by Humera Afridi

“The pity of partition was not that instead of one country there were now two—independent India and independent Pakistan—but the fact that “human beings in both countries were slaves, slaves of bigotry… slaves of religious passions, slaves of animal instincts and barbarity.” —Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition. Manto's Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide.

On a recent—I feel the urge to insert ‘historic'—trip to India—any trip to India, after all, is momentous for a person born in Pakistan, it may well be her last, given the vagaries of the visa-granting authorities—I spent the greater part of my 11 days communing with those who'd passed into the after-life. I sat cross-legged outside marble screen walls whispering supplications at the tombs of Sufi saints in Delhi, while the ancient, beautiful city crumbled all around me. Within the murmuring walls and environs of the shrines, encapsulated in the passionate verses of the qawwals singing in the courtyards, the spirit of the past was palpable and boundaries between realms of time diaphanous.

Poet, mystic, and daughter of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan, Jahanara Begum, whose tomb lies across the courtyard from Hazrat Nizamuddin Awliya's own tomb, whispered past me one evening. Dressed in a long muslin gown fragrant with perfumed ittar, she stepped directly into the sanctum sanctorum, unhindered and seemingly oblivious to the present-day ban against women entering the doors of the saint's shrine, to rest a garland of crimson roses, threaded with her own hands, on the blessed saint's tomb. Time collapsed, a myriad histories intersected. In the heightened atmosphere created by a feeling of belonging on this exilic land, fact and imagination co-mingled to manifest new truths.

Not just at the tombs, but also in the clogged lanes of Old Delhi—Shahjahanabad as it was known before the British Raj—with my feet sunk in the sodden ground of the monsoon-humid now, dodging the tyranny of oncoming scooters and rickshaws, I found myself seeking out the palimpsest-like layers of the city's past. The pungent aromas of the marketplace and the stabbing sight of a crippled dog rooted me in the present but I walked wraith-like into history. Unfinished, amorphous stories—familial and historical—propelled me on with urgency. Time is of the essence, they whispered, yearning to be resolved.

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by Maniza Naqvi

I invite you to tell me why I am wrong. I wrote a similar post on facebook and now want to engage you here in this debate. So tell me am I wrong and why.

The issue about the hijab, burka and now burkini is not simply about its presence on the beach or in public institutions and spaces including schools, or about the presence of Islam in public spaces in Europe or about freedom of choice there. The issue is about the hijab, burka and burkini becoming the symbol of Islam and all that there is about Islam.

A garment now defines Islam. A cloth, has become Islam. The issue is that modesty and virtue have been reduced to the abundance or lack of abundance of a garment. And that indeed is a shame.

It isn't that the space for hijabs and niqabs is threatened to be reduced. It is Islam that is being reduced. Reduced to a piece of cloth. And who is responsible for this?

Those responsible for doing so are Muslim women who wear it. Indeed it is about misogyny and patriarchy. Those who promote it are women. And they are predominantly articulating themselves to the West. They are reducing themselves, reducing the air around them, the light, the conversation, and they are reducing the faith that they profess to belong to by this reductionist action.

They have reduced Islam to a piece of cloth. There were two American Muslim women who participated in the Olympics and won medals. NBC and the media only played up and focused on one. Yup, the one wearing the hijab. Regularly, those women invited to speak about Muslims or Islam or represent Muslims are wearing hijabs. Those appointed and recruited to police and surveil and provide security duties are in hijab. Why?

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by Michael Liss

“In every country there must be a just and equal balance of powers in the government, an equal distribution of the national forces. Each section and each interest must exercise its due share of influence and control. It is always more or less difficult to preserve their just equipoise, and the larger the country, and the more varied its great interests, the more difficult does the task become, and the greater the shock and disturbance caused by an attempt to adjust it when once disturbed.” —Henry J. Raymond, Editor of the New York Times, January, 1860 (as quoted by Allan Nevins).

“We don’t win anymore. But we are going to start winning again.” —Donald J. Trump, just about any and every day, 2015-16.

The monster is loose.

Donald Trump is done with keeping quiet. It’s possible you might not have noticed the buttoned-up, reserved Trump (I’ve heard it compared to the Higgs boson), but worry not; it’s no longer relevant, and you won’t be seeing it in the future.

Trump wants to be Trump, and he’s tired of people telling him he needs to appear more substantive, more Presidential. So he shook up his campaign, demoted the controversial Paul Manafort (who subsequently resigned), elevated the pollster Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager, and made Stephen Bannon the campaign’s chief executive. Conway is an operative who previously worked for Ted Cruz and has good contacts with the conservative base. But Bannon is the real prize, and the one who raised eyebrows, and a little fear, even amongst Republicans. Bannon runs the influential and persistently inflammatory conservative outlet Breitbart News, which has recently closely coordinated with Trump’s messaging. And Breitbart takes no prisoners. Wild speculation, innuendo, and hyperbole are its stock in trade, and if you are in its sightline, expect to lose.

