Saba Ahmed at Prospect Magazine:

Every month, 45,000 migrant workers arrive in the Pakistani port city of Karachi. This is just one remarkable fact in Samira Shackle’s compelling portrait of the “mega-city,” in which she turns her attention away from the affluent neighbourhoods of Defence and Clifton towards the municipalities of Orangi and Lyari, which are mired in gang violence, corruption and ethnic conflict.

Shackle travels further, sketching the geography of Sindh province: its mangrove forests, sandy beaches and dry riverbeds, as well as the arid scrubland where the ancestral homes of villagers are being illegally torn down to build gated suburbs for Karachi’s growing middle class. We hear the stories of residents, their histories of migration and resettlement, which stretch from Partition to the Bangladesh war and the rise of the Taliban.

more here.

Pure Mathematics

I’ve been told it is all theory in the end, no letter
…. applying to number
That stands for a thing, no principal accruing interest
…. in a practical account,
Only the pure joy of theory and the theory of theories
…. I heard
My drunk mathematician friend try to explain one night
…. in a Country & Western bar,
Collaring the few who’d listen, truckdrivers and ex-jocks,
…. to show them proof
That followed some premise they didn’t care to understand.

We might have been crabs comprehending opera or sibyls
…. poking the blue entrails of frogs,
And still his logic accumulated napkins in an orderly pile
…. that the red-haired waitress,
Who finally asked him to leave, swept away and dumped
…. under the counter in a barrel.
And driving home later on that icy farm-to-market road,
…. he was still
Expounding, jubilantly, maniacally, as the way weaved
…. and the universal values
Of arbitrary points unrolled an infinitely expanding line.

It was the clean relish of his mind that made me forget
…. the hard curves, the trees
That loomed from snowy shoulders down to the creek.
…. My mind was never like that.
What I liked best the year I studied calculus was chance
…. error, my lame prayer
That I might arrive like Columbus, who came by wrong
…. to the right unknown. Nothing applied.
O hypothetical mind, we many who are left behind know
…. we can never know. We
Stand grounded under the twin wings of the infinite sign.

Read more »

Joanna Kavenna at Literary Review:

What is health anyway, when everyone dies in the end? The World Health Organization defines it as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. This is a long way from the attitude of the ‘last of the great Bakhtishu family of physicians, around the year 1000 in Baghdad’, writes Bamforth: they found that the perfect state of health ‘does not exist’. What about Schopenhauer and his definition of humanity as a synthesis of the infinite and the finite?

Acutely aware of the overarching weirdness of all of the above, Bamforth has created a fascinating ‘medical dreambook’, full of night terrors and waking visions. He dreams of ‘rales’ and ‘crépitations’, crackles in the lungs heard via stethoscope. He dreams of Thomas Mann and his magic mountain, where Hans Castorp meets Dr Hofrat Behrens, aka Rhadamanthus, judge of the dead.

more here.

Samantha Culp in The Atlantic:

The pandemic, which has seemed stranger than science fiction in so many ways, has occasioned much debate about the role of speculative fiction in imagining the future: The possibilities of such stories have felt, to some, like answers amid uncertainty, even as others have questioned the limits of dystopian visions. But perhaps an equally relevant literature to revisit is speculative nonfiction: the constantly evolving genre we might call “pop futurism.”

What are the telltale signs of a “pop futurist” book? It sketches out possible tomorrows, highlights emergent trends to watch, and promises ways for even nonspecialists to apply these insights to their own life and work. It’s likely to sport an arresting cover, a style dating back to the work that arguably pioneered this genre and still casts a long shadow. Future Shock—the book by Alvin Toffler that helped popularize “futurism” as a concept in mainstream culture and business, and which recently marked its 50th anniversary—was printed in multiple colorways so that it would jar the eye as a neon rainbow beaming off bookstore shelves. Other titles have kinetic lettering that judders off the page, as if traveling at high speed. The writing’s tone usually sits somewhere between start-up pitch and self-help mantra, with the oracular confidence of the returned time traveler.

