by Charlie Huenemann

At the beginning of book three of his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume argues that justice is something we invent. In a word, justice is unnatural. It isn't something we just see in the world, since we only ever see what is, and nothing in what we see tells us how things ought to be. Neither does justice come from some inner, natural feeling, if by “natural” we mean the hard-wired, immediate pleasures and pains that we can't help but have. No; to have any sense of justice, we have to be taught to have it. We have to be trained by others to feel a particular kind of pleasure in seeing fair treatment being done. Our parents have to show us how to be fair, and encourage us in whatever ways they can to get us to want fairness, until it starts to seem natural to us.

Parents train their children in this way because, somewhere along the way, our ancestors figured out – probably the hard way – that respecting and honoring fairness eventually leads to the kind of life where we can live safely, raise families, and keep property. Justice works. And so these ancestors taught their children to be fair, and they taught their children, and so today do we. “In a little time, custom and habit operating on the tender minds of children, makes them sensible of the advantages, which they may reap from society, as well as fashions them by degrees for it, by rubbing off those rough corners and untoward affections, which prevent their coalition”. We become shaped by our early experiences to take some pleasure in a sense of justice – and a good thing, that.

Hume argues that this early and artificial shaping has to be in place well before promises can have any hold over us. Promises come about because, at some point, the affairs of daily life present us with circumstances where an exchange of this for that can't happen right away. “Your corn is ripe to-day; mine will be so to-morrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I shou'd labour with you to-day, and that you shou'd aid me tomorrow”. At this point, a promise would come in handy. So we invent special words and signs that constitute a promise. But there is no reality to this human invention, apart from all of us agreeing to treat it as a real thing, out of the interest in justice we have been shaped to have.

Read more »

Posterity:

………… all that
follows

every generation since Oldowan man chipped obsidian and flint
to make a stone ax to lay open the skull of an adversary
for food or turf, honing technique until

at this end
he’s chipped them
into ICBMs

the inner stuff of blind surge
the inclination of instinct
down a slippery slope

…………the popped buds
…………of hope

…………or

whatever’s survived
the gauntlet of a willful Demiurge
in which rank and ecstatic
blossoms collide

what morphs into the next thing
which unfolds from a chrysalis
and mounts the sky

a lime Luna moth the color of bliss
a bird that whistles, a bird that sings
desire that will not desist
the leading edge of everything

the fruit it brings

my daughters now in the outer world
pushing on, pioneers

………..a bird that whistles
……………a bird that suffers
…………………a bird that sings
.

by Jim Culleny
3/12/14

by Brooks Riley

We didn’t want a second cat. That said, we got a second cat, succumbing to the desperate pleas of a friend with two litters to give away. By the time we capitulated, she was the only kitten left.

If there were an antonym for ‘runt’, it would have applied to Sperl, as we finally named her (see T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Naming of Cats’). She was the biggest kitten of the two litters, a black-and-white, gangly thing with a strange face. Like a mother who loves one child more than another, I did my best to hide my antipathy. Our other cat, after initial outrage, lapsed into a state of chronic resentment behind a mask of indifference.

Sperl was huge, a gentle giant with muscles, not fat. Anthropomorphically speaking, she could have been a Valkyrie (with an operatic voice to match), or a female wrestler. When she was nearly grown, it dawned on me that she had become a great beauty. But something else made me sit up and take notice: It was that presence, so much greater than her body mass. I fell in love.

When she died eight years later (was it gigantism?), it was one of the saddest days of my life. She had brought us so much pleasure, and more: She had taught me a thing or two. In memory of Sperl I have written down the Sperl Commandments, as I learned them from her.

The Sperl Commandments

1. If they don’t like it, don’t do it.

There was almost nothing Sperl did that I didn’t like. She was a considerate cat, unlike others I’ve known. She never used her claws, even when she was kneading my stomach in a show of affection. She knew instinctively what I liked and what I didn’t. If I reprimanded her for something just once, she never did it again.

