by Thomas R. Wells

Suppose a company wants to fill a job. They would advertise it together with the requirements for any successful candidate. HR would screen out all the applicants not good enough to do the job and everyone else’s name would go into a lottery.

Do you find this prospect upsetting? Perhaps you think it is unfair for someone to get a job without a good reason for why they deserve it rather than anyone else. Perhaps you think such a system would decrease your chances of getting the job you want. If so then you may be under the influence of the cult of excellence.

Excellence is the false religion of our time. Like all cults it fosters unhealthy and delusional behaviour, and benefits only a handful of insiders. We need to throw it out, reconcile ourselves to the essential truth that none of us is particularly special, and build a society fit for that.

The first problem with excellence is that we use it in a purely relative sense, to rank ourselves against each other to decide for who gets what. This turns society into a race in which we are trained to see each other as competitors for scarce resources rather than as fellows in a community of equals. Over time the race to the top takes over more institutions and more of our lives. In education, for example, cramming schools appear to help kids get into the right preschools, while a whole industry of consultants exists to help rich high-schoolers write their Ivy League application essays. In such a toxic meritocracy no one has the time or compassion to help the less fortunate. Winners congratulate themselves on their wonderfulness, as proven by their salaries, but retain an existential anxiety about their position. Losers blame themselves for not running faster. Inequality rockets. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

If you listened closely to the songs of praise in honor of Stan Lee, the man who is taken to be largely responsible for the present superhero-mad moment in popular culture, you might have heard an undertone of discord.

As Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos noted, Lee’s notoriety in the popular imagination as the originator of many of the most beloved characters of the Marvel Comic Universe was matched within the narrower comic book community by his reputation for failing to give adequate credit to the artists and writers with whom he worked.

Abad-Santos points to a 2016 piece in Vulture by Abraham Riesman, in which Riesman painstakingly documents the ways that Lee maneuvered to divert credit from his comic hero co-creators – most notably perhaps Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko – to foster the legend that Lee was single-handedly responsible for Marvel Comics’ biggest successes. Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

When the father of your child is in jail, pray even if you don’t believe in God. Pray even though in your head of heads you know it won’t do shit. Stop staring at the walls, at the clock, at the phone. At your baby, now eight, sleeping next to you, his sneakers, caked with mud, still tied to his feet. Pray because it will distract you from what’s coming, from a conversation millions of mothers have already had with their sons. You are not different, not an exception to some rule. Start praying instead of feeling sorry for yourself. Buck the fuck up because he will need you.

When the father of your child is in jail, think back to the beginning. When just being in the same room with him made you feel dizzy, made every cell in your body turnover. That crazy-ass, lightning speed chemistry, that undeniable force forever pushing then pulling you apart.

He wasn’t always the father of your child. Before that he was your friend then your boyfriend then someone neither here nor there. Now he’s the person you worry most about when you wake-up in the middle of the night.

When the father of your son is in jail, the details will haunt but not surprise you. How he got involved with the wrong person, a toxic relationship, an unhealthy situation. How he was blamed for things he couldn’t possibly have done. You’re scared for him in ways you’ve never been before. You’ve watched enough episodes of Orange is the New Black to think you’d know how to handle life on the inside. You could shank a bitch if you had to. But he never could. It’s just not in him. Read more »

by Samia Altaf

Actors come to each role in a new film bearing the stamp of their old ones so they are richer and more interesting in the new incarnation—the whole more than the sum of the parts. Just last week one saw Nargis as the innocent and naive mountain girl pining away for the love of the ‘shehri babu’, and today she is the femme fatale, all hell and brimstone, plotting the downfall of her rival. Or, as Mother India, upholding principles of honesty and justice, shooting her favorite son dead for raping a village girl.

Most of the time the female protagonists in our local films were uneducated but good, pious women seemingly knowing little of the world’s evil. They existed in a limited space, physically and mentally circumscribed by a patriarchal society, sheltered and protected by ‘their’ men and dependent on them for validation. They could cook up a storm, look after the household, sweep and clean, tend to animals and sick husbands, all in a day, without getting tired or complaining.

But they remained submissive women who suffered silently and deferred endlessly to their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, and society. What would people say? What would make the family lose face? The family ‘honor’ was always tied to a woman’s behavior, to her desires, and no one was allowed to forget that. Conforming to those norms secured women a place in the community, credibility and status, and the more they suffered and sacrificed themselves the more they were lauded as role models. Such lessons were not lost on young girls and boys and went a long way in shaping expectations for their futures and standards of acceptable behavior. Read more »

“In erratic times one cannot be too attentive, too
ready to stand or duck.” —A. Skutočné

Politics

what’s real depends upon where a thing lands—
how far along it is from ultraviolet to infrared
(from invisible to invisible), but on the
spectrum of real, it might be said

if it’s a matter of life-or-death I’m inclined to think
whatever’s coming at me now is most real,
so I move, I snap to

but if, instead, I’m lost in the contours
of the coming bumper that will ice me,
lost in chiaroscuro,
lost in its seductive curves,
lost in the way fenders sleek and silver slice air,
lost in the hood’s patina,
in the way its lacquered finish
creates a bright steel mood,
if I’m gone in its pricey logo
cast in chrome
……………. …… — if at that moment
my real is just beauty, then realities collide,
aesthetics gives way to physics (the most
essential real of the moment) and the
reality of beauty dies

then too, but late, the meaning of distraction
would’ve suddenly been real, suggesting a deeper take
on the meaning of lies

joy and sorrow
are both real

some say money is real
and it is, the way it wrenches things—

anything with that much clout,
anything that so shapes the mind of the world,
anything that so pummels and rips the fabric of love
is surely real

but what’s real is ephemeral as mist:
thin       thick       opaque      divine
depending upon where and when it lands
on the spectrum of real

real is different
at different times

Jim Culleny
11/6/18

by Michael Liss

This past Sunday, November 11, marked the Centennial of Armistice Day, the European commemoration of the agreement to end World War I. Representatives from more than 60 countries attended carefully choreographed ceremonies to honor the sacrifice of those who fought.

