by Samia Altaf

My son, it was reassuring to talk to you. We’re lucky that communication has become so easy, though I’d rather hold your dear face in my hands.

They’re quite a miracle, aren’t they, these phone calls, especially in these terrible times when one does not know what is going to happen to us, and to this country, this world. When we were in college in the U.S. in the late seventies, to talk to parents in Pakistan you had to book a call three weeks in advance. When your name came to the top of that line, you had to sit around the phone (there were no cell phones then) for ten hours. The call was expected to get through at any time during that window, for it had to be bounced over a satellite or some such complicated technological thing. What I recall most vividly about those moments is the excitement in the operator’s voice when the connection eventually happened. “Go ahead, ma’am/dear/hon,” they’d say, a triumphant edge to their tone, “your party is on the line.” I imagined the operator standing astride the Atlantic, a colossus holding the phone line up above her head out of the water just for the three minutes of my booked time so I could talk to my mother.

My mother, my “party,” was invariably in the kitchen when she was called to the phone. I could almost see her wiping her hands on the edge of her dupatta as she hurried over to scream How are you? into the phone. We’d talk about what she was cooking and other ordinary things. The world was safer then. No need to worry about face masks and sanitizers and such. The phone system that you laugh at did not seem too cumbersome then or too difficult—just normal for that time, even advanced. We thought we were lucky to be able to get to talk to folks back home, ten thousand miles away, on the other side of the world. Even grandma, Baiji, half deaf and half zonked on meds, was brought to the phone, and allowed to say Who? What? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

As many of us head into our second month of shelter in place orders (or not in some cases), we are looking to the past for guidance on what comes next. Unsurprisingly, many wonder when does “normal” return. It’s a hopeful question, as after all, this is hardly the first devastating disease that humanity has wrestled with historically. Those previous pandemics brought out massive disruptions, sometimes for centuries after. Events like the Black Death in the 14^th century, the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, and more recent scares such as swine flu, ebola, and zika, all had (or are still having) long lasting impacts—the aftermath was not back to normal, but a world transformed. But even the more recent public health emergencies seem distant problems to some.

AIDS for many still remains a “gay problem” rather than an actual, ongoing public health problem that needs a systemic response. For many white, straight people it was a “non-event” in their communities, something they experienced via the news rather than in their daily lives. The ones further in the past seem even less impactful, with the Spanish Flu as a prime example. Most narratives of the Great War told to the public ignore or downplay the role of the 1918 flu in reshaping the world. Part of that is a failure to understand how complexity of historical cause and effect. We don’t think of the Spanish Flu as disruptive, as it came at the end of the War, which gets all the public attention. But the world was pretty radically altered by the events of both the War and the pandemic: “normal” never fully returned. People lived transformed lives in the wake of both events. Here I want to argue that “normal” as we’ve come to experience it will most likely not return. Whatever changes come out of this pandemic need not be a negative if we proactively address the real cracks being revealed in our system. To quote the great Leonard Cohen, “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” I argue we need to use that illumination to create a system of sustainability rather than one based on endless growth to nowhere. Read more »

After rain, a puddle on the road with a film of fine pollen from nearby trees, one of which is also reflected in it. In Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, at the end of April, 2020.

by Katie Poore

A few months ago, before the news had spiraled into an endless spiral of public health precautions and death tolls, I was scrolling through Instagram, thinking, as one does while scrolling through Instagram, of nothing in particular. It had been a long day, and I was eager for those ten minutes of blank-mindedness, a strange and temporary forgetting as one melts into a digital universe. News of COVID-19 had just begun to spike where I had been living in Chambéry, France, close to the northern Italian border, and although it didn’t feel particularly urgent, I felt, as I almost always do, unsettled by the endless news cycle and the catastrophic events that have become so commonplace that the word catastrophic has begun to feel itself quotidian.

The news was bad, but Instagram was mostly anesthetizing, and anesthesia is what I sought. Thoughtlessness.

But it didn’t last long. Rather quickly I stumbled across a few snippets of a poem:

Praise crazy. Praise sad.

Praise the path on which we’re led.

Praise the roads on earth and water.

Praise the eater and the eaten.

Praise beginnings; praise the end.

Praise the song and praise the singer.

