor at someone else’s expense. It is a zero-sum game destructive to one of the parties involved. Like a gun, it is a dangerous weapon. Even in trained hands, it can misfire. Used carelessly or indiscriminately, ridicule can create enemies were there were none, and deepen hostilities among the very peoples whom the user seeks to win over.

Robert Wright, in a piece in The Atlantic, questions what effect Dawkins’ advocacy of such a hostile approach might have on support for anti-evolution bills like the one recently passed in Tennessee. It’s a good question. It is a well-established marketing tactic to associate what you’d like to sell to people – be it a product or an opinion – with the values of the target group. Being a well-known advocate for evolution, Dawkins’ advocacy of hostile anti-theism may have an undesired effect. For some people, he may be reinforcing an association between evolution and a threat to something that they value. From a marketing perspective, this would be an obvious blunder. It’s like reminding people that Coke promotes tooth decay when you actually want them to buy Coke.

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Or, Reading is Bad

Or, A Tale of Two Storytellers.

My Philadelphia childhood was marked by the image of my mother under lamplight, bent over a book, studying to become a folklorist. She was always studying children's games and rhymes and reading weighty, scary, assigned-tomes like “The Sex Lives of Savages”. She came to folklore through this fascination she'd developed with the voice of a man she met in Benin, West Africa in her late twenties. His name was Nondichao and he was a skeletal tall old griot before whom she'd place a boxy tape recorder time and again over the course of decades. I remember his grainy French-African voice very well, as if it runs through my dreams without my knowing. With a gravelly lilt Nondichao told her, over many a sweaty bottle of Fanta, and all from memory, the bloody and amazing histories of the kingdom of Dahomey as they had been relayed to him by a series of griots, all now dead. In the meantime I played with the village children chasing hoops and petting goats, and we all were recorded in the background static.

She came to that fascination–with his storytelling–because she was a storyteller herself, and had worked for a friend's children's theater group in Connecticut called Oddfellows Playhouse. And that fascination started from an even more direct seed–she'd been a devoted theatre-person. She'd been the kind of older sister who is constantly organizing her siblings into little backyard productions, who grows up into a theatre major…

So for me there's always been this narrative that explains how one could get from theatre to storytelling to folklore to history (and perhaps back again) all by following a fascination with the human voice.

Of course my mother has a lovely, expressive speaking voice. But in retrospect I see that that voice is partially responsible for the fact that I nearly failed second grade. When we left Benin I was six and she was thirty; and by the time I was eight, despite the best efforts of the Philadelphia public school system, I still couldn't read.

So I often thank my stars that I wasn't born in our current era of over-diagnostic tendency, as I'm sure I'd have been shunted off into various sad special rooms and my life might have gone quite differently. But my academic problem was pretty basic. I didn't have a disability. I preferred to be read to.

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Knot

maybe you think I do not know
maybe you think I could not be
maybe I am not where I go
maybe you are not here with me
.
perhaps the moon is nothing old
perhaps the sun is never new
perhaps all stories have been told
perhaps there is no being through

it could be everything is here
it could be everything is near
it could be heaven is not far
it could be now just where we are

perhaps all maybes will be done
maybe all should-bes might be too
it could be everything is one
beyond the shadow of we two
.

by Jim Culleny
3/24/12

by Rishidev Chaudhuri and Jason Merrill

C.P. Snow famously said that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is like never having read Shakespeare. Whatever the particular merits of this comparison, it does speak to the centrality of the idea of entropy (and its increase) to the physical sciences. Entropy is one of the most important and fundamental physical concepts and, because of its generality, is frequently encountered outside physics. The pop conception of entropy is as a measure of the disorder in a system. This characterization is not so much false as misleading (especially if we think of order and information as being similar). What follows is a brief explanation of entropy, highlighting its origin in the particular ways we describe the world, and an explanation of why it tends to increase. We've made some simplifying assumptions, but they leave the spirit of things unchanged.

