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 »

As the Minute Clicks

a new night and cool
—unlike June in Jersey
when I was green
but June anyway

anyway it comes
it’s June

it’s June
regardless of you

June then
June now

mid-evening
8:30 by the clock
—the night dark
almost

in the window the sky
glows grey behind
silhouetted trees

slate-skin clouds
which if seen from a jet
would billow bright
in the light of the torch
that makes us tick—

while underneath on
cloud-muffled earth what
makes us tick is a phantom
flame we imagine

we imagine it hints it’s here
right now in June

Brandenburg Concertos
from the other room

fountain water falling
nearby from a stone frog’s lips

car passing
cat darting

makes you wonder how
you’re doing as the minute
clicks

……………………………
Jim Culleny, June 2009

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by Eric Feigenbaum

When I lived in Singapore during the mid-aughts, it seemed like the only thing you needed to do Hot Yoga was to turn off the air conditioning or go outside.

In recent years, I have made hot yoga a part of my daily routine and am used to doing a variation of the Bikram set sequence at roughly 104 degrees and 50 percent humidity. On my last visit to Singapore, I decided to see if I could continue staying true to form.

There are a surprising number of yoga and hot yoga studios in Singapore today, so I sampled a few. The one whose format and facilities most resembled what I’m sued to at home was Hom Yoga in the Orchard Center Mall.

A very friendly American-Singaporean couple owns and runs it. Hom Yoga had all the elements one would expect of a nice corporate yoga studio – spacious, light, well appointed locker rooms with showers and hair dryers, towels, fancy water – the whole nine yards. They went the extra mile – providing mats and have them all laid out like parking spaces, which felt very Singaporean.

Hom Yoga provided exactly what I sought – the classic Bikram 26 and 2 sequence pervasive in American Hot Yoga.

Of course, the command, “Change!” between asanas was a bit jarring. No gentle, “rock forward into plank” or “let’s all meet in downward-facing dog.” While it felt shocking un-yogic, maybe you get used to it with time.

One very noticeable difference was the vibe. Maybe I’m just spoiled, but the studios I have attended in the US are very community oriented. People know each other. There are hugs and catching up between classes or while waiting for one to start. One teacher calls the ten minutes leading up to his class, “The Muppet Show” because of the quiet din of everyone chatting.

No one at Hom Yoga was talking. Maybe they were waiting for the “change!”

When I first came to Singapore on my first visits in late 2003-early 2004, I would be shocked if there were even half as many yoga studios as there are today. In 2005, when my friend Alex came to join me to recruit nurses for US hospitals, he was taken aback by how disconnected Singapore was from clean living, healthy food, self-care – all the things Alex experienced in abundance in the Bay Area for several years prior.

Alex noticed Singapore lacked its own art. He felt the amazingly strong and tight systems design that led to a successful Singapore in just one generation and was catapulting itself to higher heights in the next – didn’t leave its citizens the pathos that comes from suffering that when combined with creativity, often leads to great art.

While I never liked that assertion, the proof seemed to be in the pudding – Singapore had one modest art museum and a handful of small galleries. If there was any thriving art in Singapore, it was architecture – not the fine arts. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

In my column last month, I described our client Leqaa Kordia’s year spent in ICE detention at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, and the legal effort that eventually resulted in her release by order of an immigration court. In this column, I will sketch out her parallel effort, in federal court, to obtain a writ of habeas corpus, and the separate issues raised in that proceeding. I will also try to explain why I consider Leqaa’s case to be, as I said last month, a grotesque, pointless abuse of the American immigration justice system.

To recap briefly, the immigration courts and the federal courts are distinct. The former are administrative courts within the Department of Justice, and so Trump can summarily fire immigration judges, and in fact has fired more than 100 of them for transparently ideological reasons. Federal courts, conversely, are within the judicial branch, and so are theoretically free from pressure by the executive.

When a person is detained, he or she may petition to be released while deportation proceedings are pending, and often release is conditioned on the posting of a bond if an immigration judge determines that the person is neither a danger to the community nor a flight risk. In Leqaa’s case, an immigration judge held, three times, that she was neither. Each time the government appealed, and eventually the judge required the posting of a $100,000 bond. When this was immediately paid, the government finally did not appeal, and Leqaa was free. The government’s effort to deport her continues, but at least she will be living at home and helping care for her mother and half-brother. Read more »

by Angela Starita

Years ago while teaching a college composition class in Jersey City, NJ, I met a student named Denise James. She was lanky and sullen and looked upon her fellow classmates with a combination of suspicion and boredom. Yet somehow, she had an affection for me. She’d stay after class to ask a question or, more usually, to give me advice. I had the impression she felt I needed some guidance about Jersey City which, though I’d lived there until I was 11, knew only superficially as an adult.

