Fletching

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

I sit across from my husband at a Chinese restaurant downtown. We sit outside, in one of those wooden outhouses that Covid has made into a mainstay of New York dining. It is his lunch break, and I have come downtown to meet him, to talk things out. Frankness and care sit with us at the table; they mediate the space between us, between my cabbage and dumpling soup and his shrimp in egg sauce with white rice. 

“Why must you bring our past traumas into every argument?” he asks. His voice is steady as he asks it. The question is a question, not an accusation. In his face, I see the desire to understand. “It’s a question I ask myself, too.”

The question strikes a chord, rings a bell deep inside me, sets off alarms I did not know were there. I sit with it a moment. “I don’t know,” I say. “Or,” I continue, “I know, but—”

He finishes the thought for me: “But you don’t know why you can’t just let that tendency go.”

I nod. He nods. We understand what we’ve said and what it means, if not what it means we ought to do. We finish our lunch, and we part with smiles and jokes. We are well. As I walk uptown toward the train, however, I turn the question over and over in my mind. Why must you bring our past traumas into every argument?

*

Fletching is a word we don’t really use anymore because we live in a world of guns. It simply means to affix feathered vanes to arrows in order to make them fly. Fletching is a painstaking labor, a labor performed, one imagines, in days long gone by, only by those with the nimblest and swiftest of fingers. It is beautiful in my imagination, this work—full of colors and textures and needle-like precision. In reality, it was probably arduous and tedious, probably bent the back and wore out the eyes. But, of course, it was necessary, for in a world without guns, what is life without arrows?  Read more »



Call of Duty

by Danielle Spencer

When I was 12 my parents fought, and I stared at the blue lunar map on the wall of my room listening to Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away” while their muffled shouts rose up the stairs. As I peered closely at the vast flat paper moon—Ocean Of Storms, Sea of Crises, Bay of Roughness—it swam, through my tears, into what I knew to be my future, one where I alone would be exiled to a cold new planet. But in fact it was just an argument, and my parents still live together—more or less happily—in that same house where I was raised.

Some years ago I began dating a man whose marriage had broken up just a few months beforehand. Sam’s two sons Marco and Carl were 12 and 15, climbing the craggy precipice between childhood and adolescence, unsuspecting and devastated by the news. He assured them that he loved them very much and that he could explain more about the reasons for what he’d done when they grew older, if they wanted to know.

Both boys were playing a lot of Xbox Call of Duty, the online interactive WWII game, and Sam reasoned that if he played with them it was a way to do something together—in this case shoot Nazis—on nights they weren’t staying with him. Marco and Carl were more or less infinitely better at it than he was, though, and he wanted to become skilled enough to play on their team. Sam is a surgeon, researcher and inventor, possessed of tireless will and determination. And so he resolved to practice until he mastered the game. Read more »

The Millions of Christs of America

by Akim Reinhardt

The three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964 edition) | Open LibraryAs an undergraduate History major, I reluctantly dug up a halfway natural science class to fulfill my college’s general education requirement. It was called Psychology as a Natural Science.  However, the massive textbook assigned to us turned out to be chock full of interesting tidbits ranging from optical illusions to odd tales. One of the oddest was the story of Leon, Joseph, and Clyde: three men who each fervently believed he was Jesus Christ. The three originally did not know each other, but a social psychologist named Milton Rokeach brought them together for two years in an Ypsilanti, Michigan mental hospital to experiment on them. He later wrote a book titled The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

Rokeach hypothesized that since Jesus exists by the same code that the Immortals in Highlander later stated as “There can only be one,” these three men might be cured of their delusions when confronted with others who insisted likewise. Of course he was very wrong. Much like Highlander’s Immortals, they simply fell into conflict. When faced with the others’ unrelenting presence, each dug their heels in and doubled down on their delusions. Even Rokeach’s jaw-dropping manipulations, which included a string of outrageous lies and elaborate fabrications, could not dissuade them.

