by Madhu Kaza

My reading schedule has little to do with the publishing industry's calendar of launches, prizes and promotions. When I look back on a year's worth of reading I note that much of what I read was not hot off the presses. My year end list of favorite books mostly includes works that were published in previous years. One great thing about books, though, is that for the most part they stick around. Whether they are on my own shelves or at the library I depend on them to live out long lives and wait for me.

Here are a few books that I loved this year:

Marie NDiaye, Self-Portrait in Green (English Translation: 2014, Jordan Stump)

Marie NDiaye is a boss writer; she does what she wants. Apparently she had agreed to write a memoir. It's
thrilling to see how she shattered genre expectations to create a strange, surreal and devastating portrait of women in this book.

In the opening pages the narrator sees a mysterious ghost-like woman in green by a banana tree from her car. She is dropping off her children at school. The children are described as docile. The narrator writes of their bodies: “a golden dust floats above their heads. Their foreheads are curved and serene, their napes still pale . . . my children's arms & legs are bare, because the air is warm, intoxicating.” It's all kind of eerie as if this were the beginning of a horror narrative.

The women in green figures proliferate and the book proceeds through confusion, misrecognition, transmogrification. Early on the narrator writes, “That's when I run into Cristina, but as soon as I see her I'm not sure it's her rather than Marie-Gabrielle or Alison… If this woman really is Cristina, I remember that she's my friend.” Cristina may also turn out to be a woman in green, not a phantasm exactly but not an ordinary woman (or conventional realist character) either. Self-Portrait in Green is full of playful, intriguing passages like this one.

I didn't know precisely what to make of the book when I finished it. I didn't know what the various women in green added up to. But I did know that I had read a beautifully written, strange and visionary work that I would need to read again.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

From the outside, Lorca’s summer house in Granada reminds me of childhood laughter, something he vowed never to lose: doors and windows painted promise-green, white walls, sunlight sliding like a child on snow, belly down. On my way here, I’ve seen tomatoes nearly as big as cantaloupes in a shop not far from the sign for this place: “Calle Arabial” and “Parque de F. Garcia Lorca.” I’m entering the world of Lorca’s poems as I take paths canopied by sequoias, pines, poplars, olive and pomegranate trees, expecting to be ambushed by the mischievous, life-affirming “house spirit” duende which inspires poetry by challenging one to a “duel on the rim of a well” according to Lorca.

Inside, the tour guide says no cameras please. I glance at the drawings, photographs, furniture, piano. Where is duende hiding?

Upstairs, the floor tiles are an imitation of the tiles of the Alhambra palace.

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by Bruce K. Adler

Bruce K. Adler

A long distinguished political theorist, Professor Wolin died in October. His obituary, printed in the New York Times, notes that starting in the 1960s he “galvanized the profession by gathering key political philosophers, beginning with the Greeks, in a grand debate on democracy and examining their ideas not as historical artifacts, but as a way to criticize current political structures.” I can further attest – being fortunate indeed to have had him as a teacher and adviser – that his lectures were not only an academic pleasure, but demonstrated the power of an ever-reflecting, ever-curious mind. He was a “Plato” who drove his students to marvel at and then ponder political order.

So I want to take this opportunity not just to pay tribute to his life and work but as much if not more to carry forward an obligation that by his example he imparted to all of his students: To try, now and again, in a thoughtful and positive way, to contribute to our common social conscience. For such is essential for any society, and a democracy most of all, if it is to sustain itself more nobly than desperately.

Now it might appear that “asking” Plato (424/423 – 348/347 BCE) and Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE) to “comment” on modern-day America is but a ploy to advance one’s personal views through the guise of others’ estimable authority. But such an inquiry, seriously pursued, can yield credible insights. For in reading Plato’s and Aristotle’s writings with their observations of life in ancient Greece and their considered conclusions about what makes for the good and just society, we can see well enough where their understandings of political order roughly parallel or markedly diverge from our own.