One time, for instance, I revealed that I’d never been to the Newport Mall, part of a 1980’s hi-rise and shopping complex. It had the usual mall offerings of the era, but in Jersey City stores like Benetton and Eddie Bauer were strictly aspirational for most residents and were meant to attract white, middle-class suburbanites to the stores and, hopefully, to move into its buildings. To hedge their bets, the mall’s owners included a Sears for everybody else. When Denise learned I’d not been there, she lowered her voice and counseled me to never tell anyone else. I found it funny–her attempt to save me from social ostracism–but in thinking it over, realized that for her, Newport was the one place of value in this whole city, the only place that could deliver a bit of newness and shine, a moment of possibility in a place where expectations were low.

This was in keeping with Denise’s most memorable pronouncement, her one-word assessment of her hometown: raggedy. It really is the ideal descriptor, more apt than any other adjective I can think of. It’s not a dangerous place, it’s not brutal. Even to call it ugly is an exaggeration: there are many places in Jersey City where the landscape can make you feel energized or cozy or even exhilarated. But in an honest appraisal, one that took in the whole of the place, you’d couldn’t help but see how right Denise was. Is? It’s hard to say what tense I should use. The place has changed enormously since I first worked there in the 90’s and from my memories of it from the first half of my childhood in the mid-1970’s. The city hospital, a collection of Art Deco behemoths, were abandoned then coverted to condos, dingy pocket parks and their surrounding brownstones have been restored; a light rail connects the city to other parts of Hudson County, and most notably, I mean, in-your-face notably, are acres of new construction in the form of giant towers.

But when I was a kid, the Newport Mall and its hi-rises were just a vast train yard with miles of tracks and overhead wires left by the Erie Railroad that would dump out its cross-country passengers at the Hudson waterfront where they’d be herded onto ferries to bring them to their presumed final destination, Manhattan. That last part of the journey was a sticking point for the Vanderbilts and Goulds of the world: why couldn’t their passengers travel from start to finish via rail? The obstacle, of course, was the Hudson River, not to mention palisades bedrock. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

On Thursday this week I will join two of my colleagues—the mezzo Annina Haug and the pianist Edward Rushton—to present a program of poems by French authors to a private audience. We are staging our concert in Zurich, at the home of a descendant of one of those authors, the renowned Swiss-French clown and musician Grock. In fact, Edward, the founder of Besuch der Lieder, our home-concert association, will be playing on Grock’s own piano, accompanying Annina as she sings individual chansons and song cycles by Erik Satie, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Albert Roussel, as well as “La femme est un jardin d’amour,” a jaunty number penned by Grock himself. Edward will also perform short instrumental works by Mel Bonis, Satie, and Honegger, all on the poet-clown’s vintage Gaveau, and I will recite poems by various authors, written in France and Germany during the interwar period.

The poets whose works, both declaimed and set to music, we will be showcasing all worked for the most part in the first half of the 20th century, and the texts we are featuring come mainly from the 1920s, as do the musical works we will be playing, to a mostly Germanophone audience—hence the (bilingual) title of our program: “Les années folles: Paris um 1927.” These poets include such renowned and lesser-known literary lights as Léon-Paul Fargue, Lucien Daudet, Mimi Godebska, René Chalupt, and Guillaume Apollinaire—the last of whom, however, had already succumbed to injury and illness in 1918, although his influence on contemporary literary developments was to continue for some time.

As it happens, April 23—the date of our concert—is also World Book Day. The commemorative day, alternatively known as “World Book and Copyright Day” or “International Day of the Book,” was organized by UNESCO and first celebrated in 1995; but its roots are older, in early 20th-century Spain. The date was initially chosen to honor Cervantes, who was believed to have died on April 23, 1616—the very same day on which Shakespeare was also believed to have died, a coincidence that subsequently reinforced the significance of that date. In fact, though, since Spain and England were still using two different calendars in the 17th century, this is not really true—instead, according to UNESCO, April 23 is a “symbolic date of world literature” which “coincides with that of the disappearance of the writers William Shakespeare [and] Miguel de Cervantes.”

World Book Day, in other words, is actually Dead Poets Day. Read more »

The dandelions are back. I like them.

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by Brooks Riley

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Sughra Raza. Microforest, March 2022.

Digital photograph.

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by William Benzon

If I had been born as an Australian Aborigine, or an American Indian, I’d probably have been a shaman. If I’d been born in ancient India, Greece, Israel, or medieval Europe, I might well have been a priest. If I’d been born in colonial America, I might have been a clergyman; Harvard, Yale and Princeton were started to train clergymen.

As it is I was born in 1947 in a hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, steel country. I spent the first four years of my life in coal country, Ellsworth, Pa. The family then moved to Johnstown, Pa., as much coal as steel country. Though she had been raised as an Episcopalian, my mother took me and my sister to Sunday school in a nearby Lutheran church. My father stayed home. But he did attend services on Christmas Eve.

