by Jeff Strabone

Brown v. Board of Education. The Voting Rights Act. Miranda v. Arizona. Roe v. Wade. Texas v. Johnson. The Americans with Disabilities Act. Same-sex marriage. Looked at one way, the past several decades in the United States have been an almost uninterrupted series of victories for the American left and its activist model of advancing civil right and civil liberties through litigation and legislation.

Looked at another way—in terms of tax justice, financial regulation, and income disparity—the economic right wing has dominated American politics for the past thirty-plus years. In the face of little popular resistance and with assistance from both major political parties, the richest Americans and the most powerful corporations have had a free hand to rewrite the tax code and the banking laws to enrich themselves, endanger the world economy, and deprive government of the revenues it would need to, as the Constitution puts it, ‘promote the general welfare’.

As income inequality in the States approaches banana-republic levels, Americans are finally having a long-overdue national conversation about taxes, banking laws, and economic justice, but why were we not having this conversation all along? The singular focus on civil rights without a comparable commitment to tax justice may also be the greatest failure of the American left. While it is inarguably a great achievement that any child, regardless of color, can now swim in a public pool, that opportunity means little if tax revenues shrink to the point where cities can no longer afford to open the pools, let alone build new ones.

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“When the rich get too rich and the poor
get too poor, there is a way.”
…………….. —Pearle Buck, The Good Earth
.
Quake

when the rich get too rich
the sky falls
when the poor get too poor

there is a way:

see what breaks
over a fault when plate
pushes plate

even stacked bullion falls

it’s a grim scene
when all work meets
at an edge
when what’s raw
surges volcanic through
stone pipes stifled hope
singes the landscape,
plows plantations
under, sinks
mistaken dreams,
exhaults valleys, scours peaks
so they’re buzz-cut
as a military head —when
even air burns
all suck equally
from a bountiful
karmic void

when the rich get too rich
day leaves
when the poor get too poor

wide night comes
.

by Jim Culleny 2/9/12

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez's “Perfumes” is an intriguing (and rather wonderful) collection of reviews of various scents. It is hard to write about smell while avoiding cliches: smell is almost always seen as a primitive, noble-savage sort of sense, pre-verbal and inextricably linked to sex and memory. They, on the other hand, start with the assumption that smell should be taken seriously as an artistic medium, and that viewing perfume simply as bottled memory or barely sublimated sexual enticement is misleading. Perfume is not simply mimetic, not simply trying to smell like the natural world, and we should take olfactory abstraction as seriously as we do visual abstraction. This makes for an often odd collection of perfume reviews. After all, what does one make of reviews like these:

“The result was the powderiest, rootiest, most sinister iris imaginable, a huge gray ostrich-feather boa to wear with purple devore velvet at a poet's funeral”

“The surprise effect of Le Feu d'Issey is total. Smelling it is like pressing the play button on a frantic video clip of unconnected objects that fly past one's nose at warp speed: fresh baguette, lime peel, clean wet linen, shower soap, hot stone, salty skin, even a fleeting touch of vitamin B, and no doubt a few other UFOs that this reviewer failed to catch the first few times.”

“Maurice Roucel has a knack for putting together perfumes that feel haunted by the ghostly presence of a woman: Lyra was a compact, husky-voiced Parisienne, Tocade a tanned, free-as-air Amazon…. However it did constrain the woman inside Envy to be at once seraphic and sub-urban, complete with the sort of suppressed anger that such a creature would feel at being reincarnated as a florist in Eastern New Jersey.”

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by Hasan Altaf

One of the main differences between fiction and nonfiction might be, to use the phrase of writing workshops, between showing and telling: Fiction shows us other lives, what those other lives are like, how it might feel to be living those lives; the other tells us, laying out the context, the backstory, the rules of the game. Both forms are important, but fiction seems to me the more powerful, as stories speak to us at a more visceral level than do facts – to our emotions, rather than our intellect. There is overlap between the two genres, however, and while fiction can succeed without giving us the information of nonfiction, the strongest journalism is usually that which adopts the techniques of fiction to give us both story and background – some of Arundhati Roy's essays, for example, or Joan Didion's – that journalism which gives us both narrative and analysis, the question and some semblance of an answer.

