by Brooks Riley
Walls, Bans and Border Patrols: The Fearsome Fallout for Children
by Humera Afridi
We were surrounded by inequity, yet my ‘innocence’ or, rather, naivete remained intact. I was certainly aware of the sudden, politically motivated strikes and pained by the striking poverty—lame beggars who hopped over to car windows at traffic stops; gangs of wily, threadbare children left to roam the danger-filled streets. Nevertheless, within the highly-selective, members-only club, the harsh world outside with its mayhem of cars, motorcycles, trucks and water lorries threatening to run over the cripples weaving their way through the honking maze, seized to exist for me. The water shimmered, spangled with sunlight; I can still recall the sensation of my toes curling on the edge of the cement precipice, and a frisson of nervous excitement overcoming me in those excruciating moments before leaping towards the joyous shouts that rose to greet me as I plummeted. The beleaguered world of the city at large disappeared.
That life seems unthinkable, unconscionable, today, especially after having lived away for many years, first as an expatriate and then an (accidental) immigrant. But that was how things were: the disparity was deep-rooted and historical. Even as a child I learned to build invisible walls.
Fast-forward to the next generation and a change of setting: my son who is nine and a half, born and raised in America, possesses an awareness around issues of social justice and race, and nuanced identity politics—LQBTQIA is the more current, more inclusive term I learned from him two weeks ago—that simultaneously awes and alarms me. Even as I am grateful for his attunement and ability to perceive and articulate feelings arising from instances of injustice that he witnesses, hears about, or personally experiences, a part of me wonders: isn’t he too young to know all this? Isn’t it too soon to have to create the space in his mind to sort through a myriad possibilities of how to be? And what about facing the facts—far too many— of a cruel and unjust world?
But the age of innocence has vanished. And children aren’t exempt. Last week, over an ice-cream after school, he casually slipped in, “Mom, today I pulled my teacher aside because I was feeling really depressed.”
Words to make a mother’s heart sink.
Stuck in Traffic: The Story of Civilization
After saying a bit more about traffic to and from Manhattan, I answer the question with a boiling-frog story, a parable about Happy Island. I conclude by suggesting that the world is happy island and we’re stuck in traffic.
Tunnel Traffic
At that time I was living in Jersey City, New Jersey, which is across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan (I’m now living in Hoboken). Whenever I go to Manhattan I use public transportation, which is reasonably good, though just a bit inconvenient from my present location. But driving my car through a tunnel or over a bridge and parking it on Manhattan, that’s VERY inconvenient. And so I avoid doing it.
But I had to go to rural Connecticut to meet Charlie for a trip to Vermont. I could have taken public transportation to a point where Charlie could pick me up. But that’s a longish walk and four trains, or a longish walk and three trains and a long walk or a cab. Which was a hassle. So I decided to drive. Yes, I’d have to cross the Hudson River, but the Holland Tunnel is nearby and I could avoid rush-hour traffic on both trips, too and from. Driving in Manhattan would be a bit of a hassle, but not too bad on this trip because I’d be mostly on the West Side Highway.
So I drove. I left on Thursday morning at, say, 9:45 AM. By 11:30 I’d crossed off the northern end of Manhattan and was headed toward Connecticut. That’s an hour and forty-five minutes to go the first 15 miles, and probably an hour to go the first four miles, from my place in Jersey City through the Holland Tunnel and onto the West Side Highway headed North.
And that wasn’t rush-hour.
Monday, January 30, 2017
Being Badass
For years now, I have been dreaming this dream that our national park rangers would rise up and lead a coup.
Whenever I used to return to the US from Japan or Hong Kong -it was always so appalling flying into LAX (a truly banana republic experience), our infrastructure seemed as shabby as our healthcare was inhumane. Things felt incredibly chaotic and wild west–in many ways, quite uncivilized. On the few occasions, however, when I managed to find myself in a national park, everything began to look up. Suddenly things ran smoothly. There were trams to get people from point a to point b; rooms for all budgets, great cafeteria food often with local ingredients– and everything felt somehow rational. Kind of like Europe, I always thought.