2. Don’t be forced to do something you don’t want.

Sperl didn’t like to be held. She might curl up on my lap, but if I picked her up, she would struggle to get down, using her muscles to get free, not her claws, not her teeth. Because I was so besotted, I sometimes picked her up anyway, just to hold that great bulk in my arms (I had yet to learn Commandment number 1). Over time, to please me, she would remain still in my arms a bit longer—one second, then four, in the end ten whole seconds–before she began to squirm.

Read more »

by Hari Balasubramanian

In my first piece for 3QD, I discussed some aspects of the science of queueing. In this essay, I'd like to ground that discussion in the context of delays that patients routinely experience in American hospitals. In 2010, there were around 130 million visits to the emergency departments (EDs) of hospitals around the country. Nearly 23% of these patients waited an hour or more to see a care provider [link]. Many urban hospitals and individual patients do much worse.

The documentary The Waiting Room foregrounds the human stories that underlie these statistical estimates, and lets patients, their families, nurses, doctors and social workers speak for themselves. The film is shot during a 24-hour period at the emergency department of a safety-net hospital: Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. 241 patients come to seek care during this one day. Most of the time the camera is in the waiting room, where patients reconcile themselves to a long wait; this applies even to a man with a gunshot wound, whose body is turning numb – hard to believe but true.

The problem faced by Highland Hospital is by no means unique. I've heard it many times from hospital administrators and clinicians. My own research on reducing delays in healthcare led me to work with a large hospital which sees nearly 300 patients daily — more than Highland — in its emergency department. I was quite familiar with what I saw in the documentary: the look and feel of the waiting area; the small rooms inside the main care section with beds and equipment, curtained off to provide patients and their families some privacy; the additional hallway beds with no privacy, but nevertheless necessary due to the sheer volume of patients in acute condition; the constant buzz of pagers, movement of personnel, calls for lab analyses and diagnostic scans; the flicker of computer screens with way too much information; the difficulties in deciding whether the patient should be admitted to an inpatient unit or discharged; and if discharged where the patient should go, for some psychiatric or substance abuse patients have no home to return to.

Read more »

by Michael Lopresto

What, if anything, makes life worth living? What matters to us most as human beings, and hence enables us to live the good life? Could it be knowledge, or worthwhile achievement, or love? Philosophers have produced various answers to this question. Aristotle argued that the good life is one lived according to reason, where we as rational beings exercise our rationality and virtue. Accordingly, we'd be in a state of flourishing. (Philosophers would apparently be living the ultimate form of life, on this view.) Alternatively, philosophers have come up with two main competing theories to Aristotles's: hedonism and objective-list theory. These two views contrast with each other really well. Hedonism says all that matters for a life to go well only has to do with having good experiences, namely, pleasure and happiness. Objective-list theory, on the other hand, moves right away from hedonism's first-person perspective, and says that all that matters is what can be “seen from the outside”, and from here we try to construct an open-ended list of all the things that are objectively valuable that can be plausibly said to make a life go well. Presumably, we'd include things on this list like knowledge, achievement of worthwhile ends, wisdom, friendship, and so on.

How are we to decide between these three views? One way may be to subject each view to criticism, and see which one fares best. So the objective-list theorist may say to the hedonist that hedonism can't be true because someone could conceivably get happiness counting blades of grass or from watching Nicolas Cage films. The hedonist may in turn say to the Aristotelian or the objective-lister that exercising one's rationality, or pursuing worthwhile ends, actually makes one miserable, and this is by no means a good life. Constantly exercising one's rationality may lead one to be constantly vigilant about one's moral obligations to humanity, and to be constantly weighed down by the knowledge of having done morally wrong things in the past, like dismissing the desperate needs of a friend.

Read more »

by Dave Maier

I don't usually watch the opening or closing ceremonies of the Olympics – I like to think of the Super Bowl halfime show as an aesthetic catastrophe uniquely American in nature – but I did see the Sochi closing ceremony, which celebrated Russian achievement in the arts. Or some of them, anyway. We saw dancers and poets and painters and composers, but sadly missing (with a partial exception to be noted below) was a form to which Russian artists have contributed spectacularly since its very beginnings up through the present day.

Russian cinema ranges in tone from the bleak to the mordant to the ecstatic, in subject from the quotidian to the mystical and visionary. If you appreciate the characteristically Russian sensibility in music or literature or painting, you will surely recognize it here as well.

