by Thomas Larson

At breakfast my father asked me what I thought we should do if, in Grandma and Grandpa’s safety deposit box, we found the document identifying his real parents. The year was 1967, and he and I were in Evanston, Illinois, arranging a funeral for his adoptive mother, Elizabeth, who had died suddenly of a stroke. That he was given up at birth he had not learned until his 35th year, when Elizabeth sprang the news on him one Easter. Around the dinner table they were remembering her father, Sam Hill, descendant of a Revolutionary War general, who had often wondered aloud why Elizabeth’s child looked nothing like his parents. Dad had wondered, too.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Dad said to his mother that day, “to discover that I —”

“John, as a matter of fact, you were adopted,” she blurted out, vexing his remaining years with an insoluble conflict, namely, whether he should track down his real parents or let them be. Now that we were burying his mother and packing his 86-year-old dad into a retirement home, this bank-vault visit would be his last chance at a birthright.

He’d been up a while, ferrying trash down the back stairs to the cans. Dressed in a freshly laundered shirt, he’d rolled up the sleeves three turns. His gold watch squeezed his wrist, and the dark hair of his arms like a field of evenly charred grass reminded me that his real mother, the Czech servant girl, had given his skin a tannish color. (With the father’s Swedish ethnicity, that’s all we ever knew about his real parents.) My Scandinavian white certainly belied his half-Bohemian origins. Read more »

We drove through this long and very brightly lit tunnel just north of Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, the night before last.

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Even though I arrived at Economics with the aim of interpreting history, it soon gave me a more general perspective. First, it showed me the value of precision and empirical testing in thinking about socially important issues. This immediately appealed to me, as two of the first courses I liked in college were on Deductive and Inductive Logic. More importantly, Economics gave me a deeper understanding of the incentive mechanisms that sustain social institutions. It made me think why some of the glib solutions suggested by my leftist friends were difficult to sustain in the real world, unless based on motivations/norms and constraints of people in that world. Why are cooperatives and nationalized industries, suggested as substitutes for private enterprise, often (not always) dysfunctional? Economics asks the question: if there is a social problem, why does it not get resolved by the people on their own, and if your answer is that it is the ‘system’ that is to blame—which was the main message of many leftist stories I read and plays/movies I watched—Economics teaches us to go beyond and look into the underlying mechanism through which that ‘system’ is perpetuated or occasionally broken.

Fortunately for me in Presidency College those days Economics was combined with Political Science, as I have always looked at the two subjects as intertwined. I found that classical economists of the 18^th and 19^th century looked at economics as political-economy, and analyzed some of the major questions of distributive politics.

Aristotle in his book Politics (which was one of our textbooks) describes man as a ‘political animal’. In some sense I have been a political animal ever since childhood. My mother told me that by age five I was a regular newspaper-reader; now-a-days I read about ten newspapers (including news websites) of different countries every day. Read more »

by S. Abbas Raza

Note: This is a true story about something that happened 17 years ago but I am publishing it here this week, which marks the 20th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11/01, to give an indication of the many ways that life changed for people in the wake of that horrific day.

Recently I came upon this photo of my friend Eric, me, and his father, tucked into a book that I was trying to place in the correct place on my shelves as a part of a recent book-organizing effort and it made me think about one of the scarier events in my life. It was 2004. It was also only a couple of years after 9/11 and by then the Patriot Act was in full effect and I personally knew completely innocent people who had been caught up in the “bad Muslim” dragnet and had been detained, deported from America, etc. It was in this atmosphere that I was invited to attend my good friend Eric’s wedding on a lake in Michigan. I found the cheapest ticket possible which would involve a stopover in Pittsburgh on the way to Detroit from NYC and a stop in Philadelphia on the way back. I also reserved a rental car at the Detroit airport to get to the rural lake where the wedding was going to be.

So, on Eric’s wedding weekend, I braved the always-horrible M60 bus from the upper west side to Laguardia airport and, after going through the terrible post-9/11 security, got on my plane to Pittsburgh. All went fine.

Once in Pittsburgh, I wandered about the terminal looking at shops and tried to while away the time until my next flight and at the same time tried to ignore my nicotine cravings (I used to smoke two packs of Marlboro Red every day at that time) but in the end I couldn’t do it and decided to just go outside for a smoke, even though that meant I would have to again stand in the security line to get back to my gate for the flight to Detroit.

