by Martin Butler

For some time there’s been a common complaint that western societies have suffered a loss of community. We’ve become far too individualistic, the argument goes, too concerned with the ‘I’ rather than the ‘we’. Many have made the case for this change. Published in 2000, Robert Putnam’s classic ‘Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community’, meticulously lays out the empirical data for the decline in community and what is known as ‘social capital.’ He also makes suggestions for its revival. Although this book is a quarter of a century old, it would be difficult to argue that it is no longer relevant. More recently the best-selling book by the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, ‘Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times’, presents the problem as one of moral failure.

Google ‘loss of community’ and myriad reports and articles pop up. It’s both misleading and unhelpful, however, to frame the problem in terms of such a loss, or as a conflict between ‘I’ and ‘we’. It’s important to recognise from the outset the uncontroversial point that, like dolphins or chimpanzees, human beings are by nature social animals. The claim that we have become too individualistic can’t mean that we have somehow changed our basic nature. Since our evolution on the plains of Africa, very few Homo Sapiens have lived truly non-social lives. As individuals we are relatively puny beings, our evolutionary success largely depends on our ability to act together as a group. In one sense then, it is an inescapable fact that we all live in communities on which we depend, and it’s important to remember the simple fact that we cannot survive without cooperating with others.

The anxiety about the loss of community expressed by Putnam and others must then be concerned with something other than this deeply social nature. What exactly is this?

A general characteristic of modern industrial societies which throws light on this is the fact that our interdependence on others (as adults) has become largely divorced from our most important social bonds: families, close friends, neighbours. We all live within societies and wouldn’t last long if we didn’t, this is the locus of our interdependence on others. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Nightstreet Barcode, Kowloon, January 2019.

Digital photograph.

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by Sherman J. Clark

At a recent conference in Las Vegas, Geoffrey Hinton—sometimes called the “Godfather of AI”—offered a stark choice. If artificial intelligence surpasses us, he said, it must have something like a maternal instinct toward humanity. Otherwise, “If it’s not going to parent me, it’s going to replace me.” The image is vivid: a more powerful mind caring for us as a mother cares for her child, rather than sweeping us aside. It is also, in its way, reassuring. The binary is clean. Maternal or destructive. Nurture or neglect.

Beyond the Binary

Hinton’s framing, however powerful, is too narrow. Just as humans can relate to one another—and to other creatures—in more ways than either mothering or killing, our digital descendants could come to see us through a far richer range of lenses. A student may respect a teacher without needing to parent her; a colleague may admire another’s craft while offering challenge as well as support; a historian may honor an ancestor’s legacy even while seeing her flaws. These are all recognizable human stances, and there are others we can scarcely imagine—perspectives that might emerge from ways of being in the world that are not quite human at all.

The question of how powerful beings regard others is ancient. Throughout history, humans have understood that the character of those who hold power matters as much as the structures that grant it. Whether in Plato’s careful consideration of guardian virtues, Aristotle’s analysis of constitutional decay, or Machiavelli’s unsentimental observations about princely disposition, the insight recurs: power’s effects depend at least t some extent on the qualities of mind and character in those who wield it.

But we now confront something unprecedented. For the first time, we are not merely selecting, educating, or constraining those who may eventually have power over us. We are creating them. Every design choice, training protocol, and optimization target shapes not just what these systems can do, but how they will be disposed toward us when their capabilities exceed our own. Read more »

by Sauleha Kamal

With In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature in English, Muneeza Shamsie, the time‑tested chronicler of Pakistani writing in English, presents what is arguably the definitive anthology in this genre. Across her collections, criticism, and commentary, Shamsie has chronicled, championed, and clarified the growth of a literary tradition that is vast but, in many ways, still nascent. If there is one single volume to read in order to grasp the breadth, complexity, and sheer inventiveness of Pakistani Anglophone writing, it would be this one.

Comprehensive and weighty in the best sense, In the New Century is a tome, and unapologetically so. It almost asks readers to peruse it at a leisurely pace, giving the vastness of its subject matter, picking up and sitting with one writer at a time to uncover new dimensions to this genre. Spanning the work published between 1997-2017 by over eighty writers with least one full-length published collection in that period, the book, a follow up to her first anthology A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English  (1997) proceeds in a loose chronological order according to the year of the author’s birth. This structure allows the reader to trace patterns across decades: the repetition of certain national traumas, the evolution of form and the confusing task of carving an identity. Each writer’s entry is prefaced by a concise biographical note which provides crucial context about their lives. This framing device is characteristic of Shamsie’s editorial approach: informed, unobtrusive, and generous. It also allows Shamsie to share priceless bits of trivia with readers, for example, that the Marxist writer Tariq Ali inspired Mick Jagger’s “Street Fighting Man.”

