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 »

by Brooks Riley

by Carl Pierer

Starting from the formidable climatic challenges faced by cities on the Iranian plateau, Part I of this essay presented the ingenious Iranian invention of Qanats. Those underground aqueducts, which exploit gravitation to redirect an aquifer under a mountain to the surface, are remarkable feats of engineering. Covering distances of several kilometres, they permitted permanent settlements in landscapes otherwise hostile to agriculture. The previous part also argued that qanats have an impact on the settlements they supply with water in three ways. First of all, qanats allowed older settlements – predominantly located in river valleys – to support a larger population, since more land became available for agriculture through irrigation. At the same time, previously inhospitable places, where water cannot be accessed in other ways, could now be permanently settled. Secondly, villages and cities formed in accordance with the course of the water supply. This is particularly noticeable in settlements featuring a single qanat: they have a triangular shape at the top of which are orchards and gardens and further downhill the distribution channels fan out to allow a larger area to be irrigated. At the lower end, a grid of rectangular plots is located, which is designed in such a way that enough water is delivered in the time it takes to flow through the plot. Thirdly, the presence of qanats makes social stratification physically visible. Because qanats have a one directional flow, locating higher up on the canal means earlier access to – and therefore fresher – water. It is thus that richer households will locate further uphill, with the poorest inhabitants living just before the water reaches the fields for irrigation. Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

Fog fills a dead, gray street. As it begins to part, an opulent, borderline gaudy building glows from within. Like the Taj Mahal has plopped down on this small, sleepy town.

In the front window I can see *Leah, looking out. A large neon sign, Open For Business, clicks on next to her. She yawns and then disappears from my sight.

I met Leah through an outreach project last summer, a small non-profit that has since gone under. The goal was to help teenagers like Leah – kids who had fallen into the cracks of a town gone wrong – find jobs or apply to trade schools.

When I enter the pawnshop this morning, she is vacuuming. Then she is scrubbing a toilet. Then she is polishing a glass case full of pawned valuables; wristwatches, pocketknives, flasks. A few abandoned wedding rings.

I’m used to her flurry of movement by now, and sometimes it almost seems an act of defiance, a just wait until I’m ready to talk to you type of thing. After all, I am a writer and she is my subject and all the lines and spaces in-between are blurred. We don’t always know what to make of each other. We don’t always want to trust. Read more »

 by Evert Cilliers

So our pussy-grabbing porn-star-banging supplier-stiffing majority-vote-losing Mexican-Muslim-hating Charlottesville-excusing family-separating racist Liar-in-Chief goes to Europe and trash-talks our allies. 

But when he summits with Vlad the Journalist Killer (50 dead so far), Trump goes softer than a marshmallow on a stick over an open fire.

A weak bully.

Trump’s up-sucking to Putin was best summed up in the former CIA Director John Brennan’s tweet:

“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”

Where indeed? 

And Trump’s walk-backs were a joke. 

He says he meant to say “wouldn’t” instead of “would.” 

That must’ve been his sixth lie of the day (he averages around six a day in public; who knows how many lies he tells in private). 

And when he replied “no” to the question whether he thinks Russian election meddling is still happening, his press lady said he said “no” to answering any more questions, when he in fact answered many more questions, and said “no” to that question twice because the reporter asked him that question twice.

What are we to make of all this?

Here’s my simple three-point explainer of the whole post-surrender-treason-summit truth.
Read more »

by Dave Maier

Recently I’ve been reading a couple of books attacking postmodernism and/or leftist politics, which the authors – not surprisingly – tie together as closely as they can, albeit from rather different perspectives, for maximum polemical effect. Maybe we’ll get into the gory details some other time (haven’t got very far into them yet), but for now let’s just examine a few things that struck me about the very idea of polemical interpretations. 

