by Lexi Lerner
“They all go the same way. Look up, then down and to the left,” the EMT said. “Always.”
Why?
“I don’t know,” he said. “Well – I think they know. When they look up, they’re just… waiting.”
And the next part – why to the left? Because of the heart?
“I don’t know. Maybe something with blood pressure differences. Maybe something else. I really don’t know.”
I’m not living, I’m just killing time.[1]
It’s absurdly easy to take this life for granted. It’s so easy that I want to, so badly, all the time. The pitfall was built into its coding. So was the challenge: if I let life matter more, I choke.
What’s the worth of sitting in the grass, watching geese, or perhaps fireflies, for days or decades on end? Is it worthy of a lifetime? Where were the geese in my college classrooms? Where were the fireflies at my jobs? What’s the role of ambition? Ambition to do what?
We sat on a bench in Soho, watching a pickup kickball game.
“Is this fragile?” I asked her.
She looked through the chain link fence. The rubber ball sailed across the field; all heads followed its enormous arc. Both teams cheered heartily.
“Yes,” she said.
“Is it sacred?” I asked.
The bruised shadows of trees, the emperor sun behind them, the pigeons.
“Yes,” she said.
On a sun-spotted afternoon in a forest, I asked my dad if he missed his dad, who passed a few years ago.
Sometimes, it doesn’t really feel like he’s gone. More like, I haven’t seen him in a while, and we haven’t spoken in a while, but he’s just a phone call away. I find myself thinking, where’s Pa? Where is he? Read more »
In Tian Shan mountains of the legendary snow leopard, errant wisps of mist float with the speed of scurrying ghosts, there is a climbers’ cemetery, Himalayan Griffin vultures and golden eagles are often sighted, though my attention is completely arrested by a Blue whistling thrush alighting on a rock— its plumage, its slender, seemingly weightless frame, and its long drawn, ventriloquist song remind me of the fairies of Alif Laila that were turned to birds by demons inhabiting barren mountains.
On a recent windy morning, walking past the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument on West 89th Street in New York City, seeing the flag at half mast, just days before the 
Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980 with an attitude and agenda similar to Trump’s—to restore America to its rightful place where “someone can always get rich.” His administration arrived in Washington firm in its resolve to uproot the democratic style of feeling and thought that underwrote FDR’s New Deal. What was billed as the Reagan Revolution and the dawn of a New Morning in America recruited various parties of the dissatisfied right (conservative, neoconservative, libertarian, reactionary and evangelical) under one flag of abiding and transcendent truth—money ennobles rich people, making them healthy, wealthy and wise; money corrupts poor people, making them ignorant, lazy and sick.
When my grandfather died last fall, it fell to my sisters and me to sort through the books and papers in his home in East Tennessee. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist, my grandmother a mathematician, and among their novels and magazines were reams of scientific publications. In the wood-paneled study, we passed around great sheaves of papers for sorting, filling the air with dust.
After spending eight years on death row, Asia Bibi, a Christian, was acquitted by Pakistan’s Supreme Court this week. For many here it seemed like a good day. The country’s highest court had finally delivered justice and released a woman whose life has already been destroyed by years in solitary confinement. The court decision quoted Islamic scriptures, bits of letters by the Prophet Muhammad and a smattering of Shakespeare. A great wrong was righted.
Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as president of the United States can be taken as a striking example of the rise of right-wing populism around the world.
LAST WEEK, AS 
The word Victorian tends to evoke old-fashioned ideas: women confined in corsets, strict gender roles, and a prudishness about all things sexual. In a world where conspicuous consumerism and self-expression rule, these nineteenth-century notions of self-restraint and self-denial seem hopelessly outdated.
When Ammar Campa-Najjar was nine years old, his Palestinian father moved his family to Gaza, the narrow strip of Palestinian territory that has been under an Israeli blockade for over a decade. His family was living there when the second intifada broke out in 2000, and Israeli security forces crushed a violent Palestinian uprising with deadly and often indiscriminate force. He remembers when the electricity and water supply were cut off and sheltering in his kitchen while his neighbourhood was bombed. He remembers how a military Hummer crashed into his family’s car, causing him to burn his back and fracture his thigh and putting his younger brother into a coma.
“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” asked Henry II as he instigated the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in 1170. Down through the ages, presidents and princes around the world have been murderers and accessories to murder, as the great Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and Walter Lunden documented in statistical detail in their masterwork 
IN THE ANNUS MIRABILIS
An increasingly visible school of heterodox macroeconomics, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), makes the case for functional finance—the view that governments should set their fiscal position at whatever level is consistent with price stability and full employment, regardless of current debt or deficits. Functional finance is widely understood, by both supporters and opponents, as a departure from orthodox macroeconomics. We argue that this perception is mistaken: While MMT’s policy proposals are unorthodox, the analysis underlying them is entirely orthodox. A central bank able to control domestic interest rates is a sufficient condition to allow a government to freely pursue countercyclical fiscal policy with no danger of a runaway increase in the debt ratio. The difference between MMT and orthodox policy can be thought of as a different assignment of the two instruments of fiscal position and interest rate to the two targets of price stability and debt stability. As such, the debate between them hinges not on any fundamental difference of analysis, but rather on different practical judgements—in particular what kinds of errors are most likely from policymakers.
So, again, why is there no socialism in the United States? Perhaps when the millennial generation comes to power, the question will no longer make much sense. But if these enthusiastic young fans of socialist democracy are ever to win big in American electoral politics, it’s going to be because they will have figured out a new way to talk about class in America. And to do that, they will need to understand some of the different ways that Americans have thought—and felt—about class. And to do that, they might want to read a neglected classic of American sociology—The American Perception of Class, by Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Cannon, just reissued as an open access title by Temple University Press and available for 
“Douglass engaged in a lifelong autobiographical quest for a coherent story of ascendance and familial identity,” Blight writes, and “for the healing of his own wounds”. Douglass himself thundered that slavery “converted the mother that bore me into a myth, it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world”. He yearned for “a bright gleam of a mother’s love”.