by Brooks Riley

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise. —Novalis

The first full moon I saw after the procedure looked as if it might burst, like a balloon with too much helium. It was just above the horizon, fat and dark yellow —moving slowly upward to the firmament where it would later appear smaller and take on a whiter shade of pale. I could distinguish its tranquil seas, the old familiar terrain coinciding with a long abandoned memory.

It had been a while since I’d seen the full moon this way. For far too many moons, all I had seen were the fractured doubled contours of an indeterminate object in the night sky where the moon should have been. The problem was cataracts, or clouding of the ocular lens.

Advancing age metes out decline in increments. I hardly noticed the changes in my vision. Spending so much time on the internet, I was getting second-hand access to the world and its visual splendor and diversity through photographs and videos—none of which prepared me for the increasing inexactness that met my gaze wherever I went.

***

Even before the bandage came off, the implant’s ID card seemed to confirm it: I am a camera—with a new Zeiss lens made in Jena. Jena is back in my life.

How can that be, when I’ve never visited the city, only passed through its train station on my way to nearby Weimar? As I cautiously open my left eye to a rush of fine details I couldn’t see a week ago, the first words that come to mind are Jena Paradies, the name of the train stop that always made me smile. Jena’s Paradise is a nearby park. Mine is a second chance at sight. Read more »

Frederica Krüger feeling lazy and lying on the floor in my office a couple of days ago.

by David J. Lobina

As I mentioned last month, the first thing one notes when approaching Rudolf Rocker’s 1937 book, Nationalism and Culture, is its impressive combination of breadth and depth, thus making it entirely unpublishable today. Not only that, and what’s worse, the book is also rather modern in outlook as well as original. The originality stems from Rocker’s interest in the practical effects of nationalism on the people that have to undergo the typical processes of becoming a “common people” (not something historians care much about), whilst the relevance of the overall account follows from the prescience of some of the ideas defended in the book.

The book itself is divided into two parts and spans nearly 600 pages. Book I traces the evolution of nationalism and its relationship to the expansion of the state, resulting in the reality of the nation-state, while Book II is a critical analysis of the notion that there is any type of homogeneity to any one national identity or nation. Remarkably, Book I anticipates some features of the modern study on nationalism, and something along these lines is also true of Book II vis-à-vis “the linguistic update of nationalism” I offered so long ago now, with the required modifications and adjustments. So let us deep-dive, as the nerds say nowadays.^[i] Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In the middle 1990’s along with journal-editing I did another job in Berkeley which was even more arduous, but also in some ways quite exciting and instructive. I was invited by the campus academic senate to serve for 3 years in a high-powered committee that decided on all appointments, promotions, salaries and merit payment increases for all Berkeley faculty (then roughly about 2,000 in size). This committee is called the Budget Committee in Berkeley; technically it advises the Chancellor, but the latter took our advice in 99% of cases—in the less than 1% cases when the Chancellor did not follow our advice, the rule was that the Chancellor was obliged to meet us in a special session of the committee and explain why he/she would not follow our advice (most often this involved some legal issues) and we had a chance to rebut their arguments.

Working in this Committee gave me valuable insights into the process of how a top public university like Berkeley, even though substantially more constrained in terms of resources compared to the rich heavily endowed private universities in the US like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Yale, Chicago, etc., could maintain its high ranking in terms of academic excellence in most disciplines. I thought the insights I got from my experience would be of some use in any reform of the public universities in India. I wrote a couple of op-ed pieces in Indian newspapers and gave some public lectures in India with suggestions for reform on the basis of my Berkeley experience, but very few people paid much attention, probably because people thought my ideas were utopian in the Indian context. The Indian public universities have for long been severely hamstrung by political and bureaucratic interventions, overregulation and mismanagement by different governments. (Some years later Jean-Jacques Laffont, a leading French economist, gave me a qualitatively similar account of problems afflicting French public universities.) On top of this the current right-wing government in India has a distinct political-ideological agenda of washing away the remnants of left-liberal ideas from universities, mangling the teaching of history and culture in universities (and schools), and of installing a narrow essentially anti-science Hindu-supremacist nationalist viewpoint. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

One tedious outcome of the ascendance of the anti-abortion movement in the United States is having to listen to the tiresome arguments about “the beginning of [human] life.” It’s like being stuck in a dentist’s office waiting for an appointment while nauseating top-forty hits from the 1970s play on a hidden radio.