Some of the following films are well-known classics, others possibly mere curiosities. Time will tell; but in any case this is not a best-of list – I have omitted many famous names (Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Eisenstein) – but simply a selection for your enjoyment (much like my similar list of Japanese films a while back). I'm not a film critic, so I might not have any great insights to share with you. Go watch the films, they speak for themselves.

Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi

She is startled awake by the sound of her own snore—a sense of falling—a sudden panic— the sensation of drool down the side of her mouth—the cold point on her forehead against the window– the plane seems to be dropping—she looks out of the window—where are they? Above the Congo — no must be just out of Lilongwe—she must've nodded off—The long road trips to several villages—starting out at six am and returning late in the evening and all the attendant turmoil of thoughts— The guilt of having three meals a day—and clean water– The Agenbite of Inwit—Coetzee—had it right——-last night on a narrow path—between fields on fire—stubs of maize, stalks set ablaze—and in the other blaze of headlights: children, fleeting sights—-Children catching fleeing mice, trapping them for food—-a special favorite treat. The SUV, rushing through the rising smoke, with its large aid logos, stamped on its sides. In it, peering through the haze outside, Coetzee, Mapanje in her head, one sentence after the next.——– she is caught there—suspended—repeating words—the Agenbite of Inwit—And tomorrow is another long day and then another long ride– back in the night—Confused she looks out into the darkness— — a large patch of lights below—are they approaching Addis already? That would mean she's slept the entire three hours — But the cramped seat—the shabby state of the seats does not fit what she is accustomed to on Ethiopian. But then the surly announcement just then—instructions about the seat belts meant to allay the fear of the abruptness of turbulence—brings her back—She is suspended ten thousand feet above the frozen space between Minneapolis and Washington DC—on United—-another two hours to go—they must have just flown over Chicago—-she can just make out that it's all frozen below.

The fear sets in for a moment just as it does over the Congo— the sight of the frozen lakes conjure up the same sensation as do dense green forests —what happens if she were to fall—into that wilderness—if the plane were to crash—This possibility she wills herself to banish from her thoughts—she must get her feet on the ground fast— she tries to lure herself back to sleep—wills a calmness to flow through every fiber and nerve—-she is afraid of flying—and yet it seems she is forever doing this.

Read more »

by Carl Pierer

Dear Mr F.

Your recent book was read with much appreciation and was very well received. It is truly impressive that you manage to translate a foreign author's essays with such accuracy and close attention to his many plays on words. Yet, as a native Austrian, your annotations and commentaries are the more valuable. Indeed, their meandering and digressing nature breathes life into those articles. Witty explanations mixed with your own experiences and brief autobiographical sketches help to understand a complex writer and to see his relevance. But praise has been manifold and you are probably very well aware what great contribution you have made with this book. This letter is addressed to you because your book prompted many questions. Most of them are very closely linked to the topic of the book, but a substantial minority is as digressing as your own commentaries. Certainly, the idea you put forward that a writer cannot possibly desire a completely egalitarian society due to its lack of linguistic differences is fascinating and harbours an explosive potential for controversy. Your other arguments to the quality of writing and your drawing of parallels between turn of the century feuilletonists and modern bloggers stimulate reflection. Still, none of these kept your devoted reader wide awake at night. More troubling than these are your implicit characterisations of what makes a good novelist. This should rather read: implicit mentioning of which characteristics a good novelist displays. Your own biography and those of many other writers seem to suggest that the youthful author should struggle with his fate, they should be submerged in the search for their self and isolation. Yet, even if we accepted this, it is far from evident that the other direction of implication should work as well. If a young person begins to ask the first questions about themselves and about their identity, it does not immediately follow that these questions put to paper will make for readable literature. Instead, they might commit the error of abusing art to assert a self they want to be.

This line of reasoning seems to have a strong pull. To write is to be cool. And what is cooler than to depict (and live) a solitary man's struggle with the world around him? Isolation and prophetic cynicism are perceived as cool. Simultaneously a sort of nihilism and defiance can be adopted. Akin to the Eastwoodian anti-hero, the self they aim at is a more refined and less moral protagonist. While eating their fire-roasted beans, they polish their “designed in California”-weapon. Its smooth aluminium enclosure equips the lonesome soldier with just the right cutting-edge fashion in their Mexican standoff with evil and society. In one of your early footnotes, you analyse precisely this feature of the cultivated Apple: “Isn't the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn't even matter what you're creating on your MacBook Air. Simply using a MacBook Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris.”

