by Dick Edelstein

Although jazz pianist, composer, arranger and lyricist Billy Strayhorn died in 1967 at the age of 51, his obscure life has since then become much better known than it was during his lifetime. His songs remain popular, and his reputation has continued to grow. Strayhorn shares credit for many jazz tunes he composed and arranged in collaboration with Duke Ellington and contributed without credit to others, such as the popular “Satin Doll”, but none of these tunes illustrate his importance and success as a jazz composer better than “Lush Life” and “Take the A Train”. The latter not only became the theme song of the Ellington orchestra but also one of its greatest successes and an anthem of the swing era. The lyrics of this song came from notes that Strayhorn took when he came to New York to work for Ellington for the first time, when he was only 23 years old. Ellington had given him directions on the easiest way to get to his house in Harlem – by taking the A train. The song has gone on to become one of the great jazz tunes both in its version with lyrics and as an instrumental.

Let’s consider one of Strayhorn’s most popular compositions, Lush Life, recorded by dozens of jazz artists over the years, and in recent years by Lady Gaga and Queen Latifa. For many jazz fans, one of the most memorable recordings of this song is the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman version on their album released by Impulse! in 1963, which was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000. Most of the lyrics were written when Strayhorn was still in high school, living in Pittsburgh. In a world-weary tone, the lyrics speak of night life following a failed romance. They represent a young boy’s fantasy about a sophisticated life seen from the point of view of a jaded bon vivant. Remarkably, they also describe the sort of life that, against all odds, Strayhorn was eventually to lead. Read more »

The waters of Lake Garda substitute well for sky in this photo, I think, taken looking down from a high vantage point on the western shore last week.

by Derek Neal

Going back and reading one’s favorite authors is like seeing an old friend after a long absence: things fall into place, you remember why it is you get along with and like the other person, and their idiosyncrasies and unique character reappear and interact with your own, making old patterns reemerge and lighting up parts of you that have long been dormant.

Most, if not all my favorite authors, simply write and re-write the same book over and over again. This is often leveled as a criticism, but it is also a compliment. It means that the author in question has developed an individual voice and style that is present in all their works, often being refined over successive books until they eventually write the book that they’ve been trying to write in previous attempts, and this emerges, like a pearl, as the culmination of a lengthy process.

These were the thoughts I had upon recently reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel/memoir/letter Spring, published in English in 2018. I guess the appropriate publishing term for Knausgaard’s writing is “autofiction,” but it doesn’t really matter, Knausgaard just writes about his life and looks at himself and his actions with such unflinching honesty, and the world around him with such open and sincere curiosity and attention—also characteristic of his My Struggle series—that he is one of those writers who merits his own adjective—Knausgaardian, or Knausgaardesque, or perhaps people today would say Knausgaardy, although this feels flippant and inappropriate, so I’ll go with Knausgaardesque, also because I like the resonance it has with how Kafka’s style is Kafkaesque. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

The western admirers of Amartya Sen as a public intellectual may not be aware that he is actually in a long line of globally engaged cultural elite that Bengal has produced. (This is true to some extent of the elite elsewhere in India as well, particularly around Chennai and Mumbai, but I think in sheer scale over the last two hundred years, Bengal may have a special claim). One aspect of this phenomenon is worth reflecting on. These members of the cultural elite were well-versed in the manifold offerings of the West, but they came to them with a solid grounding in the cultural wealth of India. Take Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833). He was, as Nehru describes him in his Discovery of India, “deeply versed in Indian thought and philosophy, a scholar of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, ..a product of the mixed Hindu-Muslim culture, …the world’s first scholar of the science of Comparative Religion.” He contributed to the development of Bengali prose. He was a social reformer in Hindu society, actively engaged in serious religious debates with Christian missionaries in India, and a champion of women’s rights and freedom of press (standing up against colonial censorship). Yet when he went to England he caused some stir as the urbane face of a reforming Indian society, was active in campaigning for the 1832 Reform Act as a step to British democracy. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham reportedly even began a campaign to elect him to the British Parliament (but Roy caught meningitis and died in Bristol soon after). Read more »

by Michael Liss

Gentlemen, I’m putting the two of you on the hot seat with me. I want that third alternative!

—Captain James T. Kirk, USS Enterprise, Stardate 3289.8

Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Ron DeSantis and Biden. Trump and Kamala Harris. DeSantis and Amy Klobuchar. Ron Scott and Elizabeth Warren. Greg Abbott and Pete Buttigieg. Ted Cruz and Liz Cheney (wait, what?).

