Though we are an aggregator blog (providing links to content elsewhere) on all other days, on Mondays we have only original writing by our editors and guest columnists. Each of us writes on any subject we wish, and the length of articles generally varies between 1000 and 2500 words. Our writers are free to express their own opinions and we do not censor them in any way. Sometimes we agree with them and sometimes we don’t.Below you will find links to all our past Monday columns, in alphabetical order by last name of the author. Within each columnist’s listing, the entries are mostly in reverse-chronological order (most recent first).
by Kathleen Goodwin
As the momentum builds towards a national election in India this spring, it is clear that Indian politics is facing a turning point where the established co-dominance of the incumbent Congress and its long time right-wing rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), faces a challenge not just from regional parties, as in the past, but from a new national party that plans to contest the national election.
by Ahmed Humayun
(This is the second post on Pakistan's struggle against militancy. Part I is here).
So far in Pakistan the militant groups are winning the war of narrative. As I wrote last time, the Pakistani Taliban is by no means a monolith but its different factions do come together around a clear strategic story. Insurgent propaganda states that the rebellion's goal is to replace an illegitimate, un-Islamic government subservient to Washington with an Islamic state. Their war is defensive—for Islam and against America. The state, on the other hand, speaks in contradictory voices. Some say that the state must fight until the rebels lay down their arms, forswear the use of violence, and respect the rule of law, while others insist on immediate, unconditional negotiations. The truth is that ending the turmoil within Pakistan requires some adroit combination of fighting and talking—but only if they are aspects of an integrated strategy that has as its aim the restoration of state control and that realistically accounts for the ambitions of the rebels, which are revolutionary, and which they have pursued from the mountains in the tribal areas to major urban centers across the heartland.
Yet advocates of negotiation —including leading politicians, retired generals, and influential pundits—blame the state and its alliance with Washington rather than the militants for fomenting the violence. As a result it is widely believed in Pakistan that the war against militancy has been foisted on the country by the United States; that insurgent violence is merely retaliation for Pakistani military aggression and American drone strikes in the tribal areas; and that conflict will cease when these operations end. The result is that formula recited by many: ‘This is not our war.' This dominant narrative has had a negative effect on the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the public, created demoralization in the country's army and police forces, and emboldened the insurgents.
What God Says
I place before you a bowl of evidence
but will never make you eat
Chance is what you’re up against,
and the only is of me you’ll meet
You can pray until your tongue expires
and never know my heart’s desire
I roll the future out mysteriously,
you trace my trail of crumbs through mires
You profusely write of who I am
as if I were like you a man
You cannot know the I of me
unless you crack the I of thee
In the light and in the gloom
I beat a drum and hum your tune
.
by Jim Culleny
1/24/14
by Paul Braterman
Lord Kelvin (Smithsoinian Instituion Libraries collection)
Kelvin calculated that the Earth was probably around 24 million years old, from how fast it is cooling. Rutherford believed that Kelvin’s calculation was wrong because of the heat generated by radioactivity. Kelvin was wrong, but so was Rutherford. The Earth is indeed many times older than Kelvin had calculated, but for completely different reasons, and the heat generated by radioactive decay has nothing to do with it.
Disclosure: in my introduction to the Scientific American Classic, Determining the Age of the Earth, and elsewhere, I have like many other authors repeated Rutherford’s argument with approval, without paying attention to Rutherford’s own warning that qualitative is but poor quantitative, and without bothering to check whether the amount of heat generated by radioactivity is enough to do the job. He thought it was but we now know it isn’t. It was only when chatting online (about one of the few claims in the creationist literature that is even worth discussing) that I discovered the error of my ways.
On the face of it, things could not be plainer. Kelvin had calculated the age of the Earth from how fast heat was flowing through its surface layers. An initially red hot body would have started losing heat very quickly, but over geological time the process would have slowed, as a relatively cool outer crust formed. His latest and most confident answer, reached in 1897 after more than 50 years of study, was in the range of around 24 million years.[1]
by Mara Jebsen
I know, from my work as a writing teacher, that almost any student can produce a promising fragment, but very few can manage a coherent whole–in terms of idea, or story– without a great deal of coaxing, insistance, and endless re-writing. The work of a beginner is to complete the fragment. But perhaps the work of a master is to let the fragment be.