The temptation to slip into back patting self-affirmation of the young author's existential hermitism is well depicted in Male Novelist Jokes. The fact that these jokes take the form of low-brow amusements (How many x does it take to do y) stands in stark contrast with their smart but scorching sarcasm. However, their formal kinship with all too familiar misogynistic, racist or otherwise discriminating jokes, parallels the young male author's laddism. For instance, the following makes use of all of these elements:

Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: “The cocaine isn't the point. The cocaine is a metaphor,” he explained wearily over the pile of cocaine. She folded her arms. She didn't understand his cocaine. “Didn't you read my manifesto?” The prostitute had read his manifesto. Why couldn't she?

Read more »

by Thomas Rodham Wells

Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history

History too important to be left to national politicians and their ideological visions of national identity and social engineering projects.

First, the principle. History should be truthful, relevant, and just. As an intellectual enterprise history is a matter of fact not opinion, the discovery and painstaking corroboration of contingent events by rigorous peer-reviewed methods. People have a right to an official story that is also true, even if that is upsetting or inconvenient for some politicians or dominant ethnic groups. Children have the right to study the truth rather than propaganda, to be respected as future citizens rather than being used as pawns in a game of social engineering. It is as ridiculous to have national politicians imposing their opinions and calling it history as it would be for them to choose what kind of evolutionary theory gets taught. The idea of ‘national histories' should be replaced with the idea of international history, in which a basic requirement is that every historical account should be compatible with each other. There should be no more of the competitive victimhood in which every country teaches its children that they were the ones attacked without provocation.

Of course it is reasonable for national governments to decide to some extent which areas of the country's history should be the main focus in schools. But national curriculums should not only meet the bare truth requirement. They should also pay adequate attention to the dark side of a nation's past – the oppression of empire, the moral quagmire of occupation, the crimes of autocrats and their accomplices, and so on. The victims of national crimes, and their descendants inside and outside the country, have a particular right to have the crimes against them acknowledged, as in the case of Turkey's Armenian genocide or Japan's war-time atrocities across Asia.

Second, there should be a grievance mechanism that reflects the fact that the way history is taught is a matter not only for national governments, but of human rights below and international relations above. I like the model of the European Court of Human Rights, to which both individuals and other member states can bring cases of rule-breaking by national governments. But instead of legal judges we would have a panel of internationally respected academic historians. False, substantially misleading, or unjust history curriculums would lead to legally binding rulings against propagandist governments including fines and reform requirements.

Read more »

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

This is an excerpt from my book manuscript on call center worlds in India. For five months of my research career, I worked the night shift in a transnational call center and taught workers how to speak in an American accent. What follows are my field notes, summarily rearranged into a modicum of a narrative. All names are pseudonyms in order to protect the identities of my interlocutors.

Media create unique aural and perceptual environments, everyday urban arenas through which people move, work, and become bored, violent, amorous and contemplative. (Larkin 2008: 3)

I cannot sleep. Tossing and turning and dreaming have become the order of the day. And yes, day, not night. Sleeplessness has a power over me that I would have scoffed at when in the throes of my diurnal state. In this nocturnality that is now my life, I just cannot sleep. In my now permanently half awake state, I see visions and stray in and out of states of deep dreaming. I snap myself out of one only to enter the next. The zombies of the daytime world amble along even as I deplete my reserves of energy. The milkman outside the door, the children home from school, the “fastest-finger-first” honkers of the cruel street. In one of my dreams, my father is a doppelganger. Of himself.

Every step feels like a potential fall. I tell myself that the trick is to continue the process of living even while fighting the prospect of that which allows us to become most human, sleeping. Smoke some more, drink some more, fight some more. Fight the light, draw the curtains, and dull the sound. Steal airline kits with blinkers and earplugs. Eat when standing. Quickly. Lest I forget to eat before I have to plop onto bed and enter hallucination central, and lest I lose the hand-eye co-ordination needed to last the route from morsel to mouth.

