by Marie Gaglione

1. Into the Woods

 Most college students would readily submit that there are any number of external forces that inhibit their ability to perform or engage meaningfully with their academic endeavors, even when there is a genuine motivation and desire to do so, although such drives are often compromised by more compelling opportunities (see: survivor hour and other fun! college! activities!). There’s life outside of the university to contend with; relationships end, grandparents die, dads go to jail (the last one is particularly case-specific, but statistics on students with parents in prison would be an interesting metric to have). The necessary reaction to all of these things, for those students who have the means to carry on, is to carry on. These events can be managed, more or less, with the passage of time and the support of the community, in whatever sense of the word. There are Things One Can Do to move on from Hard Times.

I am no stranger to these external forces. Since I’ve been an undergrad, I’ve had partners become exes, I’ve lost my grandmas, I’ve been told over text of far too serious things. It’s an eerie dimension of the modern era that one can read of a friend’s suicide or a father’s prison time via instant message. We bounce from one screen to another in our waking hours and we pretend like Alexa isn’t recording our every word. Every day we let Google know our thoughts, our questions, our hopes, our fears; every day we feed into the ultimate hive mind, an unlimited data collective. We’re living in Bradbury’s fever dream with a heightened dose of Orwellian anxiety. And it’s the world today (in conjunction with certain childhood traumas and genetic predispositions) that contributes to what I’ve found far more difficult to overcome than the Hard Times: the internal forces. 

The two ages I oscillate between when considering how long I’ve been depressed are seven and fifteen. At 22, that just means I’ve been depressed for either amount of time. I think about what qualifies as the true beginning – was it the cookie-cutter childhood I missed? Or the chemical dependency that’s kept me prisoner since high school? Was it when I first contemplated the unsustainable and toxic nature of capitalism, and does it get worse the more I study the climate patterns? Whatever the answer may be, the fact remains that a lot of the time I am sad (or worse – sad and panicked). And this isn’t said in an attempt to garner pity or gain sympathy because I’m being vulnerable – it’s the reality of my experience. And it’s relevant here, in a nature essay, because it’s what brought me to the white deer; it’s what made me abandon my car and belongings and head, without intention or explanation, into the woods. Read more »

Our cat, Frederica Krüger, has taken to spying on me while I work in my home office.

by Gabrielle C. Durham

My friend does not use punctuation when he texts, so there is a stream-of-consciousness quality to much of his communications. According to the fine folks at Buzzfeed, you would likely infer that he is a millennial, but that is not true. He conveys his points while eschewing syntactic finality fairly clearly, so when he does use punctuation, he makes a big deal of it, as in “Look. At. The. Punctuation. I’m. Using.”

According to this article, using ending punctuation (specifically a period) in a text can convey insincerity (by way of gratuitous formality) or anger due to code-switching. That sounds a little forced to me, but I’m a Gen Xer, so I do not fit in the classification of folks who are deemed to be responsible for killing half the industries your parents relied on utterly.

Punctuation, which comes from the Latin root punctatio for making a point from the verb pungere, which means to pierce (circa 1539), is the set of standardized symbols in every language, and the marks do vary, that clarify meaning by separating phrases, clauses, and sentences as well as by adding breathing cues. Pablo Picasso described punctuation marks as “the fig leaves that hide the private parts of literature.” The standard punctuation marks in English are period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, colon, and semicolon. Read more »

by Ruchira Paul

Early in H.M. Naqvi’s new novel The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack (SWAC from here on out) we come across this exchange between Abdullah and a devout young Pathan as the former, in poor health and out of breath, is seen taking a drink of water from a thermos on a sweltering day during the holy month of Ramzan when most able bodied and observant Muslims choose to fast between sunrise and sunset.

“Tum Musalman ho?” asks the younger man offended by Abdullah’s transgression. “Are you a Muslim?”

Enraged by the man’s pious arrogance, Abdullah hollers, “This is Currachee! This is my city! I could be a Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, Hindoo, Amil, Parsee. I could be Shia, Sunni, Bohra, Barelvi, Sufi….If you want to ask such questions then go back to Kabul. …If you are sensible, then your God is sensible, but if you’re a dolt, your God’s a dolt.”

