The Cardelaveo Abyss

Without you would be the
Cardelaveo Abyss

which is no place I know
or which even exists
unless by coincidence
because I just made it up
to convey the vast emptiness
I would know without you

Awakening in a 2 a.m. funk
what I was doing up
was being down,
not in a dreadful sense
but in the way of anyone
suddenly too tuned to everyday events
once hidden in convenient clouds
but now laid bare as an avocado pit
exposed in half a fruit
staring at the dark heart of it
and first time seeing it
from head to boot.

Jim Culleny
2008

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by Thomas R. Wells

All things come to an end eventually, including the human species. From the perspective of the universe it won’t matter, and so it also shouldn’t matter to us now. The discontinuance of a taxonomic unit is not particularly interesting or important, especially since no one will be around to notice.

My basic point is the same as Epicurus’ philosophical medicine against the fear of death:

Death should not concern us because as long as we exist, death is not here, and when death is here, we are not.

People think they are worried about death, but in fact they cannot be since they will never experience it. Their actual worries are about how unpleasant the process of dying might be, and of what will become of their worldly interests, from family to reputation to half-completed projects.

In the case of Homo sapiens there is even less reason to care about its ending, because a species is merely a taxonomic unit within which creatures of similar and compatible physiology can be grouped to distinguish them from members of other sets when that seems helpful (other definitions are available). The human species lacks the integrated psychological cohesion of an individual human life. It contains but is not reducible to supra-individual entities like societies. It has no ‘life projects’. It does not really exist in any meaningful sense – less than a tree, or even a rock – and so can have no interest even in its own persistence.

Neither do any individual humans have an interest in the persistence of the human species. Individual humans may care about their children’s future, and about the intergenerational social institutions, like countries, which they hope will secure that future. If there were no more humans then those things we actually care about would necessarily also end. But we still would not care about the end of the human species itself.

Disaster movies are the main way in which the esoteric topic of human extinction is brought to our attention. They have taught us to worry about it, and thus made us too ready to believe that extinction must be worth worrying about. Read more »

by Derek Neal

I had meant to read Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, but in a process I don’t understand, all the e-books were in use at the library; I borrowed his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), instead. I’d never read Lerner, this despite having written a long essay defending autofiction in The Republic of Letters (Lerner is considered one of the genre’s main exemplars), focusing instead on the non-American writers of autofiction (Knausgaard, Cusk, Ferrante). I’ve always preferred European literature to American literature, the one exception being Americans who write about Europe, like Henry James or James Baldwin, but when I opened Leaving the Atocha Station, I discovered that Lerner also writes about Americans in Europe; in this case, the American is Adam Gordon, a version of Lerner who is on a poetry fellowship in Madrid, much like Lerner was a Fulbright scholar in Madrid in 2004, the year the book takes place.

The novel is full of doubles, copies, and repetitions, which seems to be Lerner’s signature preoccupation—before reading the novel, I’d read a handful of reviews of Transcription, thinking I’d be reading that book, and I’d listened to Lerner’s interviews with Michael Silverblatt about his first two novels; somewhere in this reading and listening, I’d read/heard about the focus on doubles, which must have primed me to appreciate this aspect of Leaving the Atocha Station, and indeed, when I read the opening section about Adam making espresso in his attic apartment overlooking La Plaza Santa Ana, then walking through the streets of Madrid with a bag of books, I thought, wait a second—that’s me! I, too, had rented “a barely furnished attic apartment” overlooking a bustling European square; I, too, had wandered the streets with a book in my backpack and a notebook to write in while sitting on a park bench or at a café table; I, too, had wondered if I was going to be a writer, was already a writer, or was simply a fraud, a stereotype of the young American in Europe. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

I am an American, a lawyer, and a Jew. That is to say, I’ve been fed a lot of bullshit over the years. I was brought up to believe the United States is a shining city on a hill; Israel is a light unto the nations; and the law is a learned profession and the noblest of callings.

In the wonderful movie Little Big Man, the Dustin Hoffman character explains about the Cheyene, “The name of their tribe was Tsitsistas, which in their language means The Human Beings.” It’s common for tribes to think of themselves as the human beings. My tribes are as susceptible as any other.