Trump has made a decisive choice. He will do what got him the nomination. Back to his fastball: an unscripted (but obviously deliberate) stream-of consciousness mélange of pugnacity, promises, patriotism, law-and order, and a firm, unkindly hand towards those who are undesirable because of their origins or political beliefs. He will occasionally throw in a kinder, gentler Donald because he’s retained slash-and-burn types to act as surrogates, but the core Trump message will remain intense and in your face. That’s who he is, a hammer in search of a nail.

This is actually a very smart move, a businessman’s move, and the freak-out from his fellow Republicans misses the mark. Trump isn’t like other politicians. He doesn’t do “pivot.”

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Asamprajanya

I’m in the weeds on my knees pawing dark earth
looking for my squash among prolific opportunist grasses
and broad-leafed virtuosos at finding sustenance
in the garden of a part-time farmer—
finding advantage in his jammed schedule,
in life’s necessary distractions and precious
irrelevancies, his asamprajanya

On knees I sweat under an indifferent sun
to undo the effects of looking the other way
while rooted intruders ensconced themselves
in a life of ease throttling zucchini
under the erratic care of a life-long
junkie of mysteries, dreams and peeks behind scenes,
looking for grails among wild greens
which threaten his squash’s fundamental urge to bear fruit,
who counts angels and grasps at clouds
while many weeds take root
.

Jim Culleny
8/7/16

*Asamprajanya (Sanskrit): inattentiveness, non-alertness

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by Leanne Ogasawara

The other night, I was dancing with the Dalai Lama. We were in a large auditorium that looked like a high school gym– and in front of a packed audience sitting in the bleachers, we danced, just the two of us–cheek to cheek. I am not actually such a huge fan of his holiness– so this all was rather unexpected.

As we were floating and twirling ballroom style out on the dance floor, he pressed me very close, and giggled– and I started to laugh; and then still in my dream, I thought, “Wow, maybe I died and this is heaven…”

Paradiso

I've long wondered, why it is that right from the very start, peopled have preferred Dante's Inferno to his Paradiso?

Am I the only one who– while utterly unable to imagine hell– often finds myself lost in dreams of paradise?

It's true, I love to fantasize about paradise.

Often imagining it like a Persian garden, there is the intoxicating fragrance of roses, jasmine and gardenias. There is music and gently perfumed spring breezes. And people picnic, unendingly.

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by Dave Maier

Consider how difficult it has been to get Big Tobacco to admit that cigarette smoking is bad for you at all, let alone that it kills many thousands of people every year. In particular, you might remember that time when all the major executives swore under oath at Congressional hearings that cigarettes are perfectly safe. Consider as well that most tobacco profits come from heavy users of tobacco, not smokers of only the occasional cigarette. So the all-important bottom line – public health be damned – can be preserved only by recruiting new heavy smokers as the older (or not so older) ones die off or quit. For Big Tobacco, this means targeting children, who are not only risk-takers by nature, but very often concerned above all to be cool. If cigarettes are risky and cool, then children will become smokers, and many (some studies say 30%) will become hooked, preserving corporate profits for another generation.

Marijuana prohibitionists hold the analogous establishment of Big Marijuana up as a nightmare scenario. If big money is involved – as of course it is – it is quite natural to worry that Big Marijuana will be just as bad as Big Tobacco: fighting warning labels, putting out deceptive and child-friendly advertising (Joe Camel = Joe Cannabis?) fighting class-action lawsuits with expensive lawyers, and so on. Prohibitionists point to the existence of yummy cannabis edibles (THC-infused gummy bears! “Pot Tarts”!) and fanciful marijuana strain names (“Girl Scout Cookies”! “Green Crack”!) as evidence that even the nascent legal cannabis industry has our defenseless children in its sights.

The most vocal proponent of this line is Kevin Sabet of the anti-legalization organization Project SAM [Smart Approaches to Marijuana]. Sabet represents a new development in prohibitionism, consciously distancing himself from old-school drug-warrior tactics in the hope of reaching a more moderate audience. In terms of actual policy recommendations, in fact, Sabet sounds quite a bit like yesterday’s marijuana reform activists. NORML's Roger Roffman, for example, whose book we looked at last time, spent most of his career pushing not for legalization, but for decriminalization, and more generally a reconstrual of marijuana policy not as a matter for law enforcement but instead as a public health issue: not arrest and incarceration, but education and treatment.