Not this shit again.

Abortion is an issue my husband and I have never had, nor will ever have to be concerned about, given that neither of us has a uterus. Nor do we have children from previous engagements, who might have to be concerned about what to do with unwanted or malformed zygotes/ blastocysts/ embryos/ fetuses. But the subject is still interesting to me, given that I have existed as each of those entities at one time or another. Read more »

Umwelt

what I can perceive is the outer limit of what I am
there is a universe of unknown dimensions
it whirls about me but is not about me

I am constrained
I ride its hub

Jim Culleny
6/22/22

by Rebecca Baumgartner

In his book Enlightenment Now, when discussing the drastic improvements in quality of life over the past several decades, Steven Pinker says that “the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor. Perhaps the liberation of women in general.” The most exciting promise of technology is that it will make being a human slightly less terrible. In the case of household appliances, the claim is that they will make being a woman slightly less terrible.

Once women gained access to new labor-saving devices, the story goes, they were liberated from drudgery. We all seemingly agree that these innovations have given us our time back, shifting the role of the home from a place of production to a place of consumption. What used to be produced at home (often by women) is now purchased outside the home in the form of goods and services. Everybody wins! Progress has leveled the playing field and given women so much free time that they’re at liberty to enter the workforce in historically unprecedented numbers. 

Well, hang on a minute. If these devices were supposed to create so much free time and lead to “the liberation of women in general,” then why do women continue to do significantly more household labor than men? Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Climate change is a huge and urgent problem. It is natural to suppose that it is therefore a terrible mistake, an unforced error that we should regret and try to prevent ever happening again.

I disagree. Climate change is the unfortunate outcome of the economic growth that has transformed human civilisation for the better. We cannot regret climate change without regretting the vastly better world for most people that the fossil-fuel powered industrial revolution brought. Nor should we draw the anti-technology lesson that solutions are always worse than the original problems, that humans should retreat to living within the bounds of nature rather than attempting to escape them.

The argument I am trying to oppose is not often made explicitly, but seems to lurk around and underneath the response to climate change, especially among people younger than me. It looks something like this:

P1. Climate change is a huge and urgent problem

P2. Climate change is human-made, the result of the industrial revolution and the striving for economic growth

C1. Therefore, climate change is the result of bad choices based on bad values that we should regret. (This often takes the form of a quasi-religious sense of ‘original sin’ among the climate woke)

C2. Therefore, we should prevent such mistakes from happening again (This further anti-technology/anti-growth conclusion is not drawn by everyone, but is powerful within the environmentalist movement)

Let me take each conclusion in turn. Read more »

Sughra Raza. This Moment … late June 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Michael Abraham

I have been told it is a bad thing. I have been told this by doctors and friends and my parents and lovers. They worry over me, worry over me the way a Catholic worries over her rosary. They insist on the medication and the therapy and anything but this feeling, anything but this feeling you relish so intensely. 