It is easy, when reading Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, to forget that one is reading nonfiction at all; the book feels more like a novel, and it is in fact tempting to read it as one. The careful, in-depth reporting and the meticulous research of an excellent journalist are there, but far more striking are the attributes of a novelist – the empathy and the insight that Boo brings to her writing. The style is also deliberate: Boo excludes herself almost entirely, writing instead from the perspective of her characters, letting them show us the story of their lives and their community. These people aren't case studies, side-barred in a study; they're individuals, every one of them sympathetic and understandable. The result is an incredibly rich portrait of unique, fascinating, frustrating people, doing their best to get by in a particular community and particular landscape.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

Sometime early in my grad school studies I went vacationing in Hawaii with some family. Their idea of fun was shopping. Mine was snorkeling and hiking. One of my hikes was down into the crater of Haleakala, the volcanic peak on Maui. After my ascent out of the crater, I noticed that there were a number of observatories near the summit. The high elevation and relative isolation of the mountain meant that atmospheric disturbance and light pollution would be low and visibility would be high. I vowed to return that night to see for myself why the observatories were there.

After dark I drove our rental car back up to the summit, parked, shut off the lights and waited inside the car in a sleeping bag (the air temperature was around freezing, the wind was pretty ferocious, and I had not packed winter clothes for a trip to Hawaii). As my eyes adjusted, the night sky unfurled before me. I had not spent all my life in the big city, where only the moon, a couple planets, and the brightest stars can be seen regularly. I had enjoyed a fair amount of time camping in the Mojave Desert, where the Milky Way stretches across the night sky, but I was not prepared for this. The number of stars I could see was two orders of magnitude higher than what I had ever seen in the desert. The Milky Way, instead of being a wash of white, was composed of many individual points of different colors. Clusters of stars took on a fractal quality with clusters embedded within clusters within clusters. I was awestruck. So many stars! How many had planetary systems? Which ones no longer existed? How insignificant was I in the grand scheme of things? It was profoundly humbling and simultaneously liberating. As awesome as the snorkeling on Maui was, that night of staring at the sky is likely one of the experiences that I will take to the grave.

On another occasion in the early 1990's I was camping on Pine Mountain in northern Ventura County, California. The sun had set, the stars were beginning to shine and it was exceptionally clear. Suddenly I noticed a satellite gliding across the sky in a polar orbit. I guessed it was a spy satellite based on the size of its reflection and its speed and direction. It was one of those bittersweet moments: Techno-triumphalism crossed with McKibben-esque “End of Nature” angst. It was hard not to take a certain amount of pride in our ability as a nation and species to launch a school bus sized object into orbit that could discriminate license plates from hundreds of miles away. On the other hand, having my view of the night sky altered by this rapidly moving point of light that commanded my attention was disturbing. Was there place no left that had not been altered by our hand? My ambivalence faded a bit when the technology used to build and launch spy satellites was turned away from the earth in the form of the Hubble Space Telescope and photos like the Pillars of Creation and the Hubble Deep Field and Ultra-Deep Field began to filter into our collective consciousness. Who could not be profoundly affected by contemplating these images?

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by Melanie Friedrichs

Nearly every economist who has written about money, from David Hume to Milton Friedman, has disagreed about its role in the economy and its influence on real economic growth. Underlying each argument is the same question, asked but never answered: is money causal? Today it seems like everyone’s got a different idea about what money is and where it’s going. The bond sharks fear deflation and depression, the gold bugs fear hyperinflation, and governments fear excess in either direction but disagree about how to keep the economy under control. Yet most college freshman learn that money is “long- term neutral” in economics 101. If money doesn’t matter, why are we worrying? Perhaps because despite the theory that argues otherwise, we know that the glass condos built in Baltimore and houses standing empty post-mortgage market slump are very real and were built because of money. In this post I propose a different way to conceptualize the money’s causal role, derived not from data, but from a comparison and reconciliation of the views of classical theorists.

A Short History of the Theory of Money

The first economists writing in the late 18th century used a thought problem to conclude that money has a causal effect on prices, but no causal effect on output. If suddenly the supply of money in a nation doubled, prices would double as well, and but would produce only a nominal change; real output would remain the same in the long run. However, David Hume also observed that silver arriving from the new world seemed to stimulate industry as European merchants and craftsman scrambled to produce for Spain’s new wealth. Adam Smith lauded the introduction of fractional reserve banking in Glasgow as a significant reason behind the city’s economic development. Both positions seem to suggest that money causes more than a nominal change. Indeed, outside of the academic economics, popular history nearly always paints finance as causal, with increasing bullion facilitating trade in markets near and far, fledgling banks financing the first factories of the industrial revolution, and the Bank of England’s gold standard leading to a century of prosperity and peace. This dichotomy between the received wisdom and the popular legend remained intact into the 20th Century, until the collapse of the gold standard and the deflation of the Great Depression prompted new thought on the role of money.