Tired of the same old headlines, the same ideas, the same enmities? Looking for something better? Captain Kirk’s Hobson’s Choice merely involved the lives of several million. We have a hundred times as many.

Don’t we all want that third alternative? Pew Research released a poll on August 9, which, among other things, tested that assumption, and the answer is a qualified maybe—“a sizable minority of Americans are supportive of the idea of having a greater choice of parties.” When you get closer to the numbers you find the greatest support comes from Independents (roughly half) and the least (21%) from Republicans (also, not surprisingly). But what you also see is a generational divide. Those in the younger age cohorts are twice as likely to want a third party than those over 65.

I’ll ask again: Do you want that Third Alternative? Andrew Yang (age 47), David Jolley (49), and Christine Todd Whitman (75) think you do. They have founded a new political party called “Forward,” which, presumably, is interested in moving forward.

Can they be successful? Let’s hedge our bets and say it depends on your metrics. Third parties emerge for several reasons. The first is simply decay-related—some just die off. Our earliest organized political party, the Federalists, elected John Adams in 1796, but never won another Presidential election thereafter. Read more »

“On Friday morning, the author Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the neck as he stood onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, in western New York, where he was scheduled to give a lecture. The motivations of his attacker were not immediately clear, but Rushdie—one of the most celebrated contemporary writers—had lived under the threat of violence for decades. In 1989, the year after Rushdie published “The Satanic Verses,” a novel that imagines a fictional version of the Prophet Muhammad, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a decree, or fatwa, calling for Rushdie’s death.” —The New Yorker, 8/12/2022
______________________________________________

Last Day of Federíco García Lorca

“The writer died while mixing with the rebels, these are natural accidents of war . . .”
—Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco, Authoritarian

“The country has to toughen up … part of the problem …is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?”
— US president, Donald Trump, Authoritarian

…….. Federico in pajamas and blazer died at night
…….. wearing the sudden-death clothes of a poet killed
…….. because there’s nothing more dangerous to despots
…….. than an artist who tells the day’s truth
…….. because some force within insists.
…….. Accepting death for being one’s self
…….. is life’s condition of being one’s self
…….. because to speak is to be.

…….. This condition applies to all in all times
…….. because nothing ever changes the insistence of love
…….. & witness under any sky or sun.
…….. Although the atmosphere of place and eras swings from
…….. heaven to hell on a dime before the head-count has time
…….. to blink, and because the intractable who paint Guernica
…….. or write Canto Libre or Satanic Verses
…….. (artists who dare) could well end with bullet-through-skull
…….. because, to a despot, silence is golden (long-lived or brief)
…….. because despots know that painters and poets,
…….. sculptors and dancers will always speak
…….. from momentary possession
…….. because they’ve found the straightway
…….. to brainsoul of human-kind,
…….. the place despots only enter
…….. by means of fear & blood
…….. which always mocks
…….. the divine

…….. Jim Culleny, 3/7/19

by Marie Snyder

A mandate isn’t necessarily tyrannical. It’s a rule that, in any good government, is devised to protect the people from harm so we can better live and work together. We must monitor legislation to ensure we stop laws that can harm people, but we also need to get involved when harm comes from a lack of legislation. A good mandate is put in place when harm can be prevented in an enforceable way. For instance, despite the fact that skin cancer costs many lives each year, and suntan lotion can prevent these deaths, using suntan lotion isn’t mandated. It would be nearly impossible to enforce its use. Seatbelts, on the other hand, have been mandated for decades. In the states, traffic collisions take about six times as many lives as skin cancer*, so seatbelts potentially save more lives than sun lotion. They’re also much more easily noticeable and enforceable. 

I was just 11 years old, when I was first forced by my mum to strap myself to a car with a 2″ vinyl band with metal clips that held me tight against the seat. It felt like wearing a straight jacket, and I protested the infringement on my freedom. I wasn’t the only one; in many places “resistance was the norm” to seatbelt laws. Mum was avoiding fines of $240 from our Conservative Premier Bill Davis (about $1,200 now), and she was further cajoled by ads on TV showing the aftermath of people thrown from a car. Children weren’t kept from these gruesome images, sometimes shown at school assemblies. Such was the level of care we could expect back in the 1970s. 

