by Mark Harvey

Suspended lion face
Spilling at the centre
Of an unfurnished sky
How still you stand –Phillip Larkin

In the very early and still dark hours on August 12, 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe from the coast of eastern Florida. A Delta rocket lit up the sky with fire as the probe slowly lifted off its launch pad. It gained speed quickly and within a couple of minutes was just a bright light miles above the earth, looking much like the sun for where it was headed. After about six minutes, it was traveling over 14,000 miles per hour and was out of sight. Within three years of its seven-year mission, the probe has broken all speed records of a man-made object, traveling at 330,000 mph this year. Ultimately the craft will reach speeds of 430,000 miles per hour.

Watching the launch live at Cape Canaveral was 91-year-old Eugene Parker, for whom the probe was named. In the video of the launch, Parker looks very much the professor he is, wearing a tweed coat, glasses, and a lanyard around his neck, presumably identifying him for entry into the viewing area. As the rocket launches, Parker’s mouth is agape and he appears to be in awe of the explosive force of the Delta rocket.

A little over a month ago, on December 14, 2021, NASA announced that the probe had flown into the sun’s outer atmosphere, known as its corona, and effectively touched the sun. The event actually had happened on April 28, 2021, some seven months before, but it took the scientists those months to analyze the data and realize what had happened. Read more »

Just a spider spinning a web in Amsterdam that I passed by on the street in November of 2021, stopping for a second to take this photo.

Karachi

by Rafiq Kathwari

A stray dog pulls apart a donkey’s corpse.

A camel pacing into the rushlight stomps on

mini sand-ruins of treads and tracks:

What did this: a quad bike, a Humvee?

A shadow lengthens on the beach.

Stars glow in Hi Rises inland from the sea’s edge.

People live in a bright hour, as Emerson said.

The bright falls. The night rises.

For Beena Sarwar, from photos she shared

by Mindy Clegg

In the 1990s, many Republicans fell victim to Clinton derangement syndrome. Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich built a successful career out of this syndrome. The anti-Clinton antipathy had its adherents on the left, too, but for far more reasonable objections grounded in real policy differences. The Clinton administration in the US pioneered the pro-business, neo-liberalism of third way Democratic politics that continues to haunt the party to this day. Despite this, the far right wing of the GOP (now its core) has made the Clintons into Marxist monsters despite a lack of evidence to support this claim. Donald Trump benefited from the irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton in 2016 (and we’ve all been the worse off for it). She carried the blame for some of the unhappy outcomes of her husband’s administration. In the domestic sphere, we have seen a push further right on social and economic issues. The Clinton foreign policy has largely been rejected, too, as it was focused on multilaterialism and a continuation of George HW Bush’s New World Order concept. The Clinton foreign policy was built on an optimism that America need not do much as the ultimate victor of the Cold War. If the past 22 years have been dominated by terrorism, entrenchment of neo-liberalism (and resistance to it), and subsequent economic instability, the 1990s were a time of uncertainty but also hope that most of our international problems were solved. That turned out to be a false hope. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

At ISI one day the American economist Daniel Thorner walked into my office and engaged me in a lively conversation, with his dancing eyebrows and unbounded enthusiasm. I had, of course, read his many substantive papers in EW on Indian agriculture and economic history. I also knew how in the early 1950’s, in the McCarthy era, he had lost his job at University of Pennsylvania for refusing to give information on his leftist friends, and then went on to live in India, with his wife Alice (a fellow India-scholar) for 10 years, before taking up a position in Paris. Now when he came to see me he had just read my EPW paper showing on the basis of NSS data that poverty had increased over the 1960’s in rural India. He asked me not to put so much trust on NSS data (he jokingly said that increasing poverty estimates by NSS data might be a reflection more of the increasing sense of misery on the part of the underpaid NSS workers), and to accompany him in his next trip to Punjab villages where he promised to introduce me to beer-drinking tractor-driving women farmers, the harbingers of the future of agricultural capitalism in India. Much of what he said was, of course, tongue-in-cheek, and we became good friends. But this friendship was to be a ‘brief candle’, as cancer soon cut his life short.