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by Maarten Boudry

Maarten Boudry

I want to argue in favor of the motion that religion constitutes a stumbling block to integration. By this I mean: integration in our modern, secular, liberal, democratic order. I will distinguish two types of reasons: one concerns some fundamental features of religion as a cultural phenomenon. The other reason has to do with the vagaries of history and sheer coincidence.

But first religion itself. Let me start with the most general characterization of religion. Religions are belief systems, bound up with certain practices and rituals, which proclaim some supernatural truths. In the case of revealed religions these truths are described in a number of holy books, which are infallible and should not be questioned. In my book Illusions for the Advanced I described the evolution of religious belief systems and wondered whether religions can play a useful role in our society. In the end I arrive at the conclusion that religions are byproducts of our brains, which serve no useful function for humans or for society. If they have a purpose at all, it is mainly to spread and to sustain themselves. Based on this evolutionary perspective, I think I can develop an argument for why religions are, almost by definition, opposed to integration or assimilation. In the course of history, people have worshipped countless gods, which now lie in the graveyard, as H.L. Mencken once put it, because no one is afraid of them any longer, and no one is left to pray to them. You can see this process as a form of natural selection, but in a cultural sense. Gods survive as long as the human imagination keeps them alive. Some are exiled, rejected or forgotten. Others perish along with their faithful, when the latter are conquered by other groups. Still others wither away in contact with other gods and other cultures.

And that brings me to the main point. The religions that were too malleable, too easily accommodating to changing circumstances, too prone to compromise, have disappeared in the folds of history. Numerous gods have failed, precisely because their supporters too easily blended in with other cultures. The religions that have endured long enough to still be around, are the religions that managed to forge close-knit groups that actively resisted assimilation, and didn't tolerate any questioning or doubt. Religious doctrines, at least culturally successful ones, are not open to critical scrutiny, but must be accepted on blind faith. By its very nature, religion creates a dichotomy between those who live in the ‘Truth', and the outsiders who are deprived of it. In other words, religion is the mother lode of Us-vs-Them thinking. Blind faith is divisive, whereas doubt and critical thinking unites and bridges our differences.

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Bright Rose

A Version after Iqbal

You cannot loosen the heart's knot,
perhaps you have no heart,
no share in the turmoil

of this garden, where I yearn
but gather no roses.
Of what use to me is wisdom?

Once out of the garden,
you are at peace. I am anxious,
scorched as I search.

Even *Jamshid's empty cup
foretold the future: may wine
always satisfy my mouth,

that open circle in the mirror.

* The mythical Persian king Jamshid saw the reflection of all events in a wine cup.

By Rafiq Kathwari whose collection, In Another Country, is available here.

by Tom Jacobs

We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

—William James (1908)

Years ago I found myself wandering through library stacks picking up and putting down books until I found a tome with a title that I liked. It was called Forbidden Knowledge, and the first line of the book as I remember it was: “Are there some things we shouldn't know?”

This question has haunted my mind in some way or other for many years, and although the writer was interested in a vaguely conservative way about whether we should be reading dangerous thinkers of resistance and rebellion like Foucault or the Marquis de Sade (or, less topically, whether Prometheus should have stolen that fire, or Adam and Eve have eaten that apple), I found that his opening line got me interested not so much in what we maybe would be better off not knowing, like how to build an atomic bomb, but rather in considering how it comes to pass that we come to know the sorts of things and animals and ideas that exist at the very edges of conceptual understanding. This would be the space between the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns.”

Clearly there are things that we don't understand just because we don't have a vocabulary or language to understand them. The universe itself might be one of them. As Richard Rorty so compellingly claimed, sounding not unlike Fox Mulder: “The world is out there, but descriptions of it are not.” This is not a simple idea at all, and while I don't want to suggest that we don't know what we are talking about just because we have to use language (or music or art or whatever) to describe the world in some meaningful way, what I'm interested in is how we regard those things that make us aware, even if only in the most inchoate of ways, that our representations of things are fundamentally inadequate and maybe even misleading.

