Sughra Raza. Commuter Composition, Boston, 2022.

Digital Photograph.

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

The election of 2016 represented a new salvo in the American culture wars. Trump’s campaign began with an incendiary speech against immigration from Central and South America, intended to fire up the far-right wing of the GOP. His victory rested in part on a backlash against Secretary Hillary Rodham-Clinton, the center-right Democratic candidate. Trump spent his one term in office stoking the culture wars to new heights, spinning up his base at the expense of any sense of national unity across political lines. Even the still ongoing global pandemic became fodder for the supposedly existential struggle being waged by a “beleaguered” white evangelical Christian minority. Most people point to the Clinton era as the original source of these culture wars. Newt Gingrich and other far-right conservative politicians supported the Ken Starr investigation into President Bill Clinton’s personal history, eventually resulting in a time and money wasting impeachment. This was also the era of the rise of right-wing media, starting with toxic radio host Rush Limbaugh. Although the tone and themes of the modern culture war have some origins here, the concept goes back much further. Here I want to examine some of that history.

It seems obvious, but not everyone agrees on what we mean by culture. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to a definition of culture as laid down by Clifford Geertz. According to Nasurllah Mambrol, Geertz called culture a “construable sign” and a “context… within which [social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes] can be intelligibly… described.” In the modern world, the nation-state became a primary organizing principle for much of our cultural life. Read more »

Black vultures in the parking lot of the building next to my hotel in Houston, Texas, last week.

by Maniza Naqvi

I find Sue Hubbard’s writings to be an invitation to feel sorrowful. And therefore a beckoning towards a search for beauty, an attempt at forgiveness and redemption and reckoning; a belief in the possibility of joy.

Swimming to Albania, Sue Hubbard most recent and fourth collection of poem’s reveals once again, the poet’s third and internal eye, which searches and sifts through cold water and cinder to find the source and alchemy, the gift to distill it all into words which reach right into her own and perhaps the reader’s soul. Her gift is to reach through her poems to possibilities and safe shores—where the view collapses all three, past, present and future; to the point that hope, sorrow, grief and memory—-become one. Through this, past it and to it, it becomes deeply comforting. And this merging into one, is a balm as soothing as swimming, helping us to understand that we go on and on—in memory—and this then, this now is the future. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

June 4 early morning we took a taxi from Friendship Hotel to the Beijing airport, oblivious of the dreadful happenings in Tiananmen Square the previous night. I remember the taxi driver in his almost non-existent English tried to tell us that ‘something’ (he was not sure what) had happened in the night in the Square, traffic was not allowed to go in that direction. By the time we reached Shanghai, our hosts who came to receive us knew. Of course, they could not know it from radio or TV, as there was a news blackout. These were days before internet, but cross-country fax messages were still active. Beijing to Shanghai messages were blocked, but people in Beijing were sending fax messages to their friends and relatives in Los Angeles, and the latter were sending messages to Shanghai.

We were put up in the faculty guest house of Fudan University. It turned out that our living room in the guest house had the only short-wave radio in the whole campus. So for the next few days endless streams of students and young faculty came to our room to listen to the news on BBC or Voice of America. Even though we had to listen to the same grim news again and again, this gave me an opportunity to talk to many young people in the campus. Along with discussing the news, I also asked them about their life, their studies, their family backgrounds and so on. In response to my question about what they’d like to do after university, in general the ones who were more forthcoming or whose English was better would usually say that they’d like to work for a ‘joint venture’ (joint between a Chinese company and a foreign multi-national company). I noticed that these students had often adopted English first names like Max or Susan to introduce themselves, I presume just to make things easier for the foreigners–I think the same was probably true for Justin Lin in Beijing. (In recent years I have noticed a big change in the reverse direction: my friends in China who used to send me email earlier with their Chinese names in Romanized letters, now almost always use only Chinese characters. So when I receive an email from China it takes a bit of time for me to know who the email is from, without reading the text of the message which is mercifully still in English). Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The argument in brief:

1. Romantic love hijacks our desires and practical reasoning

2. If your desires and practical reasoning are hijacked your decisions aren’t authentically your own

3. If there were something that would prevent you from falling in love (a ‘vaccine’), it would prevent this hijacking

Therefore,
4. If there were a vaccine against romantic love, you should take it

I. The Case Against Romantic Love

First, I do not deny that being in romantic love feels great. But I do deny that this answers the question of whether being in love is a good thing. After all, heroin feels great, but that doesn’t make it good for us.

