by Brooks Riley

by Joshua Wilbur 

The 2020s will have a name. In the nursing homes of the future, Millennials’ grandchildren will hear all about the coming decade. Gran will remove her headset, loaded out with VR-entertainment and the latest in biometric tech, and she’ll tell the kids about the world as it was in the third decade of the 21st Century. For now, we look ahead to the Twenties, a decade certain to be charged with meaning, roaring in one way or another.

Our current moment isn’t easy to define. Since the start of the new millennium, there’s been much confusion about what to call the times. First, there’s the period from 2000 to 2009. Was it the “Two Thousands,” the “Zeroes,” the “ohs,” the “aughts,” or the “noughties?” None of the above, it seems: a name never really caught on.  In 2010, looking back on the decade past, a number of commentators remarked on this fact, as will surely happen again in 2020 when retrospectives are faced with a similar semantic problem. Rebecca Mead, writing for the New Yorker in January 2010, noted: “[…] the decade just gone by remains unnamed and unclaimed, an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to—or, truth be told, to have aught else to do with at all.”

The same can and will be said for the current decade, and with a similar feeling of embarrassment. The “Twenty Tens,” the “Tens,” “the Twenty Teens,” the “Teens?” Again, we lack a name with real currency. The “Teens,” like the teenagers of stereotype, resist description and brim with angst.  

Maybe it’s too soon to declare our decade unnamed and unnamable. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps the period from 2010 to 2019 will acquire a title and, with it, an identity. History, though, suggests otherwise. Read more »

by Gabrielle C. Durham

Grief

by Londiwe Buthelezi

It rips through your body.
Grazing, raking, shaving away all the
protective layers you put up all those years before.
layers you used to cover all the pain
you couldn’t possibly show to others.
Grief exposes you.
shows everyone what you really are like inside.
raw and helpless…

I always thought the term “crossing the rainbow bridge” to describe a pet’s dying sounded goofy. People use it in a non-silly way, so good on them for making that work. When we refer to people who die, we use euphemisms, such as Aunt Gigi “passed” or Uncle Gogo is “gone.” It’s too difficult to say, “Grandpa died.” Go ahead, say it out loud to people, and see what happens. Everyone freezes or turns away or starts to cry. “Dead” is too direct. There’s no escaping its frigid finality.

What is grief? According to this study, it is defined as “a normal, healthy, healing and ultimately transforming response to a significant loss that usually does not require professional help, although it does require ways to heal the broken strands of life and to affirm existing ones.” It is a negative reaction to a loss. At some point, we will all grieve, whether it’s for a parent, sibling, child, spouse, friend, pet, relationship, body part, object, or national figure.

What do we say when we grieve? Some of us clam up and say nothing, processing all that has been lost in whatever way we can manage. We all know the bromides that people, ourselves included, spew. “[Person you love] is in a better place” might be the most odious phrase ever. A runner-up is “Everything happens for a reason.” But we can’t help it. We do not know what to say when confronted by pain, so we say something we would never think of uttering in any other circumstance, lower our eyes, and move on quickly to brush off so much grief-lint. I haven’t been to funerals in other countries, but I imagine it’s relatively universal that everyone is uncomfortable until food or drink is served, until some distraction presents itself. Read more »

by Max Sirak

I’m pretty crappy at taking my own advice.

Back in November of 2016 I wrote a column titled “What To Do With Our Expectations.” In it I wrote about the importance of not judging events by their outcomes and I outlined a strategy for doing so. But it turns out, surprising no one at all, it’s a lot easier to write about things from an abstracted distance than it is to put them into practice in real time.

This summer hasn’t exactly been breezy and light.

A very good friend of mine recently lost his father.

Some of my nearest and dearest had to bid farewell to their doggy-daughter.

As for me…

One of my closest friends and his family moved across the country. Another was killed by a drunk driver. And lastly, I had to let go of the primary source of love, joy, connection, affection, and touch in my life. 

“Write about what you know,” they say. Right now, it seems, endings are all I know. So endings are what I’ll write. Read more »

by Christopher Bacas

As a child, I feared dogs. A neighbor kept his German Shepherds, Heidi and Sarge, in a large pen along the alley. The yard and house, his parents’, were the biggest for many blocks. On the alley side, the chain link fence stood 10 feet. The dogs would charge out of their houses silently and hurl their bodies at the fence snarling and barking. I was caught unaware at the fence a few times. My stomach curdled and legs buckled. My mother’s family are dog people. My grandparents cared for a series of large overfed dogs who cavorted in the swamps surrounding their Massachusetts home and otherwise slumped under the kitchen table waiting for my grandmother to put together meals of breakfast scraps bound with maple syrup or for treats from a cookie jar on her counter. My uncles had shambling dogs who would leap into rough water off Cape Cod to retrieve balls from seaweed choked waves. As their fur dried, they smelled of sour salt water and general funk. At the rented house, they showed a gentle deference to humans and lolled on the grass or carpet while my cousins and I ate and talked.