I am utterly fascinated by the notion that there are some things that can't be seen because we don't have the language or means or the technology to render them visible and coherent. One of Thomas Kuhn's most compelling claims in “The Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery” has to do with what he calls the “violation of expectation”—the moment when an anomaly asserts itself and is perceived in however muddled a manner. Kuhn's discussion of this moment of violation reverberates in all kinds of ways, and although he is interested in how we understand what it means to “discover” something, it makes me wonder about how many things in this world escape our attention because we are in some sense looking at things wrongly.

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by Sebastian Normandin

On January 4th, 2015, the second day of the 102nd Indian Science Congress held in Mumbai, a very curious paper was given by two men — Anand J. Bodas, the head of a flight school and Ameya Jadhav, a lecturer at a small college in the host city.

Their paper made a rather extraordinary claim. Citing evidence from an early 20th century text — the Vaimanika Shastra — the two men argued that the airplane was invented in the Vedic Age (c. 1500-500 BCE). In further interviews, Mr. Bodas claimed these flying vehicles — vimana — were huge and could fly to other planets. Unlike modern airplanes, the vehicles didn't just fly forward but were capable of making immediate course corrections and could suddenly fly left, right or backwards.

The vimana is a fascinating idea. Mentioned in the great Indian epics — the Mahabharata and the Ramayana — it translates as “spacecraft” or “aircraft”. The Sanskrit word “vi-mana” can be literally translated as “measuring out” or “traversing” or “having been measured out”. The vimana is also an architectural term for a tower above the inner sanctum (the sanctum sanctorum or Garbhagriha) of a Hindu temple. These two meanings are not necessarily unrelated, and there is a symbolic connection between the vimana as vehicle and as architectural structure. When a god sits in the chariot — the vimana as vessel or spacecraft — it is analogous to the architectural form, the tower. Symbolically the vimana as tower sits in a “heavenly” liminal space between the earthly temple and the realm of the gods. It is this “space”, whether vessel or that which lies between, that allows transportation between the heavens and earth.

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by Thomas R. Wells

Are universities places for neoliberal human capital formation, or for the construction of a secular cathedral of human knowledge, or the development and promulgation of policies and technologies for the material benefit of society, or a finishing school to ensure the critical thinking skills and moral character of our future rulers? Clearly they cannot very well do all these things at the same time. They must choose. And that choice, according to a series of articulate, erudite critics from the humanities, like Martha Nussbaum and William Deresiewicz, should be for the liberal arts finishing school.

The diagnosis is correct but not the solution. The university cannot be saved.

I. The problem: The pathology of prestige

Universities have become too big to succeed and too big to challenge. They funded their expansion by promising all things to all stakeholders – jobs for parents, economic growth for governments, a podium for activists, an education for students. They said we had to trust them because, like doctors, they were the best judges of the wisdom they were selling. Well we did trust them and now the university has become gatekeeper to all sorts of essential parts of modern life, from intellectual credibility to middle-class jobs with dignity to scientific facts.

But they haven't actually kept their promises. They hardly even try. The leftist critique that universities have been taken over by the logic of the market is laughable. Paying customers, whether students, parents, or government, are an afterthought. Of course the money has to come from somewhere, but universities have always found ways to escape the discipline of the market. They invest a lot in marketing but not in connecting their education to the skills valued by the labour market. They have strenuously resisted providing students with the independent standardised information about teaching quality and employability that they need to make rational choices about where and what to study. The degrees they offer, even the ones with practical seeming titles, are stuffed with irrelevant courses about theory that mainly serve to provide jobs for academics rather than practical skills for students (and much of the actual teaching work is then outsourced to grad students anyway). One is often more likely to get a real education in ideas by joining the student debating society, and real work skills by leaving for a 6-month internship.