The first half of the anthology, in particular, feels like a trove of hidden gems, with stories, essays, and poems by a generation of writers who have shaped the tradition but are too often left out of mainstream discussions today. Only someone with Shamsie’s archival instinct and literary memory could have assembled such a list.

Recurring concerns of the Pakistani experience—displacement, migration, identity and  inequality—echo across time. Some older pieces that capture the resilience that defines Pakistan are uncanny in that they feel as if they could have been written in the contemporary moment. Zulfikar Ghose’s “Silent Birds” is one such poem, masterfully capturing the contradictions of life in Lahore going on as normal amid extreme incidents like terrorist attacks. Taufiq Rafat’s poem “Karachi ‘79” captures the paradox of a city built for chaos (“My relatives here/ have had to be evacuated/ by a naval boat./ When they planned this city/ they forgot the sewers”). The city’s stubborn survival set against the ongoing human consequences of a lack of urban planning still rings true. Abdullah Hussein’s “Émigré Journeys,” which recounts the story of a modest villager making up his mind to migrate to England motivated for the promise of “bright prospects,” strikes a sad chord amid today’s headlines of ICE raids in the US and Afghan refugee expulsions in Pakistan. Read more »

Bubble of a Guess and, Love Would Help

—on the Ukraine affair, Gaza, and lunatics

The saying is: there’s no time like the present
the truth is: there’s no time but the present
the rub is: what to do with the present?

There’s no reliable answer to that
it’s all conjecture
that’s what we’re stuck with, guesses,
some more educated than others
but guesses nonetheless, our
existential condition

When we painted ourselves into an atomic corner
we upped the ante by megatons—
regardless, whatever we decide will be
determined by the bubble of a guess,
or a wish and a prayer
………..—Dominus vobiscum, big time,
and the absence of lunatics,
not to mention that, in any case,
love would help while hate
will bite to the bitter end; but
that’s already been covered here
in the line about lunatics

Jim Culleny, 3/13/22– / 08/16/25

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by Jeroen Bouterse

 Under Nanna’s moon – a girl under Nanna’s moon, alone I lie

 Under Nanna’s moon drifting over the pure mountains alone I lie,

 Under the mountains of the cedars where sleeps Mullil alone I lie.[1]

“It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon”, writes Omar El Akkad in 2025. He can’t, because “no description of the moon […] reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.” Bertold Brecht wrote in the 1930s that in his time, talking about trees was almost a crime, because it implied silence about so many wrongs.

Brecht’s words are addressed To those born after, those who “will emerge from the flood that engulfed us”. They are asked to judge mildly: “when you speak of our weaknesses, remember too the dark time from which you escaped.” El Akkad’s book is titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. For him, the passing of time will allow us to settle down in comfortable and hypocritical narratives about our own innocence, and teach us nothing.

The lines above are an attempt to escape into a time where caring about the moon and talking about trees were possible. The millennia-old poetry produced by the early cities of ancient Mesopotamia seems out of reach of modernity and its missiles. We can rest our eyes on a divinity dedicating a riverbank to his mother:

 May its meadows grow herbs for you,

 may its ledges grow grapevines and (yield) grape sirop for you,

 may its slopes grow cedar, cypress, supalu-trees and box for you,

 may it adorn itself for you with tree fruit like an orchard.[2]

The distant past was not innocent; people died young there, from disease, violence, and hunger – there is Sumerian verse mentioning starvation threats as an instrument of war.[3] Even between these generic but optimistic lines of blessing – a demon that terrified the high gods themselves has just been vanquished; the future looks bright – it is not difficult to read helplessness and terror. We have to hope that meadows grow their herbs and slopes grow their cedar trees; the alternative is awful to imagine. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

Among the many things America is wrestling with right now is what constitutes a level playing field? What are the elements of a society where everyone has opportunity? There are certainly multiple competing answers to these questions.

Like America, Singapore is multicultural and, in their view, multi-racial – although I would call it multi-ethnic. The main three ethnicities for Singaporean nationals are Chinese (of many sub-groups such as Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese, etc…), Malay and Tamil Indian followed by a longtail of very small minorities who get less focus like Sephardic Jews, Bugis and Peranakans.