My wife brought her dog Tangles, a whippet mix, with her when we moved in together. Tangles’ jaws and teeth rattled for no apparent reason. Her bony head was easy to rub. I told her I would “cook her brain” with the friction generated as I stroked her skull. She lived sixteen sweet years as my wife’s constant companion and then two more after we spent a small fortune on tumor surgery. After Tangles passed, we fostered a few dogs, each different in size and personality. We got involved in a Brooklyn shelter run by a group of animal-loving, human-hating misanthropes. After my work setting up their facility, the animals they cared for suffered unspeakably and thousands of dollars disappeared in a haze of prescription drugs and acrimony. Luckily, we rescued and placed with family a small, quirky dog named Big Man. He is the one light of that weird, sad time. Read more »

by Joan Harvey

When the bobbling, babbling, unhinged conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, warned of a second Civil War starting on the 4th of July, most of us laughed, people marked themselves “Safe,” and we enjoyed the holiday. But one thing we’ve learned in these times is that both the Civil War and WWII are still underway. Not the second Civil War, but a continuation of the first. While both wars seemed to have had clear endings, in reality they continue, but until now mostly buried underground. How could we have been so oblivious? So complacent? I think of Freud and the unconscious, Jung and the shadow. Psycho-history.

Our country is mentally ill.

Politicians, it seems, think the answer is in being led by the nose by the Russian government. Oh, that and arming toddlers.

But America is changing. Across the West on the 4th of July this year fireworks displays were cancelled. Fire danger was too high. Every year is like this now. And every year, we too act mentally ill, behaving as if this year were aberrant. We get through fire season crossing our fingers, a fire season that extends for more months every year. Every year we hope a fire won’t burn too close to us, we hope it won’t force us out, we hope it won’t destroy our homes. Wiser politicians talk of turning to green energy to slow climate change, while the others push for more fossil fuel development. But no one addresses the fact that we’re past the tipping point. Even if we’re able to slow climate change, it’s still too late. Every year we burn. Then the floods come to finish the job. Read more »

by Shawn Crawford

For a Baptist, the Bible exists like gravity. Not believing in gravity will not change the outcome if you step off a building; not believing the Bible will not change the consequences if you ignore its precepts and commands. Both are laws of nature, fixed and unchanging.

To really understand what it means to be Baptist, you must understand the unique place the Bible holds in every facet of life. The central reality of existence is not God but rather the words he left behind to guide our decisions, our relationships, and our behavior. Baptists create a world that revolves around The Book to a degree that can easily be termed idolatry. In a religion that shuns all iconography, the Bible becomes the one object that can be revered. But not because it symbolizes the presence of God’s word among us: it is God’s Word, infallible and unchangeable. The Southern Baptist statement of beliefs, The Baptist Faith and Message, begins with the Bible, not God. It states in part, “[The Bible] has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.”

The close reading of scripture allowed you to extract the meaning God intended. That meaning could be discovered, not interpreted, and it could be agreed upon and then applied to how you lived your daily life: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and light unto my path” (Psalm 119.105). The Book of Psalms is in the middle of the Bible, and can best be translated “praises” or “songs” from the Hebrew. Psalm 119 is the longest chapter of the Bible, clocking in at 176 verses. Writers of Psalms often used an acrostic method employing the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Psalm 119 is a tour de force, with each of eight verses in a stanza opening with the same letter, moving through all twenty-two letters of the alphabet.

As you might have guessed, I spent a lot of time with the Bible. Read more »

by Samia Altaf

Six months before she died, Saleema, my 85-year-old mother, still in relatively good health – she did have breast cancer and Hepatitis-C, the one in remission, the other inactive – became obsessed with the quality of her grave.

“You will throw my corpse on a rubbish heap for all I know,” she said after a long and difficult phone conversation with her favorite son, “for you all do not care about my wishes.”

“We do care mom and I will not throw your corpse on a rubbish heap but put it, washed and dressed for the occasion, respectfully and lovingly, in a grave”.

“Ah! But what kind of a grave? And where? That is the question”.

“Unfortunately, I am not Shah Jehan. I have a normal grave in mind but you tell me the kind you want, and I shall follow your instructions.”

Little did I know how limited our choices were. Graveyards in Lahore, where Mom lived, and eventually died, are a disorganized mess with a terrible shortage of space. I Googled and found a list that included the Taxali Gate graveyard, the Mominpura graveyard, Miani Sahib, and Gora Qabristan. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

Few topics have captured the attention of the internet literati more than the topic of Jordan B. Peterson. Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, parlayed a protest against Canada’s transgender anti-discrimination protections, such as Federal Bill C-16, into a hugely popular YouTube channel, Patreon site, and bestselling book.

However, after a recent Independent interview with Sam Harris included some of Harris’s strongly worded reservations about Peterson’s positions, perhaps it is finally time to begin to prepare for an internet without near-daily references to Peterson.

