by Hari Balasubramanian

Of the 7097 languages in the world, twenty-three (including the usual suspects: Mandarin, English, Spanish, various forms of Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese) are spoken by half of the world's population. Hundreds of languages have only a handful of speakers and are disappearing quickly; one language dies every four months. Some parts of the world (dark green regions in the map) are linguistically far more diverse than others. Papua New Guinea, Cameroon, and India have hundreds of languages while in Japan, Iceland, Norway, and Cuba a single language dominates.

Why are languages distributed this way and why such large variations in diversity? These are hard questions to answer and I won't be dealing with them in this column. So many factors – conquest, empire, globalization, migration, trade necessities, privileged access that comes with adopting a dominant language, religion, administrative convenience, geography, the kind of neighbors one has – have had a role to play in determining the course of language history. Each region has its own story and it would be too hard to get into the details.

I also won't be discussing the merits and demerits of linguistic diversity. Personally, having grown up with five mutually unintelligible Indian languages, I am biased towards diversity – each language encapsulates a unique way of looking at the world and it seems (at least theoretically) that a multiplicity of worldviews is a good thing, worth preserving. But I am sure there are opposing arguments.

Instead, I'll restrict my focus to the following questions. How can the linguistic diversity of a particular region or country be numerically quantified? How do different parts of the world compare? How to account for the fact that languages may be related to one another, that individuals may speak multiple languages?

Read more »

by Holly A. Case

German soldiers invading Belgium, August 1914

It was from Isabel Hull that I learned what tu quoque means, and how important it is to know. Hull is a professor of German history at Cornell, where I have also taught. Once I invited her to a class to talk about the British blockade of Germany during the First World War. She explained how the Germans had made war by invading neutral Belgium in 1914, knowing full well they were breaking international law. The title of her latest book, A Scrap of Paper (2014), alludes to the phrase that the German chancellor used to describe the international agreement governing Belgium's neutrality: it meant that little to him.

Hull described to my class the blockade's origins, what the Germans had thought and done, what the British were thinking, how they reached the decision to initiate the blockade, and what its likely impact was. But one concept stood out and remained a topic for discussion for the rest of the semester, even finding its way onto the final exam: it was the Latin phrase tu quoque. A literal translation of the phrase is “you also.” Tu quoque is a rhetorical strategy whereby, instead of arguing directly against the claim of your opponent, you challenge their right to make an argument by charging them with hypocrisy. For example: the British government asserts that Germany violated international law by invading neutral Belgium and persecuting its inhabitants. The German government retorts that the British government itself is in breach of international law for having subsequently initiated a naval blockade against Germany, cutting off not only its supply of raw materials, but also (potentially) food to civilians.

The tu quoque is as old as the hills. Cicero used it to win a case in the trial of the exile Ligarius: “You are accusing one who has a case, as I say, better than your own.” The Nazis were especially adept at deploying it. In 1942, the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels confided to his diary: “The question of Jewish persecution in Europe is being given top news priority by the English and the Americans…We won't even discuss this theme publicly, but instead I gave orders to start an atrocity campaign against the English on their treatment of Colonials.” There have been countless examples of tu quoque since. The Soviets countered American claims of human rights abuses with the phrase “And you are lynching negroes,” which has its own entry on Wikipedia. Some Turkish scholars have used tu quoque to argue against claims that the Ottoman Empire instigated a genocide against the Armenians in 1915: “No nation is innocent. [T]hough the West has always accused the rest of the world of not being civilized enough, no other nations can be compared with the Germans, French, or Americans if we are talking about racism, fascism, and genocide.”

In logic, the tu quoque is considered a fallacy, because it does not actually controvert the original statement. If anything, it confirms the moral valence of wrongdoing, declaring: Yes, I have done wrong, but so have you.

Read more »

I Hold Things Up

As a carpenter I learned, before you can leverage things apart
you have to find purchase. You have to have a place where a pry-bar
can be slipped in or driven with a hammer to separate.
That being done, whether by violent or pursuasive means,
when two factions have been split
they're easier to manipulate.

These are also political techniques.
They apply as well to sweaty things.
They dictate the tone and conditions of our species' life.
They reach into souls and wrench them.
Though pneumatic they're not ephemeral.
They're tough and mean as muscle.