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by Matt McKenna

Though the target demographic for Suicide Squad can’t yet vote in the United States, it was was still thoughtful of director David Ayer to create a PG-13 film that educates children as to the state of the Republican Party. By fashioning the silly misanthrope protagonists in Suicide Squad after Republican candidates, Ayers deftly describes the sad circumstance many Republican politicians and voters are experiencing this election cycle–they dislike the candidates they’re obliged to support.

For those unfamiliar with the Suicide Squad comic book franchise, the protagonists are a group of DC Comics villains who are pressed into service by the United States in order to battle other, even worse villains. These anti-heroes, who share a cinematic universe with Batman, Superman, and other superheros in similarly boring films, are compelled to fight alongside the “good guys” because the good guys have threatened to detonate an explosive device implanted in each of the villain’s necks. It does seem a bit unfair to call the team the “Suicide Squad” given that if the protagonists don’t go along with the plan, their heads will be blown off. Alas, I suppose a more accurate title like “Hostage Squade” isn’t quite as mellifluous.

If the concept of Suicide Squad seems like a breath of fresh air compared to the noxious wind that accompanies most of the other Marvel and DC comic book movies, prepare to be disappointed. While the protagonists may not be the trite, righteous do-gooders we’ve been forced to endure over the past decade of me-too comic book cash-grabs fashioned in the form of feature films, the plot centers around the same tired tropes as its predecessors. Like the similarly incoherent Ghostbusters film from earlier this summer, Suicide Squad involves an action-figure-ready gaggle of wry underdogs charging into a skyscraper to battle a supernatural being who, before destroying the world, must first conjure a glowing beam of light and shoot it into the sky for two hours. Why does this evil spirit monster need to project a glowing energy beam through the ceiling? I don't know; Maybe that detail was covered somewhere within the bountiful dialogue, but even if it was, I can't imagine myself thinking, “Ohhh, okay. Sure, that makes sense.” Anyway, what Suicide Squad lacks in an interesting plot, it certainly makes up for in its uncanny depiction of the current state of the Republican Party.

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by Bill Benzon

These songs of mine have to be played. They mustn’t be lost, they have to be out there….They’re Byzantine and their ‘roads’, their tunes are ancient.
–Markos Vamvakaris

To read this book, this as-told-to autobiography of Markos Vamvakaris, is to confront how strange is this thing we call writing, the child of this strange thing in which we live, called civilization. It is not that Markos, as he came to be known, is uncivilized. It is not that. Living at the time and place that he did, Greece during the early and middle twentieth century, he couldn’t avoid it, this civilization.

But he could resist it. And that he did, with wine, women, and song. Hashish too, more than the wine, and the bouzouki, along with the song and more than the women. Civilization didn’t win, neither did Markos. But I wouldn’t call it a draw either. It was a dance.

* * * * *

I knew almost nothing about rebetiko – Greek urban folk music with Asian influence – when I began reading this book, this circle dance between Markos the road warrior, Angeliki Vellou-Keil, scholar and scribe who published the material in Greek in 1972, and Noonie Minogue, who translated and edited this English edition (2015). Yet the story herein set forth, Markos Vamvakaris: The Man and the Bouzouki, that story is a familiar one: poverty, social marginalization, drugs, rubbing shoulder with criminals, womanizing, dedication to craft, and the transformation of a nation’s musical culture. Rebetiko has been likened to the blues, and the stories of major blues musicians have all those elements. It is a story of resistance, survival, and transformation.

Markos Vamvakaris was born in 1905 on the island of Syra in the Cyclades in the South Aegean Sea. That puts it on one of the major crossroads of world travel and trade for three millennia, between mainland Greece to the West and Turkey to the East. Its largest city, Ermopouli, was the major Greek port in the second half of the 19th Century, and a center for commerce and industry. Many different peoples have lived in and passed through Syra, as they do today in these days of destruction and despair in the Middle East. The dance of snivilization, as James Joyce called it, power and domination, freedom and music, pomp and circumcision, the bouzouki vs. bullets. Markos snubbed the law and the songs won. For awhile.

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By Jonathan Kujawa

Photo by W. Bentley [1]

In 1611 Johannes Kepler wrote a scientific essay entitled De Nive Sexangula; commonly translated as “On the Six-Cornered Snowflake”. It was the first investigation into the nature of snowflakes and what we'd now call crystallography. Since he was a gentleman and a scholar back when you could be such a thing without being ironic or a hipster, Kepler gave the essay as a New Year's gift. As Kepler wrote on the title page:

To the honorable Counselor at the Court of his Imperial Majesty, Lord Matthaus Wacker von Wackenfels, a Decorated Knight and Patron of Writers and Philosophers, my Lord and Benefactor.