The fundamental distinction that gives rise to entropy is the separation between different levels of description. Small systems, systems with only a few components, can be described by giving the state of each of their components. For a large system, say a gas with billions of molecules, describing the state of each molecule is impossible, both because it would be tedious and because we don't know the state of each molecule. And, as we'll point out again later, for many purposes knowing the exact state of the system isn't useful. In theory we can predict how a system evolves by knowing its exact state, but in practice this is much too complicated to do unless the system is very small. So we instead build probabilistic predictions taking into account only a few parameters of the system, which gives us a coarser but more relevant level of description, and we seek to describe changes in the world at this level.

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LOST IN TRANSLATION

“Dye,” Mother says
touching her silver hair.

Harry the shrink strokes his gray beard,
“I'm proud of it.”

“Operation Doctor Sahib,”
she points to the mole on her nose.

“God’s gift,” he says. She shows him
her ulna, fractured in a recent fall.

“Make it as it was.”
Harry the shrink shows his bruised wrist,

“Fell off the bike when I was young.”
She removes her slip-ons: Girl’s feet,

Red polish chipped at cuticles.
“Slice off my bunions.”

Harry the shrink removes his socks: Big
misshapen toes.

Mother glares at me,
her fifth child, reclined

as usual on the couch, translating
Kashmiri, Mother Tongue.

“What does this decrepit man know,
she says, “My life is ahead of me.”

For my mother, Maryam, on her 90^th
3 March 2012
Hebrew Home for the Aged, Riverdale, NY
Rafiq Kathwari is a guest poet at 3Quarks Daily

by Jen Paton

This American Life, the American radio program, has posted an episode called “Retraction”, which retracts performer Mike Daisey's story on Foxconn – adapted from his stage series, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” Daisey, since the TAL story ran in January, has become one of the most visible critics of Apple. But it turns out that the most memorable stories in the piece- about a man with a subcontracted-factory-injured hand touching an Ipad screen with wonder, and a girl employee telling him Daisey was thirteen – were untrue, at least to TAL's level of comfort. When interviewed about all this in the “Retraction” piece, Daisey sounds abashed, and half-heartedly apologies to Ira Glass for allowing something that merely met the standard of truth for theater onto a journalistic program. Daisey tells Glass, “I really do believe stories should be subordinate to the truth….everything that is in this monologue is built out of the truth I took.” On his Web site (http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/), Daisey writes that he “uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell [the] story, and I believe [I do] so with integrity.”

Seemingly all of a sudden we (some of us, many of us) can instantly share our built truths, our ideas, our revolutions. Polish writer Piotr Czerski recently published a manifesto on “us”, the Web literate generation (he is three years older than me). Admitting that he uses “we” as a convenience, he describes us as communicating on a level “more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.” This seems a bit grandiose – volume does not equal efficiency, intensity does not equal clarity – but Czerski raises many interesting points. I am most interested in his discussion of how we use the Web to find things out, to weigh the evidence, to triangulate at truth. He writes that: “we have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible.” While I agree more or less with his description of how to arrive at “the truth,” I'm not sure if the Web really makes “us” better at finding it.

I'm not sure we are so good at assessing credibility – the credibility of others, or perhaps worse, our own.

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Breeze

I dreamt I was
dreaming in Chinese
so didn’t understand my dream
though it’s calligraphy was clear
as the brushed strokes of breeze.

the characters Lao Tzu
climbed behind closed eyes

but said as little as they could
mounting nothing hill

obliquely vanishing
between two skies
.

I came upon a Buddha
sitting circular and

wise as a pictograph
without a word

silently
loquacious

mutely musical
—unheard as a muzzled
mourning dove
.

in this dream
I’m free of words & guile
as Buddha’s smile

.

by Jim Culleny
3/16/12

by James McGirk

Reviewing Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men in The New York Times, Douglas Coupland proposes, “what must undeniably be called a new literary genre. For lack of a better word let’s call it Translit.” Translit reflects “an aura-free universe in which all eras coexist at once—a state of possibly permanent atemporality given to us courtesy of the Internet.” Artists are responding to this, Coupland says, by mashing together time and place, an effect “not unlike watching a TV show that’s simultaneously happening on multiple channels, a story filmed in different eras using differing technologies, but which taken together tell the same story.