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by Paul Braterman

University of North Texas, where I was teaching in 2005

Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, in which judgment was pronounced on 20^th December 2005, is the court case that established that Intelligent Design is not science, but a form of religiously motivated creationism, and as such may not be taught in publicly funded schools in the US. This is a shortened version of what I told the students at Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, University of North Texas's early admissions programme, whom I was privileged to be teaching at the time of the trial. I have omitted my discussion of the embarrassing Intelligent Design pseudotext, Of Pandas and People, and the even more embarrassing statement that the Dover School Board instructed teachers to read, for reasons of space and because I have discussed them here before. I have tried to avoid rewriting in the light of what I have learnt since, but insert some comments for clarity, and links where relevant.

The “supplementary textbook” at the core of the case

This is a rather unusual presentation. It is the only presentation that I have ever given in response to a specific request from the [then] President of the United States, who has given as his opinion that Intelligent Design should be discussed in schools. It is the only presentation in which you will see me, a chemistry professor, practicing philosophy and even biblical exegisis; and I should warn you that I am practicing without a license. It is the only presentation I have ever given with the expectation that a number of people in the audience will be actively hostile to what I intend to say, because the point of view that I stand for is often misrepresented in this society as being hostile to religion.

But what is really extraordinary about this presentation is, that it is necessary at all. Having been a hundred years in the making, the central notions of evolutionary biology erupted into public awareness a century and a half ago, and, over the following 50 years, the major religious groups of the industrialised world came to terms with these ideas. The creationist challenge to what has been, for over a century, the central theoretical framework of biology, is a recent development, and, very specifically, a 20^th-century American phenomenon. Very recently, creationism has changed its name to Intelligent Design Theory, but this is a purely cosmetic change.

I expect that this talk will please no one. I will, as you might expect, argue against Intelligent Design arguments. Indeed, I will go much further, claiming that such arguments are part of a particular kind of mindset, which I will call literalism (although some call it fundamentalism), and that the rise of this mindset represents a most serious threat to knowledge.

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by Emrys Westacott

When terrorist atrocities are visited on civilian populations, the immediate emotional response is a combination of shock, sadness, and anger. That is natural and understandable. But the anger people feel fuels the thought that “something must be done; ” and political leaders, acutely aware of what is expected of them, immediately proceed to take some action or other. Thus, after the recent massacre in Paris, French president François Hollande ordered bombing raids on Raqqa, an ISIS stronghold in Syria. After 9/11 George Bush ordered a military campaign against al Qaeda in Afghanistan. These knee-jerk responses may gratify the urge to act; they also satisfy the politicians' need to appear to be doing something. But these are unworthy ends. Always, the crucial question regarding any action a government takes should be: What are its likely long-term consequences? And very often, it seems, the long-term consequences of the responses to terrorist atrocities are quite contrary to what is intended or hoped for.

Without question, the violence threatened and perpetrated by organizations like ISIS and al Qaeda has to be addressed directly. Appropriate surveillance, improved security procedures, and sometimes military measures are all in order. But we should challenge the idea that those who support large-scale offensive military actions or draconian domestic security measures are the hard-heads, the realists, the pragmatists, while those who tend to be skeptical about the likely efficacy of such actions are weak, soft, unrealistic, and naïve. If anything, the opposite is true.

Let's face it, the track record of the hard-headed hawks is not exactly inspiring. After 9/11, a US military campaign in Afghanistan ousted the Taliban (who had provided a supportive platform for Al Qaeda). This was certainly applauded by most Afghanis. But fourteen years on, around 150,000 people have been killed,[1] about $700 billion dollars have been spent,[2] and Afghanistan was ranked a year ago by Transparency International as the fourth most corrupt country in the world.[3]

The cost of the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its aftermath has been even greater: over 224,000 deaths (according to the Iraq Body Count Project),[4] $815 billion dollars spent, and Iraq is ranked by Transparency International as the sixth most corrupt country in the world.

Moreover, the dollars and death stats just cited seriously understate the real costs. In addition to all the deaths there are hundreds of thousands of people who are crippled, blinded, deafened, maimed, disfigured, or traumatized, not to speak of millions who are widowed, orphaned, or suffer inconsolable grief at the deaths of their children, siblings, family and friends. Millions have lost or been forced to leave their homes.