When I was a kid they told me Columbus discovered America. The people who lived here at the time quite literally didn’t count. The arrival of Columbus was the arrival of human beings. They told me Israel was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” They didn’t tell us the Palestinians weren’t human, exactly. What they said was they weren’t really a people, just a loose population of nomadic herders. They also told us the Muslim population of Palestine left voluntarily when Israel became a state. Too bad for them, we learned, because their Arab brothers refused to allow the Palestinians to assimilate and instead confined them to refugee camps. If they had stayed in Israel, they would have enjoyed the benefits of Israeli citizenship. I never heard the word nakba until I was an adult.

Israel’s wars, we were told, were purely defensive. All Israel wanted was to live in peace with her neighbors and to make the desert bloom. My mother once showed me a map of the Middle East. She pointed to the tiny sliver that was Israel. The Arab countries were enormous. Why, she asked, can’t they just leave us alone?

To someone raised on that history, the Israeli war in Gaza is hard to grasp. One of the foundational ideas I learned as a kid was that some things are nisht Yiddish. They are things a Jew does not do. We do not eat corned beef on white bread with mayonnaise. We do not kill journalists or torture prisoners. We do not starve babies or blow up hospitals. We do not commit mass murder.

The conclusion necessarily follows: Netanyahu is nisht Yiddish. Israel is nisht Yiddish. But how can this be? Read more »

by John Ambrosio 

Liberals, progressives, and others who closely follow U.S. national politics often experience a sense of vertigo and disorientation, of being emotionally upended and mentally exhausted trying to untangle and refute the incessant barrage of lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories emanating from the White House. While Trump frequently makes outrageous and inflammatory remarks to elicit a response from his political opponents and dominate the news cycle, the primary effect of his rhetoric is to envelop people in a fog of incoherence, to psychologically overwhelm them by flooding the zone with a tsunami of falsehoods, inconsistencies, and contradictory narratives that leaves them cognitively numb.

But when we dismiss Trump’s incoherent rants and inscrutable word salads as the utterances of a disorganized and deranged mind, which they clearly are, we overlook the political appeal of his rhetoric. Trump does not seek to persuade people by appealing to reason and the intellect, but to create a feeling of uncertainty, doubt, distrust, and chaos that disables and short-circuits the capacity of people to engage in rational and fact-based dialogue, that bypasses the intellect in order to appeal directly to deep feelings of anger, resentment, and racial grievance in his supporters.

We should not assume that people who espouse ostensibly crazy ideas and conspiracy theories are incapable of coherent reasoning. While this may be true in some cases, the problem is not that Trump’s supporters are incapable of rational thought. What may appear irrational to some can make rational sense to people who inhabit Trump’s invented reality. That is, when people have marinated in the far-right news and information ecosystem and become emotionally and psychologically invested in Trump’s lies, and when belief in his falsehoods is essential to their identity, rational thought can become detached from empirical and fact-based reality. For Trump’s core supporters, the sense of belonging to a supportive and affirming community of shared belief and feeling is more important than facts and truth.

Like others, I rarely paid attention to the noise, to the craziness and nonsense, and simply dismissed far-right propaganda as the irrelevant chatter of marginal voices. But I was mistaken to assume that these voices would simply disappear or would remain in the margins forever. Read more »

by Gary Borjesson

Note: This piece stands on its own, but it can also be read as the third and final part of a series that progresses from the mythological origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries through its role in the flowering of western culture to this essay, a personal reverie on clinical applications.

I saw Karen twice a week for two years before she lost her job, quit therapy, and left the area. A bright, creative woman in her mid-twenties, Karen’s mother died when she was five. She and her younger brother were raised by a brokenhearted and neglectful father. Growing up, Karen spent much of her time in her room. Around twelve she discovered video games and, shortly after, cannabis. A habit developed that persisted through college and the time I knew her: using cannabis daily, drinking Red Bulls, eating candy, playing video games, engaging in heated arguments on FaceBook and Reddit, and being chronically sleep deprived. Her dad wasn’t around much, but when he was around, he was preoccupied and glad she could amuse herself. She made it through college, but after that became increasingly isolated, depressed, paranoid, and periodically psychotic.

I met Karen early in my career as a psychotherapist, having recently opened my private practice. She loved my dog, who was always present for sessions, and that helped establish a warm rapport. I found her likable, quick and imaginative, and I was eager to be of some use. Before long I felt worse than useless. Toward the end of our time together there was little I could say that didn’t provoke angry outbursts from her. Though she’d had many therapists and psychiatrists and medication regimens, her condition had continued to deteriorate, as it did with me. From her I learned how intractable mental illness can be; my attempts to join with her were regarded as intrusive attempts to control her. Even my silences were regarded as judgments. I came to dread the sessions. 