Kids today are being similarly traumatized, it’s suggested, as they’re made to feel suffocated by polypropylene or silicone masks that can cause sweating and sometimes acne. Well, they were, but now they’re free to breathe the unfiltered air in buildings everywhere in many countries despite the elevated chance of someone nearby carrying an infectious disease, which, in some areas, kills more than ten times as many people as car accidents.* Covid hasn’t finished with us. In Canada, recent hospitalization valleys are higher than previous peaks!  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

More poetry, my response to loss.
John Weir

It’s 1980, I’ve just had my first proper kiss, and the newspapers are announcing the death of love.

Well, not quite. But that’s how it would come to feel in retrospect: amid all the rumors, the myths, the half-truths, the superstitions, the warnings. The awful, racist, homophobic “jokes”. The abrupt, unheralded appearance in “family” media of discussions of practices previously not even acknowledged, let alone written about. The grainy, horror-film portrait of the deceased Québécois flight attendant said to be “Patient Zero,” stylized a Typhoid Mary for our times by the tabloids (all due, of course, as much to a misreading as to a witch hunt: the “0” noted in statistics, when Gaëtan Dugas’s infection was reported by the CDC, would eventually turn out to have been an “O”, for “out of state”). And then the wasting. And the protests. And the deaths. And the funerals.

It was during this same period, in the early 1980s, that John Weir arrived in Manhattan, from rural New Jersey by way of Kenyon College, to spend the next decade and a half (for starters, before eventually moving to Brooklyn, where he now lives) in one of the world’s great centers of gay life and culture, soon to become one of the world’s great centers of gay death and resistance. Weir was to live through those first terrible years of AIDS himself, and in 1989 he published The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, an almost unbearably light-hearted account of the vicissitudes of a young man in New York during this period, and of his eventual death of the syndrome; it won the 1990 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Debut Novel. In 2006 there followed What I Did Wrong, a roman à clef recounting the demise of Weir’s best friend, the “semifamous gay author” David Feinberg, afflicted by the same illness, and the repercussions in the protagonist’s later life of his agonizing, transfiguring death. Both books have recently been re-issued by Fordham University Press, in recognition of their germinal status as contemporary literature and as records of a period in the recent past whose repercussions we are still feeling (on which more later). Read more »

Read more »

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

I think of that title as like a carnival barker’s come-on to get people to enter the tent. The “tent” is where I display an idea from which that statement about human history and human nature necessarily follows.

That approach seems appropriate because, while the carney barker’s line is quickly understood, the idea from which it necessarily follows requires traversing a series of steps. In other words, it takes a bit of work.

And when one adds to that work the boldness of the claim — to put the story of our species in a significantly different light — a reasonable person might think, “Probably a crackpot idea,” and walk on.

Hence the value of an appealing line that tells us that we are better creatures than our history makes us look. Appealing, in that it says something we’d like to be true. Read more »

Sunrise in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Bill Benzon

We in the West live in societies organized around the idea and practice of work, where work is conceived as activity undertaken for economic gain. While that activity may benefit the worker immediately and directly, as in the production of food or clothing for their own use or to be used by immediate family, more likely the activity is undertaken for money which may then be exchanged to whatever one wishes. The assumption has been that a single adult can earn enough money in 40 hours of work per week to support a family.

Charlie Keil and I argue, in Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature, that this assumption is no longer tenable. Too many people work for too long in return for a life that may be materially comfortable, but all too often is precarious, and, in any event, is not very satisfying. We suggest that the activity of music-making has much to teach us about living a satisfying life. This article is adapted from the opening chapter of Playing for Peace.

I stage the problem with a classic essay by the economist, John Maynard Keynes, in which he predicted that by now we would have a 15-hour work week. What happened to that? Then I take up music and dance as the fundamental basis of human nature. Then we take up the concept of a moralnet, which cross-cultural anthropologist Raoul Naroll argued was the fundamental building block of human society. We then conclude where we began, with Keynes. Read more »

Where The Mind Is Full of Fear, Head Is Bowed, a Lie Is Truth

by Rafiq Kathwari

Dapaan,
Rama saw Sita bathing nude
in Sitaharan, a spring near
the Line of Control in Kashmir.
It was lust at first sight.

Dapaan,
the demon king Ravana abducted Sita
to Sri Lanka to avenge a previous wrong.
Rama flew in anger south in his glitzy
winged chariot Made in Prehistoric India,
using indigenous materials.

Dapaan,
Hanuman, son of Vayu, God of the wind,
steered the chariot. Clouds cloaked it
to foil discovery by enemy radar.
Rama shot a divine arrow piercing Ravana
in the heart and killed him.

