by Pranab Bardhan

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

In spite of my abiding interest in literature when I came to college I was vaguely inclined to major in History. In the long break between school and college I chanced upon two books of Marxist history which opened me to a new vista of looking at history. The first was Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism. This book showed me that there is a discernible pattern in the jumble of facts in history, which attracted me. Soon after, I read a lesser Marxist history book, A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England which showed me how recasting the old widely-known history of England from the people’s perspective gives you new insights. These books whetted my appetite to read more of Marxist history.

In Presidency College there was a thriving tradition of Marxist history; the doyen of the historians there was the Marxist historian Susobhan Sarkar, who had inspired generations of history students there. (I managed to attend a couple of his lectures as a sit-in student, but soon he was to leave Presidency after a long career there). Sarkar’s son, Sumit, also a famous historian now, was a contemporary of mine in College. All around me, in College and in the coffeehouse, the dominant intellectual current was that of Marxists.

In College Street, the main thoroughfare in front of the College, and the road which I walked everyday between my home and College, was a-throb with energetic leftist movements, the most important of which were the protracted agitations in the demand for adequate food at affordable prices for the poor. Loud processions, barricades, blocking of streets, tear gas, police chasing of students, and occasional police shooting became part of my daily excitement. Read more »

by Ali Minai

The events in Afghanistan over the last week are being seen as yet another “hinge moment” in history. The images of helicopters evacuating personnel from embassies and people chasing aircraft in desperation to get on them have been seared into the memories of all who have seen them. As a person from the region (Pakistan), a student of history, and as someone interested in the current state of the world, I too have watched these events with a mixture of amazement, trepidation, horror, and perplexity. It is not clear yet whether “hope” or “fear” – or both – should be added to that list. The things I say in this piece are just the thoughts and speculations of a non-expert lay person trying to make sense of an obscure situation. As will be obvious from the rest of this piece, for all the pain and suffering the new situation in Afghanistan will bring to people in Afghanistan, I think that the American decision to withdraw was the only rational choice. The alternative of staying on for years – perhaps decades – to build a better Afghanistan would just be another exercise in paternalistic colonialism. However, the way the withdrawal is happening is a great failure of American leadership and the blame for that lies mainly with the American policies of the last two decades. Perhaps its biggest failure was in not preparing Afghanistan for this day that was sure to come sooner or later. Now the Afghan people – especially women – will pay a price for that failure, but it may also come back to haunt the United States and other great powers. It has happened before….

It is tempting to see the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban as a bookend with the events of 9-11. What happened that fateful morning in the US began a series of world-altering events that, it seems, have come full circle in Kabul today. The Taliban, ousted shortly after 9-11 by the US and NATO, have now ousted the US and NATO from Afghanistan to retake control. The wreckage of the intervening period lies scattered all over the world in broken societies, shattered lives, and altered states of mind. But are we done with all that? Has the humiliation of another great power – and it certainly is a humiliation – by another guerilla force broken the fever? Almost certainly not. Yes, Afghanistan seems to have returned to an approximate status quo ante. Yes, the United States seems to be turning inward to its own problems and westward to look warily at emerging Chinese power, seemingly writing off the regions that previously engaged its attention. But if there’s one lesson that can be learned from the events of this week, it is that the plans even of great powers are built mostly on hope and prayer. History always has other ideas.