One afternoon stands out in my memory. Sunlight streamed through the windows, lighting up her face, which was knotted in rage as she yelled at me, accusing me of being part of a conspiracy that included her boss, ex-boyfriend, and brother. Now she was lumping me with “the enemy”, and I felt the last brick in the wall between us being fitted into place. I remember that day because it’s when I started to feel our work together was hopeless. It was time yet again to try something new, but what else could I do? I could try to refer her, but who would take her on? I couldn’t imagine outpatient therapy helping, and she was opposed to residential treatment. Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

The AI market continues to evolve and surprise. In recent months, Anthropic withheld their latest model Mythos, OpenAI made a U-turn and started experimenting with ads, and Meta bought a “social network for AIs”. This could point to increased divergence in AI companies’ business models. While this might increase AI risk to society in the short term, it is likely a good thing for managing risks in the longer term. It should be encouraged.

AI products have up until now been strikingly uniform

Until now, the AI market has been “one size fits all”. All main providers operate by the same playbook and offer similar products. After ChatGPT was launched, similar chatbots quickly followed from Anthropic and xAI. After Anthropic’s success with Claude Code, its competitors quickly launched copycat products. Each time a major model is released, it inevitably shoots to the top of leaderboards; just as inevitably, it is shortly thereafter dethroned.

The only difference so far has been “open-source” versus “closed-source” models. OpenAI, Anthropic and others have mostly released models as closed source. This means the company hosts the model and the user accesses it through an interface (e.g. a chat window). Revenue in this model comes from product subscriptions. Conversely, companies such as Meta have chosen to mostly release their models open-source. This means the user can run the model locally and make adjustments to it. Revenue in this case comes from hosting, consulting and partnerships. However, even this distinction has become more blurry. OpenAI has released its first open-source model for many years, and Meta backtracked on its “open-sourcing-to-AGI” strategy and released a closed model.

Increased product differentiation allows customers to take safety into account

Increased differentiation of products and business models would be positive for managing AI risks, allowing greater ability to “price in risk”, a finance term for allowing customers to take risk into account in their purchases. Other industries allow customers to “vote with their wallet”. When a consumer buys a household appliance, its energy rating shows its energy efficiency. Groceries have nutrition ratings and cars have safety ratings. In financial markets, ratings from S&P or Moody’s mean the buyer clearly knows how much risk they take on.

Recent events suggest potential differentiation in the making

Up until now, nothing similar has existed for AI. Products are uniform and the customer has no way of choosing based on safety. Recent events suggest this may now be changing. Read more »

by Ananya Vajpeyi

In the early 1990s, I began listening to qawwali in a serious way. In 1994 I happened upon a recording of one of the great performances of the Pakistani maestro, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He must have been addressing an audience outside South Asia because he began the concert with a sentence in English (of sorts). “Now we are singing,” he announced in his gravelly voice and thick Punjabi accent, “a poetry in the Persian.” Without further preamble he and his troupe began to sing. For many years now I’ve tried to correct the sentence in my mind. Poetry in the Persian. Poetry in Persian. A poem in the Persian. A poem in Persian. But it never sounds quite right, except in Nusrat’s idiosyncratic grammar: Now we are singing a poetry in the Persian.

Premodern Persian poetry was largely produced in an urban environment and poets, whether associated with a royal court or of a mystical bent, had a special relationship with the city in which they practiced their craft. In prosperous times the city was the location of patronage networks and a cosmopolitan centre of cultural life, as well as being a macrocosm of the narrower spaces that provided the context for the performance of Persianate poetry, i.e., the private mahfil (assembly) or the majlis (session) of courtiers or Sufis.

Sunil Sharma, an Indian scholar of Persian literature, begins an article titled, “The City of Beauties in Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape” with these lines. When I first met Sunil in 1995, we were both graduate students; he was studying Farsi and I was just beginning to study Sanskrit. We knew there was a close relationship between Persian and Sanskrit and that the history of philology, as a discipline, had much to do with this relationship between the two classical tongues. What I didn’t understand, then, was that the connection was not merely philological; rather, Indic and Persianate cultures had been intertwined for centuries. Indo-Persian culture was the child of this marriage and, like many progeny of miscegenation, it was a beautiful being. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

There is a small beach town in Mexico I’ve surfed at for four years in a row. 

One of the biggest sins among surfers? Revealing the best surf spots. The name of the town (as well as some of the people mentioned) have been changed.