The Europeans take the Great War seriously. Americans really don’t. It just doesn’t feel like our war. To us, it’s an old chest filled with musty, tattered maps and the remains of broken monarchies and shattered ambitions. Even the early film footage, jerky and grainy in black and white, looks more like a silent movie than something real. We know we participated, and naturally we were heroic. Our boys saved the Allied powers from the Huns, all the while singing “Over There” and wooing the local pulchritude. It’s what we broad-shouldered, brave, optimistic, can-do Americans do.

But, if you want to contextualize our actual contribution, consider the following:

The United States committed 2.8 million servicemen to the war, and suffered 53,402 killed in action, 63,114 deaths from disease and other causes, and about 205,000 wounded. On an absolute level, that’s a lot of lives. But, by contrast, in just one extended, insane battle, the Europeans fought the Somme Offensive, with more than 3 million men engaged and 1 million casualties. Then there was Gallipoli, the infamous, disastrous push by then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill in the Dardanelles, which provided the Ottoman Empire with its last meaningful military victory, and included a horrific sacrifice by ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand combined forces) and half a million casualties. And Verdun (between the French and the Germans), which lasted close to 11 months in 1916, and yielded nearly 700,000 casualties and more than 300,000 dead. And Passchendaele (3rd Battle of Ypres, Flanders Fields), between Great Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, in July to November 1917, in which the dead and wounded may have been as high as 700,000. And Operation Michael, the last major German offensive in the West (Germany, the UK, France, and, finally, the United States), which had almost 500,000 casualties. That, of course, skips every battle between the Germans and the Russians. Read more »

by Robert Fay

I get sad whenever I think of Robert Lowell. He is the poet of a lost America, an America that likely never was, but one that is gone nonetheless. I get sad when I think of Robert Lowell because of my own inadequacy to love poetry the way he did, the way I once did, when I was more vulnerable, when I was more courageous. I get sad for Robert Lowell because he is unfashionable and his legacy may soon disappear, if not from our university curriculums, than certainly from our hearts.

The optics, as they now say, don’t look good.

Lowell was the patrician poet with a trust fund; the privileged, white-male literary figure who wore a corduroy sport jacket and sloppily-knotted tie—the casual wear of the “bummy rich,” as they were once known on Boston’s North Shore. He was the old Brahmin from Yankee Beacon Hill, whose full name was Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV, and whose ancestors were a “who’s who,” of American history, including William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the U.S. Constitution, and Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist theologian whose sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is a foundational American literary text.

And then there was his relationships with women. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

Books have always mattered to me. When I was single in my 20s, I mentioned to my then boss that whenever I first visited a date’s apartment I would look at his bookshelves. He didn’t get it. Why did it matter what books a person read? I tried to explain that for starters, it mattered to me that someone actually read at all. Soon after this, I met my now ex-husband. The circumstances of our meeting had a tangential connection to his love of the Thomas Pynchon novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (long story short, we connected over the Internet in its early days and his persona was Tyrone Slothrop). I’d never read it. For our second date, he brought me a copy of the book. To this day, that was the single most romantic gift a man has ever given me. When we moved into together a mere 6 weeks later, the merging of our books was a major undertaking – interestingly, while there were a lot of authors we didn’t share a love of, like Pynchon, we had a lot of books which completed each other’s sets of various authors. We gave away a fair number of duplicates. When we divorced 18 years later, the process of remembering whose books were whose was challenging. I actually left some behind by accident. He kindly returned them to me, or let me take them off his bookcase, when one, or both us realized. Books have always mattered to me. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

In a recent study, data scientists based in Japan found that classical music over the past several centuries has followed laws of evolution. How can non-living cultural expression adhere to these rules?

Evolution is an “algorithmic process applied to populations of individuals.” [1] Individuals vary, and certain individuals’ traits are passed on while others are culled. These steps are repeated many times. In biology, scientists can study the gene as a “unit of inheritance,” but an analogous unit of inheritance has to be selected in a study of a cultural practice. Eita Nakamura at Kyoto University and Kunihiko Kaneko at the University of Tokyo decided to look at unique musical features such as the tritone–a dissonant interval of three whole notes–and measure the number of occurrences in Western musical compositions over the centuries.

According to Nakamura and Kaneko, “The mean and standard deviation of the frequency (probability) of tritones steadily increased during the years 1500-1900.” Because this might have been just a function of individual composers’ preferences or “social communities” and not necessarily governed by statistical evolutionary laws, they developed a mathematical model of evolution to tell the difference. The tritone is a relatively rare musical event, but its use has spread over the centuries in a way that the study’s authors say follow precise statistical rules. [2] Read more »

by Bill Murray

The crocodiles know. They form pincers on either side of the crossing point. Richard says they feel the vibration of all those hooves along the riverbank above them.

Waves of animals surge toward the river then fall away. If they all go we’ll witness a frightful, deadly crush of beasts in motion, mad energy, herd hysteria, dust and confusion, the cries of mortally wounded beasts rising to the heavens, birds of prey gaggling and swooping and squawking, kinetic intensity unbound.

We have come to see the sprawling, real life spectacle of wildebeests crossing the Mara River. It is the largest overland migration in the world. Read more »