We have to thank the rangers for this. For they are an amazing group of people. Committed ecologists and educators, so many of them even have a sense of humor. Able to live off grid, I think they are totally bad ass! How many times have I thought over the years that if only the United States was run like our national parks we wouldn't be nearly as much trouble.
One of the things I love best about them is they don't negotiate when it comes to the environment. The parks are not about "consumer choice." You have to keep things green–or else. There is no blaming Republicans or Liberals, no discussion of faith when it comes to the environment, climate "believers" or not, you have to live by the rules of the parks. Yep, that means no plastic water bottles are sold. Hallelujah, and is it really that hard?
Given my great fondness for them, I took more than a little delight to see them running rogue last week with NASA.
Who Can Afford to Call 911?
by Olivia Zhu
As I wrote in a post back in June, reporting bias is a phenomenon that significantly detracts from the efficacy of potential predictive policing measures. Simply put, if underserved communities don’t trust the police and are less likely to report crime as a result, the resulting data is incomplete, inaccurate, and therefore useless when considering measures such as hotspot analysis or setting new patrol routes. This month, I’d like to explore a particular reason why underreporting of crime might occur, with a particular focus on socioeconomic factors that drive who can or is willing to call 911.
It’s easy to make two major assumptions about 911. First, that 911 services are free, or at least are public services paid for by taxpayer money. And second, that they are consistent across the nation. After all, there’s a whole alphabet soup of government agencies that establish standards and rules for dialing 911, among them the Federal Communications Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Consider also organizations such as the National Emergency Number Association and any number of police, fire, and emergency medical service professional organizations to increase oversight and regulation of the service.
The first assumption is proven false by the fact that most states charge a 911 service fee. In theory, fees such as these feed into a Universal Service Fund intended to normalize 911 service across a coverage area, thereby reducing socioeconomic effects. However, the FCC collects this fee from mobile service providers, and while the “FCC does not require this charge to be passed on to you… service providers are allowed to do so.” That’s just for standard 911 calls. For Enhanced 911 (E911) calls, which provide latitude and longitude data for callers using cell phones instead of land lines, service providers may charge a fee as well. E911 calls are especially important given that most 911 calls today are made from mobile phones, not land lines, and without E911, it’s difficult for first responders to accurately locate callers. Let me add onto that.
Plastic Words are Hollow Shells for Rigid Ideas: The Ever-Expanding Language of Tyranny
by Jalees Rehman
Here are some examples of "plastic words"(German originals are listed in parentheses next to the English translations) – see if you recognize them and if you can give a precise definition of what they mean:
exchange (Austausch)
information (Information)
communication (Kommunikation)
process (Prozess)
resource (Ressource)
strategy (Strategie)
structure (Struktur)
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
The (Slow) Art of Wine: Part 2
by Dwight Furrow
As Burham and Skilleas write on the decisions made in the vineyard and winery:
These decisions are intentions certainly and wine is also a product of human artifice. However, it is not intention in the same sense as a painter might have when he approaches a blank canvas. Vintner's decisions have only a very tenuous connection with expression in the arts which is typically expressions of aesthetic intention, feeling, and the like…Wine is not as malleable to intention as paint and the most important factor beyond the vintner's control is the weather. Try as they might few vintners can remove the sensory impact of the vintage. (The Aesthetics of Wine, p. 99-100)
Burnham and Skilleas seem to think that although winemakers have intentions they are not about aesthetics. This is a questionable assertion. There are countless decisions made by winemakers and their teams in the vineyard and winery that influence the intensity, harmony, finesse, and elegance of the final product and are intended to do so.
Burham and Skilleas go on to insist that "a vintner is simply not to be understood on the model of Kantian or Romantic aesthetics of fine art for whom originality or creativity are absolutely central features." Again, this is a questionable assertion, although it may be true of commodity wines. As James Frey, proprietor of Tristaetum Winery in Oregon's Willamette Valley and an accomplished artist as well as winemaker, told me in an interview: "Originality matters a great deal. No winemaker wants to hear that his wines taste like those of the winery down the street." Originality and creativity are central concerns of at least those winemakers for whom quality is the primary focus.