A dangerous confrontation follows from which the beleaguered Abdullah is rescued by a dark eyed stranger. Abdullah’s defiant bluster notwithstanding, the reader knows that in today’s Pakistan, even a Muslim in a Muslim nation and a lifelong resident of a large and cosmopolitan city like Karachi, a man cannot really expect to have his seeming lack of piety go unchallenged. Many of the adherents of other faiths on the list that Abdullah rattles off no longer live there and the few that do, are marginalized and often live in fear. Not just in Pakistan but in many parts of the world triumphalist majoritarian bullying now pervades the public mood. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The right to own guns is typically justified by the fundamental right to self-defense against bad guys, either our fellow citizens or the state itself if it were to turn tyrannical. Both of these have a superficial appeal but fail in obvious ways. Guns are an effective means of defending oneself against bad guys only so long as they don’t have guns too (because being equally armed doesn’t add up a defense against those who can pick and choose their moment of aggression). Civilians with guns are also ineffective against the armies and ruthless terroristic violence of a truly tyrannical regime.

Here I want to discuss a more subtle and less ridiculous justification for the right to own guns. I think it drives much of the enthusiasm for gun rights but is rarely spelled out. This is the fact that widespread gun ownership forces liberal democratic governments to take the views of those citizens more seriously and work harder to gain their consent. In this way gun ownership operates as a drag on the ambition and scope of what has become a somewhat paternalistic form of government with an irritating tendency to micromanage its citizens’ lives. The hoped for result would be a more libertarian regime that leaves people better alone. Read more »

My friend, poet Nils Peterson, sent me a new poem of his the other day. It moved me to spontaneously add a second verse which I presented to him and he liked. So this is a collaborative venture. The first stanza is Nils’, the last stanza, following the break, is mine. Two writers, one poem. The title belongs to Nils.

The First of July
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Year half gone. Sometimes
I’ve been Noah hammering
away at my ark, sometimes
his wife who likes the rain.
Last night, I felt the wind
freshen and the few joined
planks of my hull strain
against their braces. I woke
thinking I haven’t called
the animals. This morning
I stand by the hull of my
salvation fiercely caulking,
calling out “Aardvark”

who come in my dream
twigs in mouths, innocent as doves
with proof the seed I’d planted
before the rains would come,
before a hammer would meet my hand,
before I ever imagined a reason for arks,
had become the tree I would fell
and cut and mill to build the story
of my salvation

by Nils Peterson & Jim Culleny
7 / 27, 28 / 2019

by Joseph Shieber

There’s an interesting reaction that I sometimes get from my colleagues in the natural sciences when I describe what I do. When I talk about epistemology – the study of knowledge – I often hear a version of the following response.

“Well, in the sciences we don’t really deal with knowledge at all. At best, we have a high degree of confidence in a claim, but we’d never say that we know it.”

In the faculty dining room, there’s seldom time seriously to discuss philosophy with faculty from other disciplines. Also, if I tried it, I might find myself sitting alone in the very near future. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to respond to my (imaginary) colleague.

To do so, I want to start by considering an argument of Saul Kripke’s. Kripke achieved fame early as a philosophical prodigy. He enjoyed widespread acclaim within the philosophical community first for his work in modal logic and later for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Kripke’s reputation also stemmed from his virtuoso lectures. He was able to lecture without notes on complex topics, the complete paragraphs tumbling out of his mouth, seemingly effortlessly. He was equally known as someone reluctant to put his ideas to paper, so for years many of the arguments attributed to him circulated in samizdat versions taken from notes from his lectures.

In the years in which many of Saul Kripke’s arguments circulated by word of mouth or in third-party notes of lectures, one of the most famous is what we can call the “Paradox of Knowledge’ argument. Read more »

Mrinalini Mukherjee. Devi, 1982.

More here, here, and current show at Met Breuer.

by Samia Altaf

I was perhaps ten years old when I had unending cups of Eatmore’s fresh handmade mango ice cream while sitting on the lawns of Services Club Sialkot. It was one of the brightest days of my life, with my parents all to myself, undistracted by the demands of their daily doings, and the crystal cups of ice cream brought to us. We sat on reclining garden chairs on the perfectly manicured lawn, bordered by fragrant motia plants and the chambeli vine clinging to the tall peepal tree, all in full heady bloom. 

My mother ordered Coca-Cola with crushed ice—a very hip fizzy drink that had just appeared in our lives and our city, taking sleepy Sialkot by storm. She ordered sizzling –hot shami kebabs and cool cucumber sandwiches and French fries—another recent and grand addition to the club’s menu. All of these were strictly forbidden to her because of her “weight problem” and her recent bout of “slipped disc,” which her doctor thought was the result of the former. But she was happy, breaking frequently into her characteristic ringing laugh, her head thrown back. 

