by Samia Altaf

In the 1960s, in the sleepy little city of Sialkot, almost in no-man’s land between India and Pakistan and of little significance except for its large cantonment and its factories of surgical instruments and sports goods, there were two cinema houses, all within a mile of our house, No. 3 Kutchery Road. Well three to be exact, the third being an improvisation involving two tree trunks with a white sheet slung between them at the Services club and only on Saturday nights.

The one closest to us our house, just this side of the railway crossing, was Nishat, popularly known as Begum’s cinema with a risqué aura because it was owned and managed by the ‘Begum,’ a burqa-clad, not so young, but still beautiful woman. There was hushed talk about the Begum’s morals because she, a single woman, owned and managed a cinema house in a time when so-called ‘decent’ women rarely went to the cinema let alone own one.

The second, past the railway crossing on the other side of the ‘drumma wallah chowk,’ the main city square, was the Lalazar. Lalazar was considered to be in a class above the others partly for its sweeping marble staircase curving upwards to the gallery and partly for its owner Mr. Majeed’s newly acquired daughter-in-law Mussarat Nazir, the rustic Punjabi beauty and a leading lady of film industry. Mr. Majeed, a portly gentleman with a loud laugh, was among the city fathers, the ‘shurafa,’ of the city. Mussarat Nazeer, still in her teens, came to public attention in the movie Yakkey Wali. My father tells how he and his friends, all grown and married men, saw that movie about twenty times and every time M. Nazir appeared on screen, they along with the whole house threw coins at the screen in the age old tradition of showing one’s appreciation. M. Nazir’s untimely departure at the height of her career to lead a life of married bliss in Canada was mourned by all till she returned thirty years later, still the rustic beauty, and became a household name selling millions of audio cassettes of Punjabi wedding and folk songs. My older son, then three years old, heard her signature folk song ‘Laung gwacha,’ saw her face on the grimy cover of a much used audio cassette, fell immediately in love and vowed to marry her. His grandfather understood completely. Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

Would I rather go deaf or blind? Every once in a while, I come back to this question in some version or another. Say I had to choose which sense I’d lose in my old age, which would it be? I always give myself, unequivocally, the same answer: I’d rather go blind. I’d rather my world go darker than quieter. I imagine it as a choice between seeing the world and communicating with it; in this hypothetical, communication with the world is all-encompassing, its loss more devastating than the loss of sight. It is perhaps clear from the mere fact that I pose this question that I do not live with a disability involving the senses. Individuals who are vision- or hearing-impaired would have an entirely different take on this question and on the issues I raise below, but hopefully what I write here will go beyond stating my own prejudices.
To prefer sound over sight is by no means an obvious choice. One could say that a preference for sound over sight goes against millennia of Platonic thought, which prioritizes sight as giving us access to what is stable, verifiable, graspable to the mind’s eye: the idea is literally that which is seen (from id-, one of the Greek roots for to see). Sound, on the other hand, changes in time, it is fleeting, untrustworthy, and hence inferior.

But poetry and myth have offered an alternative way of thought. Ancient myth is populated by sage blind men like the prophet Tiresias and Oedipus (after, of course, he learns the truth about his identity). Their lack of physical sight is not only a counterpart to their exceptional insight into the way of the world but, to an extent, the very source of their intellectual and spiritual advantage. In the case of both, what they lack in perception they make up for in a remarkable facility with language. Tiresias’ advantage over his seeing adversaries is perhaps the better-known example, as he delivers truthful but irritatingly cryptic prophetic messages to Oedipus (in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King) and Creon (in Antigone). Managing to confuse and manipulate them, Tiresias has the rhetorical upper hand, and the audience always already knows that he is in the right. In Oedipus at Colonus, the last play Sophocles wrote, the old Oedipus turns up as a similarly prophetic, wrathful speaker of harsh truths, with a sharp ability to pick out the dissimulators from the honest ones around him by virtue of what they say. Neither man’s ability to communicate is lessened by their blindness; in fact, it allows them to recognize and speak the truth more easily. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The idea of ‘good corporate citizenship’ has become popular recently among business ethicists and corporate leaders. You may have noticed its appearance on corporate websites and CEO speeches. But what does it mean and does it matter? Is it any more than a new species of public relations flimflam to set beside terms like ‘corporate social responsibility’ and the ‘triple bottom line’? Is it just a metaphor?

The history of the term does not promise much. It does indeed seem to have evolved out of corporate speak – how corporations represent themselves rather than how they view themselves – selected, perhaps, for sounding reassuring but vague. Its popularity has far preceded its definition; ‘corporate citizenship’ is still evolving, looking for a place to settle.

But what it is about is important. For it represents a political turn to the old question, Who are corporations for and how is their power to be managed? Are corporations bound to serve society’s interest, or are they free to follow their own? Are they public institutions, part of the governance of our society and publicly accountable to us for their actions, or are they private associations accountable only to their managers and owners?