Romantic love – and note that I am talking throughout about the crazy euphoric kind of love here, not the boring companionable kind – is exactly like being on drugs because it is. It operates by hijacking our emotions, desires, and practical reasoning at the neurochemical level by manipulating our dopamine and endorphin systems (valuation and pleasure). Love is a cognitive distortion field that makes us gloss over particular people’s flaws and want to refocus our lives around them. The term ‘endorphin’ is short for endogenous morphine. It binds to the same opiate receptors as heroin. We suffer literal drug withdrawal symptoms when separated from the object of our love. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman and Gayatri Jayaraman*

Embarking on a road trip destined for a deserted strip of land on India’s southern coastline had never been on our radar. Neither had we imagined making such a trip in order to consecrate our mother’s ashes to the sea. After her death in September 2019, we had fully intended to do something but going through a religious ritual was not necessarily top of mind. For starters, neither of us is religious. Our brother is a proselytizing atheist and we are both agnostic, on optimistic days. Ironically enough our mother, though deeply religious, had not expressed a wish for rituals. A compulsive altruist till the bitter end, she had wanted to donate her body to science, but this option was not viable so her body was cremated instead. Then Covid intervened. 

For two and a half years, our mother’s ashes sat in a box in Toronto. And during this time we attempted, with mixed success, to cope with the depth of our loss. Our mother was a force of nature, a remarkable woman. She was vivacious, filling each room she entered with her contagious laugh. She listened without judgment, she gave without expectation, she loved fully and unconditionally. True to her nature, she accepted her stage 4 ovarian cancer diagnosis with grace but tried to hold it at bay for as long as she could. Two years after her initial diagnosis she died peacefully, surrounded by her family. We cremated her body the next day. She didn’t want a public service and frankly, neither did we. The loss was too personal. We sent an obituary out to her friends and extended family and published a death announcement in a few Indian newspapers, but we didn’t hold a funeral. Read more »

Leandro Erlich. “BÂTIMENT”, 2004, La Nuit Blanche, Paris, France.

More here, here, and here.

by Michael Abraham

Take a star of anise and a pinch of lavender in either hand. Hold these to the chest and whisper out a little prayer. Splash clean water on the face. Brush the teeth. Fret over little details in the bedroom, whether the paintings are hung straight, whether the posters are in the right places. Shift the vase so it catches the morning sunlight. Light a candle. Pray again. Take three deep breaths and press your palms together, hard, in the way your therapist taught you. Give up on this and smoke a cigarette instead. Feel the smoke as it passes your teeth and scratches your throat. Turn your body to face the wind. Take in the wind—the dirty, city wind—and pretend it is lovely. Put in your headphones and play “Mama Said” by The Shirelles. Mama said there’d be days like this, there’d be days like this, my mama said.

***

The moment you realize you’re in pain may not be the moment in which you begin to hurt. You may hurt for days, months, years before you ever notice. But the moment you notice is essential. It is the defining moment of this season of your life. The moment you notice you’re in pain, you suddenly have agency; you suddenly have choices to make. Staring up at the ceiling of this little room in Brooklyn where I live now, I realize I have been hurting for years. The knowledge of this descends upon me like a great weight, and then, in the next moment, the weight recedes like a wave is pulled back out to sea. The weight recedes, leaving only the knowledge, like beach foam, something weightless but apparent, obvious, easy to spot. The knowledge glitters in the sun. Consider the glitter, the cruelty of it, the obviousness. Pain is so obvious except for when it is so routine that it disappears from notice. But, eventually, sooner or later, like the wave foam, pain will come forward in the mind; irrepressibly, it will make itself known. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Language has an important role to play in national identity. One only has to think about the Shaheed Minar in Dhaka. As its name suggests, this monument commemorates what many Bangladeshis view as the shaheeds or martyrs of the Bengali language movement who were killed in Bengal in 1952. The history of West Pakistan’s linguistic imperialism contributed significantly to the 1971 War and the creation of Bangladesh out of Pakistan’s former East Wing. 

However, in the context of present-day Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent more broadly, the relationship between language and nation is a complex and contested question. The English language continues to exert a tenacious hold over the subcontinent. In the decades immediately before and after Partition, the majority of South Asians, especially leftists, rejected the use of English for creative purposes, positioning it as an elitist, colonial tongue. For instance, article 4 of the Manifesto of the Progressive Writers Association (1936), sets out the radical authors’ goal ‘to strive for the acceptance of a common language (Hindustani) and a common script (Indo-Roman) for India’. Tellingly, though, this manifesto was drafted in the Nanking Restaurant off Charing Cross Road in London, signalling the inescapable hold of the English language despite the group’s grassroots aims.