So there I was, sitting on a bench just outside the terminal, quickly smoking the second of my cigarettes within 15 minutes, and frequently glancing at my watch to make sure I still had enough time to get through security and onto my flight to Detroit, when I was startled by a man (African-American, in his late 30s most likely, dressed neatly in civilian clothes) who said to me in a tone which canceled all the politeness of his words, “Sir, excuse me, I am a Federal Marshal and I would like to speak to you.” Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

Philosophers are prone to define knowledge as having reasoned one’s way to some true beliefs. The obvious kicker in any such definition is truth; for how am I supposed to determine whether a belief is true? If I already know what is true, why should I bother with some philosopher’s definition of knowledge? What’s the use of this stupid definition anyway? “Hey, I’m just doing my job,” replies the philosopher. “You wanted to know what knowledge is, and I told you. If you want to know how to get it, that’s another story — and for that you’ll have to pay extra!”

If we think of true beliefs as getting things right — really right, like if you asked God about it they would say, “Yep, that’s what I figure too” — then it is indeed difficult to see how we could ever know the truth, and not just because friendly chats with God are so exceedingly rare, but also because we don’t really know what we mean when we say “really right” instead of just saying “right”. The “really” is supposed to add some special oomph to the knowledge, an oomph we by definition can never experience or access: it is the knowledge of what is going on in the world when no one is knowing it, which is like trying to see what your face looks like when no one is looking at you. “Really”, in this context, just means: at a level that is impossible to attain. Trying to get something really right means never knowing for sure whether you in fact have it right.

Where does that leave us with regard to knowledge? Well, we could be pure-souled skeptics and insist that knowledge, real knowledge, is strictly impossible ever to attain. Or, being slightly more careful, we could at least insist that we can never know when we have it. Maybe God or other metaphysical chimeras are able to confidently pronounce whether this or that mortal attains knowledge, but these or those mortals can never know when they know. In that case, if this is the route we choose, we should simply strike the word “knowledge” from our vocabularies, as it is never going to come into any practical use. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

After running through “a linguistic update” of the study of nationalism and outlining some of the psychological underpinnings of the nationalist world-view that such an update suggests, it is now time to take stock. It is time, that is, to consider some of the repercussions of this general take on things.

Three interconnected corollaries come to mind, which I shall rank, and present, from the more general of consequences to the narrower and more significant. I should add that this is probably the sort of stuff that overzealous referees of academic journals dismiss outright, without giving it much thought (I know from experience), but do humour me anyway.

The first corollary has to do with the study of nationalism itself; or more properly, with what may well be termed “the origins of nationalism” – i.e., the genesis of nationalist beliefs.

There has been plenty of discussion on this issue in the relevant literature, with various proposals on offer, each espousing a whole paradigm. Some of the better-known accounts come under the names of perennialism, primordialism or ethno-symbolism, while the consensus on the study of nationalism I myself outlined is based on the so-called modernist paradigm, perhaps the most prominent of them all. Though a well-trodden topic, I think some of the material I presented in what I am now calling Parts 1 (the update) and 2 (the psychology) of this series on nationalism offers some novelty. As argued in Part 2, after all, it is by teasing out “the building blocks” of nationalism that we can obtain a better view of the overall phenomenon, and it may well be by drawing attention to the psychological underpinnings of nationalist beliefs that it might be possible to make sense of where nationalism as an idea comes from.[i] Read more »

Sughra Raza. Karachi Afternoon Sun, 2010.

Digital photograph.

by Robyn Repko Waller

In the United States these days, it’s difficult to find a person not profoundly angry about something. Headlines scream of the vaccinated America tired, frustrated, and angry at the vaccine-hesitant and anti-vaxxers. And unvaccinated America in turn, outraged at the local jurisdiction and vaccinated for the increasing restrictions they face in attending school, dining indoors, and enjoying the gym and theater without conceding to a COVID jab. Angry parents are expressing exhausted outrage at school boards for mask policies. Outrage at mask mandates. Outrage at a lack thereof. 