This was my first introduction to Joy Harjo, who has recently been reappointed a second term as the U.S. Poet Laureate. It was posted on an account called The On Being Project, created and led by Krista Tippett, who might be most familiar as host of the On Being podcast. She excerpted Harjo’s poem, “Praise the Rain,” as a promotion for what was then the most recent episode of her latest podcast project hosted by Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, Poetry Unbound. A meditation on the spiritual nature of gratitude and of scrupulous attention (in another line, she says we ought to praise the “curl of plant”), Harjo’s poem was a perfect antidote to both my own mindlessness and the chaos that inspired it. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

Dedication

As an “intellectual in emigration,” Theodor Adorno wrote Mimima Moralia, his book of philosophical, sociological, cultural, and psychological reflections “from the standpoint of subjective experience, [which] means that the pieces do not entirely measure up to the philosophy, of which they are nevertheless a part.” I have always been fascinated by this book. As form follows function, he uses common aphorisms as a springboard for this particular advance of critical theory; each section is a short but deep dive into the very essence of the experience about which he ruminates. As an intellectual in quarantine away from my home, I felt some loose kinship to Adorno’s condition of displacement and found the form compelling as well as comforting. My mind and spirit are restless and conflicted; protected yet partially blinded by my shelter, I nevertheless try to see, understand and find a kind of educated hope in the fact that through critical reflection there are pedagogical moments in the present and past from which to learn and grow.

Part One

2020

Nothing is harmless anymore–Theodor Adorno

1

Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee–Often referenced as the shortest poem ever written, Muhammad Ali’s poem “Me, We!” captures in the most succinct way the challenges that the coronavirus pandemic presents to a species not quite ready for primetime. According to George Plimpton in the film When We Were Kings, after Ali completed his commencement address to Harvard’s graduating class of ‘75, a student yelled out from the audience, “Give us a poem!” I imagine “The Greatest” looking out from the podium over the congregation of overwhelmingly white faces—punctuated like an exclamation point by the occasional brown one—and spreading his famously long arms as if getting ready to accept the love of a neglected child. A grin widens across that beautifully regal face as he recites, “Me, We!”; a stinging jab, followed by a powerful overhand right.

2

You never forget how to ride a bike—Reuters, April 4, 2020, journalist Gabriella Borter writes, “Hospitals and morgues in [New York City] are struggling to treat the desperately ill and bury the dead. Crematories have extended their hours and burned bodies into the night, with corpses piling up so quickly that city officials were looking elsewhere in the state for temporary interment sites.” My nine-year-old daughter, on this same day, in a town about eighty-five miles from the crematories and refrigerated temporary morgues, learns to ride her bike. A northwest wind rips open several days of raw rain, ushering in chilly spring air, cerulean sky, and bursts of Goldenrod along the harbor’s edge. It takes just a short jog and gentle push from me to send her off into that magical moment in which velocity, gravity and centrifugal force mix with our human capacity, need and desire for balance; her triumphant laughter and hoots of delight are stolen by the wind as she pedals her bike farther and farther away from me. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

For C.J. Newman

My father is no longer at home.

He returned to Montreal, the city of his birth, on retirement from the University of British Columbia, and has been living in the bottom half of a duplex in the Mile End district since. Some time ago he decided to sell the flat to a friend and now continues to inhabit it as a tenant, an arrangement known as viager, or “life lease”. My father’s place is near avenue Bernard; the strip of that thoroughfare starting at avenue du Parc and intersecting Jeanne Mance, Esplanade, Waverly, and Saint-Urbain has undergone gentrification since he was young, and now features a bookstore specializing in graphic novels and a variety of trendy, ironically louche venues; farther afield there are the celebrated feuding bagel bakeries, St-Viateur and Fairmount, each with its coterie of hipster disciples. Beginning in the adjacent Outremont district and spreading across Parc and down past those four perpendicular streets (whose initials, Ouija-style, eerily spell the word J.E.W.S.), there is also a large community of Hasidim, whom my father enjoys addressing (and occasionally serenading) in the Yiddish of his childhood, which was spent not far from here in Montreal’s Plateau neighborhood, among Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement. Those early immigrants, my father’s extended family and their compatriots, have long since moved on, to more salubrious districts to the southwest, away from tenements and walk-ups and into modern high-rises; or out of the province of Quebec altogether, to neighboring Ontario and beyond. My father’s immediate family – my grandparents, aunt, and uncle – have all died, leaving him with only a handful of cousins nearby, from whom he is for the most part estranged.

None of these disappearances or displacements, however, is the source of my father’s current alienation, which is not physical, but rather spiritual. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Okavango Delta, Botswana, March 2015.

Digital photograph.

by R. Passov

Modeling in finance is done through the lens of mathematics. To put something into a model where you are not guided by observable constants, such as the speed of light, requires assumptions.

With so many models off the shelf a common understanding of assumptions is slipping by. If you go far enough back, most good finance text books bothered to explain the assumptions underlying the model. One such text – Modern Finance by Copeland and Weston – offers a comprehensive discussion of the assumptions necessary to argue that the world of asset pricing is mean-variant efficient (MVE.)

MVE underpins the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), the second most important model in all of finance; a model most students in business classes in western universities are exposed to; and something that simply can’t work. Much can be proven about what the model can say.

The most important of which is that there’s a certain portfolio of assets – the Efficient Frontier – that is better than all others.

But it turns out that while this portfolio can always be found in historical data, it can never be identified in the present.

