by Derek Neal

I went to France to study abroad as a 20-year-old in my third year of university. At the time, I had been studying French for eight years, but when I arrived in France, I found I was unable to express myself beyond the most rudimentary statements, and I couldn’t understand the rapid-fire questions sprayed at me by curious French students. After attending a dorm party that first weekend, I realized the gap between myself and the French students was simply too large to bridge; the most I could hope for from them was small talk and polite chatter—deep, meaningful conversation, and thus friendship, would be impossible.

Luckily, a group of Italians came to my rescue. Their English skills were more or less equivalent to my French, and their French, while being much better than mine, was at least comprehensible to my ears. I quickly fell in with them, we used French as our lingua franca, and my language ability rapidly improved.

After a few weeks, I stopped translating what I would say from English to French, and then I stopped forming sentences in my head altogether; I just said whatever I felt like saying, often to the amusement of my interlocutors (for whatever reason, foul language doesn’t seem so serious in another language). Eventually, I reached a point that seems to me a benchmark for all language learners: using a word without knowing its equivalent in one’s native language. A word pops into your head and you’re not sure exactly what it means, but it feels like the right word in the right moment, so you say it and judge the appropriateness of its use based on the reaction of the person with whom you’re speaking. The conversation continues, indicating you’ve made the correct choice. This is, in fact, how most language works, and it’s why learning a language in an educational environment where theory is emphasized over practice can be so difficult. In France, I quickly realized attending courses wouldn’t actually help me learn how to speak French, so I skipped class and went to the cafés instead; my grades suffered, but my fluency increased. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tamuira Reid

He’s easy to spot. 

Signature knee-length yellow raincoat, with a stenciled peace sign on the back of it, that he wears irregardless of the weather. Army green cargo shorts with wrappers erupting from every pocket. White sneakers with orthopedic inserts to help him manage his slippery gait. The Roblox backpack from two Christmases ago, packed with sketch pads and sharpened pencils, an eraser to smudge and soften the lines of his alien bad guy drawings; one sandwich bag filled with gummy bears in case of an emergency snack attack situation (of which there have been many); a love letter from a classmate he’s too preoccupied to love back. 

Ollie Duffy, all eleven years of him, comes hurling towards me where I stand, back against a tree, off to the side, where I hide from the uncomfortable conversations that waiting parents are subjected to. Where I drink the last of my coffee in parental anonymity. Ollie Duffy, the kid always falling out of the frame, sliding on giant orthopedic shoes, coke-bottle glasses magnifying his eyes to the point of ridiculousness. In a sea of wayward school kids at pick-up, Ollie Duffy is the tsunami. 

He hugs me, always. He asks for food, always. And halfway down Christopher Street, after he’s inhaled his 99 cent bodega chips, is when I get the “How was your day, mom?” Always.

I know he’s not listening because listening is hard. Because grown-up shit is boring. Because Christopher Street is so sparkly, right? We move in-synch and at a fast clip, weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic, our shared skill set. I hold onto his hand, and he lets me. For now. Read more »

by Cynthia Haven

“People in the know know him.” That’s what his English translator, Peter Constantine, told me. Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is becoming an important poetic voice from today’s Poland, with six volumes of poetry, and translated editions on the way. His translator added, “He has a strange poetic voice, very original and stark.”

Grzegorz is also a celebrated musician: his internationally known post-rock band Trupa Trupa has been featured on NPR, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere.  He has called his music a “vital pessimism” which shows the “rather dark and rather frightening sides of human nature.”

He grew up in Gdańsk, in the shadow of a family marred by his grandfather’s internment in a concentration camp. “My grandfather and his sister were both in the camps. This experience buried them,” he said. “After the war, she went crazy and he became a quiet, hidden man.”

His minimalist poems explore not only conflicted pasts of Eastern Europe – for example, the Nazi euthanasia program – but also the paradoxes of contemporary genocides –Rwanda, for instance. His poems have been perceived as quasi-testimonies, provocative and lyrical utterances delivered by the dead.