Baker of Tarifa: A Photo Essay
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
![FullSizeRender[2]](/wp-content/legacy/6a00d8341c562c53ef01bb09730b5a970d-150wi "FullSizeRender[2]")
Data Nihilsm and Agnothology
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad
As a data scientist, I imagined that an argument based on careful analysis of data coupled with sound statistical reasoning and proper used of machine learning should be enough to convince any person of one’s argument. However in many contexts this may actually have the opposite effect. For one, the previous statement may actually sound elitist and there is strong evidence that if people have strong convictions about a certain belief then offering contradictory evidence may actually strength their belief instead of weakening it. Thinking about why people act this way becomes easier if we rather drop the assumption that people are rational and start thinking that people’s rationality is mediated via emotions. Leibniz theorized that one day we would have machines that will be able to calculate answers to any question for us and so people instead of arguing will just say let us calculate. One might argue that the data driven society that we are currently building is taking us close to this ideal. However there is a hidden assumption in this assertion that that all people evaluate evidence in the same manner. The presence of conformation bias and other cognitive biases in humans tell a different story altogether. People are more likely to be skeptical and thorough in investigation if evidence presented to them goes against what they already believe. Even things like what people perceive as the scientific consensus varies from person to person. Thus Creationists pounce over any alleged evidence that “proves” that the theory of evolution is false while neglecting any data that goes in its favor. The point is not whether one can use data to make one’s point but rather evidence is powerless if one has already made up one’s mind, to quote Salman Hameed who studies the public perception of the theory of evolution.
Monday, January 23, 2017
THE LIMINALITY OF LYME DISEASE
by Genese Sodikoff
Of course, a "rite of passage" conventionally refers to a ceremony that marks a change in status, such as a wedding or commencement, where one social identity is shed and another assumed. Van Gennep's three stages include the separation from peers, a liminal or in-between period, and reassimilation into society with a new status. But if we loosely apply this concept to other life experiences, such as illness, we begin to see a structure to the stories that make up our lives.
Say an individual goes from healthy person, to ill patient, and finally to some resolution. At this point the individual has either returned to the prior state of healthiness, dies, remains somehow marked by the period of suffering, or persists in a state of impaired health, neither here nor there. Certain diseases seem to occupy the liminal space, casting their victims into medical limbo as neither diagnosable nor well. Chronic Lyme disease is one of those. Since the source of prolonged suffering is contested by doctors, many sufferers must seek help at the edges of the medical mainstream.
To turn back to the "rite of passage" schema for a moment, anthropologist Victor Turner was intrigued by Van Gennep's demarcation of a liminal period, the "betwixt and between" stage. In the late 1960s, Turner elaborated the concept, finding it rife with both social ambiguity and possibility. For Turner, liminality evoked an unstructured space, an opposition to the dominant structure at the edges of the cultural mainstream. It is here where people experience "communitas," a spirit of camaraderie and equality. Liminality is counter-cultural, a state of flux in which the dominant structure is recast in the image of the oppositional force until that new image becomes the structure from which to pull away.
Monday Poem
“All humans are genetically 99.9 per cent identical.”
—Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Great Wall, Tremendous Wall
.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall one poet said
imagining friendly neighbors working their way
along that which stood between, resetting
fallen gneiss and granite loaves and balls
that had fallen to each to keep their wall intact
while one questioned the irony of friendly walls
and the other made a prima facie case
for an inherent friendliness in their practicality.
And so we’ve had walls and walls remain
not of stone but of blood and bone,
walls built of double helixes spiraling through time,
hydrogen-mortared pairs of adenine,
guanine, cytosine, thymine,
smaller than any past poet’s wall-builder might imagine,
but centuries stronger than Hadrian’s real
or Alexander’s mythic one which imprisoned
the Gogs and Magogs of alien tribes
behind stone or iron barriers to keep the builders safe
from differences that barely exist in the protein hieroglyphics
of the nature-made chemical bonds of a double helix
making us all Gogs and Magogs of each other
as we spiral through worlds hurting and killing
to uphold our imagination’s chronic beliefs
in quixotic walls and spurious distinctions
which heap between us grudges and griefs
.
Jim Culleny
from Blink
12/13/16
.