But there are other models which can be derived from the same set of unrealistic assumptions. In 1997, The Nobel Prize committee awarded the prize in Economic Sciences to Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for their “… method to determine the value of derivatives,” – the Black Scholes Options Pricing Model (BS).

These two, along with Fisher Black who had passed prior to the award, solved the puzzle of pricing the right which affords its holder a specific time frame within which to purchase, for a set price, a risky asset. The right can be to buy (a call) or sell (a put) or otherwise manipulated in almost any fashion that mathematics allows, and still some form of the BS equation will arrive at a price.

The assumptions necessary for the options pricing model to mirror reality have never been met. And yet, pricing options and the reams of creative derivatives that spew forth is a several-hundred-trillion-dollar market.

The notional value of derivatives collapse, or ‘net,’ to a much smaller number as most activity is part of a giant zero-sum game. Still, options exist. Farmers have long since contracted in advance to sell yet-to-be harvested crop. It’s only in the past 45 years that a workable formula has been available to help someone negotiate a price.

The basic formula was derived in 1900 by a French mathematician. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

A fine young man with a Yesus Kristus medallion bouncing around beneath his mirror drove us the seven or so kilometers into Mt. Kinabalu park, through the sleeping village of Kundasang. Farmers congregated at a warren of tin-roofed stalls along the main road. It looked like a good day for green tomatoes, potatoes, and cabbage.

They hauled us all in bas minis from the ranger station to the trailhead. From there, a six-kilometer trail led up to our destination, the Laban Ratah guest house, at 11,000 feet. At 13,432 feet, Mt. Kinabalu’s summit, in Malaysian Borneo, is the highest point in Southeast Asia.

Just at first the trail led downhill, charming, to a cool, wet place called Carson’s Falls. On the way down the mountain, conversely, having to climb at the end was just one last kick in the butt on the way out the door.The first kilometer (the trail was marked at each 1/2 kilometer) popped by in 23 minutes. We were flyin’, and all that stuff about how hard this would be was just talk. The first kilometer, we only stopped long enough to shed our wraps.

Still before 8:00 a.m. no sunlight had fought its way to the forest floor. The air was downright chilly once our shirts turned sweaty. And they did — at the first K marker they weren’t soaked through, but a breeze blew down the rise and chilled our damp skin.

We were cocky, jaunty, making tracks, and unappreciative of the flora, except the little violet flower of the Kinabalu Balsam, which was shaped more like it had a beard than lower petals.

The massif stood silent and still, the only sounds birds or a rustling squirrel. There are no monkeys on Mt. Kinabalu. They live nearer the sea, to the east. Read more »

Apple orchard, path, and dandelion field in the hills above Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in April of 2020.

by Zara Houshmand

Stefany Anne Golberg’s My Morningless Mornings is one of the most unusual books I’ve ever encountered. It’s very quietly ambitious, framing its aspirations without obvious fanfare, and it accomplishes them with rare elegance and efficiency.

Ostensibly the book is a memoir, but just barely. Its narrative scaffolding consists of memories from a period of Golberg’s life when, as a young teenager, she kept a nightly vigil in her suburban Las Vegas home while her father descended into mental illness. The rest of her immediate family had jumped ship. Staying awake every night until dawn and then sleeping from dawn until noon, she evaded the morning—a time fraught with anxiety and the burdens of reality. The night time hours were filled with the drone of old films and documentaries on television and with stacks of library books and encyclopedias that fed her self-directed education.

That narrative scaffolding is constructed with exquisite finesse and reserve, without the faintest hint of melodrama. The things unsaid—the absences—are as powerful as what is revealed. Consider this passage:

From the window I could also see the evergreen trees that had been planted in front of my house when I was one year old. They had become sick and thin, following the rest of the backyard, making it easier for the sun to reach the anguished message my father had scrawled in giant block letters on the driveway earlier that spring.

What were they, the trees? Junipers, I think. They had round, pale fruits that tasted like rocks and were the color of a northern sea, the color of water Jules Verne must have sailed across in his little wooden skiff, the color of Jacques Cousteau’s eyes when he gazed across the bow, just before diving down deep. Maybe this is the fear we all share. That when the morning comes, and shines its light, we will have to read the message that has been put there before us. Or worse, that there will be so much sunlight and nothing at all to see.

That single image of the message written on the driveway is the totality of the story, one of a small handful of carefully placed details where the constant background tension of her father’s decline breaks through the surface. But in the voids created by that minimalist narrative, another world emerges. Here the mention of Jules Verne and Jacques Cousteau looks back to a passage earlier in the book, that launches from Cousteau’s late night television documentaries, and how Verne’s imaginary expeditions inspired his career, into the fathomless, sunless, undersea world as an expression of shadow work, and Verne’s fantastic vehicles as fully contained interior spaces where “a ship is a symbol for the perfection of one’s inner humanity.”

These chains of reflection crisscross through the book, weaving together themes of darkness and light, sleeping and waking, and the transitional regions of dawn’s twilight and the dream world. Read more »