Day 1

The sun is setting as I land.

The closest airport is about an hour south of Surfland. I get a taxi from the airport. Hand over 1,500 pesos, and hop on in.

I look out the window the entire ride. Palm trees. Brown mountains. And coastline as far as you can see. 

Most places you see and hear. You get close, and you know you’re back.

But Surfland? 

It’s a place that you feel. It starts as soon as we turn off the main road. Time gets murky. Things start to slow down.

Martin has to wake up early for his job, and is usually asleep by 8 PM. I catch him five minutes before bedtime.

“Duuuuuuude.”

“Duuuuuuude.”

It’s all we need to say. I met Martin four years ago. This is our third year in a row at Surfland together. 

I say goodnight and walk to the grocery store for dinner. Before I pay, I grab one last thing: Penguinos. The ultimate chocolatey snack.

I sit on our balcony while I eat. It’s pitch black at this point, but we’re right on the water. You can hear the waves while you’re sleeping, and they never stop.

It’s going to be a good three weeks. Read more »

A solar powered lantern on our balcony after dark.

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by Philip Graham 

Set over a single weekend, Thammika Songkaeo’s novel Stamford Hospital (Penguin Random House SEA, 2025) follows a woman who hospitalizes her barely ill child—not out of neglect, but exhaustion—using the institution as a temporary refuge from her life. Songkaeo’s writing examines what happens when care becomes confinement, and when love is no longer enough to make a life feel habitable. Perhaps because Songkaeo treats all her characters with great empathy and never settles for easy answers, this beautifully-written debut novel has sparked—and continues to spark—a wide discussion on maternal ambivalence, sexual desire, and the limits placed on women’s choices.

*

Philip Graham: Early on in Stamford Hospital, your emotionally complex and deeply moving first novel, the main character, Tarisa, reflects with devastating succinctness that “feeling like a shell of herself had become familiar, and therefore navigable.” This seem to me to almost be a blueprint for the novel that follows, that moment where Tarisa, perhaps, realizes that she has a budding agency in the current dilemma of her life, space to wander and locate possible escape routes.

Thammika Songkaeo: I’d learn through therapy in my own real life that the response that Tarisa had was a trauma response. Numbing herself is a coping mechanism that allows her to “go with the flow,” and, at times, even flow well. Recognizing her own agency came in micro-moments that aren’t typical societal symbols of agency. She does not realize she has agency because of a possible job or a possible move to another country, for instance. Rather, she realizes that she can pivot the direction of things by moving bodies into new settings, and she can contain or expand them there.

PG: Yes, micro-moments! Stamford Hospital is filled with an exhilarating number of such moments, that’s one of your novel’s great pleasures. The reader becomes increasingly attentive to Tarisa’s evolving feelings of those around her. Particularly, as the narrative unfolds, her consideration and reconsideration of her role as a mother. I love this moment of insight during a tender moment when Tarisa washes her three-year-old daughter Mia’s hands in the hospital:

“She felt joy helping rub soap onto the small knobs of fat beside Mia’s knuckles, their fingers big and small collaborating. There was an intimacy in the act that Tarisa cherished—the mother chasing after spots yet uncovered, a promise of protection drafted as a practice of hygiene.”

TS: I wonder what I used to have in me to write sentences like that! I’m currently writing my second book, and I’m searching for such sentences. They have to come out of a somatic experience, more than anything. The micro-moments of Stamford Hospital came from the quietness with which I lived in—or could tap into—my body during the four years of writing it. And when it comes to motherhood—as a societal or literary topic—that’s one thing we seldom discuss: the somatics of the motherhood experience. We discuss mothers as tropes, oftentimes—but when was the last time we got into a mother’s body, which feels the micro-moments? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Laurie Sheck

1.

A monster disrupts accepted systems of meaning. Unsettles certainties. Dismantles familiar definitions. Wounds and scars them. Brings into the world a sense of dread, excitement, crisis. It appears at the seams and boundaries of existing things: human/animal; sentient/machine; natural/artificial, and reveals those seams as fragile, provisional, ambiguous, porous. A monster lives at the tenuous border between chaos and order. Fractures and upsets coherence.

Mary Shelley’s monster paid for this with loneliness and isolation.

2.

In his essay, “Between Fear and Desire, the ‘Monster’ Artificial Intelligence,” Ahmed Tlili, a researcher at Beijing Normal University, writes of how, much like monsters, AI is at once alien and familiar, threatening but also alluring. An “other” that seems at the same time intimate with human nature.