As the title suggests, Kepler's main concern was the question of why snowflakes are almost always six-pointed. In his essay Kepler ponders the shape of honeycombs, flowers, Platonic solids, and the Fibonacci Sequence. The shape of a snowflake doesn't seem to be imposed from the outside (as a scientist, “God did it” doesn't quite cut it as an explanation). He speculates, then, that there must be an internal cause for the six points. Nowadays we'd call it an emergent property of the snowflake.

Kepler next imagines that when moisture freezes it forms little “beads of vapor”. If so, it must be how these beads are arranged which gives rise to the shape of a snowflake. Thus Kepler is led to consider how one may pack together beads. In particular, he considers the question of how they could be packed together as tightly as possible. That is, how can we pack spheres together in such a way as to minimize the volume of the space between them?

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“When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note you play
that determines if it’s good or bad.” —Miles Davis

Next Note

There are no bad notes
if you’re open, cool and quick

there’ll be a next note:
first rung on a ladder from a ditch

new rudder of a boat
you'll sail to hope from glitch

The chance is not remote
you'll rise to praise from bitch

if you'll crack your shell and note
that next can overcome a hitch

you may courageously re-quote
and take your tune from poor to rich

by Jim Culleny
8/14/16
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Painting by Vagharshabadi
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by Daniel Ranard.

“Every choice we make is totally predetermined,” you hear someone say, a little too loudly, from a nearby table at the coffee shop. “If we had a big enough supercomputer, and we knew the exact configuration of all the atoms that make up a person and their surroundings, we could calculate their future perfectly!” This sounds like an excited young scientist or amateur futurist. But imagine replacing “supercomputer” with “super-mind,” and it sounds more like the French polymath Laplace, writing about determinism 200 years ago. In fact, as far back as antiquity, you can find philosophers speculating that all motion follows rules.

I imagine that humankind first witnessed the power of this idea when astronomers predicted the motion of the planets, leading to an image of the heavens as an orderly machine. Newton brought the laws of the heavens down to earth, positing that all matter follows the same rules, from celestial bodies to falling rocks. His theories made plausible the image of a clockwork universe, ticking in accordance with mechanical law. At the time, it was difficult or even ridiculous to imagine that living things followed the same rules, and many believed that life had its own spark or guiding force, apart from the mechanistic laws. But advances in biology and chemistry slowly convinced scientists that life is part of the clockwork, too. By the late 1800s, this idea permeated scientific circles and even literature–Dostoevsky's characters raged against the possibility that mathematics determined their decisions.

Since Laplace's time, our physical theories have changed, and our philosophical ideas have grown more sophisticated. With our new knowledge, what could we say to a nineteenth century thinker, existentially worried about living in a clockwork universe? What could we say, for example, to Dostoevsky's “Underground Man” in Notes from the Underground? He's concerned about a world where all human actions are “tabulated according to… laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms.” Phrasing the question in terms of free will and scientific determinism, many philosophers today declare that there's no need to pick between the two—free will and determinism are compatible. Other philosophers see the compatabilist argument as a mere redefinition of terms. But in addition to the philosophical question, there's also a more scientific question. According to modern scientific theories, is it true that the world behaves mechanistically and allows perfect prediction?

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by Genese Sodikoff

Recent outbreaks of the bubonic plague in Madagascar offer a glimpse into the dynamics of past outbreaks, the Plague of Justinian (sixth to eighth centuries), the Black Death (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), and current wave of “Third Pandemic” plagues that began in the nineteenth century. Over the past few years, genetic studies of the bacillus, Yersinia pestis, have revealed why the pathogen was so devastating, killing tens of millions over centuries. Yet much about it remains mysterious.

Tracing the plague's dynamics on the ground raises hard-to-solve questions, hard because of the material conditions in countries of Asia and Africa, where most of today's epidemics erupt. Impassible roads, lack of equipment, broken-down communication networks, proximity to rats in homes, and traditional healing and mortuary practices enable the plague to persist and evolve. Antibiotics contain the plague, but these are not always easy to get, nor are the proper dosages always consumed, in poor, remote areas.

I have just returned from a trip to Madagascar, where I visited the site of the August 2015 plague outbreak (14 cases and 10 deaths). I have a lot to learn, but my burning questions concern how long Y. pestis can survive inside a corpse or underground. For medical workers there, answers could help control outbreaks. And if it turns out that the dead are only ephemerally infectious, an overhaul the current policy on burials and funerary rites would be welcome news. The policy is a source of major anxiety for relatives of plague victims, who are prohibited from burying their kin in family tombs for seven years. For most, accumulating enough money to be able to transfer a body over a long distance is an enormous burden, so the seven years may stretch out indefinitely. Those who die of plague in the hospital may not receive the customary funerary rites from their family. All told, plague victims are unable to transform into proper ancestors. They are lost souls.

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