Nor should it be taken for granted that what we see on the ground in Kabul today presages any sort of stability. The Taliban are the dog that have caught the car. It is far from clear if the car will stop, though it may slow down briefly. Afghanistan’s history over the last several decades – indeed, over the last two centuries – should make us skeptical. But that famous rhyming of history that is supposed to inform our surmise does often lapse into blank verse. Sometimes, things are different. To that end, consider two things. First, when the Taliban came to power in 1996, they were literally a ragtag Lord of the Flies bunch conquering the devastated landscape of a long civil war. This time, they are returning as a politics-savvy, battle-tested, well-organized group with a distributed leadership, a PR operation, and – very importantly – a rolodex worth of international diplomatic contacts. This is unlikely to turn them into benign liberals, but it can turn them into much more polished autocrats, which is a very dangerous species. Second, they are going to inherit the fruits of all the infrastructure, organization, and workforce development that has occurred – however imperfectly – under the US and NATO occupation in the last fifteen years or so. The Kabul the Taliban are walking into is a functioning modern city. If they just have the wisdom to exploit this gift rather than destroy it, they will start light-years ahead of where they began in 1996. But does any of this guarantee that their hegemony will last? Not at all! The other forces who have tasted power in the preceding decades are already gathering to regain some of it. The world should keep its eye on cities like Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat, and on the Panjshir Valley. The embers of resistance are surely alive in such places, and you never know where a wind might come from to fan them into a fire. That is why the moment at hand is not necessarily a hinge moment in history. It may turn out to be one in retrospect, but it is far too early to conclude that. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

In a recent essay on Slate, Phil Zuckerman, Professor of Sociology & Secular Studies and Associate Dean of Faculty at Pitzer College and the author of the 2020 book, What It Means To Be Moral: Why Religion is Not Necessary for Living a Moral Life suggests that atheists are more moral than religious believers.

It’s important to be clear about the claim Zuckerman is defending. In particular, in contrast to the stated thesis of his book, Zuckerman is not arguing that religion is not necessary for a moral life. Rather, in his Salon essay, Zuckerman instead suggests that nonbelief is in fact more compatible with morality than religious belief. As Zuckerman puts it, “When it comes to the most pressing moral issues of the day, hard-core secularists exhibit much more empathy, compassion, and care for the well-being of others than the most ardently God-worshipping.”

Zuckerman’s brief for the moral superiority of nonbelievers consists of a list of the positions held more often by nonbelievers than the most dedicated religious believers. In addition to prizing public health during the Covid-19 pandemic, affirming the truth of anthropogenic climate change, and pursuing gun control measures, Zuckerman provides a laundry list of other positions that he suggests highlight the nonbelievers’ greater moral standing:

In terms of who supports helping refugees, affordable health care for all, accurate sex education, death with dignity, gay rights, transgender rights, animal rights; and as to who opposes militarism, the governmental use of torture, the death penalty, corporal punishment, and so on — the correlation remains: The most secular Americans exhibit the most care for the suffering of others, while the most religious exhibit the highest levels of indifference.

My sense is that I actually agree with Zuckerman that the positions that he associates with nonbelievers are the morally right ones. Nevertheless, I am not confident that Zuckerman’s argument establishes what he thinks that it does. Here are three reasons why. Read more »

Where Buddha Is

I thumb down the stack of books:

Paper Dance—55 Latin Poets

Poetry Like Bread (full as loaves
my mother made) subtitled
Poets of the Political Imagination

and here’s Billy Collins Sailing Alone Around the
Room—which is pretty much what we all
do to a great extent

until, at the bottom:

Precise V-5
which is not a book at all
but the label on the black pen
that lies here in incandescent light
at the bottom of a ziggurat of books
its axis aligned with their stepped spines
upon the golden oak table so perfectly     here
for a moment Buddha is

“See,” he says, “I’m as real as
as joy and lament”

by Jim Culleny

by Martin Butler

Diversity is all the rage. It has even reached the boardrooms of the UK’s top companies and indeed those that are not so top. Targets are set for the percentage of women and ethnic minorities who should populate these boardrooms. A group known as the 30% Club aims for “30% representation of women on all FTSE 350 boards” and “to include one person of colour”.[1]  We are told that although we have some way to go, things are moving in the right direction. This all seems very progressive and few voices, even from the more conservative corners of the business world, object. But there’s something odd about this. Why has an idea about boardroom composition that would further the interests of a diverse population to a far greater extent (and which has been around in the UK since the 1970s) been implacably opposed by the business world? What is even more puzzling is that, far from finding the wholesale acceptance achieved by the aims of the 30% Club, this idea has been rejected out of hand without shame or negative publicity. The idea is that boardrooms ought to incorporate an element of democracy, that employees in a company ought to have at least one elected representative on the board of directors who can advocate for their interests. There is no club to promote a modicum of democracy in UK boardrooms, and there is no pressure for one either.[2]