More here.

Jennifer Hallam in Thirteen:

When Africans were taken from their homes and forced into slavery, they were separated from mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers and were torn from extensive kinship networks. Enslaved in the British colonies of North America or the free states of the American Union, the ability of Africans to reestablish nuclear families and familial support systems depended on many factors including the needs and desires of the slave owner. As the circumstances of slavery changed across time and place, the opportunities for slaves to marry, have children, and create stable family units fluctuated.

Slave trade to the original thirteen colonies was slow and sporadic. In places like New York and Virginia, where small farming units were the norm, slaves were bought by handfuls rather than shiploads. The preference for male laborers limited the ability of most black slaves in early colonial society from developing relationships with black women. Among the Atlantic Creole population in New Amsterdam, however, a more balanced male to female ratio made as many as twenty-six marriages possible. These unions took place within the Dutch Reformed Church. The church became an institution through which New Amsterdam blacks were able to form independent familial units. In addition to marriage papers, archives of the Dutch Reformed Church contain baptism records that list children according to fathers rather than owners and name black godparents as witnesses.

Enslaved blacks attempted to provide for their family members financially, as well as spiritually. At a time when slavery was still a concept rather than a legal institution, blacks from New Amsterdam to the Chesapeake Bay used the courts to ensure the well-being of family members. Numerous slaves made bequests of property to wives or children in wills.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

Do bees have generals? Do they constitute a nation? A tribe? Perhaps a clan?

How we answer these questions may reveal something about our implicit convictions regarding what might be called “the metaphysics and politics of the swarm”. What is it exactly that forms when several individual entities, human or animal or something different still, come together after the manner of the bees, and act as one? And what are the political potentials and hazards of human individuals in particular coming together in this way?

Answering these questions in turn may help us to make some sense of the political promise of such frenzies as we have seen over the past few days, when a concerted effort on the part of the lads from Reddit drove up the price of GameStop stock, squeezing the hedge-fund managers who had hoped to short it, costing Wall Street billions of dollars, and sending the market into chaos.

More here.

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

Ever since astronomers reached a consensus in the 1980s that most of the mass in the universe is invisible — that “dark matter” must glue galaxies together and gravitationally sculpt the cosmos as a whole — experimentalists have hunted for the nonluminous particles.

They first set out in pursuit of a heavy, sluggish form of dark matter called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP — the early favorite candidate for the cosmos’s missing matter because it could solve another, unrelated puzzle in particle physics. Over the decades, teams of physicists set up ever larger targets, in the form of huge crystals and multi-ton vats of exotic liquids, hoping to catch the rare jiggle of an atom when a WIMP banged into it.

But these detectors have stayed quiet, and physicists are increasingly contemplating a broader spectrum of possibilities. On the heavy end, they say the universe’s invisible matter could clump into black holes as heavy as stars. At the other extreme, dark matter could spread out in a fine mist of particles thousands of trillions of trillions of times lighter than electrons.

More here.

Jacob Mchangama in Arc Digital:

After years of providing oxygen to the political guerrilla tactics of Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey finally decided that fanning the flames of violent insurrection through a firehose of incendiary falsehoods violated their terms of service (sort of).

From a purely legal point of view, Facebook and Twitter were on solid ground. The First Amendment might be the most protective free speech standard in the world, but this bulwark of liberty protects the social media platforms from government officials, not government officials from the platforms.

Since Facebook and Twitter are private entities, some liberals see no free speech issue at all with how they moderate user generated content distributed to billions of people across the world, many of whom rely heavily on social media for news and information.

In the specific context of Trump, the narrow legal purist understanding of free speech is seductive. Indeed, the muting of Trump feels almost cathartic after four years of incessant disinformation, petty grievances, and stab-in-the-back legends with Trump as the victim fighting heroically against the “Enemies of the People.”

However, the larger ecosystem needed for free speech to thrive does not begin or end with the law.

More here.