If you’re like me, you might think this time is already overdue. Believe me, I get it. It’s hard not to get frustrated at the thought that we haven’t already passed the point of Peak Peterson. That’s the stage when all of the think pieces, discussion notes, and book reviews will begin to taper off, and we can begin to wring our hands about the inexplicable popularity of the next (pseudo-) intellectual dazzler who holds out the promise of providing heft to the thought behind free speech concern trolls, incels, misogynists, or members of the alt-right.

Of course, that we’ve spent so much time doing this with Jordan Peterson is one aspect of his genius. His writing allows his defenders to deny that the darker reaches of his appeal actually speak to Peterson’s own ideas. He’s not a free speech concern troll, but a brave defender of untrammeled thought against government intrusion. He’s not a misogynist; he’s simply following the best science on evolutionary and personality psychology where it leads. He doesn’t support the alt-right, though he is incisive enough to understand its roots deep in our psyche.

In short, Peterson’s appeal is at least in part that his writing is tailor-made for these tribal times. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

At the heart of liberalism is the idea of personal sovereignty. There is some domain of thought and feeling that is essentially private, for which we are not answerable to others because it is no one else’s proper business.

Privacy is the metaright that guarantees this right to think our way to our own decisions in our life, whether that be how to follow our god, or what to make of our sexual inclinations, or how to grieve for someone we have lost. It prevents others demanding justifications for our every thought and feeling by veiling them from their view. It is the right to be mysterious to others.

More specifically, privacy is the right to choose how we are known and by whom. For example, we may confide the details of an embarrassing problem with a particular friend – but not just any friend and certainly not a stranger. We do so because of the mutually trusting, caring relationship we have with that person. They may still criticize us for our faults, but not like a stranger would, whose knowledge of us lacks that special relational context. A friend’s criticism could actually help us do better. And if it doesn’t, they will respect our confidence. They won’t turn around and ‘share’ it with all the people who might find it interesting.

Of course, the right to control how you are known is not unlimited. You can’t control exactly what people know about you and you certainly can’t control what they make of it. And like other rights, such as speech or property, it may be curtailed in particular cases to protect other rights held by other people. For example, a convicted fraudster should not have the right to hide that fact from prospective business partners. On the other hand, his neighbours don’t have such a need to know. And even his business partners don’t need to know his sexuality or religion. The fact that people are curious enough about such things that they will ask google, and that google can sell more advertising by telling them, is not enough to justify disrespecting people’s privacy.

These days lots of people are talking about the value of privacy and its limits in the internet age. But few note its political significance. Read more »

by Holly Case and Lexi Lerner

What follows is part of a collaborative project between a historian and a student of medicine called “The Temperature of Our Time.” In forming diagnoses, historians and doctors gather what Carlo Ginzburg has called “small insights”—clues drawn from “concrete experience”—to expose the invisible: a forensic assessment of condition, the origins of an idiopathic illness, the trajectory of an idea through time. Taking the temperature of our time means reading vital signs and symptoms around a fixed theme or metaphor—in this case, the circus.

***

In its most basic iteration, a circus is a ring or circle. The Circus Maximus in Ancient Rome was an oval-shaped track used for chariot races. Presbyterian minister Conrad Hyers writes that the modern circus has a “willingness to encompass and make use of the whole human spectrum”:

The costumed beauty rides on the lumbering beast or walks hand in hand with the ugly dwarf. The graceful trapeze artist soars high above the stumbling imitations of the clown in the ring below. Nothing and no one seem to stand outside this circumference, this circus.

***

From a 1930 program for Krone Circus in Vienna: a Roman-style chariot race, gladiator games, Eskimos and polar bears, a parade of twenty elephants, springing Arabs, “The Maharadja’s Grand Entrance,” an “Exotic procession,” the Chinese troupe of Wong Tschio Tsching, and Cossack riders. (“No smoking. No dogs allowed.”)

***

The circus often starts by breaking its own rules. Paul Bouissac, a semiotician at the circus, explains. A master juggler is poised to begin the opening act, but he is interrupted by a clown who appears among the audience–introducing himself, fumbling, stealing a child’s popcorn, all the while defying the warnings and threats of the Master of Ceremonies. “From the beginning,” writes Bouissac, “as a kind of foundational gesture, this clown has defined himself as a rule breaker.”

He has mocked good manners. He has transgressed even the circus code of which he is a part. But his tricks have made people happy. He has denounced the arbitrariness of authority. When the Master of Ceremonies wants to throw him out of the ring, the audience spontaneously boos…

Eventually, the clown is removed and the juggler can begin his act. “At the end,” Bouissac concludes, “the triumph of the juggling hero will be both physical and social.” But this satisfying resolution can only take place after the clown has created a problem. The juggler’s act is only triumphant within “the framing provided by the clown.” Read more »