In the UK, the Bullock Report of 1977 recommended a system of worker directors on the boards of large companies, an idea to those of my generation which seemed as compelling as the idea that boardrooms should be ‘diverse’ is to today’s generation.[3]  Of course this report was never implemented, and the coming Thatcher years saw the rise of the neoliberal ideal that the prime purpose of any public company was the ‘maximization of shareholder value’ (known as the Friedman doctrine after the economist Milton Friedman[4]). This excludes any room for boardroom democracy.  Over the last two decades there has been talk of a company’s ‘stakeholders’ – in other words, all those with an interest in the success of a company (not just shareholders) – but no mechanism has been introduced that might actually rebalance the scales in favour of the ordinary employee. Short term profits and shareholder value reign supreme. Teresa May timidly suggested introducing some kind of worker representation on the steps of Downing Street after the 2017 election, but again this idea was quickly buried by the powerful business lobby.  The experience of the last 50 years seems to be that if companies can get away with low pay and degraded working conditions, by and large they will, which is why the Labour government needed to imposed a minimum wage in 1998. Read more »

by Derek Neal

As far as I know, Bret Easton Ellis is the only person with the audacity to charge money for a podcast. Every other podcast I listen to is free or at least becomes free shortly after an exclusive period for subscribers. While Ellis’s podcast used to function in this way, a couple of years ago he started charging two dollars per episode, and I stopped listening.

In truth, this is a reasonable price. The podcasts are two to three hours long and feature interesting guests, usually from the film world. For the time and effort he puts into it, it’s worth the money. And yet I’m of the generation who grew up downloading music for free, streaming pirated TV shows and movies, and torrenting expensive music making software. I’ve downloaded thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff for free. I’m not trying to justify my actions, but asking me to fork over two bucks for a podcast (a podcast!?) is a lot. Expecting me to pay seems like a violation of my rights, or something.

Nevertheless, on a day a few weeks ago circumstances conspired against me: I was in a city that I’d moved to during the pandemic, where I knew no one. I was alone in my studio apartment. I needed some human companionship, and Ellis had just released a three hour conversation with Quentin Tarantino. To make matters worse, I’d watched Tarantino’s film Jackie Brown for the first time a week or so prior and had been listening to its soundtrack of late 60’s and 70’s soul and funk non-stop. What can I say, The Delfonics are pretty good. With all these forces stacked against me, I was powerless to resist. I cursed Bret Easton Ellis and punched in my credit card number. Then I called my father to give him my login information and see if he wanted to go in 50/50 with me.

As I started to listen to the podcast, I was surprised to discover that it began not with a monologue from Ellis, as it did when I had listened in the past, but with a reading of a new chapter from his memoir/novel, The Shards. I was immediately hooked. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Temple Wall Philosophy. Galle, Sri Lanka, 2010.

Digital photograph.

by Tamuira Reid

I.

I lost my father in August 2017. My son lost his a year later. I’ve always hated summer. Maybe because I was born on a cold January morning and I’ve got winter running through my blood. Maybe because the warm days always felt suffocating to me, in their endlessness. Maybe because it’s when everyone dies.

My father’s death was not a quick one off but a slow easy spread, permeating every organ, every passageway, every out he had left. Death teased him. Came at him hard then relented just long enough to make its presence known. To him. To us. To everyone at home who had their health still, dotting the hills of the small valley town around us. It pushed and pulled until every last hope for a dignified ending was filibustered. Until the man who had somehow managed to avoid hospitals for the better part of his life knew, very clearly, it would be the last place he’d see. One wall, three curtains, and a gurney. The daughters and the wife. The younger by not much brother who had already seen how this would play out because after all, cancer is no stranger in the branches of the Reid family tree.