There were two ways Daniel had unwittingly nudged me in a direction that I was already contemplating for my next line of research with data analysis. One was to probe deeper into the quality of survey data in India (particularly NSS data); and the other was to attempt collecting my own data on many interesting questions that NSS data did not cover. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

Every Econ 101 student learns the basic model of demand and supply. It’s pretty straight forward. Picture a graph with the price of a product or service on the vertical axis and the quantity supplied and demanded on the horizontal axis. There are two curves drawn on this graph: the demand curve and the supply curve. The demand curve is downward sloping because as prices decrease, consumers are willing to buy more. The supply curve is upward sloping because producers are willing to supply more when they are paid more. The “competitive equilibrium price” of the product or service is where supply equals demand: two curves intersect. When prices are higher than the equilibrium price, supply is greater than demand: there is “excess supply”. This makes sense: at higher prices, suppliers are going to be happy to sell more, but consumers aren’t willing to buy as much.

Economic conservatives often apply this logic to justify their opposition to a minimum wage. The argument goes like this. Minimum wages mandate that the price of labour be set above the market wage. At the new, higher wage there are more people willing to work and fewer jobs to go around because hiring a worker is now more costly to employers. In other words, there will be an excess supply of labour. Another way of saying this is that there’s going to be more (involuntary) unemployment.

Now, of course there are many excellent reasons to want to raise the minimum wage, none which have anything to do with economics. Trying to ensure that low-wage workers are paid decently is important if you care about things like equity, human decency, and fairness. But if my support for minimum wages rested on my commitment to social justice, the prospect of this policy instrument causing a dramatic increase in unemployment would give me pause. It’s hard to maintain the moral higher ground when my favoured policy improves the wages of those who are lucky enough to have a job but drives countless others into unemployment. Read more »

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

I knock at the bathroom door. 

“You alright, hun?”

No pause. “Yeah, I’m fine! Just bad today.”

I try to keep any sign of pity out of my voice—nobody likes to be treated like a patient—“I’m sorry. Can I get you anything?”

No pause. “No, I’m fine! Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

My husband has a chronic, invisible disability called microscopic colitis. It is a bowel disorder, common in white women in their seventies and eighties. (He likes to joke that at least some part of him is privileged.) It causes pain, bleeding, and, quite often, a violently upset stomach. Marco is remarkably lighthearted about it, but it is the kind of disability for which one could be put on government assistance. Some days, I don’t even notice colitis. And then, some days, Marco is scarcely out of the bathroom. He has developed all of his own ways of coping with this, using music mostly to turn the bathroom into a kind of sanctuary. Most days are somewhere between these extremes. Colitis interrupts things here and there, causes us to miss movie credits or makes us late for dinner. I have no idea what it is like to be the one who suffers through missing movie credits or running late for dinner. I have no idea, either, of the pain—real, physical pain—that I can so simply gloss here as movie credits and dinner. For me, it is abstract. For him, it is embodied and immanently real. I only know what it is like to live adjacent to that suffering, to witness it and to try my best to respond to it with delicacy and care. 

The first and most prominent thing I have learned in my five years of living with a man who has a disability is that those who live with disabilities are remarkably resilient. This almost sounds like a cliché. Of course they are, you’re thinking. But resilience is a more expansive thing than our typical idea of it. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

January 1 was Public Domain Day. One of the pleasures of the day is stumbling upon hidden gems as the collective wisdom of the internet – yes, there still is such a phenomenon, if one knows where to look! – unearths them.

That’s how I came upon this passage from Wittgenstein’s Blue Book – a passage that I must have read previously many times, but one that hadn’t struck me until seeing it out of context like this, in Berfrois under the heading, “Ludwig Wittgenstein arranges books”:

Imagine we had to arrange the books of a library. When we begin the books lie higgledy-piggledy on the floor. Now there would be many ways of sorting them and putting them in their places. One would be to take the books one by one and put each on the shelf in its right place. On the other hand we might take up several books from the floor and put them in a row on a shelf, merely in order to indicate that these books ought to go together in this order. In the course of arranging the library this whole row of books will have to change its place. But it would be wrong to say that therefore putting them together on a shelf was no step towards the final result. In this case, in fact, it is pretty obvious that having put together books which belong together was a definite achievement, even though the whole row of them had to be shifted. But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.—The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know. E.g., to see that when we have put two books together in their right order we have not thereby put them in their final places.