Dan Froomkin in Salon:

Channels to fall asleep to

While shoe box to shoe box travels my childhood

Professionals roll garbage cans around a conference room
Half the size of a holding tank
Half the hope of a holding tank
Full of third world retail flattery
“nothing wrong with the blind leading the blind,”

………………………………………………….…….. we think they just said

…………………………… the entire train station crouches behind a piano player
……………………………… ……and why should Harlem not kill for its musicians
……………………………… ……………………………….………………..“He is in a dream”
……………………………… ……………………………………………………..“A spirit world”
……………………………… ………………………………….…“I should introduce myself”
……………………………… ……………………………………“And convince him to sleep”

porcelain epoch
succeeding for the most part
dying for the most part
married for the most part to its death

when a hostage has a hostage
that is u.s. education

stores detach their heads
and expect you to do the same when you enter

God says, “do not trust me in this room”
Two fascists walk into a bar
One says, “let’s make a baby.”
The other says, “let’s make three… and let the first one eat the other two.”

……………………………… ……………………..……………….…….your sky or mine
……………………………… …………………..………………………………….read from
……………………………… ……………..…………the book of pool room enemies

“I’m the best kind of square. Poor and in love with the 1960s. The first picture I ever
saw in my life faded from my storytelling a long time ago.”

Not even ten years old
And most of you are on my shoulders

……………………………… ………………….The store’s detached head smiled

casually be poor
… teach yourself
… how to get out of this room
… and we’ll leave you enough blood
… to turn off the lights
… on your way out

casually be poor
.. they are all cops when you are poor

by Tony Eisen-Martin
from Brooklyn Quarterly

Kamala Thiagarajan in NPR:

“Do we loathe our masters behind a façade of love, or do we love them behind a façade of loathing?”

This is just one of the questions that Balram Halwai, a poor, village-bred Indian boy and the central character of the movie The White Tiger, asks himself as he works as a chauffeur to a rich businessman in Delhi. The movie, newly released on Netflix, is an adaptation of the Booker Prize- winning debut novel of the same name by Indian author Aravind Adiga. Produced by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and directed by Ramin Bahrani, the film offers a grim tale of corruption and betrayal, examining the complex dynamics of the employer-servant relationships in India while delving into the country’s stark rich-poor divide and its class and caste issues. A predominant image in the movie is the rooster coop — a metaphor for the oppression of India’s poor: “The greatest thing to come out of this country … is the Rooster Coop. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers … They know they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.”

…Not everyone feels the rooster coop image was an apt representation. Vaishali Shadangule, 42, founder of the fashion house Vaishali.S, left her hometown of Vidisha, about 500 miles from Mumbai, as a 17-year-old, with only the clothes on her back and the burning need to escape the limitations of a small town. Traveling ticketless on the train out of her hometown and headed for the northern Indian city of Bhopal, she had no money and no plan either. “I disliked the way the movie portrays poor people,” she says. “I thought it catered to the white Western gaze, reinforcing stereotypes that the poor are helpless.”

The overriding theme of the rooster coop in the movie is offensive and insulting, she says, because it dehumanizes poor people and implies that anyone born poor is subservient and servile.

More here.

Adam Przeworski in Boston Review:

Some time in 1991 I was invited to give a talk to the Andalusian Confederation of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). Afterward, the secretary of the confederation walked me back to my hotel. I asked him why there was a widespread atmosphere of demoralization within the party. Nos hicieron hablar un idioma que no era el nuestro, he answered: “They made us speak a language that was not ours.”

Note that the secretary did not evoke the industrial restructuring of the 1980s, which significantly reduced the party’s industrial working class base. Nor did he refer to the emergence of television, which reduced the importance of the party machine in mobilizing that base. He also did not point to cultural transformations in Spanish society, which rendered new ideological dimensions politically salient. Instead, he identified the root of the party’s transformation in language—the language party leaders were expected to use to address their supporters, publicly interpret the world, and justify their policies. What was this language that was not “ours”?