Will the End of Obamacare Mean the End of Cancer Care?
by Carol A. Westbrook
Paying for this is a complex process. About 60% of peple with cancer will be 65 or older, and thus will be insured through Medicare. A few percent more will qualify for Social Security disability insurance. Some of the rest will have health insurance. The others face loss of savings, huge loans, and even bankruptcy.
But even with insurance or Medicare, many medical costs are not reimbursed–these include deductibles, co-pays for clinic visits, medical supplies, and outpatient medication. Cancer patients face especially high unreimbursed costs because their treatment may require frequent clinic visits or expensive chemotherapy pills with exorbitant co-pays.
Cancer patients and their doctors are concerned about the uncertainty of health care costs with the threatened repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare with the new presidential administration. What will be the impact on cancer care?
In reality, the impact may be smaller than you think. Obamacare has helped with cancer care in some ways, but has made it worse in others. The most significant positive impact is guaranteeing health insurance coverage even in the face of pre-existing conditions, including cancer. Another improvement is in the ability to obtain insurance, even if you never had any in the first place. But the uninsured are still liable for the medical bills they already owe before their insurance kicks in–and they have to wait for the open enrollment period (December to January) to sign up for it through the insurance exchanges.
Where Obamacare has really failed is in cost containment. Enactment of the ACA led to rapid and often exorbitant increases in insurance premiums, or even the loss of coverage for those whose policies did not meet ACA standards. Worse yet, medical costs have continued skyrocket; there are continued increases in deductibles, co-pays, medication, medical supplies, and hospital charges. Although Obamacare does not apply to Medicare, there were collateral effects on its recipients, who faced mounting costs for their medication, for their Medicare supplemental insurance, and higher deductibles. Obamacare did nothing to stop the increase in health costs, and may have made it worse.
The Wedding Singer: Take a Ride
by Christopher Bacas
I was in tenth grade and a bit under a hundred pounds. So far, I'd played football games, Pancake Jamborees, and school assemblies. The high school fielded a juggernaut band of 250, drawing eager youth from three middle schools. A local wind band, filled with parents and teachers, performed park concerts all summer and included a jazz unit. At the fall agricultural fair, its stalwarts backed touring acts. Music as vocation wasn't in the air, though. Sulfurous paper plants, tar and asphalt makers, and a feed mill all smoked constantly. Guys started a second or third shift job the summer after graduation. Their father or uncle would vouch them in. If they did well, better hours and money, a car and house could follow. My trajectory was different. The day I came home with a tenor, my dad played "Soultrane" for me. On the LP jacket, a saxophonist with onyx skin and a gold mouthpiece; an African God pouring molten ore from his mouth. His playing, on "Russian Lullaby" (written by a real Russian), confirmed that mythic gift. Later, at a Woody Herman concert, Gregory Herbert, unimpressed I listened to Weather Report and Mahavishnu, pointed me back to Stitt, 50's Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. Of course, my father had their records,too. Later on, I saw Herbert burn up the bandstand with Thad and Mel. A year later, he was dead at 30. I knew about Bird and Fats Navarro, of course. Punctures came soon for the rest of my innocence.
Poem
“THE PRESIDENT IS HUMAN. HE GETS SICK”
— White House Press Secretary Responding to Reporters’ Questions in The New York Times, January 9, 1992
A thousand tiny dots of light:
I diminish the noise.
Duped smirk on aging face,
eyes eclipsed by spectacles,
The President,
previously recorded,
vomits,
moving his lips slowly.
Watching me watching him
he holds my stare
kindly, gently.
Reading my thoughts,
George Herbert Walker Bush
C
O
L
L
A
P
S
E
S.
By Rafiq Kathwari / rafiqkathwari.com / @brownpundit
My Grandfather’s Ghost
by Elise Hempel
He was a misogynist too, every once in a while, from behind his daily paper or The Wall Street Journal, telling my grandmother to "shut yer yap" if he felt she was talking too much, or talking about something he didn't want to hear. And once, I've recently learned, when my aunt was a teenager and my grandfather had ordered my grandmother to get the ketchup or mustard or whatever condiment it was he immediately needed, and my aunt spoke up from her place at the table and told him, on my grandmother's behalf, to get it himself, he hauled her to the bedroom and beat her with his belt. His beliefs about women being subordinate to men didn't end after my grandmother died and he was forced to spend his final days in a nursing home. After he died, at 85, with Parkinson's, there were reports from the home not only of his attempted escapes but also of his inappropriate touching of certain female residents. He was depressed and disoriented at the nursing home, but he didn't have dementia, and it's hard not to wonder about the possibility of some long prior history of sexual indiscretion.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Ch-ch-ch-changes
by Max Sirak
Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon write in their book, A General Theory of Love, "Because human beings remember with neurons, we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought."