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by Akim Reinhardt

I first met Alfred nine years ago, shortly after moving into my current home. I was brand new to the neighborhood and had only been there a week when Baltimore was blanketed with a fresh coat of snow eight inches deep. Around here, that’s well more than enough to shutter schools and keep most people out of work.

I was barely awake, walking around the livingroom in jeans with no shirt or socks when I heard a tremendous rumble and thump outside the window. My primal, territorial instincts took over. The rage began to well up inside me as I prepared to defend my new holding, even if it was a rental. Who dare invade my domain!

I peeled back the curtain to see kids roaming through the streets, engaged in a massive snow ball fight free-for-all. “Alright, Reinhardt,” I said to myself quietly, “you’re only thirty-five. Don’t become a grumpy old man just yet.”

Children of all ages were streaming everywhere. A rather large one had come cascading over a short wall and onto my porch, then onto yet another, clumsily flopping across the connected rowhomes, and thereby creating the most immediate ruckus.

I got on some clothes, went outside, and started firing snowy projectiles. Sensing the opportunity to act out every kid’s fantasy by safely attacking an adult with impunity, the juvenile chaos coalesced into a children’s army. I held them off for a while, relying on a rapid fire release and some bear-like growling. But in the end their numbers were too large. They drove me back into my yard and up the stairs to my rear porch. In the end, it was all I could do to close the latch to the back gate as a fusillade misshapen snowballs reigned down upon me.

All in all, it had been a successful introduction to the neighborhood.

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I'd like to have my own Super PAC
That on my behalf could attack
Of course any sign of collusion
Would be just an illusion
I wouldn't tell them how to act

I know that no contact's allowed
But what's the harm if I just say out loud
“It would so make my day
If your ads were to say
That only I stand out in the crowd”

Oh, the money you'll all want to raise
To make sure you can heap me with praise
And will you please read my mind
Where you'll happen to find
The names of those I'd like to faze

The PAC's name's no concern of mine
Whatever you choose will be fine
But if I had a voice
And was given a choice
I might suggest “Sarah's Divine!”

But of course, it's all up to you
My friends won't be on your crew
We won't speak and won't meet
I'll be just shocked when you tweet
Some of the slander and lies that you'll spew

So I guess that what I need right now
Is to find someone rich I can wow
I mean, really rich
Then I'll make my pitch
But all connivance I'll disavow

by Vivek Menezes

This Saturday night, I attended one of the best concerts in my life.

I’m trying to avoid all hyperbole here, honest. Also it’s not like I haven’t been around – my 3-decade concert resume includes Jobim in Rio, Springsteen in New Jersey, Aida in Luxor, and – some of you might recall – Lou Majaw in his hometown Shillong.

But this Saturday night on a rugged hillside overlooking the Mandovi River in Old Goa was the equal of all those experiences.

The marvelous soprano Patricia Rozario sang Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn in the lovely 500-year-old Capela do Monte, packed in tight with a hushed, intent audience. The sari-clad singer dazzled throughout, but it is when she sang in Konkani – hymns from Goa’s centuries-old tradition – that a palpable atmosphere of catharsis arrived for Rozario and her now-emotional audience.

The formidably talented and experienced singer suddenly had tears visibly welling in her eyes. All around me audience members were crying, the silver-haired lady next to me buried her face in her grandson's shoulder and sobbed quietly. My own face was wet now, we each had suddenly realized it had taken all of us – setting, singer, repertoire and audience too – five full centuries to get to this electric moment of coming together. It was inexpressably moving to be there. But we all knew it never should have taken this long.

For at least two decades, I’ve fairly diligently (but informally) surveyed scholars, musicians and music fans about “western” music in India.

In all that time, I’ve encountered barely a handful of non-professional musicologists who realize that – for example – the violin’s presence in India far predates the sitar or tabla, or even what is now called “Hindustani classical music.” It is common for boneheads to tout the credentials of this music, that emerged from post-Mughal North India, as somehow more ‘Indian’ than, say, a cello concerto. But that is totally ahistorical, and like every single North-India-generated generalization about “Indianness”, willfully ignores the history and culture of India’s Western coastline.