The anger isn’t confined to the pandemic. Our social and political landscape is bubbling with anger. Anger at politicians, left and right. Outrage in the form of cancelling. Responding anger at the ‘Cancel Culture.’ Anger about the Afghanistan withdrawal and the tragic humanitarian aftermath. Anger at continued social injustice stateside and abroad. Conversely for some, anger directed at social justice activists. Outrage for the teaching of Critical Race Theory. Anger — but perhaps not enough — that climate change, disrupting and catastrophically reshaping our Earth and its populace, remains largely unaddressed. So much anger. 

Americans are angry. But is all of this anger really warranted? And even if it’s warranted, does it do us any good? With the amount of negative appraisal emoted as of late, it seems like a fitting time to step back and explore these concerns. 

This is especially so, as political polarization is no longer a novel phenomenon in the US. Whereas once one might take such claims of political shifts to be hype, recent electoral and public health crises stand out as manifest expressions of polarizing views and self-contained communities. Divided towns, divided co-workers, even deeply divided families. Anger at a perceived other is a prominent feature of our current standing. Moreover, clashing moral views plausibly underpin this growing schism in society.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mark Harvey

Here’s a weird thought: if it weren’t for 18th-century vaccines, America might have lost the revolutionary war to the British. That would have meant that all the anti-vaxxers today touting their freedom not to get a vaccine might have inherited quite a different destiny of eating scones and clotted cream under the British crown. Viruses have always been with us and they always will be, but in the early days of the revolutionary war, an invisible enemy probably killed more American soldiers than the British did. That quiet killer with no generals, no cannon, no forts, and no muskets was smallpox. The weapon against smallpox back then wasn’t truly a vaccine, for modern vaccines hadn’t been invented. But the inoculations were based on a similar principle of introducing a pathogen into a human to develop immunity to a disease.

It’s hard to know exactly how long smallpox has been with us, but we do know that it has been around for at least a few thousand years and probably killed Pharaoh Ramses V in 1157 B.C. When archaeologists unwrapped the linens and layers of resin preserving the pharaoh, his skin showed the characteristic pockmarks of a bad case of smallpox.

George Washington himself had suffered a bout of smallpox when he was traveling with his brother through Barbados at the age of 19. The illness incapacitated him for a solid month but also left him with a lifelong immunity, and a respect and understanding of the disease that would come to play a huge role in the revolutionary war and even the destiny of our country. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

Last month I took a trip that had a profound impact on me. Departing from a small staircase, my short flight had stopovers on the edge of a sofa and a magazine rack, before finally reaching my final destination on the floor. Being the overly intellectual sort that I am, I proceeded though most of the itinerary head-first. As soon as it was over, I questioned how best to process the experience, and how it might change me as a person, going forward. (Lord, how I despise that expression. As if freezing or going backwards were options, plutonium-powered Deloreans notwithstanding.) I didn’t seek medical attention, given that I was half-vaxed at the time and not disposed to sitting in hospital waiting rooms with the Delta variant coming into bloom.

I had taken a similar voyage to the floor years ago, and knew the protocols for returning. The last time, I adhered as closely as possible to a 10-14 day regimen of silence, darkness, sleep and dietary fat, with an absolute prohibition on screens, reading, physical activity and alcohol. This is a much more stringent regimen than those prescribed by most Canadian health guidelines regarding concussions, for the same reason that dairy-producing countries prescribe more cheese in a balanced diet. To whit, if Canadian health authorities took the long-term effects of concussions seriously, we would have to cancel North-American-style hockey and football (and boxing and MMA and Judo and racing and that competition where Russians slap each other really hard), and any professional league with money in its pockets would be sued into oblivion.

I do take the long-term effects of concussions seriously, having taken a heap of psychology classes at the very neurologically-inclined McGill University (Go Martlets!), and having done a fair bit of rather rough martial arts (safely). Concussions scare the living daylights out of me, and I’m struck by the tone of much public health information on the subject, which seem to be structured around the question of when Timmy can lace up his skates again. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

Chocolate. The very word makes your mouth water; it conjures up images of childhood, of ice cream sundaes, of Valentine’s Day, of love. A small piece in your mouth makes you happy and improves your outlook—and makes you want more. chocolate is a stimulant, a mood elevator. And so many people reached for a piece of chocolate to help get through the dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic, as reflected in the increased chocolate sales during those months