As a beginning storyteller myself, I find that whole tales are elusive, and the images arrive like little shards of a broken mirror. What to make of them–that's the hard part. What follows is the first piece of a tiny “novel” that is all pieces, inspired by a Sufi tale I heard three years ago, and subsequently garbled in my mind. In it, a man is visited by three different messengers, all strangers, each of whom require that he leap violently away from the life he is leading, and begin again. In the third phase of the man's life, he begins to show signs of spiritual enlightenment, and he ends as a mystic. The story, for some reason, made dozens of images–partial ones stuck in angled mirror-shards–arrive in my head for two years. In my version, the eventual mystic is a girl. She is young, wealthy, blank.
TODAY WINDY THEN SHOWERS
Gold-plated heels
On heart-shaped leaves
Calf-highs below
Slim band of flesh
Flirty pleats creased
Above naked knees
Ruby clutch releases
Jangling of keys
Wanton cornrows unbraided
In last night's storm
In last night's storm
Wanton cornrows unbraided
Jangling of Keys
Ruby Clutch releases
Above naked knees
Flirty Pleats creased
Slim band of flesh
Below calf-highs
On heart-shaped leaves
Gold-plated heels
By Rafiq Kathwari
by Brooks Riley
by Lisa Lieberman
I used to teach a course on French colonialism, from the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century through the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). On the first day of class, we read Jean de Brunhoff's classic children's book, The Story of Babar. De Brunhoff's story can be viewed as “an allegory of French colonization, as seen by the complacent colonizers,” to quote New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik:
the naked African natives, represented by the “good” elephants, are brought to the imperial capital, acculturated, and then sent back to their homeland on a civilizing mission. The elephants that have assimilated to the ways of the metropolis dominate those which have not. The true condition of the animals—to be naked, on all fours, in the jungle—is made shameful to them, while to become an imitation human, dressed and upright, is to be given the right to rule.
Gopnik, I should add, distances himself from such political readings of the book. He sees Babar as both a manifestation of the French national character, circa 1930 (when de Brunhoff's wife first came up with the tale, which she told to the couple's young sons as a bedtime story) and a gentle parody of it, “an affectionate, closeup caricature of an idealized French society.”
I remember enjoying the book as a child, and I've read it to my own children, but for all its charm, I'm not willing to let Babar off the hook quite so easily. The business of the civilizing mission—the “native” elephants adopting the values and behavior of the humans who inhabit the city—is cringe-inducing enough, but what really troubles me is de Brunhoff's ending. Here the fantasies of French nativists come true. The elephants come and immediately assimilate, recognizing the superiority of the mother country, hang around long enough to entertain their hosts with anecdotes about their exotic origins, and then they go home.
by Hari Balasubramanian
My class required each student to do a hands-on project in a real setting. I chose mine to be the nearest supermarket, a busy metropolitan Safeway store. Broadly speaking, the two big pieces in any queueing study are: (1) how quickly people/requests arrive, and (2) how quickly they are serviced. The interplay of these determines the probability of delays. So for my project at Safeway, I decided to focus primarily on collecting data on customer arrivals and checkout times.
I talked to the store manager, Scott, about my plan. He was a tall, blond man, dressed formally, gentle but with a clear sense of authority. He was immediately worried and didn't get what I was up to. I tried to convince him by suggesting that my data might be useful. Scott was (quite rightly) skeptical, but I got some sort of an affirmation from him. You can't ask customers any questions, he said sternly, and I promised him that.
by Emrys Westacott
Obviously, no one expects every important work of fiction to precipitate some great moral awakening or social reform after the fashion of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Nor do we expect to see patrons of a New York literary festival dispensing cash to street people as they wait for their cabs after a reading. The moral and social benefits of art identified by critics are usually more subtle. Typical academic commentary on fiction, for instance, will see its importance as lying in the way it enlarges our moral imagination, helps us to grasp another's point of view, sensitizes us to another's feelings or sufferings, warns us against certain kinds of illusion, exposes insidious forms of cruelty, shows us how to avoid self-deception, impresses on us some profound truth, strengthens our sense of self, and so on. This approach receives theoretical support in works such as Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge, and John Carey's What Good are the Arts?
