by Jeroen Bouterse

“I am by nature too dull to comprehend the subtleties of the ancients; I cannot rely on my memory to retain for long what I have learned; and my style betrays its own lack of polish.”[1] Among the benefits that reading the twelfth-century philosopher John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon has brought me were the pleasure of finding a witty and humane voice to introduce me to the new and faraway world of 12^th-century learning (of which voice I intend to give plenty of examples below), and the fact that he helped me quit Twitter (again, more to follow). Apart from those, however, a major one was certainly the consolation of seeing an unquestionably capable thinker express his intellectual limitations in terms that seem genuine, going further than what perfunctory modesty would have required.

There have surely been thinkers who were more emphatic about their natural flaws, but there is a fine line between the comforting and the disturbing. When the 20^th-century Dutch philosopher Leo Polak dreaded his approaching inaugural address, he wrote in his diary: “I came to nothing […] I have been of no value, for my family or for other people, or even simply done my duty. My pathological lack of memory my only excuse, but it is also partly laziness and sloppiness (no card system) and having whiled away my time, having flattered myself with undeserved success.”[2] That, too, resonates, but not in the uplifting way that John’s confessions do.

John has already implicitly abstracted from his own feelings of inadequacy, and has learned to look kindly upon them; he feels his lack of powers acutely, but he asks and thereby gives sympathy. “Would it not be unjust”, at his age and with all the distractions of his responsibilities, “to expect of me the mental spryness of youth, the quick comprehension of glowing natural talent, and an exact memory, always sure of itself?”[3] John makes himself small, but by connecting his own stature to the universal human condition, he also shows us how to feel small without self-hatred. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

…the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence…This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

For Asa Weinstein, on his birthday

On August 17, 1977, I stopped in as usual at our neighbors’ house, to while away the summer day with my younger brother and sister until our mother’s return home from the university. Our friends – two sets of twins and one singleton – were home-schooled by their mother, and we were all having a summer staycation in any case, so there was always somebody at their house, and a reliably lively time to be had. What met me when I walked into the kitchen that morning, however, was an unaccustomed stillness. All five young people were hovering around the door to the living room while their mother sat at the kitchen table, hunched over a newspaper. “Elvis is dead,” whispered the singleton. Presley had died the day before, in Memphis, in the early afternoon of August 16; but the headlines, and President Carter’s address, would be that day’s news, on the outskirts of Vancouver as elsewhere around the world.

I was thirteen years old and freshly returned from an ersatz bar mitzvah trip to Israel with my professor father. My psychologist mother’s musical taste – and thus mine, for the moment – ran to Mozart and The Beatles, with admixtures of Joni Mitchell and bel canto. Elvis was a yokel and a hillbilly, I had been given to understand at home: a pioneer of perfidiously whitewashed Black culture and a bridgehead of American imperialism on a Canadian West Coast swarming with counterculture “draft dodgers”. So on that day, in that mourning household, in an access of hubris and pubescent provocation, I made a disrespectful remark; in fact, I may have done nothing more than clutch my brow melodramatically and feign a heartbroken sigh.

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

Our friends’ mother, a Pennsylvanian expat as renowned for her discipline as for her volubility and salty vocabulary, had raised her baleful head to deliver my sentence of temporary exile. Her eyes were red; she had clearly been weeping. The mixture of grief and anger was palpable, alienating, and uncanny: I was still young enough to be shocked by the spectacle of a mother’s tears. Something epochal had obviously occurred, to so shake the foundations of parental placidity. I had clearly misjudged the significance of Elvis Presley. Read more »

Hydrangea flower bed in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in late July of this year.

by Sarah Firisen

My eldest daughter has a new boyfriend. I met him the other day, and he seems to be a very nice young man. When I told her I liked him, she replied, “He makes me so happy. Happier than I’ve ever been.” The first blush of love is wonderful. Young love perhaps even more so because it’s so unencumbered by the cares of adult life.