The immediate point of the passage is that, if you set about to arrange a disordered collection of books, it is very unlikely that you would search first through all of the books, until you found the book that occupies the first position on the first row of the first shelf, place it at its location, and then go back to the piles and find the book that occupies the second position on the first row of the first shelf, place it next to the first book, and so on.

Rather, what you would likely do, even if you began initially with the first position on the first row of the first shelf, would be to put books that belong together in a row on one of the shelves – somewhere in the middle, say – knowing that, although the books will remain together, they will likely wind up together somewhere else in the overall arrangement of bookshelves. Read more »

Sughra Raza. First Snow 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Emrys Westacott

On the anniversary of the attempt by Donald Trump and some of his supporters to subvert the 2020 US presidential election, Joe Biden denounced those who “place a dagger at the throat of democracy.” To which one can only say: About bloody time! The threat posed by Trump and the Republican party to America’s democratic institutions–highly imperfect though they are–is so obvious that anyone who has a bully pulpit should be pounding out a warning at every opportunity.
Regarding the current situation, one can identify three main issues:

• The historical and legal roots of the problem
• The nature and causes of the current crisis
• The best strategies available to protect and, ideally, extend, existing democratic norms.

On each of these, whole books could be and have been written.

The roots of the problem

The existing political system is seriously flawed in many ways. The method of electing a president through the electoral college means that the will of the majority can be overridden (as it was in 2016 when Hilary Clinton received 3 million more votes than Donald Trump). It also means that only a few swing states receive any attention from presidential candidates. In the majority of states, where the presidential vote is a foregone conclusion, voters know that their vote won’t be added to the grand total.

Ironically, the electoral college was established because the founding fathers didn’t trust the good sense of the people. They feared the prospect of tyranny emerging in just the way Plato describes in the Republic: a demagogue arises who, by misinforming and misleading the people, hoodwinks them into electing him to office, whereupon he proceeds to entrench himself in power. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

A large number of jobs exist not because they create economic value but because they make business sense given the institutions we have – customer expectations, bureaucratic regulations, and so on. They do not solve a real problem but a fake problem created by inefficient institutions. They therefore do not make our society better off but rather they represent a great cost to society – of many people’s time being expended on something fundamentally pointless instead of something worthwhile. One way of spotting such anti-jobs is to compare staffing in the same industry across different countries. US supermarkets employ people just to greet customers and bag groceries, for example, which would seem a ridiculous waste of time in most of the world. In Japan one can find people standing in front of road construction waving a flag (they are replaced with mechanical manikins on nights and weekends).

Another way to spot anti-jobs is to to observe the effects of Covid restrictions and look for areas where removing workers or tasks made no impact on performance, or even improved it. Take waiters. In America there are around 2 million people doing this job (1.4% of all employment). The experience of Covid lockdowns shows that much of what waiters do can be done better by pasting a QR code to tables for customers to scan to visit the menu webpage and order and pay directly. Having learned this, it would be ridiculous to go back to employing people to waste their time and their customers’ by doing such fundamentally needless work. We still need some waiters to bring the food and drink we ordered (for now), but we don’t need nearly as many because we don’t need to employ people to ask us what we want and then tell someone else to make it. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Dick Edelstein

In this last of four essays on historical memory, I consider some of the guises under which this topic arises in Spain, the conflicts that exist between the need to remember and the need to forget, and those that crop up when different groups appeal to the right to remember. I previously discussed the issue of public access to archival data on Spanish Civil War casualties and victims. For two decades Spain has been on the leading edge of a wave of concern over historical memory: how social groups and nations construct and identify with particular narratives about historical periods or events.

Following Franco’s death, the main Spanish political parties negotiated the Pacto del Olvido, an agreement that was formalized in the Ley de Amnistía, which freed political prisoners but also protected those who had committed crimes during the Civil War and the subsequent Francoist regime. In 2007, the Ley de Memoria Histórica provided a new legal framework for investigating the human rights violations that fell under the amnesty and for identifying individuals buried in unmarked mass graves. Some conservatives considered that this legislation violated the spirit of the earlier pact.