O, but to live without it is a waste, a wasteland, and not in the TS Eliot way: not a wasteland overbrimming with meaning, but a wasteland devoid of even the potential for meaning. Hypomania is summer thunder, is getting crushed by the rain. It is having sex with two men in one night, and learning their names, and learning their deepest fears because one is so open that deep fears tumble out. It is falling into Triangle Park, into the puff-puff warm feeling. It is taking ecstasy on the tongue and dancing all the night long. It is spending all your money and calling it good, for a good night out is only the sign of one who hopes. O, it is sex and drugs and money, but it is more than that, so much more than that. It is a deep thrum like a drum struck at the center of the being, an immaculate sound that emanates through the vibration of the whole body. It is an easy slide into Exactly Who He Wants To Be. The world is an oyster, and hypomania is the pearl: it is gorgeous; it is extravagant; it deserves to be worn at the neck as a sign of glamour and appeal. For one who has experienced it, there is nothing quite as quick as the slice of its blade upon the throat. It bleeds one out. It makes from one who is merely body, merely mind, something spectacular: a fountain of bright red conundrum, a spill of the holy stuff onto the ground. There is no living without it once you’ve had it. It is the best drug on the street. It is top-shelf liquor. It leaves nothing in its wake but wanting for it. Staying up to write all night, sweating profusely as you dance your aches out alone in front of the DJ booth, falling into the arms of any boy, falling into your own embrace, embracing yourself as a broken thing full of yearning: it is a true human condition. It is maybe the human condition laid bare. There is no proper way to say it, but to say that all the stars align for a moment, and in that moment, you are immortal; you are the absolute apotheosis of chance and luck. You take the world in your hands, and then you take the succor of the world in your mouth, and then you fill yourself until your greed for all the world has to offer is finally satiated. O, but it is never satiated!—not until the hypomania passes, and you pass with it, into the doldrums, into the never-ending blue of regret and depressive reconstruction of the self. You lose your ground in the hypomania, and then, in the depression, you get your ground back. And your ground is such a burden. To be free of oneself, to be an onslaught, to be a trick in the back pocket of a satyr prancing wild to a Madonna song: it is so very difficult to leave it.  Read more »

by Claire Chambers

I know Lyn Innes from her career as an eminent postcolonial critic at the University of Kent. Since retirement, Innes has turned her hand to life writing. This is unsurprising when one learns of her unique and fascinating family history.

Her book The Last Prince of Bengal: A Family’s Journey from an Indian Palace to the Australian Outback is a story of two marriages and two British colonies, India and Australia.

Innes’ great-grandfather Mansour Ali Khan (1830–1884) was the final Nawab of Bengal, eighth in succession to Mir Jafar (1691–1765). As is well known, Mir Jafar collaborated with the British East India Company. His payment was to become the Nawab of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa: the greater part of eastern India. The East India Company also bestowed on Mir Jafar honour and rights, including a large pension or stipend. In return, the Company got freedom to tax the region, which they did with gusto.

Given that Innes is a respected postcolonialist, I was interested in her reaction to the lineage from Mir Jafar, widely regarded in India as a traitor. Furthermore, Mansour Ali Khan and other family members supported the British in the so-called Mutiny of 1857. After this Rebellion, the Governor-General of India was appointed by the British Parliament instead of the East India Company. Many members of Innes’ family were not nationalists and opposed Indian independence. However, it is clear from her dispassionate and rigorous account in this book that Innes is no royalist and that she is neither proud nor ashamed of her ancestors. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

More than any other, one article I read last Friday, June 24, brought home to me how difficult it is to maintain respect for the law in the face of injustice.

You’re probably thinking that it was one of the articles reporting on the United States Supreme Court’s having struck down the 50 year old precedent in Roe v Wade, constitutionally guaranteeing to women in the United States the right to exercise control over their own bodies. It wasn’t.

Rather, it was an article in the South China Morning Post announcing the death, on Friday in Beijing, of the lawyer Zhang Sizhi at the age of 94.

Zhang, known as the “conscience of the lawyers” in China, was born in Henan province in 1927. After serving for three years in the Chinese Expeditionary Force, Zhang began studying law in 1947, graduating from the Renmin University of China in 1950. Zhang was only able to handle a few cases in the 1950s before being thrown into a reeducation camp as a “rightist” and intellectual. He spent 15 years in prison.

After his release, Zhang resumed his legal practice and began a career as a defender of the developing Chinese rule of law – and the principle of the freedom to dissent – that spanned over thirty years, from the 1980s to the 2010s. Read more »

Self-portrait at a wedding last week.

by Derek Neal

In last month’s column, I wrote about the opening pages of Philip Roth’s Nemesis, and how Roth creates the backdrop of 1940’s Newark upon which the events of the novel play out. I’m using the words “backdrop” and “play out” intentionally, as these pages really do function as a sort of stage set that provides the context for the story which follows. This kind of storytelling is, I suppose, somewhat traditional or old fashioned. What it suggests is that the characters are products of their environment, and it’s important to explain the context in which they exist if the characters are to be understood. The setting of the story can also be seen as its own character, such that we must have a grasp of 1940’s Newark to comprehend the protagonist of the story, Bucky Cantor, because his understanding of the world and how he moves through it, his hopes, his dreams, and his fears, have been shaped, or to use a stronger word, created, by the fact of being born and growing up in Newark, New Jersey in the middle of the first half of the 20^th century.