I’ve recently been pondering this infamous tale of poorly conceived psychological experimentation because in it I see reflections of problems currently plaguing America. Except instead of being thrown together in confinement, people with similar mental disorders are now finding each other on their own. And instead of a psychological professional at least trying (albeit in a highly flawed manner) to cure them, the medium of connection is the largely unregulated and even more manipulative internet. And, finally, instead of insisting there can only be one, mentally ill people are now reinforcing and reduplicating each other’s delusions. Read more »

On Feeling Small: Reading John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon

by Jeroen Bouterse

“I am by nature too dull to comprehend the subtleties of the ancients; I cannot rely on my memory to retain for long what I have learned; and my style betrays its own lack of polish.”[1] Among the benefits that reading the twelfth-century philosopher John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon has brought me were the pleasure of finding a witty and humane voice to introduce me to the new and faraway world of 12th-century learning (of which voice I intend to give plenty of examples below), and the fact that he helped me quit Twitter (again, more to follow). Apart from those, however, a major one was certainly the consolation of seeing an unquestionably capable thinker express his intellectual limitations in terms that seem genuine, going further than what perfunctory modesty would have required.

There have surely been thinkers who were more emphatic about their natural flaws, but there is a fine line between the comforting and the disturbing. When the 20th-century Dutch philosopher Leo Polak dreaded his approaching inaugural address, he wrote in his diary: “I came to nothing […] I have been of no value, for my family or for other people, or even simply done my duty. My pathological lack of memory my only excuse, but it is also partly laziness and sloppiness (no card system) and having whiled away my time, having flattered myself with undeserved success.”[2] That, too, resonates, but not in the uplifting way that John’s confessions do.

John has already implicitly abstracted from his own feelings of inadequacy, and has learned to look kindly upon them; he feels his lack of powers acutely, but he asks and thereby gives sympathy. “Would it not be unjust”, at his age and with all the distractions of his responsibilities, “to expect of me the mental spryness of youth, the quick comprehension of glowing natural talent, and an exact memory, always sure of itself?”[3] John makes himself small, but by connecting his own stature to the universal human condition, he also shows us how to feel small without self-hatred. Read more »

No Elvis, Beatles Or The Rolling Stones

by Rafaël Newman

…the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence…This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

For Asa Weinstein, on his birthday

On August 17, 1977, I stopped in as usual at our neighbors’ house, to while away the summer day with my younger brother and sister until our mother’s return home from the university. Our friends – two sets of twins and one singleton – were home-schooled by their mother, and we were all having a summer staycation in any case, so there was always somebody at their house, and a reliably lively time to be had. What met me when I walked into the kitchen that morning, however, was an unaccustomed stillness. All five young people were hovering around the door to the living room while their mother sat at the kitchen table, hunched over a newspaper. “Elvis is dead,” whispered the singleton. Presley had died the day before, in Memphis, in the early afternoon of August 16; but the headlines, and President Carter’s address, would be that day’s news, on the outskirts of Vancouver as elsewhere around the world.

I was thirteen years old and freshly returned from an ersatz bar mitzvah trip to Israel with my professor father. My psychologist mother’s musical taste – and thus mine, for the moment – ran to Mozart and The Beatles, with admixtures of Joni Mitchell and bel canto. Elvis was a yokel and a hillbilly, I had been given to understand at home: a pioneer of perfidiously whitewashed Black culture and a bridgehead of American imperialism on a Canadian West Coast swarming with counterculture “draft dodgers”. So on that day, in that mourning household, in an access of hubris and pubescent provocation, I made a disrespectful remark; in fact, I may have done nothing more than clutch my brow melodramatically and feign a heartbroken sigh.

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

Our friends’ mother, a Pennsylvanian expat as renowned for her discipline as for her volubility and salty vocabulary, had raised her baleful head to deliver my sentence of temporary exile. Her eyes were red; she had clearly been weeping. The mixture of grief and anger was palpable, alienating, and uncanny: I was still young enough to be shocked by the spectacle of a mother’s tears. Something epochal had obviously occurred, to so shake the foundations of parental placidity. I had clearly misjudged the significance of Elvis Presley. Read more »

51 Pacific and the Green Villain: Welcome to the Fun House

by Bill Benzon

I was living in the Lafayette section of Jersey City at the time, just in from Communipaw Avenue on Van Horne, next to the Jackson Funeral Home, the largest black funeral home in the city and up the block from the Monumental Baptist Church. It was only a couple of weeks before Hurricane Sandy roared though at the end of October 2012, though no one knew she was coming at the time. I was at a meeting of the Morris Canal Community Development Corporation, chaired by June Jones, Executive Director.