Yale critic Richard Deming said that Kwiatkowski’s work “reveals that the unforgettable is also the undeniable. Is it beautiful? I say it is powerfully necessary, unrelentingly direct. I say it burns.” Read more »

Graves of soldiers killed in WWI and II, in the Soldatenfriedhof in Brixen, South Tyrol. Photo taken last week when, needing a bit of peace, I went and sat there for some time in the middle of the day.

by Alexander C. Kafka

The Last Duel is a compelling wide-screen-worthy medieval period drama with exemplary production values — all the more admirable given its disrupted filming schedule during the pandemic. But the project is also a fascinating psycho-cultural phenomenon: a primarily male-helmed Me Too-era exercise in brutal masculine mutual and self-punishment. 

The true tale was adapted by Nicole Holofcener, with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, from a book by Eric Jager. It is directed by the ubiquitous Ridley Scott, who also has a production credit. Damon is a 14th-century French knight, Sir Jean de Carrouges, whose onetime comrade in arms, Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), alienates and subverts him, then allegedly rapes Jean’s wife, Marguerite (Jodie Comer). The titular duel will render God’s verdict on whether Le Gris is telling the truth in his profession of innocence. If he is, then not only will Jean perish but so will Marguerite — bound and burned alive. Jean’s corrosive pride, sneaky mother, and trouble conceiving an heir twist the tale further, as do plague-era economics and royal politics.

Reviews have prominently noted The Last Duel’s feminist spin. The script has a three-perspective Rashomon story structure from the viewpoints of the two knights and then of the lady in question, and what fools men be is certainly a key takeaway. 

But there’s more going on than that — an expiation, a cathartic self-sacrifice, of the male Hollywood ethos itself. Knights confess, or try to pummel each other into confession. And the film feels like a giant testosterone- and angst-spilling plea for forgiveness. Read more »

by Mir Ali Hosseini

Most cinemas have been open for some time where I live. After having been indoors in restaurants and bars a few times, I was slowly reintroduced to the pleasures of sharing a space with strangers. And finally it felt like the right moment to, once again, set foot in a cinema.

After about one and a half years, I wanted my return to cinema to be epic — literally epic. Dune’s synopsis seemed to promise exactly that:

A mythic and emotionally charged hero’s journey, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people.

So, despite being unfamiliar with Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), I chose to watch Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation.

I wanted my first post-lockdown cinema experience to be a sheer re-enchantment with the silver screen. So, not only did I pick a film which could surprise me the most, but also, I intentionally avoided reading about it. Even though I never read any reviews before watching the film, all the review titles I came across seemed to indicate that a great work, maybe even a masterpiece, is awaiting my presence in cinema.

Well, Dune did surprise me — though in a way which I wasn’t expecting. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Among other members in the Economics faculty at Cambridge, there was the great Italian scholar, Piero Sraffa. He was administratively the professor-in-charge of us, graduate students. So I met him a few times in that connection, but never quite intellectually engaged with him, partly because by that time he was a bit reclusive and did not teach classes or attend seminars; but also because I was so much in awe of his reputation in areas where I had little expertise. His work in Economics was path-breaking in taking price theory to its classical roots, he had an influence on Wittgenstein’s philosophy (which the latter acknowledged), and he was a close friend of the Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci (when the latter was jailed by Mussolini in 1926, Sraffa used to regularly supply him with books and even pen and paper, with which Gramsci wrote his famous Prison Notebooks, procured by Sraffa from the prison authorities after Gramsci’s death in 1937).

Other faculty members with whom I wish I had more interaction were Nicholas Kaldor, Maurice Dobb (I did tell him that his book had helped me come to Economics), and Luigi Pasinetti (many years later when I gave the first Luca d’Agliano Lecture in Development Economics in Turin, Luigi called me from Milan, which was a pleasant surprise, and we had a long talk). Both Kalpana and I saw quite a bit of two young faculty members, one was Geoff Harcourt (the friendly Australian) and Ajit Singh, an astute Marxist academic and organizer (the leftists, including some gorgeous upper-class British women, doted on him). Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

It’s my favorite topic of the year, I tell the kids, before scanning my conscience for signs that I have just lied to them. No, this feels about right, and in any case, they didn’t need my reassurance: after a dry unit about ratios, at my mention of the word “probability” I can practically hear the sound of neurons firing. Whether they know of any contexts in which chance turns up? Boy, do they. My twelve-year old students inform me about dice, cards, spinners, lotteries, casinos, about your chances of survival in Squid Game, about unearthing rare minerals in Minecraft, and about whether the stuff you want to buy is actually in stock because sometimes they run out and there’s no telling in advance when. Also the weather.