The game is rigged. The deck, stacked. Odds are, despite our best (or pretend-best) efforts, we will continue to live as we always have and do what we've always done. We are designed to repeat our patterns. We're made to continue our habits.
This is how we work. It's how we're wired. To borrow some computer programmer lingo, this is a feature of our system, not a bug. Because our neurons like ruts, "attempting to change" could easily be rebranded "fighting inertia."
I get it. I mean, I love ruts. They're comfortable and easy, like an old pair of jeans. They're familiar and warm, like a favorite hoodie. However, just like old clothes, sometimes old ruts need replacing.
Maybe we wake up one morning and have an anti-Talking Heads moment. "I don't have a beautiful house. I don't have a beautiful wife. I don't even have a job. How did I get here?"
Or perhaps there's an external cause. Our doctor calls and says the test came back positive. We're on a crash course with a major health risk. There is no surgery. There is no medicine. It's change or die.
Whatever our reasons, whatever our whys, I want to help with our hows.
Walking Past the White House: March comes in January
by Maniza Naqvi
Because in this system, it doesn't matter who is elected, they become part and parcel of, let me coin a term the: war industrial complex kitkaboodles endless dreadfulness (WICKED).
Let me locate myself. If you draw a straight line from here, Karachi, to there—DC, both points are home. Most days of the year walking past it I stop and gaze at the White House—at its glory—with appreciation as well as with many grievances in my heart for the policies unleashed across the globe.
Grievances against the kind of endless war policies which have now brought us inevitably, shamefully, tragically, criminally up to year sixteen of relentless erosion of public space, privacy, discourse and the increase of war and the propaganda necessary for it—books have disappeared—we rely on google and social media for all our information.
In the vicinity of where I live in Washington DC and where I work there used to be many bookshops and now there are next to none. Yes, Politics and Prose and Kramers— one or two keep chugging on—but more as coffee shops, bars and restaurants then bookstores. With the erosion and disappearance of books and with the rise of IPhones and social media—we are getting more and more connected with nothing—and informed about nothing. Perhaps the march across the USA on January 21, 2017 has finally woken up America, thanks to the over the top fascistic rhetoric of Donald J. Trump. Perhaps Trump has managed to build that wall—after all—but of people rising against injustice and fascism. Perhaps against war and the killing of people and genocide and not just for the sake of protection of our women's right to birth control.
Monday, January 16, 2017
Zygmunt Bauman Lives
by Holly A. Case
Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017)
The first and last time I saw Zygmunt Bauman was in October 2011. The Polish sociologist had come to Jena where he was one of the star participants, along with the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller, at a workshop on "Approaches to Postmodernity from the East." As the organizers of the conference repeatedly emphasized, Bauman and Heller did not merely write about modern European history, they were modern European history. They were invited to reflect on their mid-century experiences—of the Holocaust, Stalinism, dissidence—in light of what they (we) know now. The conceit seemed straightforward enough, but as the German historian Reinhart Koselleck wrote, "modernity only became recognizable as a new time once expectations distanced themselves ever more from all previous experiences." In other words, nothing ever turns out like you expect.
Although at the time I had not read Bauman's work, the particular tragicomic trajectory of the workshop left a deep impression on me. I reported on it at length to a German acquaintance in a series of emails, and even wrote a poem about Bauman's role. (Historians are not, in general, renowned for their poetry; it will soon become clear why.) When I saw the announcement of Bauman's death last week, it brought to mind that October five years ago. The following are excerpts from my letters (translated from the mediocre German) and the poem, along with passages from Bauman's own writings. The "exchange" that emerges is meant not as an in memoriam, but as a sign of life and a continuation of thought, an attempt to follow his example.