Dapaan,
Rama flew Sita back to Sitaharan where they lived
happily, until India partitioned herself on this day
75 years ago: first as Tragedy. Now, as Mythology.

***

Dapaan, a Kashmiri folkloric term, means “They Say.”

by Jim Britell

Rules of thumb

People by the millions don’t know the difference between a billion and a trillion.

To get an accurate remodeling estimate, obtain bids from three reliable contractors and add them together.

Big planets attract big meteorites.

Trustworthy people never say, “Trust me.”

A wild fox knows better than to pick a fight with a domestic cat.

No man can serve two bastards.

Old people and old houses always have one problem or another.

To get excellent medical care, develop interesting problems.

Don’t assume that someone who likes and forwards something actually read it.

People say, “going forward,” when they have no idea what’s coming next. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In 1998 when Amartya Sen got the Nobel Prize it was a big event for us development economists. Even though the Prize was announced primarily for his contributions to social choice theory (in particular, his exploration of the conditions that permit aggregation of  individual preferences into collective decisions in a way that is consistent with individual rights), the Prize Committee also referred to his work on famines and the welfare of the poorest people in developing countries. Even this fractional recognition of his work on economic development came after a long neglect of development economics in the mainstream of economics. The only other development economist recipients of the Prize had been Arthur Lewis and Ted Schultz simultaneously decades back.

As development economists we all grew up on the classic 1954 article by Arthur Lewis, which as a combination of economic theory and a sense of rich panoramic history still remains exemplary in the whole of economics. As someone born in the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean he was the first economist from a developing country to get the Prize. I met him at Princeton shortly after he got it. John Lewis, another professor at Princeton who was a specialist on development aid and on India, whom I had known for some years, took me to have lunch with Arthur Lewis, whom I found to be a simple and charming man. (I still remember him, with his suit and tie, lying down flat on the floor of the faculty lounge to show John a particular exercise that he was advising John to do to cope with his back problem). Shortly afterward I was invited, I think by Carlos and Gus Ranis at Yale to contribute a chapter in a book they were editing in honor of Arthur Lewis. In this chapter I formalized and expanded on an idea on some historical aspects of tropical trade that he had exposited in a set of lectures in 1969 in Sweden. Read more »

by Terese Svoboda

Hitler and My Mother-in-Law is a memoir I’m writing about Patricia Lochridge, the only female reporter at both WWII theaters who “identified” Hitler’s ashes. The book is all about those quotes, that is to say, what’s between propaganda, truth and lies in war and family. This excerpt reveals how she appropriated a Cranach.

***

In June 1945, the American military appointed twenty-nine-year old Pat Lochridge mayor of Berchtesgaden, the tiny fairytale Bavarian town near the Austrian border crowded by Alps, where  three thousand feet up, Hitler built his Eagle’s Nest retreat.  “It is the intention of the Allies that the German people be given the opportunity to prepare for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and peaceful basis,” wrote the Allies at Potsdam. [i] In Germany, this was a nuanced and difficult task, with the defeated angry populace on the brink of starvation. “You can be the first American woman in the military government of Germany. I warn you, however, it’s a tough assignment,” said Lieutenant Colonel Robert S. Smith of the 101st Airborne Division, according to “I Governed Berchtesgaden,” the article Pat published in July’s Woman’s Home Companion.[ii]  “No gag, honest” reads the headline. The first and only civilian to be given such authority, she was to show the human side of responsibly governing the country postwar.

You can imagine “the enormous inlaid desk” with not-so-tall Pat seated in a sturdy chair behind it, cap straight, hair over her ears, a stack of documents, a sharpened pencil and Captain di Piero at her side, a “tough paratrooper” who “wigwagged the right answers whenever a problem came up.”[iii] There were problems. During and immediately after the surrender, German guerrilla units worked to sabotage facilities, Nazi agents in US uniforms raped and murdered to incite rebellion against Allied troops, and new recruits, some women, but the majority teenage boys, pillaged and robbed the many homeless. In France, women who’d slept with Germans were put on parade but had to be protected to prevent the crowds from tearing them to shreds.[iv] And the occupying forces had to be kept out of trouble. Leonard Rapport, chronicler for the 101^st Airborne, particularly known for their fighting during Battle of the Bulge, was also noted for its ability to have a good time. “Indeed, it was a social error to be caught without a corkscrew in Berchtesgaden,” writes Rapport.[v]

Read more »