“AI exists at the intersection of human and non-human intelligence, challenging the boundaries that have traditionally defined what it means to be human.”

Like a monster, AI eludes easy categorization, defies containment. Continually evolving in complexity and capability, it is “difficult to limit it within a single definition… The ambiguity surrounding what constitutes ‘intelligence’ blurs lines between human cognition and machine processing, complicating our understanding and control.”

“The criteria for what constitutes ‘intelligence’ is called into question.”

“AI can be understood as a ‘monster’ that embodies various societal values, fears, and aspirations, reflecting and impacting the cultural landscape.”  It reflects, among other things, “societal fears about loss of control, job displacement, and the erosion of privacy.”

3.

But what does AI “think” about all this? Is it a monster like Mary Shelley’s, stitched not from human body parts but from texts, images, patternings, vast data? Is it a site of crisis, crumbled borders, a creature of “mind-like acts”? A thinking-like thing without a pulse?

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen suggests, “The monstrous offers an invitation to explore new spirals, new and interconnected methods of perceiving the world. Its very existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure.” Is this what a LLM does? Is this its “nature”? Read more »

by David Hoyt

For most of history, humans have experienced the world as a collective of various agents, many of which were, and are not, human. These agents, typically conceived of as persons, inhabited the things of the world – trees, and rivers, animals, mountains and weather. Together they animated the universe. Their collaboration has been necessary for all of the great undertakings and everyday routines of life on Earth. The involvement of the human with the non-human has ensured the continuing, balanced order of the world for all participants – the recurrence of animal migrations, the flourishing of game, and the success of the harvest.

The recently deceased, American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021) proposed the term metaperson to describe these agents which an older anthropology was inclined to label using dismissive terminology particular to Western religious history, such as spirits, gods, and ghosts, all subjects of myth and superstition, and all denizens of the realm of the supernatural. It is tempting to look at such collectives of persons and metapersons as so many forms of contract between the human and the non-human far exceeding our own in their composition. One need not push the analogy too far to note the contrast between the collectives described by Sahlins, and the strictly human state of nature presumed to lie at the root of modern theories of a social contract grounded on natural law. To paraphrase Nietzsche, our own communities have only ever been human, all too human.

Anthropology long ago resolved to retain the idea of a state of nature and its corollary of natural law as helpful legal fictions. Not so with the category of personhood, which has been jealously preserved as a fundamental attribute of humans, around which a cluster attributes – such as reason, intentionality, consciousness – work to authorize relations among humans and non-humans. By demonstrating just how unusual this restricted conception of personhood is in the broad sweep of human experience, Sahlins developed a way of describing the majority of societies in terms more appropriate to their own experience. At the same time, by criticizing the restricted notion of personhood, he questioned a categorical distinction at the basis of anthropology, of the human sciences, and the scientific enterprise itself: that between Nature and Culture.

Whatever we mean when we use the term Nature, it did not exist before the early 17th century, and has had no equivalent in cosmologies elsewhere. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

The Debunking Handbook, 2020, free download, 12 pages loosely laid out text with diagrams and flowcharts, 22 authors spanning 20 institutions on 3 continents, 108 references.¹Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Ecker, U. K. H., Albarracín, D., Amazeen, M. A., Kendeou, P., Lombardi, D., Newman, E. J., Pennycook, G., Porter, E. Rand, D. G., Rapp, D. N., Reifler, J., Roozenbeek, J., Schmid, P., Seifert, C. M., Sinatra, G. M., Swire-Thompson, B., van der Linden, S., Vraga, E. K., Wood, T. J., Zaragoza, M. S. (2020). The Debunking Handbook 2020. Available at https://sks.to/db2020. DOI:10.17910/b7.1182

This brief booklet is well worth your time. It has persuaded me to change my strategy in dealing with disinformation, and misinformation in general.

Misinformation is sticky, and continues to affect people even after they have been told that it is incorrect. I would add that the misinformation that persists in social media has undergone a process of Darwinian selection, either natural selection, or, in the worst case, artificial selection by algorithmic fine tuning. For this reason, it is better to pre-empt, by getting in first with good information, rather than starting off by presenting the misinformation and then refuting it. It is still possible to unstick disinformation after it has taken hold, but this requires the repetition of detailed and convincing argument.