The surgeon was wheeled into my father’s room – his concerned, televised face, skyping from a nearby trauma unit – to break the news. All systems a fail. Nothing more to be done.

I couldn’t help but think that if he were younger, they’d do more. Try harder. Not give up.

I told the nurses that the man in the bed bared no resemblance to our real father. Our real father still hiked and lifted weights and hauled timber without getting winded. Our real father could annihilate The Times Sunday crossword in under thirty minutes. Our real father read Huck Finn at eight years-old and Steinbeck at ten. Our real father could do anything they could, except save his own life.

But in the end, cancer is cruel. It’s ugly and thoughtless. And it couldn’t give two shits about who you might’ve been before it got there. Read more »

by Dick Edelstein

Not all jazz fans today will understand why an ultra-talented singer and musician like Billy Eckstine aspired to be a famous crooner. But his full, rich bass-baritone voice was ideally suited to that singing style – his voice was as smooth as that of Der Bingle, as Bing Crosby was affectionately known in those days. And crooners were the most admired singers in the 1940s, although it hardly escaped notice that they were all white men. Crosby topped the list of popular crooners –  he was idolized by Sinatra – and his style was not merely influenced by jazz; he had built his reputation by fronting prominent jazz bands like the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, whose music suited the taste of white America. Crosby was good at that style of singing, sure, but Billy Eckstine could do as well without breaking a sweat and he wanted to prove it.

In a previous article I discussed how Billie Holiday’s vocals reflected the sound of horn solos. Eckstine, a friend of hers and a contemporary, was part of that story. An innovator, like Holiday, he too incorporated horn styling into his vocals, particularly when he was singing big band arrangements. This came naturally enough since he was a talented horn player who regularly performed on trumpet and trombone. His singing style was not like Holiday’s, but each found their own way of bringing the sound and feeling – and the excitement – of horns into their vocals. Eckstine didn’t imitate Holiday’s mercurial rhythmic shifts and unusual inflections; his vocals sounded more like studied compositions, ornamented with his faultless vibrato, which industry figures called the widest in the business. What the two singers had in common was their use of vocal styling to give expression to lyrics as they incorporated up-to-the-minute styles like progressive jazz and bebop into their expanded palette of vocal effects. Also, both of them were not only composers of popular hits, but successful lyricists as well.

So how great a singer was Eckstine? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Pranab Bardhan

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

One remarkable redeeming feature of my dingy neighborhood in Kolkata was that within half a mile or so there was my historically distinctive school, and across the street from there was Presidency College, one of the very best undergraduate colleges in India at that time (my school and that College were actually part of the same institution for the first 37 years until 1854), adjacent was an intellectually vibrant coffeehouse, and the whole surrounding area had the largest book district of India—and as I grew up I made full use of all of these.

College life was a big and refreshing change for me in many ways. There was a lot of independence and opportunity to think in new ways and participate in a great deal of vigorous discussion in a whole range of discourse, including radical thoughts and risqué topics. Interaction with so many bright young minds all around was scintillating. Also, the proximity of so many women (this was my first experience of a co-educational institution) added to the excitement. There was, of course, a lot of one-upmanship, intellectual pretensions, and showing-off. But in general the discussion both in college, and in the coffeehouse (which was really an extension of the college) usually rose above all that. There were invidious class distinctions among students, many of them coming from far richer households than mine, thus with more access to not just material goods—they were much less shabbily dressed than I was–but cultural artifacts and networks and the inevitable name-dropping. But soon I figured out that I was not any less well-read and politically less aware or informed than some of the rich or culturally snobbish students, and that, to my giddy delight, even some women were prepared to listen to what I had to say. Slowly I developed an intellectual confidence to overcome some, though clearly not all, of the class barriers. Read more »