As a strategy this is not new. This new genre sounds a lot like Moby Dick, minus the throbbing heartbeat of Captain Ahab pursuing his white whale, or the multi-faceted storytelling of a Thousand-and-One Nights. Every novel is a soup of partially digested hanks of literary matter. A typical chapter is a hybrid of drama, description and transcribed speech. This soupiness is the reason why novels have defied easy categorization into genre since they evolved from the golden triad of Greek drama, tragedy and comedy.

Nailing down a new genre and coining a new term to slot into the canon is harmless fun. What is disturbing about this “Translit,” however, is Coupland's suggestion that it is an effective strategy for dealing with, “interconnectivity across time and space, just as interconnectedness defines the here and now.” The spacey refraction that Coupland is so impressed with is a feint and one that contemporary literature would do well to expose.

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by Hasan Altaf

Let England Shake (2011), the eighth album by the English singer PJ Harvey, was by itself already high concept: In the music industry in the twenty-first century, releasing an album that focuses so explicitly on history – on war, on England, on England and its wars – seems like a particularly dangerous gamble. Even for Harvey herself, much about the album was different from her previous work, including the instrument of choice (autoharp), the singing voice, and even the writing process – the lyrics were written and finalized before she began to write any music at all.

The only thing left to do with such an unconventional album might be to keep going along the same route, to heighten the high concept. Instead of filming traditional music videos, Harvey asked the British war photographer Seamus Murphy, whose photographs from Afghanistan she had admired, to make a few short films for some of the songs on the album. The end result of that process is a DVD, also titled Let England Shake, that collects all twelve of these films as a sort of film on its own.

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by Karen Swenson

A VISA TO TIBET

Sometimes getting into Tibet is a snap; sometimes it is a convoluted diplomatic maneuver out of an Eric Ambler spy novel. In 2007, on my 8^th trip to Tibet, it became the later because a group of young Americans, mistaking their egotistical urge for courage, flew in with a rolled up banner reading, “CHINA OUT OF TIBET,” unrolling it in the midst of Lhasa. They were thrown out of the country but those in the country suffered for their action. The Chinese banged the Tibetan door shut, an action at which they are expert. The pointless protest disrupted the tourist trade on which many Tibetans are dependent.

I flew from Shanghai, having ascertained that no Tibetan visas were being handed out there, to Chengdu, capital of Szechwan, hoping to find a way in, but every agent I talked to at the, unfortunately named, Traffic Hotel, next to the bus station on the cemented shores of the polluted Jin river said they wouldn’t be able to get me a Tibet visa for at least two weeks. Disgruntled, I wandered Chengdu seeing sights I had not visited in years. Prosperity had come to town in rouge and furbelows and the inhabitants were on a prolonged buying spree (this was before the earthquake) but prosperity had also brought interesting improvements to the park around Du Fu’s cottage in the form of archeological excavations that exposed the real cottages of the poet’s time and the refurbishing of a number of monasteries and temples. Between parks and temples I emailed a friend in New York expressing my irritability. He suggested I try the local CITS travel agency, a thing I would never have done on my own. There a young man, whose English name was Jim, signed me up for a five day Chinese tour of Tibet. I knew that given those five days and a little luck, I would find a Tibetan agent in Lhasa, able to get an extension on my visa, as well as a guide and car to go to Mount Kailash. It would be my 7^th time to Kailash.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

I have to admit that I had never really paid much attention to reproductive issues until Rush Limbaugh's recent remarks about birth control and state mandates for transvaginal ultrasounds got me to thinking about what is really at stake: Wasted human potential. All that sexual activity taking place with nothing material resulting from it? How could I have missed it? Now that I have seen the light so to speak, I would like to suggest that Rush and company have really been thinking too small.