This may seem obvious, but in foregrounding the setting of the story, it also goes against the idea that people are unique, ahistorical individuals, which seems to be an increasingly common contemporary assumption. Nemesis makes this point explicit by placing the narrator in the present, or at least in the future in terms of the events of the story, and then having him relate what has taken place in the past. This is an acknowledgement that to attempt to tell a story about a certain time period from within that time period would in some ways be deceitful and anachronistic, running the risk of assuming that people in past times thought about themselves and the world in the same way that we do, or mapping a contemporary morality onto the past. Because it would be nearly impossible to faithfully recreate a past consciousness (although this is what any story about the past attempts to do), the practical solution is to frame the story from the viewpoint of a narrator in the present and admit defeat from the outset. This serves the purpose of recognizing the futility of the attempt while still trying to achieve the goal of fully recreating a different time and place. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Some years after Carlos died, another friend and another noted development economist, Hans Binswanger, was diagnosed as HIV-positive. He initially took that as a death sentence and gave away much of the material things he had. But by then the new antiretroviral drugs were in use, and possibly because of them lived an active life for another quarter century, until he died in Pretoria, South Africa in 2017 at age 74. In 2002, shortly before he left his World Bank job, he founded and endowed an NGO in Zimbabwe, that supported about 100 mostly HIV-positive children and their families by providing education, supplemental health care, and counseling. In South Africa he married his boyfriend Victor in a traditional multi-day Zulu celebration. Since then he has always identified his last name as Binswanger-Mkhize.

Hans was born in Switzerland in a prominent Swiss family. He was a major agricultural economist with pioneering work on peasants’ behavior in the face of risk. This work was based on experiments carried out in India. I think I met him first in Hyderabad at ICRISAT, the International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics, where he was the principal economist for 5 years, before joining the World Bank.

In 1977 he invited me and Kalpana to present papers at a conference in Hyderabad on the subject of rural labor markets (later he co-edited a book where these papers were published). I remember the lavish party he gave for all the conference participants at his home which was a stunning converted-fortress in Hyderabad. The intensive ICRISAT village studies that started under his leadership in India made possible data-intensive work by many agriculture researchers all over the world, and generated over the years hundreds of Ph. D’s. Since then I have interacted with him many times, particularly when he was doing some policy work for the World Bank on land reform in South Africa. He came to Berkeley and addressed my graduate seminar on Economic Development. I last saw him at a meeting in Delhi, just a couple of years or so before his death. Read more »

by Michael Liss

Carved in marble above the entrance to the Supreme Court Building is the motto: “Equal Justice Under The Law.”

It is a noble sentiment, expressing the highest ideals of our nation. Here, in this building, before these nine robed figures, the one essential that soars above means, above influence, and above race, religion or class, is equality before the law. Here is the place where justice is blind so that justice can be served.

That is the theory. The reality is nothing at all like it. Public trust in the Supreme Court as an institution has dropped markedly (a Quinnipiac University Poll conducted May 12-16, 2022, shows that 52% of the public disapprove). Far worse, respondents, by an alarming 63-32 margin, answered “politics” to the question: “In general, do you think that the Supreme Court is mainly motivated by politics or mainly motivated by the law?”

John Roberts, a man who believes deeply that the mission of the Court to be a cool and impartial arbiter, has got to be in despair. He is now stuck with two stories of leaks and the growing sense of irrelevance inside his own conference. The Chief Justice is a gradualist, a man who wants conservative change, but by degrees, constructively, gently, and respectfully. As this Term has shown, the newly empowered hard right have brought the bulldozer and a healthy supply of scorn for the past to go with it. Read more »

Napoleon Jones-Henderson. TCB, 1970.

Woven tapestry.

More here, here, and here.