I love introducing them to the math of probability precisely because it is a topic that they have already thought about so much, but that I know many of them have incoherent intuitions about. Not that I don’t, of course, but I am a little bit ahead of them and I know from experience what I am working with. Somebody will opine that the chance that it’s going to rain next month is “fifty-fifty” because it either will or it won’t. Somebody will say that there is a 1/7 chance that someone’s favorite day of the week is Thursday. Somebody will reason that since the highest sum you can roll with two D6-dice is a 12, the chance you roll a 10 is 1 in 12, which…

Oh wait, is it? Anyway, you get the point: the process feels properly Socratic, taking slightly muddled concepts that students already feel strongly about, and providing the right nudges to make them reconsider some of those concepts and make others click together. It is a significant source of satisfaction every year to see just how fast ‘the group’ moves from guessing that a sequence of three coin flips has six possible outcomes (unless it can land on its side, which they also unerringly point out), to calculating the number of four-digit pin codes where all the digits have to be different.

It’s also becoming a little predictable, now that I teach this level for the third time. Though I was surprised to learn that this cohort of young teenagers had already binged Squid Game, I don’t generally expect them to say anything unexpected about mathematics. Until, last week, we were classifying certain things according to likelihood. I always include an apodictic claim like “1 + 1 = 2” in the mix, and students usually say that its probability is, indeed, 1. This time, I wondered out loud why we are so sure of this. Read more »

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

I am sitting at a coffee shop downtown. It’s a nice Friday morning, not too hot and not too cool, not quite autumn and not quite summer. I have eaten, so I am no longer dreaming. And, I am reading “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg for the first time in at least half a decade.

I realize about halfway through the poem’s first long section that I don’t like this poem very much. Or, I don’t like this poem very much anymore. It’s a little bit racist, a little bit whiny, a little bit full of itself. It is profound; don’t get me wrong. It is epochal, in its way. But, it is not for me anymore. In his introduction to Howl and Other Poems, William Carlos Williams writes that “Howl” is “a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience” (a sentence if ever there was one). Perhaps this is what I no longer like, this defeat, this sense that only in the abject is one to find the truth. The gambit of “Howl” is to think the marginal—the madman, the homosexual, the drug addict—as the site of visionary consciousness. Normally, this is a gambit for which I would be entirely down. But, contrary to Williams’s notion that, in the poem, “the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the strength and the courage and the faith—and the art! to persist,” there is a kind of showmanship in the poem that does not sit well with me, a glorying in the abject that never quite reaches the eternal pronunciation of the Truth-with-a-capital-T that it explicitly declares as its intent. “Howl” is an exposé of the marginalized life, and it reads, to me at least, as imbued at every moment with the same kind of sensationalism on which the exposé thrives. A perfect example of this is the third section to Carl Solomon, in which Ginsberg declares as his refrain, “I’m with you in Rockland,” the psychiatric institute. While Ginsberg and Solomon did meet in a psychiatric institute, and while Solomon was in and out of them throughout his life, he was never in Rockland, and this bothered him. He also generally took issue with his representation in the poem, feeling it was not historically accurate and feeling, one imagines, sensationalized, reduced to his psychological afflictions to serve Ginsberg’s aesthetic aims. This is not to say that there is not gentleness in “Howl” at certain points, that Ginsberg did not belong to and care for the community he describes. But, “Howl” revels in a pain that I would seek to ameliorate rather than to celebrate. It takes too much pride in the total destruction of its protagonists and does not display enough worry for them.

However, as I read, I am taken back in time to a very different period in my life: sixteen and a fag, caught in the suburbs and dreaming of Manhattan, stumbling through sex and hopelessly in love with every boy, gay or straight or inbetween, who would bear his cock to me, tumbling over myself with hormones and earnestness and a flamelike desire to mean, to write. I found Ginsberg sometime around then. “Howl” consumed me like a dream. Read more »

Cauleen Smith. Space Station Chinoiserie #1: Take hold of the Clouds, 2018.

More here, here, and here.

by Eric J. Weiner

Ghazal: India’s Season of Dissent by Karthika Naïr[1]

This year, this night, this hour, rise to salute the season of dissent.
Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims—Indians, all—seek their nation of dissent.