The governing Spanish Socialist Party is now providing funding for the activities covered by the Ley de Memoria Histórica, which had been blocked since 2011 by the right-wing Partido Popular. The government is also drafting a more ambitious act to deal with the legacy of the Civil War and the dictatorship. Its objectives include funding the exhumation and DNA identification of casualties and victims, investigating past crimes, and educating children about the Civil War. Read more »

by Derek Neal

It’s the time of year end lists: Best Movies of 2021, Best TV Shows, Best Fiction. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen many movies that came out this past year, haven’t streamed many TV shows, haven’t read many books. I’m not saying I haven’t seen any movies, or watched any shows, or read any books—I have—just not many that were released this year, 2021. But really, outside of reviewers and critics, has anyone? The phenomenon of year end lists seems to me to be much more of a marketing and business endeavor than one based on actual artistic merit. And how can one keep up? There’s simply too much stuff out there, and I’ll never have the time to read and watch everything I’d like. The number of unread books on my shelf is rising, and I keep buying more. I don’t have much to say about this year, 2021, but a more interesting question to ask would be, “What’s the best of your 2021?” Not what was made this year, but what you discovered this year.

For me, I went on a New York mob movie kick—Carlito’s Way, Donnie Brasco, King of New York—that splintered out into other films like Jackie Brown, American Psycho, and L.A. Confidential. I read, mainly, books I picked up at used bookstores and used books sales on front lawns. I’ve found that the best way to alleviate an ever–increasing stack of books is not to make a list or plan but to walk into a store, or sale, and buy a book in a serendipitous fashion—maybe it’s an author you’ve been meaning to read but have never gotten around to, maybe the cover is interesting, or maybe you read the first page and are hooked. This works for me, as I can buy the book and read it right away. The trouble is buying just one book. Read more »

Water freezing on a chain link fence near Mittewald, South Tyrol.

by N. Gabriel Martin

What did my friend mean when he told me that there was no such thing as a seagull? He didn’t mean that the aggressive bird that had stolen my chips didn’t exist, nor did he mean that it was something else, not a seagull. He meant that “seagull” isn’t the right word.

He went on to explain that there is no particular species called a seagull. What stole my chips on Brighton beach was a herring gull, which is different from the glaucous-winged gull I’d seen going after fries in Vancouver and the silver gulls that harass picknickers in Sydney.

Okay, fine. But he had no right to correct me. It was a seagull after all. Calling it a herring gull or even Larus argentatus would be no more or less correct than calling it what I’d called it. It wouldn’t even be any more precise.

He was insisting on a distinction that may well be significant for scientific purposes, but which may have obscured the perfectly true things I want to talk about when I talk about nuisance seabirds. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

At ISI we were assigned statistical assistants who’d take our large data analysis jobs to the IBM computer at the Planning Commission, but for relatively small jobs they’d do the calculations themselves by furiously rotating the handles of the small Facit mechanical calculator they each had, you could literally hear the noise of ‘data crunching’. This was before electronic desk calculators came to Indian institutions. I remember buying a small Texas Instruments calculator in a short trip abroad and was quite impressed by its capacity; and I told TN that I did not need to learn the operation of Facit machines, which I saw him cranking all the time. (This reminds me of a British economist, Ivor Pearce, who told me that just before the War he used to work for an accounting firm where they had not yet heard of log tables; he said he finished the whole day’s work in just an hour by using the log table and read books in his office the rest of the time). Of course, I am told today our tiny laptops/smartphones contain computing capacity million times larger than the biggest IBM machines in India at that time.

The statistical assistants at ISI were literally called ‘computers’ (I was a bit taken aback when on the first day a man came to see me and said “I am your computer, sir”). One day when I was chatting with this human ‘computer’, he said some years back he had worked with a foreign professor who was rather short-tempered and used to scream at him for the slightest delay or lapse. (It so happened that I knew this professor). I said he should have protested if the professor was unnecessarily rude. He gave me a sneaky smile and said that he and other ‘computers’ had taken their ‘revenge’ on that guy. When I asked how, he said they used to mess up his calculations without the professor knowing about it. I was aghast (and also made a mental note not to trust his data analysis of that period). This was an example of what Jim Scott, the political scientist, has called ‘weapons of the weak’ in his eponymous book; many decades earlier the famous Czech novel ‘Good Soldier Švejk’ had satirical accounts of passive-subversive resistance of military authorities by the soldier. Read more »