by Omar Baig 

On October 23rd 2020, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum reopened their flagship, Frank Lloyd Wright designed building on NYC’s iconic Museum Mile at 25% capacity and expanded to 50% by April 27th, 2021. Associate Curator, Ashley James selected pieces from Guggenheim’s permanent collection: by 13 contemporary artists, like Carrie Mae Weems, Carlos Motto, and Sable Elyse Smith, for Off The Record (Apr 2—Sept 27, 2021). This exhibition investigates “the power dynamics obscured by official documentation” and playfully resists the so-called objectivity of official records that preserve “truth” by what remains excluded or “off” the record. Off The Record marks James’ first group exhibition since guest curating Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Sept 14–Feb 3, 2019) for the Brooklyn Museum.

Unlike her previous exhibit, James chose not to explicitly market Off The Record as a collection show of African American (or female) artists; despite 9 out of its 13 artists identifying as Black (and 10 as women). Glenn Ligon’s Prisoner of Love #1-3 (1991) series, in particular, epitomizes Off The Record’s point of view on race: by repeatedly stenciling the binary statement “We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.” French writer Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love (1986) introduced the phrase, which Ligon adapted and increasingly overlapped across three, 6.5 by 2.5 feet, linen canvases. The black text on white-canvas, its wall text states, “serve as a clear, though not an exclusive, reference to race and other constructs; yet the blurring of the words effectively relieves these polarities of their impact.”  Read more »

Weathering of sign at the Brixen train station in the South Tyrol inadvertently shows the mountain skyline views surrounding the city. A fast train passes by in the background. Photo taken in May of this year.

by Michael Liss

It entered the bloodstream somewhere in Asia in the 1340s, killing ruthlessly and abundantly there—in India, Asia Minor, Persia, Syria, and Egypt. Trading routes, including the legendary Silk Road, were its primary arteries.

In 1347, it penetrated Europe on 12 ships from the Black Sea, destination Messina in Sicily. The flotilla brought goods, vermin, and hundreds of dead and dying sailors, all in gruesome condition.

The local authorities, realizing this was beyond the control of human hands, ordered the ships to leave, but this first instinctive public health measure was too little, too late. The ship’s deadly cargo “unloaded itself” and relentlessly found more victims.

Soon, horrifying stories came from other ports, first Marseilles and Tunis, then other major trading cities. Florence and Rome, Paris and Lyon, and then, by 1348, hopping the Channel to London. From Italy, it also crossed the Alps into Switzerland and crept into Hungary. A year later, it spread to Picardy, Flanders, and Belgium. From England, it headed North to Scotland and Ireland. Eventually, almost all of Europe was engulfed, with the Black Death killing indiscriminately, if erratically.

There was an almost mystical nature to all this. The enemy could not be seen, yet was hiding in plain sight. What we know now is that the bacillus that causes the Black Death is carried in rats and fleas, and in other humans. But rats and fleas were everywhere people lived, and they were particularly prevalent on ships, where supplies (human and otherwise) offered a consistent food source.

The easy person-to-person transmissibility added both danger and tremendous sadness. Trying to sooth a tortured loved one in the last throes was often a self-imposed death sentence. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

There are few people who spend as much time writing, thinking, and talking about the value of the work they do than intellectuals. Even as some noted intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Thomas Sowell bristle at the term intellectual to describe who they are and what they do, they among many other self-described or self-denied intellectuals have taken up significant time and space writing and talking about the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals. The bibliography of work about the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals by intellectuals is impressive and too long to review here. Suffice it to say that from the dissident side of the intellectual coin, the work of Antonio Gramsci, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Henry Giroux, James Baldwin, C. Wright Mills, Doug Kellner, Stanley Aronowitz, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Michel Foucault, Ellen Willis, Eddie Glaude, and Cornel West represent some of the best and most provocative ideas and examples to date about the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals in modern times. Out of these conversations comes more exacting representations of the intellectual based on the kind of work she or he does. From Pierre Bourdieu comes the idea of the Collective Intellectual. From Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux we get the Transformative, Critical, and Accommodating Intellectual. Doug Kellner gives us the Postmodern Intellectual. Most famously, Antonio Gramsci offered up the Organic, Traditional and Hegemonic Intellectual. From Noam Chomsky, we get a simple dichotomy between Dissident Intellectuals vs. Commissar Intellectuals. Michel Foucault identified Specific Intellectuals. And then there is the beloved Public Intellectual. There is also a significant body of work specific to the role of Black Intellectuals.

