by David Oates

The  soon-to-be famous ship is part-way around the world. It will eventually become only the second vessel in recorded history to achieve the complete circumnavigation – after Magellan. But the ship is poised over disaster. Somewhere in the seas off present-day Indonesia, the captain has ordered full sail and then retired to his cabin. The ship hits something – there’s an awful shudder and it stops dead in the water. A reef, probably.

There it stays for some twenty hours – “as its crew tries and tries to fathom the trouble they are in.”

The ship is the Golden Hinde, and the captain is thus, of course, Sir Francis Drake – hero to every British schoolchild for the following four hundred-some years. Four hundred years of “gloating,” as author Horatio Morpurgo puts it, as he uses this pivotal moment to put some questions to the glittering hero – to its crew – and to ourselves.

Is Drake’s triumphant return to Plymouth harbor in September 1580 – the ship loaded with treasure – really all there is of this tale? It makes for easy telling, with Drake cast as the swashbuckling old sea-dog, as if from an Errol Flynn movie of the thirties. But what has been left out of this version?  Morpurgo uses this daylong pause to ask the question: this episode of doubt ended in bitter enmity between the captain and his ship’s chaplain, who apparently preached against the great man – upon his own ship! – during these hours of peril. Why? What other stories are buried beneath the blinding treasures and easy clichés of the Golden Hinde? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Eric J. Weiner

He was both a street fighter and a hard-boiled romantic for whom the radical imagination was at the heart of a politics that mattered, and he was one of few great intellectuals I knew who took education seriously as a political endeavor. —Henry Giroux

On August 16, 2021, Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, labor organizer, educational theorist, author, and dissident public intellectual died. Essentially self-educated, he told me once that he began with Spinoza and just kept reading. He may have actually started with Kafka or Dostoevsky, but the order of things is less important than the central lesson. It’s because of him that I often find myself telling my students—who overwhelmingly come to Montclair State University for a credential or, in Aronowitz’s lexicon, to be “schooled”—that to be educated all they really need is a “library card” and intellectual curiosity.

Through his radical and relentless pursuit of knowledge and justice, Aronowitz provided a blueprint for living an intellectual life that matters to those of us who refuse to accept the status quo. He showed us through his dissident research and activism how to direct the imagination toward the utopic horizon of radical democratic freedom and economic justice. At the heart of Stanley’s intellectual project was his life-long rejection of fatalism; his revealing criticisms of the status quo always pointed to radical possibilities for social change. Aronowitz never feared freedom like so many “intellectuals” who camouflage their conservative bias within critiques overburdened by cynicism. His embrace of what Erich Fromm called “positive freedom” was amplified by his deep respect for working people and his willingness to get his hands dirty in the fight for a future that looked radically different than the past or present. Read more »

School of fish in a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol. Photo taken last week.

by Thomas Larson

Everyone knows—or should know—how burdensome a pregnancy is on a woman. It’s especially hard now if you live in Texas where a fetal heartbeat detected at six weeks means by law the woman cannot terminate her pregnancy; she must carry it to term. The burden of having a child, whether planned for or forced, is made worse by the financial responsibility of raising that offspring, for parents and families, through childhood and adolescence, the next eighteen years. Would any man argue that such a load, for poor women in particular, is among the toughest things she’ll ever face?

But there’s another Atlas-like weight on the woman: The Texas anti-termination law refuses to address the father’s role, which I think should be restated with typographic emphasis: He Is the Father of the Fetus. While some good men do share the many duties of parenting—pregnancy, birth, and the child’s life itself—many men don’t. They flounder and flee. The stats for deadbeat dads (estranged, separated, divorced) are appalling: 30% pay nothing and 50% are forever in arrears. (As a consequence, close to 85% of custodial parents are mothers.) Is it right to force a woman to have a child when there is one in three chance that the newborn will not be supported by both parents?

I propose that we add another provision to the Texas law or the Supreme Court’s all-but-certain decision to modify or overturn Roe v. Wade. First, the Texas law should stipulate that the father of each child, in gestation or in the world, must be identified by a DNA test and by the mother. Second, the father—by court order—must pay for child-rearing over the next eighteen years. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

When Robert Solow asked me in Cambridge if I’d like to join the faculty at MIT in the other Cambridge, I was taken aback, and asked for some time to think about it. Until then I never imagined living in the US, a country I had never visited before, and what I saw in Hollywood films was not always attractive. I was planning to go back to India where my aging parents, younger siblings, and the majority of my friends were.