Power and respect between the ethnicities was one of Singapore’s earliest challenges. In fact, Singapore wouldn’t be an independent country if not for it. Initially, Singapore was one state of the Malaysian Federation – which was as a whole expected to gain its independence from Great Britain in 1965. Only cultural and linguistic issues began to sour conversations within the new government. Looking at the Malaysian Federation as a whole, Malays were the dominant ethnicity and began to strongly insist on additional rights and privileges as the Bumiputeras – Sons of the Soil.

This was problematic for Singapore with a more than 70 percent Chinese ethnic population. Singaporean leadership was fine with Malay as the official language of what would become Malaysia, but felt that all citizens deserved equal rights and privileges. In short, the country should be an equal playing field for all.

This sticking point led the Malaysian Federation to expel Singapore within a month of Malaysia’s expected independence. Many felt it was a gambit to scare Singaporean leadership into submission. But to everyone’s surprise, including the Singaporean leadership itself, Singapore did not go crawling back to Malaysia, deciding instead to go it alone. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

In the first part of this column last month, I set out the ways in which the separation of powers among the three branches of American government is rapidly being eroded. The legislative branch isn’t playing its part in the system of “checks and balances;” it isn’t interested in checking Trump at all. Instead it publicly cheers him on. A feckless Republican Congress has essentially surrendered its authority to the executive.

Having sidelined Congress entirely, Trump has trained his fire on the other supposedly coequal branch of government. The executive branch is engaged in a sustained, multipronged war against the judicial branch. This war is waged every day across the country, inside courtrooms from coast to coast, and outside courtrooms as well.

Inside the courtroom, Trump’s Department of Justice is seemingly trying to create its own reality – a new kind of reality divorced from both facts and law. It is important to understand here that the DOJ, whose lawyers represent the United States in court every day in hundreds of federal courthouses, is not, despite its name, part of the judicial branch. It is, rather, part of the executive branch.

For most of the nation’s history, however, the DOJ has viewed itself as an independent agency, dedicated to pursuing justice – not to advocating for the personal interests of the executive. Its federal law enforcement power was largely wielded independently of Congress or the president. It hasn’t always been this way – Watergate was a particularly egregious example of DOJ being used by a president for his own corrupt purposes. But after Watergate, bipartisan efforts to insulate DOJ from politics ensued, and these were mostly successful. These efforts involved statutory enactments, such as elements of the Ethics in Government Act and the Federal Election Campaign Act. But equally importantly, they also involved a strong commitment to the same basic understanding of DOJ’s role, by presidents of both parties and their appointees. Even in Trump’s first term, his two attorney generals, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, both of whom were stout conservatives, ultimately refused to let DOJ surrender to Trump’s commands.

This understanding that has prevailed for the last 50 years has been shredded in six months. Read more »

I tried to photograph the graceful flight of this heron but it landed on this seemingly dead tree branch next to the river Eisack in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, before I could capture it flying.

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by Akim Reinhardt

I drive in silence these days. That in itself is nothing new. For years, my solo road trips across America have featured long stretches of near silence. Nothing coming from the speakers. No talk, no music, no pleading commercials. Just the whir of the road helping to clear my mind.

But not at home.

Tooling around Baltimore, whether commuting about twenty minutes each way or running some errands, I almost always have the radio on. Or at least I did. That started to change in January and February, though the issue dates back to last November.

Donald Trump’s victory was not much of a surprise, but deeply depressing nonetheless. And it was the first time an election depressed me. There’s been no shortage of shitty politicians I’ve hated to see win elections in the past. But this felt different. Maybe because I’m a little older now and my perspective is changing. Maybe because it was so obvious there would be very few guard rails the second time around. Maybe because Trump really is a psychopathic rapist and aspiring dictator who has successfully chipped away at democratic norms while transforming the U.S. presidency into shameless kleptocracy while about a third of the electorate ardently roots him on. Whatever the reason, it was very clear to me that a new, very fucked up version of “normal” was about to unfold, and the one thing I could not stomach was reputable news agencies, dizzy with fear, doing everything they could to sound “objective,” which meant actively sticking their heads the sand and pretending that everything was still the old, familiar normal.