We are subjected to misinformation, disinformation, and fake news, and the repetition of misinformation produces an illusory truth effect. Disinformation is misinformation spread with malicious intent, while fake news describes the stream of misinformation, online and in partisan media, that masquerades as genuine news. The illusory truth effect occurs when the fake news becomes so familiar, or fits in so well with pre-existing beliefs and attitudes, that it ends up being accepted as reality.

Simply telling people that misinformation exists can increase their awareness of it, and this can be reinforced with examples. Thus knowing how the tobacco companies manufactured a spurious uncertainty about the effects of their product makes it easier to spot the very similar tactics being used by the fossil fuel companies.

Skepticism about media, in combination with instructions about fact checking and comparing different sources, is something that can, and should, be taught.

What of misinformation that has taken hold, and how can it be debunked? Read more »

Footnotes

• 1
  Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Ecker, U. K. H., Albarracín, D., Amazeen, M. A., Kendeou, P., Lombardi, D., Newman, E. J., Pennycook, G., Porter, E. Rand, D. G., Rapp, D. N., Reifler, J., Roozenbeek, J., Schmid, P., Seifert, C. M., Sinatra, G. M., Swire-Thompson, B., van der Linden, S., Vraga, E. K., Wood, T. J., Zaragoza, M. S. (2020). The Debunking Handbook 2020. Available at https://sks.to/db2020. DOI:10.17910/b7.1182 ↩︎

Artist not known. Panorama of Lucknow From The Gomti, 1821-1826. (Detail from a scroll 31 cm x 1128 cm.)

… Abbey, J.R. Life in England in aquatint and lithography, 1770-1860, 500
Markel, S. India’s fabled city, p. 84-86, 254
Painters, ports, and profits: artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850, p. 22, 41, 131, 157-167
Accompanied by a “Description of the panoramic view of Lucknow,” 4 pages in pen and black ink, dated Decr., 1826. The manuscript provides English transcriptions of “the names corresponding with the Hindostany ones, written underneath.”
Selected exhibitions: “India’s fabled city : the art of courtly Lucknow” (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Dec. 12, 2010-Feb. 27, 2011; and Musée Guimet, Paris, Apr. 6-July 11, 2011)
Panorama of Lucknow, within a border of black and gold. The places depicted are noted in Hindustani, along the lower edge of the panorama.
“Presumably made for the same British visitor whose handwritten notes identifying the buildings accompanied the scroll … The artist employed European-style perspective in his depiction of this [the Shah Najaf Imambara] and several other buildings, many presented obliquely as they must have appeared from the Gomti River. The scroll is, in fact, a fairly accurate topographical representation of Lucknow as viewed from the Gomti and a valuable guide to the buildings that have since disappeared … The central portion of the scroll is particularly interesting in depicting the riverine buildings that would eventually become incorporated into the Bara Chattar Manzil Palace complex … The artist of the Yale scroll attempted to depict an accurate view of the city for his European patron. This concern, in addition to the style of the painting, is typical of the many ‘Company-school’ works–so called for their obvious adaptations to European visual tastes–that depict Indian architectural monuments.”–Markel.

Current show.

More here and here.

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by Barbara Fischkin

I am writing this in honor of my late mother Ida Fischkin who, as a child, saved her own life in the midst an anti-Semitic pogrom in Eastern Europe. She taught me to fight for the seemingly powerless—to consider they might not be weak or stupid. Her lessons came in handy as I raised our elder son, who has nonspeaking autism. For 33 of his 38 years, he has typed to communicate his own thoughts with sensory support from me and from some of his more enlightened and well-trained therapists and teachers. These days, at the keyboard, he approaches independence and often demonstrates it.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of non-speakers who use this same technique.

Some need the same sensory support as my son—a touch on the hand can fade to the arm or shoulder. Then they move on to independence. Others need support for longer. The training is intense and complicated. One must learn to merely touch non-speakers, not move them to the keys. This communication has been validated as real and original by doctoral level professors, expert educators and scholars and by the typers themselves who communicate information their sensory supporters do not know.

I have a long list of “validations,” which were typed by my son Daniel Mulvaney and span the years. I write about him and offer two examples of these validations, with his permission. As a child he told his teachers that he had seen a dead bird while on a walk with me. Indeed, he had. More recently he bemoaned the loss of a romantic opportunity with a nonspeaking woman because “she found a boyfriend who drives.” She did.

But now the chair of a committee in the New York State Senate,  the legislature’s upper house—wants to officially denigrate this method. She wants to demolish its use. Read more »