Staying awake is a technique and the call center, a living, breathing, demanding technology. One night I wake up, and I'm trembling. I have slept through my alarm, and I will miss being at work. My body has betrayed me. At this point, there is no clear disappointment or fear or anguish or disapproval. Just a shiver. And a silent anxiety building to nervous crescendo. I call the company's transport desk, already always on speed dial on my phone to see if a cab might be somewhere in my vicinity. The situation is managed, my out of control state abates, and I make it to work. Sashaying into my training session, I address the young workers in quiet confidence and tell them to manage their sleep.

Read more »

by Gerald Dworkin

It has been a well-recognized phenomenon for some time that how we frame our questions to others affects the answers they give. The best known work on the topic is by Kahneman and Tversky. They give examples such as the following.

Subjects were asked to choose between two treatments for 600 people who had a fatal disease. Treatment A was predicted to result in 400 deaths.

Frame Treatment A
Positive saves 200 lives
Negative 400 people will die

Treatment A was chosen by 72% of participants when it was presented with positive framing (“saves 200 lives”) dropping to only 22% when the same choice was presented with negative framing (“400 people will die”).

Another example: 92% of Ph.d students registered early when there was a penalty for late registration, but only 67% did so when the penalty was framed as a discount for early registration.

Those who choose because of these framing effects display a cognitive bias leading to choices that are less than fully rational.

More recently psychologists and philosophers who are part of the so-called experimental philosophy group (x-phi) turned their attention to whether such framing effects affect judgments about what to do in various well-known examples of moral dilemmas such as the notorious trolley problems. Those of you lucky enough to have escaped the latter will be exposed to them anon.

Here are some examples of framing effects in people's responses to the following hypothetical cases used by philosophers to determine what are called “moral intuitions.” These are the judgments that people make about what is right or wrong, and what they would choose to do in these cases.

1) Standard trolley case. A runaway trolley is heading for a track on which five people are trapped. You are standing by a switch that can divert the trolley onto a track where there is only one person trapped. Should you or should you not divert the trolley?

2) Heavy Man. There is a heavy man standing on a bridge over the tracks. He is standing on a trap door that you can release by pulling a lever. If he drops onto the track with the five people ahead his body will stop the trolley before it gets to them.

3) Heavy Man. Same as above but you are standing on the bridge and have to push him over.

Many people believe that while you ought to divert the trolley in the standard case one ought not to do so in the Heavy Man case. It does not matter, for our purposes, whether you agree or not. What you probably do not believe, and should not believe, is that the order in which you present the cases should affect your judgments about what to do. That is, if we present 1 and then 3, or 3 and then 1, the judgments about what one ought to do in the two cases should not be affected.

Read more »

by Tasneem Zehra Husain

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas”. – Albert Einstein, (Obituary forEmmy Nother)

The first time you encounter a truly dazzling idea, its light seems almost blinding; slowly, your eyes grow more accustomed, and the glare dulls down to a glow which pleasantly illuminates your outlook. At least, that's how it usually happens, but Noether's Theorem is in a class of its own. I first came across it as a graduate student, about fifteen years ago, and to this day, I am stunned by its unfading brilliance.

I find it a travesty that Emmy Noether and her beautiful work are not more widely known. With International Women's Day just behind us, and Noether's birth anniversary around the corner, this seems like a good time to right that wrong. But before I introduce you to Emmy Noether, let me first tell you about her work. That, I am convinced, is how she would have wanted it.

Symmetries & Conservation Laws

The fact that the total energy of a system must always stay fixed, has been used to tremendous effect, countless times and in several contexts; from calculating the height to which a ball will rise, to predicting the existence of the neutrino. The laws of conservation of energy, momentum and charge, have long been considered sacrosanct, but for centuries, no one knew where they came from. To what do we owe the pleasure of their (very welcome) protection? Emmy Noether figured it out: Conservation laws arise out of symmetries, she said. And suddenly, just like that, there was a deeper underlying reason behind these mysteriously powerful statements – they had an origin.

Noether's theorem states that, to every (continuous) symmetry of a theory, there corresponds a conservation law.