For around a hundred years this question had an institutional answer in the form of ‘managed capitalism’, with governments playing a central role in corporate decision-making. They were outright owners of many businesses; they directed negotiations with labour – itself institutionally empowered by the state as a countervailing power to the large corporation; and they used the wide discretionary authority of the state to cajole and coerce company directors to serve what they saw as the public interest. Read more »

by Emrys Westacott

Learning Objectives. Measurable Outcomes. These are among the buzziest of buzz words in current debates about education. And that discordant groaning noise you can hear around many academic departments is the sound of recalcitrant faculty, following orders from on high, unenthusiastically inserting learning objectives (henceforth LOs) and measurable outcomes (hereafter MOs) into already bloated syllabi or program assessment instruments.

But why do they moan and groan? Administrators, accreditors, and politicians see no problem. Nor do many teachers in STEM subjects and other technical fields. And prima facie they have a good case. Isn’t it obviously a good idea to have LOs for any course you teach? And shouldn’t you know what they are, be able to articulate them, and let your students know what you want them to achieve? How could any reasonable person think otherwise?

Ditto for MOs. Don’t you want to know if your LOs have been achieved? Why on earth wouldn’t you want to know? This, surely, is how we improve on what we do. We set goals. We see how well we are meeting them. We then tinker, tweak, or revamp wholesale in light of our findings, in a never-ending process of improvement.

It all sounds so sensible.

But what is sound practice in some contexts makes much less sense in others. Even those who have drunk the LO-MO Kool-Aid might balk at the idea of couples specifying in their pre-nuptial agreements a well-defined set of marital objectives linked to measurable outcomes. When it comes to college courses, the emphasis on LOs and MOs may sometimes be reasonable, particularly in courses that form an integrated and progressive program of study in technical subjects that lend themselves to exact modes of assessment. But I suspect they are of dubious value in at least one common and important kind of course–namely, the general education course where most of the students are receiving their only college-level exposure to an academic field. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Carl Pierer

In the first part of this essay, the axiom of choice was introduced and a rather counterintuitive consequence was shown: the Banach-Tarski Paradox. To recapitulate: the axiom of choice states that, given any collection of non-empty sets, it is possible to choose exactly one element from each of them. This is uncontroversial in the case where the collection is finite. Simply list all the sets and then pick an element from each. Yet, as soon as we consider infinite collections, matters get more complicated. We cannot explicitly write down which element to pick, so we need to give a principled method of choosing. In some cases, this might be straightforward. For example, take an infinite collection of non-empty subsets of the natural numbers. Any such set will contain a least element. Thus, if we pick the least element from each of these sets, we have given a principled method. However, with an infinite collection of non-empty subsets of the real numbers, this particular method does not work. Moreover, there is no obvious alternative principled method. The axiom of choice then states that nonetheless such a method exists, although we do not know it. The axiom of choice entails the Banach-Tarski Paradox, which states that we can break up a ball into 8 pieces, take 4 of them, rotate them around and put them back together to get back the original ball. We can do the same thing with the remaining 4 pieces and get another ball of exactly the same size. This allows us to duplicate the ball.

The second part of this essay demonstrated a useful consequence (or indeed, an equivalent) of the axiom of choice, known as Zorn’s Lemma and looked at a few applications of this Lemma. Two positions have been mapped out in the course of this essay. On the one hand, the axiom has very counterintuitive consequences, so much so that they’ve received the name of a paradox. On the other hand, the axiom proves to be very useful in deducing mathematical propositions. These considerations lead back to the question that had already been raised at the end of the first part: how are we to decide on the status of an axiom, on whether to accept it or reject it?

In this third and final part of the essay, we will take a more philosophical approach to this problem. In particular, we will look at a possible resolution offered by Penelope Maddy in her Defending the Axioms. The solution offered would lead onto further questions about the nature of mathematics: what is mathematics actually about? At the same time, Maddy’s view is based on a certain conception of proof that does not really reflect mathematical practice. The essay, due to limitations, only hints at a different perspective offered by looking at what mathematicians actually do and what role proofs play for them. Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

It’s nearing lunchtime when I make it over to Kevin’s, and beautiful out, but his window shades are still drawn closed, outside light on. I notice the porch slopes ever so slightly to the right, where a few forgotten footballs and beer bottles have now collected. I knock. Wait. Hear some movement and bustling. Then silence. I knock again. Silver masking tape covers large rips in the screen door, big enough for a head to push through. More movement. Finally Kevin emerges, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

He doesn’t say hi, but rather ushers me in, a quick gesture of his skinny body, a bony hand-to-back motion that says hurry.

I am used to this with Kevin. The hurry up and go of it all. When you’ve made the conscious decision to hangout with crystal meth addicts, life becomes a constant hurry-up-and- go, even if you’re only going to the bathroom.