The phrase, “Happier than I’ve ever been,” has been stuck in my head. Perhaps that’s because the last year and a half or so seem to have been, somewhat perversely, a time when at least some people have been happier than they’ve ever been. Or at least happier than they’ve been for a long time. Yes, Covid is scary. Having people around us get very sick, get hospitalized, die has been awful. And lockdown brought a loss of so many of the things that we enjoyed: eating out, listening to live music, travel, gathering with friends. But for many people, it was also a time for forced quiet. And in that quiet, there was the opportunity for reflection.

Arthur C. Brooks, who writes extensively on the topic of happiness, wrote this piece in The Atlantic, A Once-in-a-Lifetime Chance to Start Over. It’s time to prepare for a new and better normal than your pre-pandemic life. In it, he tells the story of a young woman who suffered from amnesia due to a traumatic head injury. Even once she recovered, she was never the same again, “Her parents always attributed these major character changes to her “bump on the head.” But she told me no—the injury had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was the recovery time, away from ordinary routines, that created a punctuation mark in the long sentence of her life. She had a unique opportunity to assess her priorities. She vowed to take nothing in her former life as given. She tore her beliefs and values down to the studs, and rebuilt them. And in so doing, she said, she became happy for the first time in her life.” Brooks likens lockdown, for many people, to this young woman’s experience. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

The gully cricket I played in my neighborhood also had a tournament, where different neighborhoods of north Kolkata competed. I once played in such a tournament which was being held in the far north of the city, some distance from my own neighborhood. I don’t now remember the game, but I met there a savvy boy, somewhat older than me, who opened my eyes about Kolkata politics. When he asked me which locality I was from, he stopped me when I started answering with a geographic description. He was really interested in knowing which particular mafia leader my neighborhood fell under. Finding me rather ignorant, he went on to an elaborate explanation of how the whole city is divided up in different mafia fiefdoms, and their hierarchical network and different specialization in different income-earning sources, and their nexus with the hierarchy of political leaders as patrons at different levels. After he figured out the coordinates of my locality he told me which particular mafia don my neighborhood hoodlums (the local term is mastan) paid allegiance to. I recognized the name, this man’s family had a meat shop in the area.

Since that day my whole outlook to local politics changed, and soon after I saw a newspaper photo where this mafia don was sharing the dais in a political rally with the chief minister. This was the beginning of my academic interest in gangster politics and its role in the power relationships in different parts of the world. Later when I read Mario Puzo’s Godfather (before the movies based on it came out) I realized that this was a feature of metropolitan politics in rich countries as well. Now, of course, there is a whole industry on this, in literature and TV (in India, more on the Mumbai underworld, less on Kolkata’s).

I started closely observing the methods of operation of the local mastans, how they work out their demarcation of the business of extortion (sometimes the system broke down, and violent turf wars took place, like when we heard loud boom-boom noise of explosions coming from the street where the brothels were), how they mesh their organization with that of the political and cultural mobilization by the local politicians. Two of their characteristics immediately struck me as a young observer. Read more »

by Azra Raza

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

On May 31^st, 2021, I sent an email to John Pawelek, Senior Research Scientist at Yale University, requesting a zoom meeting. When a week went by without a response, I decided to call. Searching for his number, I came across his Obituary instead. John Pawelek died on May 31^st, 2021. Alas, I missed my chance to speak to a knowledgeable and accomplished scientist.

I had been reviewing the literature on metastatic spread of cancer and Pawelek’s work stood out, confirming the proposal of Otto Aichel from way back in 1911, that metastasis occurs when a tumor cell fuses with a blood cell. Fusion means good things for both cells; for the tumor cell, cozily ensconced inside a normal blood cell means it can now evade attacks from the immune system, and, as an integral part of a blood cell, it becomes mobile. Cloaked in secrecy, it can now travel all over the body with impunity. As for the blood cell, fusion with the cancer cell brings with it the ultimate gift; immortality.