Far from making a political choice to write in English, many writers who were educated in the ‘English-medium’ system in Pakistan or Anglo-American countries up to the present have English as their strongest language. As a character in Aamer Hussein’s Another Gulmohar Tree remarks, ‘You don’t choose the language you write in, it chooses you’. The continuing power of English also arises because in the subcontinent there is no single language that has universal support. I do not forget the possible exception of Bangladesh already discussed, but even in that Bengali-dominant country, Urdu speakers are a beleaguered minority upsetting the linguistic equilibrium. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

Suppose that you were in charge of a large government agency responsible for dealing with public health emergencies. Suppose furthermore the country is in the midst of just such an emergency, and that there is a particular action that, if a large enough percentage of the public performs that action, will alleviate a significant amount of the ill-effects of the current public health emergency. Let’s say that the large enough percentage of participation is 70%. The action is one that requires ongoing participation: even if a member of the public is currently performing the action, they have to KEEP performing it in order for the benefits to accrue.

Suppose finally that your agency is the only agency with access to accurate information about the participation rate, and your tracking data suggests that the participation rate is at 50%. At a press conference, a reporter asks you a question about the current participation rate. 

So far, this imagined example has none of the farfetched qualities that people associate with philosophical thought-experiments. Indeed, most of the example will involve the sorts of situations that could very plausibly emerge. However, there is one aspect of the example that WILL be fantastical, but not in a way that should affect our judgments about the questions that I want to raise – in fact, this aspect should just serve to sharpen those questions. Read more »

by Derek Neal 

I’m not sure anyone has ever figured out how to write about music. This is a dangerous statement to make, and I’m sure readers will be quick to point out writers who have been able to capture something as intangible as sound via the written word. This would be a happy result of this article, and I welcome any and all suggestions. I should also say that I don’t mean there are no good music writers; there are, and I have certain writers I follow and read. But the question of how to write about music remains a tricky one.

As far as I can tell, most writing about music is built on analogies and cliches. This is understandable; you can’t describe music literally because it wouldn’t give an accurate representation of what it is you’re hearing. What use is it to say that a song is written in the key of A minor, has a tempo of 110 beats per minute, and follows a 4/4 time signature? These facts don’t add up to much. On the other hand, using analogies to describe music is meant, I suppose, not to state the objective facts of a song but to capture the experience of listening to a song and the subjective emotional response created within the listener. Perhaps, in combining technical, factual description of a song with figurative language, a song can be captured via text and the reader can hear the song in their head without ever actually having heard it out loud. This seems to be the goal of most music reviews.

I was put in mind of all this when I read an article in this month’s issue of Harper’s about the transition from the pre-internet world to the digital world of today. The author, Hari Kunzru, was writing about how he would read descriptions of music in magazines and try to imagine what the music sounded like, which does bring up the question: when we can listen to any song instantly, is it even necessary to attempt to put music into words? Perhaps the genre of the music review is simply a historical anomaly that has run its course. This may be true, but the same could be said and has been said for the novel, the essay, and many other forms of traditional composition. And yet here I am, writing these words, so I’ll continue to explore the description of music and attempt to achieve its goal of transmitting sound via written language. Read more »

Trees in Vahrn, South Tyrol, last week.

by Dick Edelstein

I got an incredible break when I was thirteen. We moved to Seattle and I entered public school in the sixth grade, after five years of Catholic education. The impact of the change in fortune was all the greater since I had no particular expectations, a good example of the principle that you can never know when things are about to change for the better. It was not just that my least favorite subject, religion, was no longer on the curriculum–that was the least of it. My new school exuded a different mood, much more open, so different to the reform school atmosphere I had become accustomed to. My life began to feel truly blessed.

My first day in class was unforgettable. At the start of class, the teacher introduced me and asked if they could call me Dick. To my surprise, I answered in the affirmative even though I had always been called Richard. In a single haphazard stroke of unaccustomed boldness, I had named myself. My dad took it with a grain of salt and my mom was appalled.

There was more. The school year was already in progress and this was election day. Every month a new class president was elected. Owing solely to the fleeting popularity of being a new boy, I was elected. The other candidate had expected to win but took it with good grace. His name was Ike like the former US president. That very day he began to initiate me into his world. One of his chief interests was electronics. Since this field of knowledge was not covered in the curriculum at this early age, I was able to glean what I needed to know about it from magazines and the public library. Read more »