The Baby Jesus

I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old when I had my first cosmological idea. By that time I was attending Sunday school at a Lutheran Church in the neighborhood where we lived. The teachers told us marvelous stories from books with colorful illustrations. I figured out that the world was a movie God created for the entertainment and enjoyment of the Baby Jesus. One thing puzzled me, though. Movies are flat, but our world is round. I never figured that one out. Perhaps I’m still working on it.

My sister is four years younger than I am. I don’t know what she thought about the Baby Jesus. Early in the 21^st century she would convert to Shinnyo-en Buddhism, an esoteric sect founded in Japan in the first half of the 20^th century. Back in 2013 she invited me to attend a lovely interfaith Celebration of the Equinox Shinnyo-en held in St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan.

Bertrand Russell and Madeline Murray

Sometime during my early teens I was rummaging in boxes of paperback books my father kept in the basement. I found, and read, George Orwell’s 1984, which had a lurid pulp-style cover depicting a shapely woman in tight blue overalls wearing a button for the “Women’s Anti-Sex League.” I forget what the cover of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World looked like, but I read it too. Theodore Reik’s Listening with the Third Ear introduced me to psychoanalysis. And then there was Bertrand Russell’s collection of essays, Why I Am Not a Christian, devastating and witty. Read more »

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by Ken MacVey

It has become harder to be a judge, especially when it comes to politically controversial cases handled by federal judges. President Trump, his cabinet members, and White House spokespersons have relentlessly shot off barrages of nasty, personal attacks on judges for making decisions Trump disapproves. One stand – out is Trump’s  comment that Supreme Court justices who ruled against his tariff program are “an embarrassment to their families.” He  has called judges “rogues,” “criminals,” “unpatriotic,” “lapdogs,” “crooked,” and “radical left lunatics.” These comments cannot be dismissed as hyperbolic rhetoric any more than Trump’s invitation to his supporters to come to  Washington DC on January 6, 2021 (“it will be wild”) can be dismissed as friendly “chit chat.”

Death threats against judges have increased astronomically. Judges are being “doxxed.” Last month, Chief Justice  Roberts in an interview declared it is fair game to criticize  judge’s decisions but not fair game to go after a judge with personal attacks. He said it’s dangerous and  “it has to stop.”

Judges judge. That’s true by definition. What is not tautological is that judges are also judged. Despite Chief Justice Roberts’ well justified alarm about the escalation of  personal attacks on judges and courts— judges and courts still must be judged. This is particularly true in these unprecedented and challenging legal times. Speaking up for judicial independence is essential. Speaking up about judges’ decisions that undercut the rule of law is essential too. Judges, especially federal judges and Supreme Court justices, will face in the next months the gravest challenges judges have had to face perhaps in the history of the American republic. How they fare will be judged by the American people and history. If judges flinch in doing their duty in upholding the rule of law and standing up to a president’s attempts to shred the Constitution, they must be judged. That absolutely does not include personal, angry attacks. But it does not mean being silent either when the rule of law is being undermined. Read more »

by Steve Gimbel and Tom Wilk

Comedian Druski’s impersonation of Erika Kirk has generated a predictable mixture of clicks, outrage, and threats of legal action. Kirk argued that the bit was immoral because it involved whiteface, and for many people that seems to settle the matter: race-crossing performance is race-crossing performance. If blackface is wrong, whiteface must be wrong too.

Not so quick. The moral question is not whether Druski crossed an identity line. He did. The question is what that crossing meant: how costly the joke was, what history it invoked, and whether he had the standing to make it. Humor is always morally risky. Jokes can wound, demean, reinforce ugly stereotypes, and normalize bad ways of seeing other people. But the ethics of humor does not depend only on the content of a joke. Who tells it matters. Context and history matter.

A useful way to think about this is through what in our book In on the Joke we called joke capital. Jokes have moral costs. Some are cheap and mild; others are expensive because they are cruel, degrading, or entangled with histories of domination. A joke teller’s social position, relationship to the target, and place within that history all affect whether they have the standing to cover those costs. This is why we give people more leeway when they joke about their own communities than when outsiders do. Shared membership does not make every joke acceptable, but it changes how the joke is heard.

So: how morally costly was the joke?

If all we knew was that a Black comedian put on whiteface to mock a white woman, we might expect something nasty or dehumanizing. But that is not what made this bit work. The humor came from accuracy, exaggeration, and performance. Druski crossed racial and gender lines while brilliantly capturing Kirk’s mannerisms. The joke was not built around reducing white people to a degrading caricature. It did not rely on stock features meant to present its target as subhuman or grotesque. Could he have taken it too far? Of course. But ethical judgment requires attending to the joke actually told, not the more offensive one critics imagine in advance.

The second question is what history the bit invoked. Here is where the blackface comparison breaks down entirely. Read more »