Pawelek’s animal experiments and the direct evidence he provides of fused, hybrid cells in human cancers in support of Aichel’s hypothesis, are hard to ignore. The issue of symbiosis, a fundamental principle of biology, permeates non-biologic disciplines; fiction abounds with stories of interdependence, synergy, acts of cooperation, often with startling consequences for the individuals involved. Read more »

Quantum Angel

I call you
Quantum Angel
because you’re so unbelievable
not even physicists can pin
you down
the way you
flit through atoms
you must have wings
the way you punk time
your wings must be turbocharged
the way you fling particles
we can’t keep up
where do you get so many
tiny spinning things?
you must have a secret source
or you’re a maestro of illusion
a tall-tale provider, a teller
who tells in sparks and quarks
the most fundamental things,
mere things almost,
in super hadron mist
colliders

Jim Culleny

—Drawing: A Quantum Angel Spinning Off Particles
Jim C.

by Jonathan Kujawa

Some years ago I twisted the arm of an old friend and got him to visit Oklahoma to give a talk to several hundred high school students. Any reasonable person would be terrified at the idea of facing a crowd of teenagers to tell them the wonders of mathematics. Gladiators in the Colosseum had better odds. Fortunately, Michael Orrison is not a reasonable person. He handled the job with aplomb.

100 ants are dropped on a meter stick. Each is traveling to the left or right with a constant speed of one meter per minute. When two ants meet, they reverse direction and head away from each other. When an ant reaches the end of the meter stick, it falls off. What is the longest amount of time it takes for all 100 of the ants to fall off the meter stick?

At first and second glance, this seems like a very difficult problem. There are 100 variables for the locations where the ants first land on the stick, plus another 100 variables recording if they first go left or right. There will be all sorts of ping-ponging back and forth and the ants will only slowly drop off the meter stick one by one. It isn’t even so clear that you couldn’t arrange a scenario where a few ants oscillate back and forth forever. With some thought, you can convince yourself that never happens. Still, it still seems like a very hard problem to compute how long it might take for the meter stick to empty of ants. Read more »

Sughra Raza. HAPPY BIRTHDAY JIM CULLENY!

May all the marvels of the world be yours to see. Warmest wishes for many healthy and joyful years ahead.

Digital photograph, Mt. Cinnamon, Sri Lanka, 2010.

PS: perhaps this will inspire a poem 🙂

by Varun Gauri

A few years back, The University of Chicago Magazine sponsored a David Brooks parody contest. Don’t you think this one was a winner?

Porn Stars in Paradise
By David Brooks
(and Varun Gauri, AB 88)

There are two kinds of Americans. You might be surprised to hear that the basic political division is not between Republicans and Democrats. Nor is it Tea Partiers versus Huffington Post readers, extremists versus moderates, nor even Bobos versus NASCAR fans. Rather, the central divide these days is between Americans who accept electromagnetic scans of their intimates at airport security lines (let’s call these people “Porn Stars”) and people who would rather have a uniformed and preferably leathered officer touch their privates (let’s call them “Johns”).

Porn Stars accept the scans because they trust institutions. Generally speaking, they do this because they have careers and occupy professions that advance the nation’s major institutions: doctors, lawyers, professors, school teachers, scientists, bureaucrats. To them, institutions are themselves and their colleagues and friends. What’s not to trust? According to a fascinating study conducted by Professor E. Reilly Vant of the University of Chicago, 89% of social science graduate students, when told that their private parts were being shown to an unknown colleague, exhibited heightened brain activity in MRI scans in precisely the same neural regions as they did when told that their article had been accepted by The Center Folds, a leading journal in the field. In other words, Porn Stars believe in society and desperately want to be appreciated by it. Their deepest fear is that no one will see them on the inside or the underside.

Johns, on the other hand, are deeply skeptical of institutions, especially scientific ones. Johns are people who usually work with their hands, such as mechanics, electricians, small business owners, and car dealers. To them, pictures and scans, and indeed, the media altogether, can misrepresent, distort, and disguise. To know something is not to represent it but to feel it. That is why they want their fellow passengers to be touched. Only then can you verify that nothing untoward is being carried onto the plane. Now, where this gets is interesting is that Johns are themselves alienated in their own way. According to Vant’s University of Chicago colleague, Professor Trey V. L. Booker, 94% of MBA students preferred managing a massage parlor to running a university, if the private returns were identical, because they believed in the social mission of a massage parlor more than a university. The breakup of the social fabric, driven by the very social forces and institutions that Porn Stars glorify, have left Johns in need of social contact. Their deepest fear is that they will be alone.