From the hegemonic side of the intellectual coin, the work of Richard Hofstadter, David Horowitz, Bill Bennett, Thomas Sowell, William F. Buckley, and Heather Mac Donald represent the work of intellectuals who, not surprisingly, deny or minimize the importance of their role in manufacturing a form of common sense that rationalizes the status quo of culture, power and knowledge. Their attacks on dissident intellectuals distracts from their own role as hegemonic intellectuals. Their attacks are not on intellectual work per se but on dissident intellectual work that exposes how various ideologies of official power naturalize oppression, violence, poverty, sexual harassment, white supremacy, and other social modalities of brutality and injustice. The primary project of hegemonic intellectuals, in addition to producing intellectual work in the service of established ideological, cultural, educational, and/or military power, is to attack dissident intellectual work and the intellectuals that produce it. Read more »

Sacrificial Goat

everything unknown snaps to light
upon awakening

in bed, supine, sun-given day ignites a fire,
blankets burn, mind’s the filament of a lamp
upon awakening

stupidity tumbles down a sheer of chance,
small thoughts plunge, they start an avalanche,
the ground gives way beneath our feet
upon awakening

light ricochets from every wall, blind see, deaf hear,
motion stills, minutiae interlock
upon awakening

east and west do not collide, they mesh
upon awakening

bias stands upon its head draining deadliness,
its river Cocytus circles a sewer
upon awakening

states recede, decline, abjure,
the babble of all the contradictory words of God unite
upon awakening

they steep in a cauldron of love, the clock’s a joke
upon awakening

doors swing wide though no one knocks,
each ajar as each unlocks
upon awakening

windows blast from jambs
upon awakening

lions lie with lambs, every noise becomes a glory note
upon awakening

every weight begins to float, even cacophony’s in tune
upon awakening

nothing’s ever learned again by rote
upon awakening

every thing becomes the sacrificial goat

Jim Culleny
8/21/14

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

I sit across from my husband at a Chinese restaurant downtown. We sit outside, in one of those wooden outhouses that Covid has made into a mainstay of New York dining. It is his lunch break, and I have come downtown to meet him, to talk things out. Frankness and care sit with us at the table; they mediate the space between us, between my cabbage and dumpling soup and his shrimp in egg sauce with white rice. 

“Why must you bring our past traumas into every argument?” he asks. His voice is steady as he asks it. The question is a question, not an accusation. In his face, I see the desire to understand. “It’s a question I ask myself, too.”

The question strikes a chord, rings a bell deep inside me, sets off alarms I did not know were there. I sit with it a moment. “I don’t know,” I say. “Or,” I continue, “I know, but—”

He finishes the thought for me: “But you don’t know why you can’t just let that tendency go.”

I nod. He nods. We understand what we’ve said and what it means, if not what it means we ought to do. We finish our lunch, and we part with smiles and jokes. We are well. As I walk uptown toward the train, however, I turn the question over and over in my mind. Why must you bring our past traumas into every argument?

*

Fletching is a word we don’t really use anymore because we live in a world of guns. It simply means to affix feathered vanes to arrows in order to make them fly. Fletching is a painstaking labor, a labor performed, one imagines, in days long gone by, only by those with the nimblest and swiftest of fingers. It is beautiful in my imagination, this work—full of colors and textures and needle-like precision. In reality, it was probably arduous and tedious, probably bent the back and wore out the eyes. But, of course, it was necessary, for in a world without guns, what is life without arrows?  Read more »