by Hari Balasubramanian

The slim, green book Natural History of Western Massachusetts is one of my favorites. Compressed into its hundred odd pages are articles and visuals that describe the essential natural features of the Amherst region, where I’ve lived since 2008. I turn to it every time something outdoors piques my interest — a new tree, bird or mammal, a geological feature.

One section that I particularly enjoy is the ‘Nature Calendar’ at the end. The calendar gives predictions on what to expect in each phase of a month; there’s approximately one prediction for every 3-day period. In early November, for example, it says “dandelions may still be blooming in protected areas”, and indeed some wildflowers do retain their bright colors despite freezing fall temperatures. It also says for the same month that “flocks of cedar-waxwings may be migrating through the region”. This was such a specific claim, but it is accurate: I was startled to see a flock of nearly a hundred waxwings swirling around bare trees on a rocky mountaintop this November.

The scientific analysis of such seasonal patterns is called phenology. Wikipedia defines it as “the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations, as well as habitat factors (such as elevation)”. It’s a clunky, textbook kind of definition but the gist is clear enough. I find myself drawn to phenology for many reasons. Read more »

—for Danny, 1949-1976

When you caught that bird in flight,
that was a wild moment, the reflex of it,
as if you’d had the mind and eyes of a hawk,
as if in your world, mysterious to us all,
mother father sisters brothers—
as if in that world you flew above
less bewildered than we,
island brother,
eagle-eyed and quick,
whose aerie was ringed
by an invisible moat

At that time there was not even a name
for your bright, distant, blinking galaxy
so they dredged up whatever seemed useful
from their spent nomenclature:
retarded, they said,
as if a boy who could snatch a bird in flight
had a slow mind.
they should have more accurately called you
distant, as if a galaxy 10 billion light years away,
as far from us as our understanding
of what made you tick

So my mind was no help in knowing you.
Conveniently hobbled I excused myself
from the work of understanding.
Now I see you were in no way slow but
full of crushing frustration, confined by your moat
at the center of your island inarticulate
to the point of slamming your head with a palm
to jar loose what you could not say,
not tongue-tied but mind-tied,
kept by genetic leash from joining
our world of connection, striving to snap it
so that you might join in our jokes
……………………… ……join in our sadness
or have us join with you in yours

And all the while I circled your moat
in relative freedom. I gazed across seeing you
self-contained to the point of desperation
jangling mom’s ring of measuring spoons
next to your ear, gone in the small joy
of hearing the peal of their teaspoon bells
but…………….
……….. dropping them
………… at the quick flicker of wings
……..….to catch your bird

Jim Culleny
4/13/18

by Mary Hrovat

Everything in the universe that’s visible from your location on Earth passes by overhead every day. We’re usually able see only the stars, galaxies, planets, and so on that are in the sky when the sun is not; we become aware of them when the sun sets and Earth’s shadow rises from the eastern horizon. But all of them are there at some point in the day. We picnic beneath the winter constellation Orion in summer and walk beneath the Summer Triangle on the short days of winter. The moon also crosses the sky every day, sometimes in the daytime, and sometimes too close to the sun to be seen.

Because we associate particular constellations with each season, and because the position of the sun on the sky indicates the time of year, in a sense all of time is up there in the sky too.

∞

The past is always arriving at Earth’s surface. All the visible light and other electromagnetic radiation reaching Earth comes from the past. The light from the sun and other bodies in the solar system is minutes to hours old. The light from the stars is ancient; some of it is older than Earth and the sun.

The oldest light you can see without using binoculars or a telescope may be that from the Andromeda Galaxy, which arrives from approximately 2.5 million years ago. Sensitive instruments can detect light much older than that, from more distant galaxies. The echo of the Big Bang, the cosmic background radiation, is the oldest light to reach Earth. You could say that some of the electromagnetic radiation reaching Earth is as old as time itself. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Another Morning. Venice, July 2012.

Digital photograph.

by Charlie Huenemann

We primates of the homo sapiens variety are very clever when it comes to making maps and plotting courses over dodgy terrain, so it comes as no surprise that we are prone to think of possible actions over time as akin to different paths across a landscape. A choice that comes to me in time can be seen easily as the choice between one path or another, even when geography really has nothing to do with it. My decision to emit one string of words rather than another, or to slip into one attitude or another, or to roll my eyes or stare stolidly ahead, can all be described as taking the path on the right instead the path on the left. And because we primates of the homo sapiens variety are notably bad at forecasting the consequences of our decisions, the decision to choose one path and lose access to the other, forever, can be momentous and frightening. It’s often better to stay in bed.

Indeed, because every decision cuts the future in half, the space of possibilities is carved rapidly into strange and unexpected shapes, causing us to gaze at one another imploringly and ask, “How ever did such a state of things come to pass?” And the answer, you see, is that we and our compatriots made one decision, and then another, and then another, and before long we found ourselves in this fresh hot mess. And we truly need not ascribe “evil” intentions to anyone in the decision chain, as much as we would like to, since our own futuromyopia supplies all the explanation that is needed. We stumble along in the forever blurry present, bitching as we go, like an ill-tempered Mr. Magoo. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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 »