Where is society going? Who is going to end up on top, Porn Stars or Johns? It’s clear that there is every reason to believe that Porn Stars are winning, hands down. We live in a society that is growing more institutionalized, more scientifically complex, and more representational every day. That has its advantages. But really, we could all use a nice pat down now and then. We are all Johns now.

“Unidentified Objects”

Here we go again. A secret government investigation. Blurry pictures. Debunkers. He saw…/She saw…. UFO fever comes around at least every decade or so and, if you are old enough to remember earlier iterations, it’s deja vous all over again.

But “UFO” is a misnomer. How do we know these objects are really “flying”, anyway? Maybe, they’re falling. Or floating.

It’s time to move past this stale framing. Forget about “Unidentified Flying Objects”, let’s talk about “Unidentified Objects”.

There are unidentified objects all around us. There are at least three on my desk right now. No, wait. That one is a hole punch. But who uses a hole punch anymore? Where did it come from?

My point is, why limit ourselves to things in the air? According to science, at any given moment we cannot identify with any specificity about half of the objects around us. Well, not science. But that seems about right to me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In my Kolkata neighborhood there was one kind of collective action that was unusually successful–this related to religious festivals. Every autumn there was a tremendous collective mobilization of neighborhood resources and youthful energy in organizing the local pujas for one deity or another, and on these occasions almost the whole community participated with devout dedication and considerable ingenuity (including openly pilfering from the public electricity grid for the holy cause—this art locally known as ‘hooking’).

These festivals had both religious and cultural dimensions, and Bengali society being highly politicized, politics was not far behind. In my childhood politics in my neighborhood was dominated by the Communist Party, and contrary to what you’ll expect, the communists were often enthusiastic participants in those religious festivals. The main difference with the pujas of non-communist localities was in the brochures they produced on these occasions (in our neighborhood they would, for example, invoke the goddess Kali, the fierce deity of destruction, to come and slay the forces of the evil demon of capitalism) and in the list of celebrity artists they’d invite for their cultural soirees, containing mainly those of leftist persuasion.

Many years later when my Italian classmates in England used to discuss Catholic Marxism in their country—on one occasion I even participated in a vigorous discussion with them on the famous film by the Marxist poet-director Pasolini titled “Gospel according to St. Matthew”—I told them about the communist Kali-worshippers of my neighborhood in Kolkata. I also told them of a communist activist Brahmin neighbor who combined, with touching sincerity, his daily activities as a mantra-chanting family priest in several households with his indefatigable party propaganda work every morning at the street-crossing near our house, trying to catch hold of passersby and apprising them of the evil doings of the ruling capitalist-lackey party and his marching in the streets in his lunch break from office work shouting slogans against American imperialism. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

There are momentary flashes in the aesthetic life of an individual which can’t be explained away by the exigencies of personal taste or the broader parameters of gender-biased inclinations. These random epiphanies may or may not have their roots in a psychologically identifiable pantheon of ‘likes’, but when they occur, they yank us from our routine expectations of a work and catapult us into a recessive-compulsive emotional terrain resembling infatuation—with a breathlessness induced by the sudden recognition of something strikingly familiar and yet completely unrelated to us.

It’s a given that the brain knows things we don’t know, even if it’s our own grey matter that’s withholding secrets from us. Forget the details of subliminal daily self-maintenance and logistics of being alive, whose rules hold little interest as long as everything is humming along. Consider the other, less tangible connections that the brain makes on its own, regardless of will, regardless of desire—in effect, regardless of me. At times, its affinities seem to have a life of their own, independent of my consciousness or even my history.

Not long ago, watching an emotional scene between two male Korean detectives in Beyond Evil, I was suddenly transported to Jean Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece La Grand Illusion, set during the First World War: Two aristocratic officers—Rauffenstein, the German commandant of a citadel for prisoners of war, and de Boeldieu a French captive there—are discussing the end of class-oriented military hierarchies and their own shared fate as a dying, useless breed of snobs in the new egalitarian world. Their acquaintance precedes the war, and transcends the level of hostility normally associated with enemies. Read more »

Railroad siding leading to the main Munich-Rome line in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. With a puddle with a reflection of a very tall cellphone antenna and a mountain. Photo taken last week while on one of my daily walks.