Clad in magenta-pink French chiffon sari, a daring sleeveless blouse and a string of pearls around her neck, pearls brought back all the way from Tokyo by my father. On her feet she had pointed-toe kitten-heel slides in pearl-colored leather, hand made by Hopson, the exclusive Chinese shoemaker on Mall Road, Lahore. She had just returned from the city, where she got, from Hanif’s Mall Road salon, the stylish Jackie Kennedy haircut that along with Coca-Cola and French fries had become quite the rage. My father in his white “bush-shirt”—half-sleeves, tennis collar, buttons down the middle, worn untucked, and white linen trousers sipping nimboo-pani in a tall glass with generous chunks of clinking ice, gazed lovingly at her, and since she looked so radiant, felt that nothing could do her any harm. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Katie Poore

“How will you defend yourself?”

It was one of the first questions my oldest brother asked me on the phone several months ago, along with: “Do you have a knife? Do you know how to use it? Maybe you should just buy a machete, if they sell those at REI. Do you know where you’re getting water? Is this really safe?” Another older brother said, “Are you bringing pepper spray?” A few weeks prior, my mom had asked, seemingly out of the blue: “Should you bring a gun?”

“No, absolutely not,” I told her. “And also, I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”

When it trickled down the family grapevine that I would be backpacking alone in southern California for a few days, reactions were mostly alarmed. It didn’t matter that I’d been backpacking plenty of times before, nor that I had been teaching children outdoor survival skills for two summers, nor that backpacking was a mostly safe exercise, if one only took the necessary precautions. It didn’t matter that the risk of being attacked by an axe-wielding murderer—on whom I would, presumably, use the pepper spray, or maybe even the knife, or, as the oldest brother later suggested, a flare gun—were slim-to-none.

What mattered was that I would be alone, and that I was a woman, and that I was going into a so-called wilderness without a companion. My mother couldn’t even feign excitement, electing only to grunt begrudgingly as I told her my route and gave her my flight information. Before I left, my younger brother cautioned me: “You better call Mom every night.” The oldest only said: “You know it’s going to be cold, right?” Read more »

My wife’s cactus plant suddenly produced this spectacular bloom a couple of days ago.

Public discussions of generations lately most often only focus on two generations–the boomers (1946-1965?) and millennials (1985-2000?). Yet many in our culture do not identify with either. One such group, Gen X, represents a midpoint between the two. And it’s a cohort that exerts more cultural influence than is generally understood.¹ Once dubbed “slackers”, for a while Gen X elicited the concern common in our discourse since the 1950s (when “teens” as a social and consumer category were born²). Those who were born from the late 60s into the early 1980s qualify, around 80 million people by some estimates.³ But we rarely hear about the social and cultural contributions made by Gen Xers to the modern cultural landscape, despite the current surge in 80s nostalgia (such as Stranger Things, which is so full 80s nostalgia that they even brought back New Coke for a season 3 promotion!)⁴.

Despite the lack of attention from the major media outlets, several Gen X themed thinkpieces have been published in various venues across the web. They center on pop cultural phenomenon, generally speaking. Youth is also part of the prism, another unsurprising facet to these works. It is hard to ignore experiencing history in part through our relationship to pop culture in the postwar age or to fail to note how that shaped people (individually and collectively) during their teenage years. But these thinkpieces on Generation X rarely explore groundshaking events in the same way that discourses on boomers or millennials do, through events like the war in Vietnam and the anti-war movement for boomers or the 2008 economic crisis and the still ongoing student debt crisis for millennials. Nor do they seem to recognize the role Gen X played in shaping the modern subcultural landscape, which signals a deep politicization of popular culture. Gen X embraced subcultures readily, and carried that on into building the modern internet age.

As a cultural historian myself, I embrace the focus on pop culture in defining generational cohorts to a certain extent. After all, in the postwar consumerist world where young people had an increasing share of the buying power, cultural experiences helped define a generation’s cohesiveness – think of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Beyonce’s Lemonade album. But under closer inspection, those generational moments often break down. Read more »

by Liam Heneghan

The Art Institute of Chicago is unremarkable in this one respect: like every world class art museum its galleries teem with works representing indefatigable artistic industry besieged by the entropic desolation that all the works of humankind are heir to.

Our lot is to amass and assemble; the universe responds, dispassionately, with decay and dispersion. Millennia of creative effort crumble away. Walk through any decent sized art museum and behold the craquelure of old oils, the loss of patina in the watercolors, the splintering of carved wood, dents in metalwork, and the extremities snapped off old stonework. Can there be a pleasure in art that is completely unhinged from the intimations of loss ? The sense of loss that decay evokes may intensify pleasure if you incline to morbidity. Read more »