What exactly does that mean? Physicist Philip Morrison writes, “symmetry is related to the indiscernibility of differences. Once you walk into the hall of a Palladian building, you can't quite remember whether you turned left or right”. ‘The indiscernibility of differences', while not a formal definition, is a good working description. An object is symmetric if some operation can be performed on it without leaving a trace: a circle, for instance, is rotationally symmetric, because can be rotated (about its center) through any arbitrary angle, and no one will know the difference.

The symmetries Noether was concerned with are far more abstract – they are symmetries of the equations that describe a process (more properly speaking, symmetries of the Lagrangian), not symmetries of the objects participating in the process. In other words, they refer to differences that are indiscernable to the laws of physics.

Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

I.

It's hot out. We're by the pool.

“Shh – baby, we're talking. I'm talking to your father.” Mama slaps my butt playfully, not hard like when I ate all her thyroid pills. Not hard like when she's scared.

I climb onto her lap. Papa watches us from the pool. It's shaped like a peanut. He never really swims, just stands there in the water looking distracted. His elbows rest on the edge, big plastic cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Mama doesn't smoke, but she's got the plastic cup too. She closes her eyes when she takes a sip. Closes her eyes a lot.

I don't know it now, but he will kick these bad habits one day. Quit drinking and stop buying Winston's. He'll call me up to tell me how he threw his pipe into the ocean. I'll laugh at his story while I light my own cigarette, trying to picture him standing over a cliff, flinging his most prized possession into the cold winter waves.

Papa tells me to beat it for a while, he needs to talk to mama. She grabs me tighter, wet chest pressing into my back. He stares at the two of us for a minute, his brown eyes looking into our blue eyes, the father looking at the mother. The father looking at the daughter. A year from now he'll look at the pictures of us on his desk in his new apartment twenty minutes outside of town. He'll pick us up every other weekend and take us to the mall for corn dogs and soda, and wonder when his heart begins aching where he went wrong. How seventeen years of marriage went down the drain, and why the tears on her face and long vacant stares weren't enough to make him feel bad. He'll write a letter the following spring from inside that same apartment, and it'll start “Mien Liebe”, my sweetheart, and my mother will read it and think, and hurt, but not hurt enough. She will tuck it away in a wooden box under the bed, and only pull it out ten years later to show to her daughter in a single nostalgic moment.

Papa is still staring from the pool shaped like a peanut, and my sister has her goggles on. She can hold her breath under water. She sneaks up to daddy and wraps her arms around the hairy part of his belly. He takes another sip and tells her to get off him, no goddamn horseplay, this is a serious time. She's so pretty. Long blonde hair and a red bathing suit. The baby cries from her bouncy seat in the doorway, and mama winds it back up again.

Papa is drying off. He's wearing the blue shorts and they're all bunched between his legs, and he can smoke without using his hands. He can drive like that too – no hands or anything. Balancing a hot cup of coffee between his knees. One time he ran over a gopher that shot out of the lawn and into the street like a bottle rocket. He told me not to tell anybody and I swore I wouldn't because, like he said, mamas are sensitive about that kind of thing.

When they are both remarried and semi-happy, their past just a “fart in the wind” as my sister will put it, my parents find some sort of solace in a shared cup of coffee. “The girls ready yet?” “What do you think?” she'll reply and they'll both laugh. “Got a fresh pot?” “Just about to put it on and she'll scoot past him, squeezing into our small kitchen. Every other weekend pick-ups become their every other weekend visits and they both look forward to them in their own silent ways.

The sun looks like a giant orange sitting in the sky and mama keeps squeezing me. I love you baby, she whispers in my ear with that damp, sweet breath. Papa says he's taking all his books with him. And maybe the antiques, too. You can't leave me with nothing, mama says, and he tells her I'm not – I'm leaving you the kids.