Can chocolate really do all of these things? A surprising amount of research has been done to try to answer this question, with inconclusive results. Yes, there are pharmacoactive substances in chocolate, the most prominent of which is theobromine. This chemical which is named for the plant in which it was discovered, the cacao tree, (Theobroma cacao), the source of chocolate. Carl Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist, gave the plant its name, perhaps in recognition of its importance to the natives that cultivated it. Theobroma contains the Greek words theo (god) and broma (food), meaning food of the gods—there is no bromine in the substance. Theobromine is a mild stimulant, similar to caffeine. It is also present in green tea and Yerba mate. A milk chocolate bar contains about 60 milligrams of theobromine, while dark chocolate has about 3 times as much. Consumption of an entire dark chocolate bar can have some pleasant mood effects, while three dark chocolate bars can cause sweating, trembling, and headaches. But keep your chocolate bars away from your dogs, because theobromine cannot be metabolized by animals, and it is toxic to them. Read more »

Mountains are very large. Look at the also-large, in its own way, three-story building in the lower-right of this photo taken in Brixen, South Tyrol, in June of this year.

by Nicola Sayers

To be clear: I was snooty, too. I first saw colour-coordinated bookshelves in my friend’s home, and I have to admit that, even then, I liked the look. Each neatly stacked shelf, bright and orderly. It reminded me of the new packets of felt-tipped pens I used to love getting as a kid. But in the same moment, a well-trained habit of literary condescension kicked in (I blame grad school – at heart I’m more an enthusiast than a critic, but they beat that out of you pretty quickly) and I heard myself asking a series of cringey questions. Questions designed to belittle, to declare my own bookishness in some way superior to my friend’s. But how do you find the book you’re looking for? Isn’t it weird to separate books by the same author? How do they all look so clean? (Subtext: do you even read these books?) 

But several years and a mild-to-moderate Pinterest addiction later, I found myself one rainy morning, stuck at home with a baby whose sweet smile did not, on that day, quite make up for her conversational shortcomings, and in need of some cheer. And so it was that, a few frenzied hours later, my husband came home to find all of our books rearranged according to colour. (His shelves, he’d no doubt want me to point out, have since been returned to what he views as their rightful order – yes, although we share children, a home and a bank account, our respective bookshelves are still clearly demarcated). 

My reasoning behind the reorder was admittedly entirely superficial, but the effect was surprising. I look at, engage with, and even re-read my books much more since the change. Before, I had a feeling that I knew what was there: the classics, my Frankfurt School lineup, my ever-expanding gang of contemporary female writers, and so on. Now, my book collection is both more and less familiar to me. The pops of colour draw my eyes in more frequently, but I find that the thematic disorder left in the wake of the coloured order is also strangely welcome. I not only look at the books more often, I also look at them anew.  Read more »

by Rafiq Kathwari

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. ―Franz Kafka

East Wall of My Living Room

From the top down is a magnificent square Jamawar shawl, circa 1870s, clipped to a dowel. I bought it about 40 years ago, when I still had petty cash, from a shop with a big sign board, “Shawl King, Lambert Lane, Srinagar, Kashmir” where I was born a Scorpio at Midnight. The shawl has the history of Kashmir woven into it, and more about that later.

Centered below the shawl is a large bright painting, oil on canvas. It’s titled “Vegetable Jewelry,” by Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, an Iranian living in Paris, the first Muslim or non-Western artist to achieve notoriety contemporizing the Arabic script, repeating just one alphabet across the width and breadth of the canvas. Imagine the prosperous belly of the English letter S but facing left, wearing a ~ (tilde) as a hat. That’s the Arabic letter ‘Hay or Hey:’ hay hey hay hey . . a sole hay playing its own solitary sonata.

Gracing “Vegetable Jewelry” on either side are small miniature paintings in the Mughal style, hand-painted on ivory, showing Mughal royalty in various romantic scenes inside a royal court, or on the rooftop reclined on serpentine-shaped divans upholstered with velvet, scented and shaded by blooms . . . Sigh!

There are family photos as well on this wall, all black and white. Here’s one of my younger brother Tariq, and myself, 4 and 7 years of age respectively, wearing white wool Pakols, a soft, round-topped Pashtun hat, in Murree, Pakistan in the 1950s. Chubby lads! I am beaming. Tariq has a faint smile. He was the youngest of six who, on his 63^rd birthday, went for a swim in the Arabian sea off the coast in Goa. The sea, never known to give up her human bounty, washed his corpse ashore a day later. I miss him. Read more »