To answer this question we have to go back in time and to venture beyond Spain. The two keywords of the socialist movements born in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century were “working class” and “social revolution,” where the latter was expected to realize the “ultimate goal” of abolishing the class system. Yet when socialist parties entered into electoral competition and, for the first time, gained parliamentary power in the aftermath of World War I, “ultimate goals” were not sufficient to mobilize electoral support or to govern. As political leaders, socialists had to offer a program of immediate improvements to the life conditions of the public. Moreover, socialists learned to dilute or obscure the language of class in order to win elections. While communists continued to adhere to “class contra class” strategy, socialists formed coalitions and fronts aimed at appealing to “the people.”

Thus reformism was born: the strategy of proceeding toward socialism by steps, through electoral expression of popular support.

More here.

Christopher Kutz in the LA Review of Books:

A FIERCE AND EMOTIONAL debate recently broke out among the first-year law students at UC Berkeley, where I teach. Because of the strain of remote learning during the pandemic, roughly half the class asked that the law school suspend ordinary grading (as we did last spring) and replace our letter grades with pass/fail grades. The other half of the class opposed this proposal in equally heartfelt terms.

It turned out that many advocates for keeping the letter grades were first-generation students and students of color, whom Berkeley enrolls in significant numbers. These students argued that grades give them a chance at competing for jobs. Without grades, they worried, potential employers would rely on stereotypes and hire those students who most resemble themselves.

Meritocracy looks different from different angles, and is easier to dismiss when you’re already sitting pretty.

This matter of angles and perspectives was apparent to me as I read the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? The book is a jeremiad against meritocracy, taking Harvard as its model. It is a view of Harvard as seen from Harvard. For someone looking at Harvard from 3,000 miles away in California — or more often, looking at meritocracy in the public university system and therefore not looking at Harvard at all — things appear very different.

To Sandel, Harvard represents meritocracy run amok, epitomized by its less than five percent admissions rate. This meritocratic extremism imperils the common good by leaving the other 99.5 percent out in the cold, allocating wealth, power, and cultural prestige to a small elite of “winners,” and creating extreme political, economic, and cultural stratification and polarization in its wake.

To me, in contrast, not only is Harvard not much of a model of meritocracy but there are different and far more important sources for the polarization we are facing. The best hope of a solution to this polarization bypasses Harvard altogether.

More here.

Andrew Elrod in Phenomenal World:

Until 1980, the annual rate of change of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the weighted measure of the cost of a basket of core consumer goods, increased at an accelerating pace in every business-cycle expansion, reaching double digits during the 1940s and 1970s. Inflation—its causes and consequences—was at the heart of economic debates throughout this period, when the discipline of macroeconomics took its current form. While we understand individual industry price changes in terms of supply, demand, and market power, our conceptual tools for understanding inflation remain weak. Neither monetarist attention to the “money supply” nor the institutionalist focus on the Phillips Curve have provided a reliable guide with which to construct macroeconomic policy: the relationship between the price level and the unemployment rate has attenuated with the decline of collective bargaining, and a more than eleven-fold increase in the sum of checking deposits, savings deposits, and cash on hand in the US since 1980 (the standard M2 measure of the money supply) has seen the annual increase in the CPI fall below four percent for all but a handful of the past forty years. Even the phenomenon implied by the term is the subject of confusion: Does it refer to the amount of money or debt in circulation, or to a rise in price and values? If the latter, which prices or values?

More here.

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian:

This may be why I find the ambition of Jonathan Bate’s new book a little on the mad side. Crikey, but this is daring. Attempting to squeeze the short, dazzling lives of Fitzgerald and Keats, already so much written about, into one short volume, he asks a huge amount of himself, and of his reader. Flipping between 19th-century Hampstead and 20th-century Los Angeles, between Keats’s mooning after the barely outlined figure of Fanny Brawne and Fitzgerald’s tortured relationship with the altogether more vivid creation that was his wife, Zelda, has the potential to cause a certain amount of dizziness. I felt at moments as though I was caught between two lovers. When I was with Keats, I longed to get back to Fitzgerald; when I was with Fitzgerald, I would experience a sudden, fierce pang for Keats.

more here.