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by Charlie Huenemann

The biggest struggle my fellow modern-day cyborgs and I face is to create a virtual reality that connects more wholesomely with the human part of our nature. The artificial reality we currently plug into is a Terry Gilliam nightmare. Too many characters within it are armed, dangerous, and barbaric. The bright spots within it – few and far-between – are either so childish and sugary as to seem like a parody of our hearts’ deepest needs, or so smart and ironic as to mock any nobler aims. It’s Grand Theft Auto, or Sesame Street, or South Park – take your pick.

Other virtual diversions exist for us, of course. One can find meaningful examinations of human experience, sensible and judicious overviews of economic tensions, intelligent and respectful discussions of critical issues, wonderfully rich book reviews, and so on. But one has to seek out such treasures deliberately – they seldom pop up of their own accord out of the collective net consciousness – and one must have the time, patience, and discipline to attend to them. This is a bit like trying to read Moby Dick in a strip club. And, cyborg nature being what it is, not many of us will end up spending much time with brother Ishmael.

Aristotle, a human being from twenty-five centuries ago, did his best to put together a sensible account of what makes human beings happy. By his own estimate, we are social beings who like to enjoy one another’s company, usually with some nice food and drink, some music, and a conversation that stimulates the mind. We like to exercise, and to apply our best ideas to laws and social policies. Through drama and art, we love to explore vicariously the troubles we can get into, and discover for ourselves how we would feel in other people’s tragic circumstances. We are, as one might say, multidimensional beings. The trick then, according to Aristotle, is to manage this multidimensionality with reason and experience. We need to monitor our cultural intake with the fastidiousness of a Weight Watcher, judging for ourselves how much is too much, how much too little, and when more attention needs to be directed here or there.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

During my middle and high school years, I became fascinated with two generations of stray dogs that lived in my neighborhood. This was in the early 1990s. My family lived in the central Indian city of Nagpur, in a 3rd story flat. The flat had a couple of balconies (decks) which gave me the chance to watch the dogs go about their routines. Instead of studying for exams – which involved the dreary task of memorizing entire sections of textbooks – I would get up in the morning and spend time watching the neighborhood strays. The dogs liked the cool air of early mornings. They played frantically, chasing each other down, trying to wrest torn rags from each other as if the rags were of great value. At 8 am, with the sun up and strong, they would be exhausted. They would lie in the shade, front limbs stretched, their snouts nuzzling in between but their noses still twitching and ears still alert for anything untoward.

Stray dogs (desi kutta in Hindi, theru nai in Tamil) can be found almost everywhere in India. The term ‘stray', in the South Asian context, does not refer to abandoned pets (although some mixing with pet European breeds does happen). From the genetic viewpoint these dogs are actually very ancient and have been around for millennia. They seem to have evolved independently by natural selection (they were not bred commercially) and have adapted well to living in and around human settlements. And they are still around, living on the dirt shoulders of streets, alleyways, the platforms of railway stations, and the ignored nooks and interstices of infrastructure. Residential families and street vendors may occasionally feed them and look after them informally, but the strays largely fend for themselves, scavenging in rubbish dumps or wherever leftover food is available. They mark their territories with their seemingly bottomless bladders, participate heartily in the chaotic and noisy mating season which happens once a year, and work hard to raise their offspring. In this sense, the strays are as wild and independent as, say, the squirrels and crows we find everywhere. They are not always liked due to the risk of rabies, and there is an ongoing debate on how their numbers should be controlled (see this for another perspective).

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

The rains visited on the 1^st of December, 2015. This monsoon in Chennai, we had already experienced deluge and mayhem, mid-November. The city's low-lying areas had flooded, and thousands of people had to be evacuated.