Read more »

by Eric Byrd

Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air, or draughts of water to drink. But that is part of our lesson. (Specimen Days, “New Themes Entered Upon”)

Intensely artful, intensely vernacular – some draughts of the tipsy-making water Emerson talks about in the essay by which young Whitman was called (“The Poet”). But Whitman's waters do not flow in the clear stream of a style that refuses to call attention to itself – the bizarre ideal of those dismayed at the demanding perceptual detours and little linguistic renewals that constitute “good” writing, truly readable writing. Whitman recoiled from what he called “the sickliness of verbal melody,” and the prose of Specimen Days is among the most casual and colloquial in English – but the style still calls and holds one's attention. Style, Flaubert insisted, is an “absolute way of seeing,” and Whitman makes us to see what he sees, in the way he sees, with all the corporeal contours and spiritual subtleties apparent to him.

And did he see! He was everywhere. Metropolitan man of ferried crowds, omnibus flaneur and opera-goer in the booming Astoria of midcentury New York City – an ink-stained bohemian, arguing politics over sudsy steins in rowdy fireman taverns – a stroller of Broadway, where he sees Andrew Jackson, Dickens, and “the first Japanese ambassadors.” In 1861 he goes down to fort-belted wartime Washington (“her surrounding hills spotted with guns”) to nurse the wounded and watch over the dying – meets the bloody boatloads down at the wharf, dresses wounds, reads the Bible at bedsides, loans books, distributes money, stamped letters and writing paper – soda water and syrups when Lee is repulsed at Gettysburg – and pens letters home for the illiterate and feeble. He doesn't know how much good he does but he cannot leave them, stays on in the embattled, cemetery- and hospital-environed capital through the four years of carnage. When not in the wards, he loafs in army camps, observes and notes the goings-on, chills with the pickets through their watches, and clerks part-time in a government bureau until its indignant head realizes he's employing an “indecent poet.” Once stands in the street all night as endless columns file past to the front, savoring unseen the jokes and songs that waft through the dark. He and Lincoln nod to each other when they pass in the street. He chats with Rebel prisoners and Union deserters; compares eastern and western, northern and southern soldiers, speculates about regional types, local moldings, the looks of future Americans. The war – “the most profound lesson of my life,” with “the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Army Hospitals” – breaks his health, and the lusty rambler is confined paralyzed for a time. He regains much of his strength later, enough to resume “gaddings-about in cities” and even to manage “a long jaunt west”—to the “distances join'd like magic” by the railroad—and there to eyewitness the course of empire, to see America planting the prairies with world-feeding wheat, tunneling railways through mountains, feeding forests into steam-powered sawmills, the sublime statistics of this titanic industry yet dwarfed by the continent itself, by the tinted canyons and empyrean peaks, the melted snows thundering through gorges.

Read more »

by Matt McKenna

Over the past year, theatres have been inundated with terrific biopics: Leonardo DiCaprio won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, Matthew McConaughey won an Oscar for his rendition of Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club, and 12 Years a Slave won best picture for its depiction of the life of Solomon Northrup. Less talked about, but even more interesting than the aforementioned films is Non-stop, the recently released Ben Bernanke biopic starring Liam Neeson. Granted, the film isn't a straight retelling of the economist's life–at no point does Neeson's character open up an Excel document and ponder interest rates. Instead, Neeson's character spends most of his time texting terrorists and punching people in the nose, things for which Bernanke isn't particularly well known. Don't be fooled by these surface differences, however. Director Jaume Collet-Serra realized that, in order to adequately tell the story of Ben Bernanke's life as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, he would have to do it through the lens of a suspense-thriller set on a transatlantic flight.

Non-stop is a fantastic example of a high-concept film: an international flight is hijacked, and the accused hijacker happens to be Bill Marks, the American air marshal assigned to protect the plane. Because the movie is more of a mystery film than an action film, the overarching tension isn't so much about the safety of the passengers on board. Rather, audiences are expected to wonder whether or not Marks, played by Liam Neeson, is actually hijacking the plane or if he is, in fact, attempting to save it from being hijacked. The is-he-a-good-guy-or-is-he-a-bad-guy question that pervades Non-stop mirrors the questions surrounding Ben Bernanke and his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve. In a sense, Bernanke was the air marshal assigned to protect the United States economy. And indeed, the policies Bernanke enacted while the economy was “hijacked” by the Great Recession have engendered voluminous commentary on the subject of whether or not he did a good job or a bad job at improving the country's economic outlook.

Read more »