One of agenda items involved adding a skate park to the Berry Lane Park that was closing in on a start date. I spoke in favor of it – indeed, I’d brought the idea to June a couple weeks before as it had been something I’d been pursuing for awhile – as did Musaddiq Ahmad and others. Musaddiq came up to me after the meeting and told me that if I wanted to see some interesting graffiti – which may have come up in the meeting as well, I don’t know, but somehow he knew of my interest – I should come down to a place on Pacific, just a couple of blocks away. Amazing graffiti all over the walls inside and in the alley out back as well.

As I recall what he said registered well enough, but it didn’t quite compute. Why not? Because I’d been photographing Jersey City graffiti for several years now and, while I certainly didn’t think I had it all, what Musaddiq was describing was a major cache of fresh graff right under my nose and I didn’t even some much as suspect it. But that’s how the world is sometimes. You just don’t know what’s right around the corner.

Read more »

The future of happiness

by Sarah Firisen

My eldest daughter has a new boyfriend. I met him the other day, and he seems to be a very nice young man. When I told her I liked him, she replied, “He makes me so happy. Happier than I’ve ever been.” The first blush of love is wonderful. Young love perhaps even more so because it’s so unencumbered by the cares of adult life.

The phrase, “Happier than I’ve ever been,” has been stuck in my head. Perhaps that’s because the last year and a half or so seem to have been, somewhat perversely, a time when at least some people have been happier than they’ve ever been. Or at least happier than they’ve been for a long time. Yes, Covid is scary. Having people around us get very sick, get hospitalized, die has been awful. And lockdown brought a loss of so many of the things that we enjoyed: eating out, listening to live music, travel, gathering with friends. But for many people, it was also a time for forced quiet. And in that quiet, there was the opportunity for reflection.

Arthur C. Brooks, who writes extensively on the topic of happiness, wrote this piece in The Atlantic, A Once-in-a-Lifetime Chance to Start Over. It’s time to prepare for a new and better normal than your pre-pandemic life. In it, he tells the story of a young woman who suffered from amnesia due to a traumatic head injury. Even once she recovered, she was never the same again, “Her parents always attributed these major character changes to her “bump on the head.” But she told me no—the injury had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was the recovery time, away from ordinary routines, that created a punctuation mark in the long sentence of her life. She had a unique opportunity to assess her priorities. She vowed to take nothing in her former life as given. She tore her beliefs and values down to the studs, and rebuilt them. And in so doing, she said, she became happy for the first time in her life.” Brooks likens lockdown, for many people, to this young woman’s experience. Read more »

Charaiveti: Journey From India To The Two Cambridges And Berkeley And Beyond, Part 5

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

The gully cricket I played in my neighborhood also had a tournament, where different neighborhoods of north Kolkata competed. I once played in such a tournament which was being held in the far north of the city, some distance from my own neighborhood. I don’t now remember the game, but I met there a savvy boy, somewhat older than me, who opened my eyes about Kolkata politics. When he asked me which locality I was from, he stopped me when I started answering with a geographic description. He was really interested in knowing which particular mafia leader my neighborhood fell under. Finding me rather ignorant, he went on to an elaborate explanation of how the whole city is divided up in different mafia fiefdoms, and their hierarchical network and different specialization in different income-earning sources, and their nexus with the hierarchy of political leaders as patrons at different levels. After he figured out the coordinates of my locality he told me which particular mafia don my neighborhood hoodlums (the local term is mastan) paid allegiance to. I recognized the name, this man’s family had a meat shop in the area.