I like Kevin. He’s thoughtful and smart and ridiculously resourceful. He’s also one of the worst addicts I’ve come across during my time in Clatsop County – or in my personal life – which is saying a lot. He will likely never get clean. He might commit more than a few crimes. And he will probably die too young. His life is already pedal to the metal, as he’d tell you. Pedal to the fucking metal. Read more »

by Michael Liss

He flew so fast and so close to the sun that it took an entire lifetime to fall back to Earth.

William Jennings Bryan was just 36 years old when, on July 9, 1896, he seized the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination on the back of a single, electrifying speech, “Cross of Gold.”
Twenty-nine years later almost to the day, a haunted shell of his former self, he sat at the prosecution’s table, waiting for opening arguments in the Scopes Monkey Trial, unaware it would lead to his humiliation and ultimately hasten his tragic end.

In between, “The Great Commoner” was nominated twice more by his party, in 1900 and 1908, and served as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State from 1913 to 1915. He then threw himself into efforts for causes as diverse as women’s suffrage, direct elections for Senators, and Prohibition. In the 1920s, he shifted his primary focus to his faith, but remained a prominent figure among Democrats through the 1924 Convention, when he was literally heckled off the stage in tears while trying to broker a compromise on an anti-KKK platform plank.

Bryan is an enigma. He failed frequently, but got multiple chances where abler men were passed over. Contemporaries questioned his intelligence and the scope of his interests, yet the exacting, often arrogant Wilson put him in his Cabinet and gave him a free hand with Latin American policy. His durability might best be ascribed to his possession of two tremendous assets: First, he was arguably the best orator of his time, compelling almost whenever and wherever he spoke, and, second, he seemed to have a psychic bond with his base. As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, while other politicians of that era may have sensed the feelings of the people, Bryan embodied them. His people stayed with him through his successes and his disappointments. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

I recently read Simone Weil for the first time after having come across numerous references to her over the past year. I broke down and bought Waiting for God despite the intimidating and frankly confusing title.  I was not disappointed. One of her essays in particular, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies in View of the Love of God,” has opened and focused my thinking on education and learning in general, whether for children or later in life for the rest of us.

Weil writes that “prayer consists of attention. . . . Although today we seem ignorant [of] it, the formation of the faculty of attention is the true goal and unique interest of all studies.” She explains that by developing our capacity for attention, we can enhance our spiritual practice. Leaving that aside for the moment, it is nonetheless worth exploring what she means by attention. I am very interested (along with countless others) in how we in the internet era are maintaining our ability to focus given ever-multiplying distractions. As a mother of a school-age child, I also have a particular interest in how children are developing their ability to focus in this distracting climate.

Weil essentially promotes a meditative or mindful attitude for children facing challenging subject matter in school:

If someone searches with true attention for the solution to a geometric problem, and if after about an hour has advanced no further than from where they started, they nevertheless advance, during each minute of that hour, in another more mysterious dimension. Without sensing it, without knowing it, this effort that appeared sterile and fruitless has deposited more light in the soul.

Weil’s approach is timely because it makes learning less stressful and more enjoyable for students. Even if it does not seem as if the student is mastering the material, in Weil’s view she is coming closer to understanding by virtue of having focused her attention on it. In an age when students are sleep-deprived and unduly anxious about exams, college prep, and living up to parents’ lofty and usually unreasonable expectations, students may be comforted to hear from Weil that “we confuse attention with a kind of muscular effort. [. . .] Fatigue has no relationship to work. Work is useful effort, whether there is fatigue or not.” What is happening today in our schools is not your typical adolescent turmoil–it is a mental health epidemic. Suicide rates have surged; two-thirds of college students report “overwhelming anxiety.” [1] Clearly, merely applying more effort is backfiring. Read more »

by Bill Murray

It all started with zebras. 

Hard to believe, but sustained, hands-on field work in east Africa only has a sixty year history. Today Hans Klingel is an emeritus professor at the Braunschweig Zoological Institute, but when he arrived in Africa in 1962 Herr Klingel was one of only three scientists in the entire Serengeti.

Klingel and his wife made wildlife their career. Their first mission was to recognize individually and study ten percent of the 5500 zebras in the Ngorongoro Crater west of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Zebra stripes are whole body fingerprints. The Klingels took photographs, taped the photos to file cards and carried them into the field. They came to recognize some 600 individuals.

Their file card technique caught on. In 1965 zoologist Bristol Foster studied giraffes at Nairobi National Park, photographing their left sides to memorize their unique patterns. He glued pictures onto file cards too. From 1969 a researcher named Carlos Mejia photographed and carried cards of giraffes in the Serengeti. Scientists swarmed into east Africa and the game was on.

On the open savanna, giraffes and zebras form a natural alliance. Zebras (and wildebeests, their fellow travelers) benefit from giraffes’ strong eyesight, elevated vantage point and superior field of view. Giraffes have the largest eyes among land animals and can see in color. Their peripheral vision allows them to just about see behind themselves. The next time your safari Land Cruiser rattles around the corner into view of a giraffe, you can bet the giraffe has already seen you. Read more »

by Brooks Riley