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by Quinn O'Neill

A sizable minority of Americans holds beliefs that have been thoroughly dispelled by science. About 40% believe in a biblical account of human origins and as many as 29% seem to think that the earth is at the center of the solar system. Public opinion is divided on the reality of global warming and some even think that the moon landing was a hoax. If there’s one thing we can be certain about, it’s that many Americans have a hard time distinguishing fact from fiction.

How could a country so scientifically and technologically advanced be awash with confusion, anti-science fanaticism, and conspiracy theories, one might wonder. Reading Canadian news this past week, I was struck by an obvious answer. The Canadian government (or the “Harper government” as the megalomaniac narcissist at the country’s helm prefers) recently teamed up with Sun TV to bring Canadians their first real dose of fake news. At the government’s request, Sun TV News, the closest thing Canada has to Fox news, staged what the Star’s Heather Mallick described as a “happy clap-clap Canadian moment” for Citizenship Week. It was a “reaffirmation” ceremony (whatever that is), in which new Canadians reaffirmed their citizenship oath. As it turned out, six of the “new Canadians” weren’t new citizens at all, but federal bureaucrats simply acting the part.

Given its fabricated and dishonest nature, the event wasn’t the sort that would make Canadians swell with pride or tear up with sentimentality. It does, however, serve as an ironic commemoration of events that took place this time last year.

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by Liam Heneghan

“He was violent?”

She exhaled. “I don’t know. What’s ‘violent’ anymore? He was a teenage guy. Then, a guy in his twenties.”

—Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

Once upon a time, there was an editor of a short-lived academic journal called Evolutiona Pathologica who was fired in disgrace. In an interview published after his dismissal, the editor, a notoriously fastidious man, reported that papers in his journal often had a pronounced impact on the field primarily because they were unsound; unsound in their conception, imperfect in their analysis, defective in their conclusions drawn from meager data, and inflated in the claims they made about their practical implications. The papers were often wide of the mark, he conceded, and even occasionally bonkers. Yet, many papers were masterpieces precisely because refuting the claims strengthened the subdiscipline of evolutionary pathology. Or so he said.

Recently, while archiving the material from the defunct journal, I reread the manuscript the publication of which resulted in the editor’s dismissal. I also discovered an internal report on the dismissal that shed light on the case..

Before reproducing the offending paper – some of you, of course, will remember it well – I’ll remind you of some of other mildly controversial pieces that appeared in the journal. For instance, in a rather famous special issue on the pathological origins and implications of bipedality, Professor J. P. X deRossa-Ellman made the celebrated claim that upright walking evolved to reduce the overstimulation of reflexology points on the hands and to intensify the quality of the massage on the feet. “As hominins shifted from an arboreal habitat,” deRossa-Ellman opined, “pressure on the hands, especially on the zones associated with the small intestines inclined Australopithecines to a frightful gassiness. In contrast, the laudatory effects of passively massaging the feet by walking on the dewy grasses of the East African savannah produced a sense of well-being that disposed our primitive forbears to recreational coitus. Those more upright proto-humans joyously copulated thus leading to increased fitness.” To the embarrassment of the journal it was later discovered that deRossa-Ellman ran a specialized massage parlor on the near North side called “Strange Beginnings/Happy Endings”. He also did a brisk business selling “genuine savannah grass”. Apparently you could also smoke the stuff.

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Alarm

Wake up as much as possible
before you sleep
………………… catch
your breath while the sun’s up
when
……….in February after a snow
everything’s so soaked with light
sleep
……… is impossible
and all that’s left is to catch a day
by an hour
………………. and dance
.. ….in incandescence

forget
……….. about sleep and dreams
forget
……….. the doldrums and
wake
……….. to what the crows caw
cackling over road kill
……………… ……… wake
to the wind's insistence that
moving-on
……………….. is the way
the world works
…………….………….wake
to its
……….. alarm

.
by Jim Culleny
1/28/12

by Misha Lepetic

“If you design with a view to optimize anything, it is bound to end up suboptimal, because it can’t cope with change. This applies as much to political constitutions, universities and buildings”
~ Jeff Mulgan

Recently I had the good fortune to catch “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” at the IFC Center here in New York. The docuementary is a fascinating corrective to the perception that when we talk about failed public housing, we are talking about failed architectural design. The documentary makes liberal use of the above 1972 picture and footage, which has become visual shorthand for, as Alexander von Hoffmann writes:

…an icon of failure. Liberals perceive it as exemplifying the government’s appalling treatment of the poor. Architectural critics cite it as proof of the failure of high-rise public housing for families with children. One critic even asserted that its destruction signaled the end of the modern style of architecture.