Since that day my whole outlook to local politics changed, and soon after I saw a newspaper photo where this mafia don was sharing the dais in a political rally with the chief minister. This was the beginning of my academic interest in gangster politics and its role in the power relationships in different parts of the world. Later when I read Mario Puzo’s Godfather (before the movies based on it came out) I realized that this was a feature of metropolitan politics in rich countries as well. Now, of course, there is a whole industry on this, in literature and TV (in India, more on the Mumbai underworld, less on Kolkata’s).

I started closely observing the methods of operation of the local mastans, how they work out their demarcation of the business of extortion (sometimes the system broke down, and violent turf wars took place, like when we heard loud boom-boom noise of explosions coming from the street where the brothels were), how they mesh their organization with that of the political and cultural mobilization by the local politicians. Two of their characteristics immediately struck me as a young observer. Read more »

Monday, August 9, 2021

Fear of Math

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Image: CSUN

From 8th grade to 11th grade, I was taught mathematics by a teacher who was a tyrant. A brilliant man who left a lucrative engineering career to teach high school, he clearly was dedicated to teaching the subject. But his dedication took the form of catering to the brightest students in the class and mocking the rest. Since I was not among the brightest students, I was often the object of his ridicule. I was deeply interested in music by this point and sometimes came in late for class because I was held up in music practice; when this happened he used to mercilessly taunt me in front of everyone else and tell me that I should probably drop out of school and start a band. Sometimes he used to refuse me entry to the class. At an age where peer validation means much, this was devastating. Hatred of the man led to hatred of math and I turned into a rebel, not caring about the subject. I liked the abstract aspects of math but just wouldn’t do the problems, seeing it as an act of rebellion

The old joke goes that the world can be divided into three kinds of people – those who can count and those who can’t. Like many jokes this one has a shred of truth in it because math does seem to impose binary divisions on us. Most of us put up with it because it’s useful to us to various extents in our professions, be it accounting, biology or economics. Some of us love it. A select few are blessed with great natural ability and passion for the subject. The rest of us are not just bad at but are often proud of our mathematical deficiency. How often have we come across people or caught ourselves joking that we were always “bad at math”? The result of this attitude – as indicated by any reading of the pandemic news these days for instance – is that we live in a largely mathematically illiterate society which is both bad at and distasteful of numbers and statistics. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Read more »

The First Cell, Part 5: The Secret Sharer: Hybrid Cancer Cells

by Azra Raza

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

On May 31st, 2021, I sent an email to John Pawelek, Senior Research Scientist at Yale University, requesting a zoom meeting. When a week went by without a response, I decided to call. Searching for his number, I came across his Obituary instead. John Pawelek died on May 31st, 2021. Alas, I missed my chance to speak to a knowledgeable and accomplished scientist.

I had been reviewing the literature on metastatic spread of cancer and Pawelek’s work stood out, confirming the proposal of Otto Aichel from way back in 1911, that metastasis occurs when a tumor cell fuses with a blood cell. Fusion means good things for both cells; for the tumor cell, cozily ensconced inside a normal blood cell means it can now evade attacks from the immune system, and, as an integral part of a blood cell, it becomes mobile. Cloaked in secrecy, it can now travel all over the body with impunity. As for the blood cell, fusion with the cancer cell brings with it the ultimate gift; immortality.

Pawelek’s animal experiments and the direct evidence he provides of fused, hybrid cells in human cancers in support of Aichel’s hypothesis, are hard to ignore. The issue of symbiosis, a fundamental principle of biology, permeates non-biologic disciplines; fiction abounds with stories of interdependence, synergy, acts of cooperation, often with startling consequences for the individuals involved. Read more »

The Emperor of Death

by Chris Horner

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death in exile on the island of St Helena. And it was 206 years ago last June that his career came to a bloody end at Waterloo, with defeat at the hands of an allied army led by Britain’s Wellington and Prussia’s Blucher. But while the Emperor himself is dead and gone, the Napoleon Myth marches on, and is celebrated in some unlikely quarters. 