We the people of…they chant: the mantra that birthed a republic.
Even my distant eyes echo flares from this beacon of dissent.

Kolkata, Kasargod, Kanpur, Nagpur, Tripura… watch it spread,
tip to tricoloured tip, then soar: the winged horizon of dissent.

Dibrugarh: five hundred students face the CAA and lathiwielding
cops with Tagore’s song—an age-old tradition of dissent.

Kaagaz nahin dikhayenge… Sab Kuch Yaad Rakha Jayega…
Poetry, once more, stands tall, the Grand Central Station of dissent.

Aamir Aziz, Kausar Munir, Varun Grover, Bisaralli…
Your words, in many tongues, score the sky: first citizens of dissent.

We shall see/ Surely, we too shall see. Faiz-saab, we see your greatness
scanned for “anti-Hindu sentiment”, for the treason of dissent.

Delhi, North-East: death flanks the anthem of a once-secular land
where police now maim Muslims with Sing and die, poison of dissent.

A government of the people, by the people, for the people,
has let slip the dogs of carnage for swift excision of dissent.

Name her, Ka, name her. Umme Habeeba, mere-weeks-old, braves frost and
fascism from Shaheen Bagh: our oldest, finest reason for dissent.

As democracies wither and die throughout the world, Karthika Naïr’s ghazal is a passionate and timely celebration of dissent. The places, peoples, and languages of India dance, crack, bleed, demand, and sing their dissent. Soaring through and beyond the borders of India’s post-colonial history, dissent is the oxygen of freedom, scoring the sky with “words, in many tongues.” The “winged horizon of dissent” delineates “what is” from what should be; it is a practice of the radical imagination, an articulation of audacious hope in the long shadows of broken promises and paralyzing fatalism. As the malcontent’s muse, dissent drives the radical desires of dissident artists and intellectuals, the pedagogues of utopic possibilities at a time in which, as Naïr pointedly says,

…there are no small freedoms…I think that India is unfortunately right now living proof for anybody who wants to see the chronicle of an ascension of totalitarianism. This is the chronology: the loss of greater freedoms comes in the slipstream of the denial of perceived “smaller” freedoms. It’s an incremental approach. First, almost always, they come for the books, the art, the movies, the seemingly frivolous things. I would trace it all the way back to the first book banned in independent India, whatever the reason. Because if you can police the imagination, control the freedom of the mind, then everything else will fall in line. There can never be adequate protection for, or vigilance over, these.

Naïr’s poem is also a warning that without dissenting voices, bodies, and minds the promises—explicit and implied—of democracy, like the bones of a malnourished child, will break. Its demise is barely audible against the pitch of rage spewing from the mouths of autocrats and their sycophants throughout the world. These “dogs of carnage” are unleashed, roaming urban streets and dusty squares, rabidly tearing the flesh of hope from the bones of people who have the audacity to dissent. Read more »

by Usha Alexander

[This is the thirteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

In the world of Star Trek, no one ever goes hungry or lacks access to healthcare. No one wants for housing, education, social inclusion or any other basic need. In fact, no citizen of the United Federation of Planets is ever seen to pay for everyday goods or services, only for gambling or special entertainments. The Federation suffers no scarcity of any kind. All waste is presumably fed into the replicators and turned into fresh food or new clothes or whatever is needed. Yet despite ample social safety nets, there’s no end to internecine politicking, human foibles and failures, corruption and vanity, charisma and venality. The world of Star Trek appeals so widely, I think, because it presents us with something colorfully short of a utopia, a flawed human attempt toward a just, caring, and individually enabling social order. It imagines a society based on a shared set of human values—fairness, cooperation, political and economic egalitarianism—where basic human needs are equitably answered so that no one has to compete for basic subsistence and wellbeing. As the venerable Captain Picard has put it, “We’ve overcome hunger and greed, and we’re no longer interested in the accumulation of things.” Some Libertarian Trekkies have been scandalized to realize that Star Trek actually depicts a post-capitalist vision of society.