There was also a mental block. Growing up in the leftist environment of Bengal, I had developed a visceral distaste for the American political regime in general, its imperial hegemony and its support of oppressive regimes all over the world in the name of fighting the cold war. The ongoing Vietnam War was obviously a major irritant. At the same time I knew that in the world of new ideas, entrepreneurial innovations, and academic excellence American preeminence was undeniable. In particular MIT Economics Department was then, as now, one of the top two or three Departments in the world.

Most of my friends told me that it was silly of me not to give an immediate positive response to Solow. When I asked about how it was like living in US, most of them were not very helpful. Only Kalyan, the mathematics student, who had some experience of living there, told me that it should be fine, except that I had to be mindful about two things: (a) whenever there was a policeman around, I should keep my hands out of my pockets, otherwise I’d be shot on suspicion of hiding a gun; and (b) I should minimize visits to doctors, not just for the expense involved (particularly compared to NHS in UK), but also because American doctors were supposedly ‘knife-happy’, on the slightest pretext they’d cut out a limb or two, as fees they got from surgery were high! Read more »

by David J. Lobina

I naturally pose this question in the context of the series of posts on Language and Nationalism I have published here in the last few months. An example of a peripheral nationalist movement, the case of Catalonia will allow me to make my final message on these issues explicit enough, thus bringing the series to an end (this is the last entry; the previous 4 instalments are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4).

Catalonia, a region in the north-east of Spain, is by any definition of nationalism one might have quite clearly a nation which is furthermore in charge of a significant number of state functions all of their own – namely, it has a devolved parliament, some control over fiscal policies, a local police force, and more. What Catalonia isn’t, of course, is an independent nation-state, though in the last decade or so political events in the region suggest that a sizeable portion of Catalans would be partial to changing that. So what do the people of Catalonia want? And who are the Catalans to begin with?

The answers to these questions are partly historical, but contrary to what is usually the case in discussions such as these, we don’t actually need to go too far back in history. This is of course in keeping with the point I have made in this series of posts that the concept of nationalism and the actual reality of nation-states are rather modern phenomena, no older than 200 years (and mostly European in origin). Curiously, however, it is often the case that many standard or official histories of a given country or nation start rather far back in time, and the case of Catalonia is no exception. The monumental Història de Catalunya [The History of Catalonia], for instance, first published in 1987-89 (in 8 volumes, expanded to 10 in 2003), starts in prehistorical times. There are no doubt many who will claim that in some cases the history of a nation does start much further back than 200 years ago; some nationalists from the Basque Country, for example, another region in the north of Spain, regard Basque culture as a 1000-year phenomenon, but this is an ideological viewpoint rather than a historical one and I shall not be concerned with this type of discourse here.[i] Read more »

by Mark Harvey

Someone described the US Federal Government as a huge insurance company that has its own army. There’s real truth to that description. The vast majority of the federal budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those entitlement programs take up about 65% of the federal budget, while the military takes up about 11% of the federal budget. The interest on the federal debt takes up another 8%, leaving only about 15% for “discretionary” spending. The money spent on the military is also considered discretionary but given our vast reach with hundreds of military bases in dozens of countries, voting to reduce the military budget much would be political suicide.

The word discretion implies both the freedom to choose and sound judgment. So discretionary spending on the federal level might lead one to infer that the spending is done with good judgment. Our government receives vast sums of money through taxes and like a good frugal household never spends more than its annual revenues, with some savings set aside for a rainy day. (Insert percussive sting made after a weak joke). Actually, the federal government spends money like your deadbeat uncle with intermittent employment, too much familiarity with how the lotto works, and numerous investments in machines that purport to have finally succeeded on the concept of perpetual motion. This is not your Shaker family living with simple furniture and within its means.

Last year the federal government took in $3.4 trillion of taxes and spent $6.6 trillion, nearly twice its revenues. A trillion dollars is a vast, almost inconceivable amount of money. And yet our government spends money in such cosmic sums that congresspeople and senators toss around the word trillion as if it’s the cost of a night’s stay in a Motel 8. Perhaps the two best quotes about casually spending and losing vast sums of money come from the late Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt. When asked about his $1.7 billion losses after he tried to corner the silver market, he replied, “A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be.” Then at a congressional hearing when asked about his net worth, Hunt replied, “I don’t have the figures in my head. People who know how much they’re worth aren’t usually worth that much.” Read more »

Tanya Goel. Mechanisms 3, 2019.

