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 »

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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]

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Sughra Raza. Self-portrait in Reflected Morning Light, August 2, 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Brooks Riley

by Claire Chambers

It’s still such a strange time as regards the Covid-19 pandemic. Most governments have lifted restrictions and lockdowns. However, new variants are still emerging and far too few people have been vaccinated globally to lend confidence for the health crisis’s resolution. With this in mind, I’ve been reading Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Despite dealing only obliquely with the pandemic, Ishiguro’s novel reflects a great deal about this period of our history.

Klara and the Sun is a fable, and Ishiguro has acknowledged in an interview:

It came out of thinking about books for children … a bedtime story … Except my daughter told me I must go nowhere near young children with this story and traumatize them. So I thought, okay, it’s going to have to be a dystopian adult dark story.

Through a deceptively simple, childlike lens, Ishiguro explores a dystopia involving artificial intelligence and gene editing, but also suggests hope for the future.

Consciously or unconsciously, he also plays on Covid-19 and how technology is changing us in relation to shifts in social, educational and employment norms. The novel reflects on disease, death and bereavement, as well as the upsurge in governmental control which has sometimes been bleak and Orwellian. The British-Japanese author focuses on loneliness, the ‘oblongs’ of the digital screens we’re fixated on, as well as those partitions and fences put up to divide us. As fellow Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore put it more than a century ago, ‘the world has … been broken up into fragments | By narrow domestic walls’. Read more »

Photo and slow motion video (slowed down by a factor of ten) made last week. There was not enough light to use a high shutter speed to freeze the huge, hummingbird-like hawk moth and this was the best I could do. Notice the very long proboscis it uses to feed.

by Eric Bies

Birds talk in Chaucer. Three of his twenty-four Tales of Caunterbury practically center on speaking beaks, and a long poem preceding these, the Parlement of Foules, may have been written with no better motive than the trial and joy of Englishing chirps and squawks. We are told up front in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” that “beestes and briddes koude speke and synge,” a rather no-nonsense preamble to permitting Chauntecleer and Pertelote (a rooster and a hen) their colloquy on dream hermeneutics in a Jungian tongue, and though the word “auspice” hadn’t yet been coined in Chaucer’s day, the Latin from which it springs—auspex, literally “birdwatcher”—would have been familiar enough. Still, one never finds Chaucer’s birds articulating an oracular shape: there is nothing in them, really, to watch for. They resemble instead the simple, good-natured birds of Assisi, who helped form the first eager audience for an Umbrian friar’s itinerant preaching—birds of the same sort Henry David Thoreau mentions in the fifteenth chapter of Walden:

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

Although there is no evidence that the bird could communicate any further than the touch of its twiggy toes upon the writer’s shoulder, such a touch was enough. Had the sparrow tipped out from the end of Chaucer’s quill, however, it may have ventured to ask how the writing was going. For hadn’t Mr. Thoreau gotten it into his head, seated in his cabin at Walden Pond, to put pencil to paper and compose a book? Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

After LSE I have seen Jean Drèze mostly in India, usually in conferences in Delhi and Kolkata, and at Amartya Sen’s home in Santiniketan (where he used to stay whenever the two of them were writing books together). The Kolkata conferences were the annual ones that Amartya-da used to organize for some years, held usually at the Taj Bengal five-star hotel, which Jean would refuse to stay in. While others would take the 2-hour flight from Delhi to Kolkata, Jean would take the 24-hour train in the crowded second-class compartment. Then he’d call me and often stay with me in my Kolkata apartment. If Kalpana was around and it was winter she’d warm the bath water for him and arrange a comfortable raised bed for him; but Jean would refuse even those minor luxuries, and insist on taking cold showers and sleeping on the floor.

During his days at the Delhi School of Economics faculty he’d stay in a nearby jhuggi or slum (with his newly-married activist wife, Bela Bhatia). Soon he became an Indian citizen and started devoting more of his time to social activism and less on teaching. He left Delhi and was first in Allahabad, and now for some years in Ranchi. But much of the time he’d be on the road, walking, biking, and occasionally in crowded trains and buses. Once I remember getting a long email from him describing his walking trip (padayatra) to one of the poorest villages in Kalahandi, Odisha. He had heard of near-starvation conditions there. As he was walking he saw a man carrying a headload of vegetables, going to the marketplace several miles away. He started walking along and talking to him (probably in Hindi, which Jean speaks much better than I do) and found out that the man had not eaten anything for the previous day or so, and was hoping to eat after he sold his vegetables in the market. At one point Jean offered to carry the head load at least part of the way to the market. The man emphatically refused, but Jean kept on nagging. After some time the man yielded, but when Jean tried to take the load on his head, it felt so heavy, Jean wrote to me, that he almost fell on the ground—just to think that this wiry little man was carrying it for miles with no food over the previous day! Read more »

by Deanna K. Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog)

A little while ago my friend Bethany requested that I write an essay on the following topic: “Can/should pedantry be reconstituted as a virtue, maybe particularly for women.” I filed it away on my list of possible future essay ideas, but like a previous topic suggested by this same crafty, devilish friend, it got stuck in my brainpan and has been rattling around in there ever since. I’ve decided to fish it out and look at it, if only to stop the infernal racket.

First of all, I have to confess that I already have a dog in this fight. I am definitely a pedant, and a pretty irritating one at that, so I have a vested interest in rehabilitating the practice of nattering on about arcane ephemera and correcting people’s grammar (unasked). It would be convenient for me if it suddenly became cool to know—and to trumpet one’s knowledge of—all the African capitals, say, or what an anusvāra in Sanskrit is, or what economic and political pressures led to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.[1]

But then I started wondering: is it possible to be a pedant without being an asshole? I’m not sure I’m ready to sign up for the latter. The word “pedantic” is clearly pejorative; a pedant is defined as someone “who excessively reveres or parades academic learning or technical knowledge” (Oxford English Dictionary, a.k.a. The Pedant’s Bible). The word has been in use in English, essentially as an insult, since the late 16^th century. When my friend asked me to consider reconstituting pedantry “as a virtue,” she clearly had this history in mind. Would it be possible to tease apart the erudition from the obnoxiousness implied in the word “pedantic”? Read more »