There is much to be said about the story of Pruitt-Igoe. Its history, and the narratives and ideologies that are woven around that history, constitute a microcosm of how we choose to perceive many aspects of architecture, urban planning and public policy during the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, such a grand flameout was bound to attract grand pronouncements, since there was something for everyone to cherry-pick for his or her own agenda.

The genesis of a housing development as large as Pruitt-Igoe was made possible by the United States Housing Act of 1949, but flight to the St Louis suburbs was already in motion. Postwar migration from the South, in the form of the Second Great Migration, re-filled that urban core with poor families that could not afford much better than the tenant buildings run by slumlords. However, even this migration was not sufficient to re-inflate the population of the City of St Louis, which would peak at 857,000 in the 1950 census. Currently standing at 319,000, the 63% loss in population has left the city at roughly the same size as during the 1870 census. Even more remarkably, the St Louis Metropolitan area – the destination of urban flight – saw its population grow from 400,000 to well over a million in the same 60-year span.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

Lost to history, a number of cities of classical antiquity once existed along the banks of the river Narmada in central India. Many of these cities date back to the 3^rd century BC, to the time of the emperor Ashoka, who united the subcontinent into an empire whose extent was never again to be matched in the history of India. The emperor ruled from Patliputra (modern day Patna) in the heart of Magadh in the Indo-Gangetic plain but the spread of his empire made it inevitable that there would be other centers of administration. It was carved into four provinces, after Magadh the most important of these was Avanti with its capital Ujjain. Along the highway connecting the two capitals a number of cities came up and prospered, including some on the banks of the Narmada.

A coup by a Brahmin commander-in-chief who in all likelihood could not tolerate the ascendance of Buddhism brought down the Mauryan Empire. In the aftermath Patliputra could no longer exercise control over the unwieldy empire, the cities soon went their own way. One of the most important of these was Mahismati. Despite several references that crop up in classical Sanskrit literature, today it is difficult to pin down its exact location. This has given rise to a host of claimants along the Narmada, residents of modern day towns such as Mandla and Maheshwar still wage a fevered battle – leaving nothing aside, myths, fanciful notions, borrowings from questionable sources, notions that historians of repute would never touch.

There remains one authentic source for delving into the history of these cities. Coins dating back as far as the third century BC have been recovered in such abundance from the Narmada valley that the subject now forms a separate field of study. Borrowing symbols used on coins once struck at the Ujjain mint, we can guess at the existence of cities such as Bhagila, Kurara and Madavika only through the markings on their coins.

The coins do not differ much in size from the modern coin, though square shapes seemed to have been preferred. They are often crowded with symbols. A single square coin, no larger than the modern 25paisa coin, could accommodate as many as five symbols on each face. Some of these symbols were in use across the subcontinent, such as the swastika; others such as the Ujjain symbol resembling the iron cross demarcated a region.

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by Namit Arora

Some travel impressions prompted by the living and the dead of Varanasi, India.

In early 2006, I was on a train to Varanasi when my mother called from Jaipur. Terrorists had just hit Varanasi with explosions at multiple sites, including at the train station; many had died. Since I was going there as a tourist, she urged me to postpone the trip and get off earlier. I was traveling with my partner and two white American friends, both on their first visit to India. They seemed rattled enough and I worried about their safety. What if Hindu-Muslim riots broke out? We were ten nighttime hours away from Varanasi, so we had to decide fast.

The reality of the event sunk in further when an NDTV reporter and her camera crew got on the train. With time to kill, she began quizzing tired and bemused passengers about their take on the news. And she did so in an overexcited style that seemed to dominate live reporting in India. When she thrust the mic at me, I could only mutter something about my worry for my companions.

I persuaded my fellow travelers to continue. The terrorists had already done their deed; Varanasi was likely the safest place to visit now. Worst case, we could stay holed up in our hotel. Truth be told, I was also drawn to this unbidden frisson of travel. When we arrived in the morning, we found a part of the train station cordoned off by the police. I could see blotches of red on the ground. The driver of the taxi we took into town had witnessed the explosions: flying body parts, screams, the ensuing melee. He had helped take the injured to the hospital. But our decision to not abort our journey turned out to be a good one—the city remained calm and we moved around freely. I felt proud of my fellow citizens for being so mature about the situation. It was my first time in Varanasi as an adult, and the place did not disappoint.

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