When the rains made a dramatic appearance again on the 1^st of December, I wasn't prepared for a repeat of the November events. One spate had already weakened the city, and it had tired me out. One only prepares for one natural disaster a year, though all evidence should have us scurrying otherwise. The waters seeped in through the walls of my ancient building, and I looked on, fervent in my belief that this too would pass. Neither the slowly forming pool in the dining room of my second floor walkup, nor the increasingly bleak weather reports prepared me for anything but a day's worth of indoor activity, and a night of sleeping to the sound of soothing, lashing rains.

Picture © Neetesh Kumar

From the evening of the 1^st of December to the evening of the 5^th of December, large parts of the city went under water and lost power. The rains came at us relentlessly as the sky dissolved into eddies of Mordor-like blackness.

I have experienced the phenomenon known as a natural disaster a few times before; first as a child, and then as an almost adult. Other floods and earthquakes had produced in me a vague sense of preparation. As if this is but another event out of a series of life possibilities, and one is bound to emerge unscathed. When the lights went out that 1^st of December, I retained this sense of possibility. Fumbling around with the help of a few forgotten birthday candles, I wolfed down some leftovers, and went to sleep in the darkness. Before going to bed, I gathered all the dust cloths, old towels, and washcloths in the house and lay them down like a patchy quilt next to the walls, hoping they'd absorb the waters. I slept in the living room, the daybed sticking up against the windows, hoping that I would hear the rains stop.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

It is practically a rite of passage for physics majors. We study Maxwells equations – the illuminating set of relationships that reveal the nature of light; we marvel at the power and grace of this compact quartet, and can't resist a chuckle when – inevitably – we come across the t-shirt that says “God said [Maxwell's Equations] And there was light.” Something about that sticks. We remember the t-shirt years later, even if we can't write down the equations anymore.

But, even though James Clerk Maxwell could boast several outstanding accomplishments – including taking the first ever color photograph, and unleashing a fictional demon that outwits entropy – for far too many of us, our association with this brilliant scientist begins and ends with the famous equations that govern electromagnetic radiation.

There is no cult of genius surrounding Maxwell. Unlike Einstein, Feynman or more recently, Hawking, Maxwell has no groupies; his quotes don't adorn bumper stickers, physics students don't own collections of his lectures or writing, and I don't know of anyone (save Einstein) who put up a poster of Maxwell in their workspace.

Like thousands of other physics students who went to college, studied Maxwell's equations, and bought the t-shirt, I felt no real bond with the man until some years ago, when a writing project (to which I shall forever remain indebted) led me to find out more about him.

I read Maxwell's writings as part of my research, and it was love at first letter. I was completely enchanted by the mind revealed in, and between, the lines; it was an investigative, creative, whimsical creature, with scintillating wit and lyrical expression. Over the months, as I read more, my initial intellectual infatuation developed into a deep fondness and a genuine respect. I found the flow of Maxwell's logic and the dance of his ideas simply beautiful. I read and re-read his words for the pleasure of having them stream through my mind, but also in the hope that if they performed his choreography enough times, my thoughts might learn to move that way on their own.

Casting around today for a piece of writing that might serve as an introduction to Maxwell, I settled upon his 1870 address to the members of the British Association (whom Maxwell teasingly referred to as the British ‘Asses') about scientific metaphor. This is not an idea that is articulated very often, especially not this clearly, but it is precisely the sort of overarching theme that I think should be emphasized in physics classrooms everywhere.

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You will not be punished for your anger,
you will be punished by your anger.

.

WWBS?

What Would Buddha Say, I thought,
of all that flows from lips of wealthy oafs
who claim to know the shortcuts
on the highway to nirvana?

I’d guess he’d sit in stillness, smile
un-perplexed, knowing discontent and bile
and the willingness by which
we all can be deluded

He’d see impostors on TV
as he sat beneath his favorite tree
counting discontents that lead to rage
and suffering in Saṃsāra

Sid studied long the hearts of oafs
and made his case for noble truths
long before this modern age
had put all beings in this cage
(himself included)
.

by Jim Culleny
12/12/15