A huge amount of literary criticism is of this sort, and it can certainly be interesting, insightful, and entertaining to read. But I also believe that it might be useful, for once, to meet it with a robust, even vulgar skepticism. I would not deny that literary works are sometimes capable of having desirable effects of the kind just mentioned on individuals and society. But I believe that in most cases, such benefits are either negligible, or short-lived or non-existent. They certainly provide a rather flimsy reason for valuing the works. Compared to the much more obvious good of the enjoyment we derive from reading fiction and poetry, their value as instruments of edification is like the light of stars against the light of a full moon.
by Mathangi Krishamurthy
Sometime this year of 2014, my father will retire, ending thirty odd years of service tending and minding a chemical factory. We will also concurrently end what I consider my foundational era, and will have to stop inhabiting a particular vision of the Indian nation-state.
For years, my answer to that most ubiquitous question, “Where are you from?” used to be a really long sentence. “On the National Highway Number Four from Bombay to Pune”, I would begin, “somewhere between New Bombay and Lonavala”, I would continue, “…it's a two-pony town”, I would cautiously insert before ending with, “Rasayani; I'm sure you haven't heard of it.”
My one important memory of Rasayani – the place named after the word ‘chemical' in Hindi, “Rasayan” – is of snakes. I remember waking up one morning, being called out to excitedly by many voices, one distinctly my mother's. And I cautiously stepped outside, to see a man hurling a snake by its tail into the distance. Some kind of pioneering and slightly mad community we must have seemed in my newly anointed Rasayanic head.
I was four or five and we were a bunch of young families, newly imported to one more example of the nation-building spirit of the pre-1991 Indian nation-state, the industrial township. Or in other words, as literature across the world calls it, the company town.
The sociologists Rex Lucas and Lorne Tepperman in their groundbreaking 1971 study “Minetown, Milltown, Railtown”, define company towns as “closed communities owned and administered by the industrial employer” and as a place where everyone, and ominously, the company, knows everyone. Rasayani is a many-company town harboring competing closed communities. Or as we called them, colonies.
by Randolyn Zinn
Meditative Rose by Salvador Dali
Owen
He walks into a millinery shop in Back Bay, looking for a straw Panama.
“Do you have any Persian lamb Papakhas?” he asks, just for the hell of it.
“We don’t work with skins,” the milliner replies, coiling a cloth measuring tape between his fingers. In the back workroom, a hot iron hisses as held by a red-faced girl with chubby arms, who yawns as she presses a piece of striped ribbon.
“Do you know,” Owen says, eager to impress the shopkeeper, “that President Karzai’s Afghan Karacul hat is made from the downy fur of aborted lamb fetuses?”
The milliner sniffs. “Is there something I can help you with, sir?”
Owen tries on every hat in the store. The porkpie is too retro. The Basque beret a bit better, and in the gray Fedora with a white grosgrain ribbon band, he’s a dead ringer for a 1920’s Chicago gunrunner. Not good.
“I’ll take this one in straw,” he says, fingering a Borsalino. “How much?”
“Only in felt, sir. We only deal in felt. And wool.”
Owen’s neck reddens and puffs out like the feathers on a parrot. “How idiotic,” he spits. “Aren’t you a hat store? I want a hat.”
He storms out of the shop and a little bell at the top of the door jangles like an angry fairy when it closes behind him. He knows he’s been unreasonable, but can’t help himself. He’s inconsolable.
Neighbors pushing grocery carts or sitting on benches look up as he passes, the violence of his exit a palpable disturbance to their calm.
by Michael Lopresto
The idea of objective value has come into disrepute in some quarters. We have an image of the natural world, well defined by physics—a world of mostly empty space filled sparsely with unimaginably tiny objects (an umbrella term for particles, fields and waves) that are governed in law-like ways. Indeed, this world, given precise definition and overwhelming empirical support, is often thought to be radically different to the world we know from experience—the world of vibrant colours and sounds, tastes and smells. The fact that our perception of the world seems to be so profoundly impoverished has led many to despair at the prospects of genuine knowledge of the world. So, this line of reasoning goes, the natural world given to us by physics has absolutely no room for objective values, as pure “atoms in the void” exhaust all of reality.