For example: I can never figure out whether I’m supposed to be the audience, invited to join the authors in combating these worthless and dangerous ideas, or instead whether I am the target, such that these books intend to smash my own position(s) to conceptual smithereens. If I picture myself beside the author as he fires bolts at his target, I find myself alarmed at the way he’s swinging that crossbow around: watch where you’re aiming that thing! But maybe I myself am really the target – in which case I watch in puzzlement as the bolts sail harmlessly off to one side (was that really aimed at me?). If it were consistently one rather than the other, I would simply toss the book aside as incompetent; but when the two flip back and forth like the duck and the rabbit, it makes me wonder about polemics in general. How exactly are they supposed to work? Read more »

by Michael Liss

The other shoe dropped.  

Anthony Kennedy’s idiosyncratic role as a Justice of the United State Supreme Court will come to an end a mere week from now. A lot of things are going to change.

Let’s start with the politics. Kennedy’s leaving cinches the conservative revolution (or counter-revolution) for at least a generation. For the first time in living memory, a conservative Supreme Court will be in position to review and bless the acts of a like-minded Congress and President.

This will occur regardless of who is confirmed (Trump’s list is one to which moderates need not apply), but, unless a bolt of lightning strikes, it’s going to be Brett Kavanaugh. Yes, there will be plenty of Kabuki before he gets measured for a new robe, but Kavanaugh is the one who rings every bell for both Republicans and Trump. He’s a Federalist Society member, reliably conservative on all the big issues, not afraid to advance his interpretation of the law even when it conflicts with precedent, and has a past history of partisan politics. His nomination even offers a prize in the Cracker Jack box—the unique, magnificent straddle of having worked aggressively for Ken Starr, but now being deeply committed to the idea that sitting Presidents should be immune from prosecution. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

Spectator sports can reflect a society’s worst inclinations by promoting pure partisanship.

Pure partisanship is profoundly anti-intellectual. Pure partisanship can disable a person’s moral compass. Anyone who follows sports, even tangentially, witnesses this frequently. This team’s victory or that team’s loss have led to countless riots. Here in Baltimore a few years ago, I listened to fans make excuses for football player Ray Rice after footage surfaced of him knocking his fiancee unconscious. And just this past weekend, Milwaukee Brewers baseball fans gave star pitcher Josh Hader a standing ovation after it was revealed that he had published racist and homophobic tweets. My team, wrong or right.

In the world of spectator sports, unchecked partisanship reveals human beings’ self-limiting intellects and ugly moral shortcomings. But when pure partisanship runs amok in politics, the possible ramifications are truly dire. A my party (or candidate, or politician) wrong or right attitude facilitates political repression and the rise of totalitarianism. That is the threat facing the United States and several other democratic nations today.

It is a recent development. For most of the post-WWII period, American political partisanship was moderated by tremendous pressure to conform. While conformist pressures certainly present their own set of problems worthy of critique, we must acknowledge that they also helped preclude the type of hyper political partisanship we now see in the Age of Trump. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Jamie Elsey

Although some may be heralding the end of free speech, 2018 has been a year of far-reaching debate and discussion. In the coming months, we can anticipate attending or streaming discussions ranging from such topics as the role of race in American politics to the nature of truth, from existential threats posed by artificial intelligence to the value of religion.

As sure as I am that many readers will share my enthusiasm for these events, I’m also certain I’m not the only one frustrated by the sense that many such talks end up with the participants merely talking past one another. It’s as if the speakers have agreed to play chess, but change the rules to drafts whenever they’re put in check. I at least find myself in the good company of Stephen Fry who, well over an hour into the recent Munk debate on political correctness, expressed his bemusement that “people will look back on this debate and wonder why political correctness wasn’t discussed”.[1]

Failure to properly define the topic of discussion is, I believe, a primary cause of this frustration. Changing the format from one of debate to one of open conversation is less conducive to the kind of evasiveness and rhetorical point scoring that characterizes purely combative interactions. However, even in open-ended conversation, we want to see opposing viewpoints properly challenged, and the problem of poor definition stands even when all participants are in apparent agreement. How do we know that we are in agreement if we don’t really know what we’re agreeing to?

There is nowhere this issue of definition looms larger than in recent discussions of religion, God, and morality. Grappling with these topics is as vital as it is difficult. We can’t expect to make any progress if we do not have a shared or at least mutually understood language with which to tackle them. Read more »