But Star Trek’s world is premised upon the existence of a cheap, concentrated, and non-polluting source of effectively infinite energy. Obviously, no such energy source has ever been discovered (solar-paneled dreamscapes notwithstanding). And the replicator, which eliminates both material waste and scarcity, is a magical technology. The Star Trek vision is also a picture of human chauvinism and hubris, presuming H. Sapiens as the only relevant form of Earthly life. So it falls short of a vivid and plausible imagining of an ecologically sustainable, technologically advanced, and egalitarian human civilization.

It is, of course, too much to expect the creators of Star Trek, by themselves, to fully and flawlessly reimagine our global human society. Indeed, it’s become an aphorism of our age that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Yet, though this might sound like a joke, at this point the matter is all too serious, and reimagining human civilization is a project we all must engage with, to whatever extent we’re able. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

What is the present? When did it begin? Stoics simply consult the calendar for an answer, where they find each new span of 24 hours reassuringly dubbed Today. Archaeologists speak of “Years Before Present” when referring to the time prior to January 1, 1950, the arbitrarily chosen inauguration of the era of radiocarbon dating following the explosion of the first atomic bombs. And the Judeo-Christian West makes of the present age a spatio-temporal chronotope, a narrative rooted in the time and place of birth of a particular figure, whose “presence” as guarantor is inextricable from the dating system, whether the appellations used are the frankly messianic Before Christ and Anno Domini, or the compromise variations on an ecumenical “Common Era”.

In 1977: Eine kurze Geschichte der Gegenwart (Suhrkamp, 2021), Philipp Sarasin deploys a novel methodology to determine the outlines of the present. His is a retrospective, thematic approach: one figured, like the Judeo-Christian narrative, by death and rebirth, but with an ambiguous and polymorphous turn. Sarasin, an intellectual historian who teaches at the University of Zurich, chooses as his foundational moment, and the stark title of his study, a year notorious among connoisseurs of Anglo-American pop culture for its symbolic passing of the baton between generations: the year in which Rock ‘n Roll was declared dead, only to be immediately resuscitated in the form of Punk; when Queen Elizabeth II was fêted throughout the Commonwealth during her Silver Jubilee while the UK languished in economic malaise and the Sex Pistols mocked the monarch from a boat on the Thames. 1977 is thus, viewed from a certain angle, an obvious facile hinge between sociological epochs. The key to Sarasin’s more complex method, however, is in his subtitle: “A Brief History of the Present,” with its echoes of popularizers like Stephen Hawking and Bill Bryson (the latter himself the author of a study devoted to one particular year), is also an insider’s reference to the journal Sarasin publishes with a collective of other historians in Switzerland and Germany. Read more »

by Callum Watts

Almost two years ago I caught COVID-19, and became quite sick for a month. Luckily I did not require hospitalisation. I was then in various states of more or less debilitating ‘unwellness’ (I use this because the word sickness does not seem to quite capture it) for about 6-8 months. I don’t think I felt ‘normal again’ till probably a year later. I’m not convinced I’ve returned to my full previous health. But all in all, if I treat that then/now comparison as an unhelpful rumination (which it is), I’d say I’m now in good physical health. Having said that, I find the phenomena of long COVID interesting and I still read first hand accounts of people experiencing long COVID as well as research on the subject. Recently the WHO has given the condition an official definition. This has caused me to reflect back on my own experiences and try to understand what, if anything I’ve learnt from it.

If I try to remember the sleepless nights, nausea, intense fatigue, palpitations, hot and cold flushes, and brain fog, they all seem very distant now, like they happened to someone else. I find it difficult to even imagine how low I felt. Similarly, when I try to pinpoint the moment at which I felt better, I find it extremely hard to pick it out. It’s almost like trying to remember when I went from being a child to an adult – I know it happened to me, I know that it involved really deep changes in myself, but trying to think back to the before and after feels impossible. I do know that at some point the amount of time I spent thinking about long COVID diminished and the amount of time I spent thinking about “everything else in life” increased. When I think about that recovery, that psychological shift seems at least as important as the physical improvements. Not only did the psychological shift support my physical recovery, but my physical recovery also allowed me to focus on the rest of my life again. If I were to experience a post viral condition again, I would focus predominantly on my psychological well-being rather than changes to my physical symptoms. In the grip of a mild chronic ailment, your mental response to it will have an enormous impact on your ability to feel like you are actually living your life again. Read more »