I think this line of reasoning is wrong, and shows the desperate need for philosophers to make sense of the natural world as defined by physics, with our place as human beings firmly as part of that natural world. To use a term from Wilfrid Sellars, it's the job of philosophers to navigate the way between the scientific image and the manifest image of the world. The scientific image is the “atoms in the void” picture of reality, where ordinary objects like tables and chairs are really just near-empty lattice like structures of atoms. The manifest image is what is presented to us in experience, where tables and chairs are solid objects, we have rich conscious experiences of music that touches us deeply, and, as I'll be focusing on in the remainder of this essay, objective values that bind on us whether we like it or not.
In his superb book, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (1998), the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson develops some tools for navigating our way between the scientific image and the manifest image.
by Ben Schreckinger
This past November, they held the sixth annual EPIC Summit in Toledo. As the name implies, it was “a day of career-enhancing training and networking.” Epic!
Use of the word “epic” has exploded in recent years, but the incidence of actual epic things has not. Now, as likely as not, “epic” refers to the quotidian, the small, and the mundane Need proof? Take the actual first result in my Twitter search for #EpicFail: “Just realised I forgot to buy crumpets for breakfast in the morning….so no toasted buttery crumpets for me!! Boo! #epicfail.” Some of my friends work for a company called Epic Systems. It does health care IT. I’ve been eating at a food hall in Dublin that advertises its epic club sandwich. It’s no wonder the top definition of epic on Urban Dictionary calls it “the most overused word ever… Everything is epic now.” Something has gone terribly wrong.
It’s past time to add “epic” to the sad list of words that have come to mean what they don’t mean. The Oxford English Dictionary caused an uproar this summer when the press discovered it had expanded its definition of “literally” to also mean figuratively — because that’s how people now use it. That redefinition was a defeat for language purists in their battle against sloppy usage. But the bastardization of epic signals something far graver: the inescapable malaise of post-industrial existence.
The world of the true epic is one of famine and feast, terrifying monsters and awesome deities. It conveys the mysteries of the wild unknown and the joy of emerging from it to rediscover the comforts of hearth and home. The epic’s grand scale reflects the awe with which its characters view a world whose grandeur they can’t contemplate. In other words, the world of the epic is the opposite of New York City, where the diners stay open 24 hours and the drug dealers deliver. The epic hero is the opposite of the modern knowledge worker, for whom the closest thing to an existential struggle is a battle for market share. After the sack of Troy, Odysseus was lost for 20 years before he returned home to Ithaka. Now we have GPS. It’s hard to imagine The Odyssey with iPhones.
Odysseus: Hey babe, I totally killed the presentation enemy today. Looks like I’ll be home late though. Google Maps is showing some traffic on the Aegean.
Penelope: Pls hurry! These suitors are making me nervous.
Odysseus: Umm, uninstall Tinder? LOL.
by Carl Pierer
To philosophers, and I mean to include all people interested in philosophical questions, this is a pretty standard response to a pretty well-known thought experiment: The Trolley Problem. But it is not only in philosophy that you get very uncanny scenarios when trying to clarify an idea by applying it theoretically. These thought experiments play an important role in fields as diverse as physics and arts, mathematics and literature, but the most infamous ones are probably to be found in philosophy, and in ethics particularly. Not only are they notorious, but in fact they face two challenges, which easily turn into dangers should we ignore them and base our argument on them.