Reproduction is far too important to be left to women. Let's face it, ovulating and menstruating once a month is the rate limiting step in this process. Even a woman who immediately became pregnant again upon giving birth could only reproduce about once a year. In contrast, males can produce millions of sperm per day. We've been so focused on issues surrounding pregnancies that we've missed far bigger issues like Onanism. Talk about wasted potential: All those little swimmers could have been contenders! Think about the possibilities if the 23 chromosomes in a sperm could be combined with 23 in another sperm (from another man of course; no inbreeding here, thank you very much.). It wouldn't be too hard to splice in some essential genes from X chromosomes to flesh things out. The 46 chromosomes needed for proper embryonic development would be in place. A small injection of Calcium or some other trigger could get the ball rolling in these “spermbryos.”

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I'm begging you please let this end
Decide which of these clowns you will send
Just take your pick
From Newt, Ron or Rick
Or Mitt who is able to bend

Into whatever candidate that you might need
For he's not met one belief he can't knead
If one doesn't thrill
Perhaps a different one will
Whatever it takes to succeed

So choose one of these men and please soon
For all of the fun's left the room
I used to enjoy
Whatever the ploy
For they clearly spelled GOP doom

But of recent I just can't get enthused
And I'm quite frankly rather bemused
Can these men really think
That their words are in sync
With the women who's rights they'd abuse?

Yes the election has come down to sex
And all women this truly should vex
Forget abortion these days
There are new trails to blaze
And women's rights muscles to flex

Do we all want our sex lives controlled
By these men who wag their fingers and scold
Who won't condemn Rush
Whose bile makes them gush
And who can't see this issue's fool's gold

They'll all fight for your every last gun
Make sure the healthcare law's undone
Denounce evolution
Increase earth's pollution
There's no real difference in the long run

So, I'm begging you please let this end
Decide which of these clowns you will send
Newt, Ron, Rick or Mitt
I don't care a whit
They all equally rile and offend

by Alyssa Pelish

I.

I recently tried to pitch an essay that made use of, if not coined, the term “friendship porn.” The essay was basically about my massive consumption of a certain genre of TV show, which I had tried to make sense of by dipping into the literature on friendship — a phylum of work that includes treatises and lectures and meditations by big names like Cicero and Aristotle and Confucius and Kant, as well as papers by contemporary social scientists whose names are not yet in lights. However, as much as he liked my essay, the editor was bothered by the fact that this phenomenon I was discussing, this “friendship porn,” was dated. Friendship porn is old news, he told me. We want you to tell us what’s next. What’s the next big kind of “porn”? And although I tried to explain to him that my point was, look, friendship porn is timeless — he said no dice.

But I persist in believing that the phenomenon of friendship porn, regardless of how 1995 it is, hasn’t been adequately plumbed. The style sections have investigated the highest-profile categories of nouveau porn: the terms “food porn” and “torture porn” and “real estate porn” more or less trip off our tongues now. I accept them. I’ll admit that I’m not immune to the aesthetic pleasures of a well posed entree: my head can be turned by the stained glass slices of roasted beet against white china, drizzled with a citrus reduction, strewn with faintly toasted pignoli and garnished with pale leaves of escarole. So, too, will I page through a photo spread of tastefully renovated and cunningly designed breakfast nooks and turret rooms in the Times real estate section. But the kind of porn I’ve finally come around to admitting that I have, historically, been most susceptible to, is friendship porn. And lots of other people are, too, it would seem. Yet where is the Times style section feature? Where is the academic paper? Where is the Wikipedia entry? Granted, friendship porn is no longer new, but it warrants at least a modicum of pop-analysis.

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by S. Abbas Raza

This is my English version of Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's Urdu rendition of a Turkish poem written by Nâzım Hikmet for his Russian wife Vera.

To Vera

She said come
She said stay
Smile, said she
Die, said she

I came
I stayed
Smiled
And died also.