The Guardian’s Martin Kettle is a big fan of the Emperor, as is the historian Andrew Roberts. Both have written admiringly on the man, the former in the pages of his newspaper, the latter in a big biography that verges on hagiography. On the face of it this is odd – Kettle is a liberal and Roberts is a conservative. What could they both find in the life of the ‘Disturber of the Peace of Europe’ to admire?  They are not first to mourn the fall of Napoleon and sympathise with those who saw him as a great bulwark against reaction, but just the latest in a long line of Bonaparte fans. I’m not inclined share their adoration of the Corsican Adventurer. 

It is certainly true that an appalling set of Crowned Heads did well out of the fall of the Emperor: after 1815 they imposed reactionary regimes across the content of Europe, which lasted until at least 1848. And in Britain the period fallowing the wars was one of great suffering and repression,  a veritable ‘Thanatocracy’ in which armed force and the noose secured the rule of the rich. It is understandable that any radicals of the day tended to see Napoleon as a great alternative to the tyranny of the Monarchs who fought him: the essayist Hazlitt kept a bust of Napoleon on his desk, Byron publicly regretted the result at Waterloo, and later Victor Hugo devoted a large section of Les Miserables to mourning the fall of the Emperor in 1815. They saw him as carrying the spirit of the great Revolution of 1789 forward, and wished he had prevailed on the field of battle. Read more »

Monday Poem

Quantum Angel

I call you
Quantum Angel
because you’re so unbelievable
not even physicists can pin
you down
the way you
flit through atoms
you must have wings
the way you punk time
your wings must be turbocharged
the way you fling particles
we can’t keep up
where do you get so many
tiny spinning things?
you must have a secret source
or you’re a maestro of illusion
a tall-tale provider, a teller
who tells in sparks and quarks
the most fundamental things,
mere things almost,
in super hadron mist
colliders

Jim Culleny

Drawing: A Quantum Angel Spinning Off Particles
Jim C.

Zigrolling and the Mathematics of Acrobatics

by Jonathan Kujawa

Some years ago I twisted the arm of an old friend and got him to visit Oklahoma to give a talk to several hundred high school students. Any reasonable person would be terrified at the idea of facing a crowd of teenagers to tell them the wonders of mathematics. Gladiators in the Colosseum had better odds. Fortunately, Michael Orrison is not a reasonable person. He handled the job with aplomb.

Toni Vighetto and Marie-Martine Robles Zigrolling. Image from [0].
The theme of Michael’s talk was how mathematics can help us see the world differently and thereby unlock our creativity to let us do things we didn’t know were possible. One puzzle he shared was the following:

100 ants are dropped on a meter stick. Each is traveling to the left or right with a constant speed of one meter per minute. When two ants meet, they reverse direction and head away from each other. When an ant reaches the end of the meter stick, it falls off. What is the longest amount of time it takes for all 100 of the ants to fall off the meter stick?

At first and second glance, this seems like a very difficult problem. There are 100 variables for the locations where the ants first land on the stick, plus another 100 variables recording if they first go left or right. There will be all sorts of ping-ponging back and forth and the ants will only slowly drop off the meter stick one by one. It isn’t even so clear that you couldn’t arrange a scenario where a few ants oscillate back and forth forever. With some thought, you can convince yourself that never happens. Still, it still seems like a very hard problem to compute how long it might take for the meter stick to empty of ants. Read more »

What’s in a Weed?

by Ethan Seavey

Illustration by Ethan Seavey

When I was a young boy of Midwestern Suburbia, I plucked a bouquet of dandelions. The flowers were so vibrant, approaching the color of the crayon I’d always use for the sun. I gave them a cup to live in and water to drink; and they were the sun wilting indoors. They sat on the table as I did my homework, until someone older came along to tell me that my flowers were evil and malicious weeds, that I should throw them away before Mom spots them.

That was when I learned: a weed is a dandelion and dandelions should be plucked. When you find one, you go into the garage and find that green metal pole with fingers like a claw machine’s on one end. Then you locate the chest of the weed, push the metal into the ground, raise your foot and stomp on the metal bar. You break up the earth a little; you adjust the pole; and the metal claw is ready and eager to choke it out. At last, you smack the button on the top of the pipe, and those magic iron fingers grab the roots of your prey. 