First of all, thought experiments have to be distinguished from metaphors, since they serve different purposes. At first sight it might seem that they are poles apart. However, Dennett writes: “If you look at the history of philosophy, you see that all the great and influential stuff has been technically full of holes but utterly memorable and vivid. They are (…) lovely thought experiments. Like Plato's cave, and Descartes's evil demon, and Hobbes' vision of the state of nature and the social contract, and even Kant's idea of the categorical imperative.” Dennett here conflates a variety of famous philosophical scenarios under the heading “thought experiments”. Yet the structure of Plato's cave is completely different from Descartes's evil demon. In Plato's case there is no new knowledge gained. It is not a hypothetical scenario of how the world might be, but rather a more literary expression of how it actually is. The philosopher's ascent from the cave is figurative and an it does not serve the purpose of drawing some conclusion from this view, but rather to embrace the general idea that this is the philosophers' condition. It is a picture, an illustration of his idea rather than a method to develop a new belief. Descartes, on the other hand, imagines an evil demon who brings about a very sophisticated illusion of reality, making us think that all our experiences are real while they are merely his creations. It is an application of radical scepticism. Once we hypothetically accept this scenario Descartes asks whether any of our pre-demonic knowledge still stands. The difference between Plato's cave and Descartes's demon is that the former is a mere illustration of an idea. The latter, in contrast, serves to provide some new insight. Therefore, I propose to distinguish between thought experiments and metaphors. The purpose of the former has to be a more rigid one than that of the latter. We use thought experiments to test what happens if we apply our theoretical ideas. Its similarity to actual experiments should not be ignored. We peruse those hypothetical results, and only if we can accept them are we ready to accept a theory.
However, more often than not, thought experiments are used the other way round. Hypothetical scenarios are invented in such a way that our theories fail to deliver what is expected of them.
by Brooks Riley
by Mara Naselli
“A foolish consistency,” Emerson famously wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I memorized this line in high school. It was one of those Emersonian zingers that gave me momentary purchase in my otherwise bewildered adolescent state. Nothing cohered in those days. I didn’t know who I was or where I belonged. Literature might have been a consolation, but reading required a concentration I was often too depleted to muster. But that line—that line I held onto. How delightful the feel of hobgoblin—the labial b, glottal g and l, the nasal n rolling back and forth in the mouth like a marble.
I hadn’t lived long enough to understand what Emerson meant by consistency, nor did I realize hobgoblins were both dreaded and amusing, petty little troublemakers. To my ear it was the sound of imbecility—the perfect word to describe my small suburban world that alternately objectified and ignored me. Though I hardly noticed, that sprite of a line was making light of my seriousness, skipping along with its arms swinging, like a nursery rhyme: “adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
It was once practically an American rite of passage to read Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in high school. Its forcefulness seemed to affirm the abundance around us. We lived in new suburbs, on land that not so long before had been open fields, and before that wooded plains. Subdivisions and gleaming, glassy shopping malls sprang up with the confidence of new money—our twentieth-century Manifest Destiny. Our world was contained within brick facades and putty-colored siding on streets with names like Kensington Cross and Buckingham Place. Bright curbs, smooth black pavement—but no sidewalks, so as not to disturb the “colonial feel.” From my Middle America blossomed entitlement and palliative consumption. Our parents had arrived. A daughter of affluence was expected to display the fruits of her parents’ achievement. Short skirts, school spirit, an absurd accumulation of extracurricular activities—the only appropriate response at the time seemed to be a feminine compliance. A silence, really. I had no language yet with which to reject the dumbing effects of material comfort.
by Maniza Naqvi
I'm in turmoil when he is there but always sorry when it is time to let him go. And why not, he is after all, such a complicated man; a beautiful man. He would have to be. After all– I have created him. Quintessential: American hero. The one, everyone hates but never quite as much as he hates himself. Still, still—certainly not as much as I, hate him. Love will do that, you know.
So, a beautiful man, my creation: gone. Gone, until, he resurfaces again suddenly. And he always has these past so many decades when the news has been and is all about dictatorships, war and the violence of subverting whole societies and I have traveled for work to places torn by war or about to be. And in this time alongside the work, and witnessing the world and watching BBC and CNN— I have written poetry and fiction. But the time for this has been limited for I am overwhelmed with visits to villages and planning and designing programs to tackle misery and poverty.