At the opening of Trump’s second term, that was NPR to the max, for all the good it did them; it took Trumpists all of half a year to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As if you couldn’t see it all coming. I certainly did, and I absolutely could not bear to listen to them normalize the pending Trumpist assault on the U.S. republic. But I didn’t switch the station. Instead, I did something that, as a former radio DJ myself at two different public stations, surprised me. I turned the radio off. Which is a shame, because it meant I was forsaking Baltimore’s fairly robust radio scene. Read more »

by Angela Starita

Over the past six years, I’ve intermittently studied weaving. For reasons unknown to me, I’ve wanted to weave for at least the last 20 years, but only as a distant dream. It was part of a larger fantasy, one I wrote an essay about years ago: riding a bike to a clean studio reminiscent of a kindergarten classroom, lots of light, plywood furniture and reams of color in the form of signage and yarn and material. I’d go there every day, work on a project and other women would be working on their projects–parallel experiences but no collaboration. There would be long periods of quiet as we concentrated with occasional meal breaks. By 3 or 4, we might start talking, playing music, showing off our progress. Then we’d clean up our spaces and bike back home. This was how we’d make our living. The specifics of our funding sources remained unresolved —it was a daydream, and I had enough trouble figuring out money flow in real life.

The essay, though, was really about my ambivalence towards fiber art, something I didn’t sense in the younger women who were taking up knitting and crocheting and sewing with what I deemed nary a moment of critical reflection about the historic role of those skills in women’s lives. In articles at the time, needle arts were seen as part of a DIY trend, a resurrection of skills learned from grandmothers and with a fair amount of attendant nostalgia. Both my grandmothers were talented at knitting and sewing, and in fact, I learned the basics of crochet from one of them. The other was in a deep senility by the time I was born, but I learned that she’d been hesitant to teach those skills to her three daughters. Her mantra was go to college and get a good job so you stay in a marriage because you want to, not because you have to.

Though I think her own marriage was a strong one, my grandfather’s insolvency in the middle of the Depression meant she needed to go back to freelance garment work. She’d spend whole nights bent over a crochet beading loom, prepping beads that she’d sew onto evening gowns for a designer she called Miss Ania. Those weren’t skills she wanted her girls to depend on. Read more »

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by Rafaël Newman

Language changes. And I’m fine with that, particularly since it wouldn’t make any difference if I weren’t. I have made my peace with the attrition of the oblique case of the interrogative pronoun—“Who to follow”¹ instead of whom; with the replacement of the subjunctive by the indicative in result clauses—“Yet the exorbitant must be rendered exemplary or typical in order that her life provides a window onto the lives of the enslaved in general,”² rather than provide, to express a hoped-for outcome; with the transformation of i-a-u ablauts (ring-rang-rung, sink-sank-sunk) into semi-deponent verbs—“For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound,”³ where the past participle is used instead of sank, the simple past; by the extension of the subjective “suspicious” to cover the objective “suspect”—a suspicious person is now not so much the one who harbors a suspicion of foul play, as the one who is suspected of it (no examples needed here; simply round up the usual suspects).

I can intuit the unconscious force behind such deformations, all of which perform the characteristic work of linguistic development: which is to simplify by removing or replacing forms no longer required for disambiguation, or whose vestigial inflection remains stranded after the tide has borne out most of their company (as in the case of whom, in the mostly no longer inflected idiom of modern English).

What I cannot bring myself to accept, however, whether in common speech or in (astonishingly) unedited written accounts, is the creeping use of the nominative “I” in compound objects (“Susan and I”), both direct and indirect, where the oblique “me” (that is, the accusative or dative form of the word) would be reflexively supplied were the object used by the speaker in uncompounded form. Read more »

Junya Ishigami. Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2019.

Photograph by Sughra Raza, August 14, 2019.

“Ishigami’s design takes inspiration from roofs, the most common architectural feature used around the world. The design of the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion is made by arranging slates to create a single canopy roof that appears to emerge from the ground of the surrounding Park. Within, the interior of the Pavilion is an enclosed cave-like space, a refuge for contemplation. For Ishigami, the Pavilion articulates his ‘free space’ philosophy in which he seeks harmony between man-made structures and those that already exist in nature.

Describing his design, Ishigami said: ‘My design for the Pavilion plays with our perspectives of the built environment against the backdrop of a natural landscape, emphasising a natural and organic feel as though it had grown out of the lawn, resembling a hill made out of rocks. This is an attempt to supplement traditional architecture with modern methodologies and concepts, to create in this place an expanse of scenery like never seen before. Possessing the weighty presence of slate roofs seen around the world, and simultaneously appearing so light it could blow away in the breeze, the cluster of scattered rock levitates, like a billowing piece of fabric.’”

More here and  here.

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