Dyed paper silk, graphite pens, colour pencils and acrylic on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

by Brooks Riley

by Mike O’Brien

Read more »

The top photo was taken by me at a park called Lido in Brixen, South Tyrol, on the 20th of October last year. It reminded me of the painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat. (I’ll put a photo of that painting in the comments so you can see what I mean.) On October 20th this year I happened to be in the same place and tried to take the same photo again, the one at the bottom here. When I got home and compared it to the old photo, I was surprised by how similar they were and how I had managed to stand in the exact same spot as last time. The light is a bit different, and the people, but much has remained the same, which is reassuring in some way.

by Carol A Westbrook

Men have always wanted to fly to the moon and stars. We wanted to find out what was up there on the moon and planets? Was it heaven? Were there angels? Or were these worlds inhabited by strange creatures who built canals? We looked up, we used telescopes. We watched the stars and charted their movements. But we wanted to do more than look and imagine; we wanted to go up there and see for ourselves? The birds could fly, why couldn’t we?

But man remained earthbound until that historic day in 1903, when the Wright brothers left the ground at Kitty Hawk in the first manned, self-propelled flight. The age of flight began. Barely fifty years later, Sputnik was launched into space. Ten years later man walked on the moon. We watched the moonwalk with great excitement and anticipations. We knew it was now just a matter of time before we ourselves would get our own chance to do the same—to experience weightlessness of space, to see the moon up close, to walk on the surface of the moon.

So we waited. And waited. We dreamed about space travel, wrote books and made movies about it. “Fly Me to the Moon,” Frank Sinatra sang for us. (Click here for the song.) We grew old, and we still waited. The longer we waited, the further our dreams seem to get. Initially there were plans for more flights to the moon and perhaps a settlement, followed by exploration of Mars. Instead, NASA launched the International Space Station, or ISS.Travel to the ISS was to be by the space shuttle. Maybe we could hitch a ride and go along, too? But after the tragic crash of the Space Shuttle in 1986, in which everyone aboard perished, including the first civilian passenger, Sharon McAuliffe, NASA said, “no more civilians in space.” The shuttle project was cancelled. Read more »

by Rafiq Kathwari

Owowwowwow! What timing, Joy said, kissing my forehead. I was leaning against the island in her kitchen, my arms cradled, eyes lowered to my worn-out sneakers as she sautéed fillet of sole in the juice of tangerines.

Later, my sneakers squeaked when I dragged my feet home in an October drizzle, my sight dim, thinking at least she didn’t reject my marriage proposal completely, only “for the time being.” It was an impulsive moment, a reckless proposal.

I tossed and turned all night, hoping that when the “time being” elapsed, Joy would say, “no.” My body said sleep, but my mind was in turmoil. What did I really know about Joy? Could I list three good reasons why I wanted to marry her? Was I driven by the need for love? Was I afraid of keeping my own company? Did I have a commitment phobia, as my friends said I did? And did this phobia stalk me in my relationships? Was I looking for a mother? That gave me pause. It would be unfair to Joy or to any other woman I might meet. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

My Presidency College friend Premen was always a voracious reader, particularly of political, social and military history. He often told me of new books in those areas and sometimes persuaded me to read them. But by the time I saw him again in Cambridge, I could see his slow turn from his fascination with Trotsky to Mao. This was in line with a general movement among the young in the European left around that time. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise captured the restless energy of politically-activist students in contemporary France, foreshadowing the student rebellions in a year or so.

A Chinese student in Premen’s hostel provided him with copies of official publications from Beijing, which Premen read with interest, but I saw mainly propaganda in them. He and I used to go to China-centric evening talks, say by Joan Robinson (praising the new anti-bureaucratic directions for the world’s left being shown by the Cultural Revolution) or by Joseph Needham (on the great strides in Chinese history in science and technology). Premen directed me to Needham’s multi-volume magnum opus Science and Civilization in China, but I could manage only a partial skimming. I was, however, attracted by what is now known as the ‘Needham Question’: why has the West overtaken China (and also India) in science and technology, despite their earlier successes? By now there have been several attempts to answer this question by historians and economists, but none of which I have found fully satisfactory. Read more »