Weeds are dumped on the sidewalk now and gathered into plastic bags later so they don’t re-root or go to seed. Weeds should be pulled before they are little puffballs; and blowing puffballs in the yard is spreading the evil. 

Dandelions aren’t the only weeds but they’re the only ones that you’ll see. They are not beautiful; they cannot be, because they are invaders. 

In Oak Park, the first suburb west of Chicago, everything is by human design. Every tree is planted and maintained by the village.. Every lawn is a dense green, watered every morning and cut every Saturday. If your yard is unkempt, you are fined. If you plant native, yellow grass, you’re disturbing the system and lowering property values. Read more »

Porn Stars in Paradise (a David Brooks parody)

by Varun Gauri

A few years back, The University of Chicago Magazine sponsored a David Brooks parody contest. Don’t you think this one was a winner?

Porn Stars in Paradise
By David Brooks
(and Varun Gauri, AB 88)

There are two kinds of Americans. You might be surprised to hear that the basic political division is not between Republicans and Democrats. Nor is it Tea Partiers versus Huffington Post readers, extremists versus moderates, nor even Bobos versus NASCAR fans. Rather, the central divide these days is between Americans who accept electromagnetic scans of their intimates at airport security lines (let’s call these people “Porn Stars”) and people who would rather have a uniformed and preferably leathered officer touch their privates (let’s call them “Johns”).

Porn Stars accept the scans because they trust institutions. Generally speaking, they do this because they have careers and occupy professions that advance the nation’s major institutions: doctors, lawyers, professors, school teachers, scientists, bureaucrats. To them, institutions are themselves and their colleagues and friends. What’s not to trust? According to a fascinating study conducted by Professor E. Reilly Vant of the University of Chicago, 89% of social science graduate students, when told that their private parts were being shown to an unknown colleague, exhibited heightened brain activity in MRI scans in precisely the same neural regions as they did when told that their article had been accepted by The Center Folds, a leading journal in the field. In other words, Porn Stars believe in society and desperately want to be appreciated by it. Their deepest fear is that no one will see them on the inside or the underside.

Johns, on the other hand, are deeply skeptical of institutions, especially scientific ones. Johns are people who usually work with their hands, such as mechanics, electricians, small business owners, and car dealers. To them, pictures and scans, and indeed, the media altogether, can misrepresent, distort, and disguise. To know something is not to represent it but to feel it. That is why they want their fellow passengers to be touched. Only then can you verify that nothing untoward is being carried onto the plane. Now, where this gets is interesting is that Johns are themselves alienated in their own way. According to Vant’s University of Chicago colleague, Professor Trey V. L. Booker, 94% of MBA students preferred managing a massage parlor to running a university, if the private returns were identical, because they believed in the social mission of a massage parlor more than a university. The breakup of the social fabric, driven by the very social forces and institutions that Porn Stars glorify, have left Johns in need of social contact. Their deepest fear is that they will be alone.

Where is society going? Who is going to end up on top, Porn Stars or Johns? It’s clear that there is every reason to believe that Porn Stars are winning, hands down. We live in a society that is growing more institutionalized, more scientifically complex, and more representational every day. That has its advantages. But really, we could all use a nice pat down now and then. We are all Johns now.

Forget About “UFOs” & Cryptocurrency, Meet “UOs” & Cryptovocabulary

by Tim Sommers

“Unidentified Objects”

Here we go again. A secret government investigation. Blurry pictures. Debunkers. He saw…/She saw…. UFO fever comes around at least every decade or so and, if you are old enough to remember earlier iterations, it’s deja vous all over again.

But “UFO” is a misnomer. How do we know these objects are really “flying”, anyway? Maybe, they’re falling. Or floating.

It’s time to move past this stale framing. Forget about “Unidentified Flying Objects”, let’s talk about “Unidentified Objects”.

There are unidentified objects all around us. There are at least three on my desk right now. No, wait. That one is a hole punch. But who uses a hole punch anymore? Where did it come from?

My point is, why limit ourselves to things in the air? According to science, at any given moment we cannot identify with any specificity about half of the objects around us. Well, not science. But that seems about right to me. Read more »