So the time I have spent with him can be stacked up as a few short chapters or even dots on the point of a pin—in relation to his and my entire lives and yet in hindsight those moments seemed to be in emotional volume disproportionately more meaningful than all the others. When he leaves, as he always does, he says: Hope to see you at some point. What point might that be? I have always asked. Those points—in the past have been scattered. Each point, in the moment, as is the point of all of this, was all that there was at that point—and breathlessly all that mattered—as in, without full stops and commas, without pauses—the time spent with him, in the margins of moleskins was always, constant and seamless. And in hindsight was always pointless.
by Dave Maier
Earlier posts in this series: here, here, here, and see also here (scroll down).
Our first set is another time capsule, mostly from the glorious 1970s.
1. Heldon – Virgin Swedish Blues (Heldon III)
Heldon is guitarist and synthesist Richard Pinhas with occasional help from others, the Continental counterpart to Robert Fripp's King Crimson. This track, from 1975 or so (check the hairstyles on the cover if there is any doubt of this), is an overt hommage to Fripp & Eno, but that distinctive guitar tells us who it really is. Some early Heldon is a bit raw for effective spatial journeying, but this one is right out there. Some of you may know Pinhas from that bizarre Lingua Franca article in which we hear how Pinhas so freaked out Philip K. Dick that the latter was moved to alert the FBI. True story!
2. Tonto's Expanding Headband – Riversong (Zero Time)
Not that Tonto (which interestingly enough means “stupid” in Italian), but TONTO: The Original New Timbral Orchestra, a titanic bank of electronics assembled by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. They – and it – are best known for their work with Stevie Wonder on a string of classic 1970s albums (e.g. Talking Book and Innervisions), but they put out some music of their own as well. I'm not convinced by some of the compositions, but this track is a stunner. Incidentally, Tonto has a new home.
by Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis
David V. Johnson recently wrote an essay for 3 Quarks Daily titled “A Refutation of the Undergraduate Atheists.” In the essay, he accuses the New Atheists of making a simplistic and ultimately unfalsifiable claim—namely, that “humanity would be better off without religion.” It is, as Johnson points out, rather difficult to prove this kind of broad counterfactual. The New Atheists (or the Undergraduate Atheists, as Johnson calls them, including the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris) “claim to know something that cannot, in fact, be known and must be accepted on faith.”
Interestingly, Johnson is himself an atheist. But he wonders whether humanity might actually be better off with religion, even if there is no God and religion has no basis in truth. “Consider,” Johnson writes, “the tremendous boon in happiness for all of them in knowing, in the way a believer knows, that their lives and the universe are imbued with meaning, that there is a cosmic destiny in which they play a part, that they do not suffer in vain, that their death is not final but merely a transition to a better existence. This mental state is, I submit, so important to human happiness that people are willing to suffer and die for it, and do so gladly.”
Though they disagree about the purpose of religion, as atheists, Johnson and the New Atheists come from roughly the same position. They are non-believers looking out upon the vast sea of believing human beings and trying to figure out whether these false beliefs are detrimental or beneficial. In playing with the idea that false beliefs could be beneficial, Johnson brings up the work of Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), the Spanish writer whose essays and novels made him one of the most important thinkers of his time, though he isn’t read so widely today.
Johnson discusses one story in particular, “San Manuel Bueno, Martyr.” It is a powerful story, beautifully written. It is about a village priest who secretly harbors many doubts about his faith. But he throws himself into his work as a priest. The priest does such good work with the people that a young atheist from the city (Lazaro), who comes back to the village to “enlighten” the villagers, ends up becoming an “unbelieving” Catholic, just like San Manuel. Here’s how Johnson explains the story:
Like Lazaro, San Manuel doesn't believe the articles of faith. (“I believe in one God, the Father and Almighty, Creator of heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen …”) What he believes in, rather, is administering to the needs of the villagers, in putting on such a convincing performance of dedication to Christ that they all believe he is a saint and have their faith in the Church and in life everlasting sustained. Lazaro's “conversion,” then, is one consistent with atheism. He becomes a lay-minister of sorts under San Manuel and eventually dies a Catholic.
The moral of the story, according to Johnson: Religion is false, but the people need it because it makes them happy. The only problem with this reading of the story is that Unamuno thought no such thing. Unamuno was, in fact, contemptuous of the idea of “blind faith.” But Unamuno was also a practicing Christian when he wrote the story. There’s something funny going on here, you might think. In a sense, you’d be right.