As a carpenter I also learned
If you set a post upon a solid pier
and brace it well it will never
tilt in glory

it will simply know
I'm here to serve
I hold things up,
end of story.
.

by Jim Culleny
8/25/46
.

by Libby Bishop

Amid the latest privacy kerfuffle in which WhatsApp agreed to sell users' data to its parent Facebook, an article published by Jackman and Kanerva in the Washington and Lee Law Review Online that describes new procedures for research review at Facebook could be deemed inconsequential, or at best, ironic. Even readers familiar with the outcry over Facebook's “emotion contagion” experiment might conclude, with boyd (2015), that Institutional Review Boards are not the solution (IRBs are committees that assess the ethics of federally funded research in the U.S.), and move on to the next item in their newsfeed. That would be a mistake, for there is more at stake here. First, Facebook has over 1.6 billion users, all of whom are potentially its research subjects and thus, would be affected by these procedures. Second, the authors hope the principles they present will “inform other companies” (Microsoft has also recently formed a review group https://vimeo.com/134004122.) Most important, however, this new system at Facebook provokes urgent questions about the role of review systems in achieving ethical research.

The Facebook contagion experiment

In 2010, researchers at Facebook and Cornell University published research that provided evidence that online social networks can transmit large-scale emotional contagion (Kramer, et al., 2014). The experiment demonstrated that reducing positive inputs to users' feeds resulted in users posting fewer positive, and more negative posts, and when negative inputs were reduced, the pattern was reversed: there were more positive and fewer negative posts. Kramer et al. emphasised the meaning of their findings: emotional contagion had been shown to occur without face-to-face and non-verbal cues. The change was small but statistically significant. Moreover, the authors pointed out that small changes can have “large aggregated consequences” (the sample size was 689,003) in part because of connections between emotions and off-line behaviour in areas such as health.

The import of the findings was swamped by the ensuing public outcry about the methodology, in particular, the manipulation of users' feeds, and hence emotions, without their consent. But a key question that emerged was the issue of research review: had the project been subjected to any formal ethical review, and if not, why not? Editors of the journal where the article had been published wrote an Expression of Editorial (Verma, 2014) stating that Cornell had confirmed that the research did not fall under the purview of their Human Research Protection Program because the experiment had been done at Facebook and not Cornell. Furthermore, because the research was not federally funded, it was not required to go through an IRB (boyd, 2015).

Read more »

by Richard King

When Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Party candidate for the 2002 French Presidential election, unexpectedly finished in third place in the initial round of voting – behind the Gaullist conservative Jacques Chirac (first) and the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen (second) – progressive and leftwing voters in France were presented with a stark choice: should they support Chirac in the run-off or should they abstain from voting at all and risk a (still unlikely) victory for the Front National. Characterising the decision as a choice between ‘cholera and plague', most progressives took the first option, often demonstrating their unhappiness by turning up to vote in rubber gloves and nose-pegs. One group of activists even set up a symbolic shower in a Paris square and invited Chirac voters to pass through it after voting.

Fourteen years later, the conflict between political pragmatism and political principle is as relevant as it ever was. With rightwing demagogues on the march in Europe (Le Pen's superior genes go marching on in the shape of his youngest daughter, Marine), a situation may soon arise where progressive voters have to choose between, say, a Jobbik or a Danish People's Party on the one hand and some milquetoast neoliberal or smooth-talking Tory on the other. In the UK, Labour Party members are warned that a vote for Jeremy Corbyn in the upcoming leadership election is sure to mean another Conservative government; vote for the more electable (i.e. centrist) candidate, they are told, lest the Tories have their evil way. And then of course there's Hillary and The Donald – a cholera-or-plague choice if ever there was one. Having run Clinton close in the primaries and set out an agenda for change far to the left of the Democratic candidate, the Sandernistas are faced with a dilemma. Should they sink their differences with the Clintonoids? Or should they stay pure and risk a Trump win?

Thus the lesser evil calculus – the proposition that one must choose the candidate most likely to win who will do the least harm – continues to exert its pull. ‘Vote for me,' says the ‘cholera' candidate, ‘not because I have good policies but because I'm not the other guy, and the other guy, well, just look at him! You wouldn't want that on your conscience, now would you?' The pitch is as old as politics itself and a constant source of frustration to those who see the need for more than just piecemeal change. It is an appeal to fear, and a brake on real progress. ‘Don't waste your vote on a principle,' say the cholerites; ‘Don't risk a bout of plague.'

Read more »

by Sue Hubbard

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Mirror —Sylvia Plath

Like many good ideas it is deceptively simple. The artist Mark Wallinger has installed a large mirror across the ceiling of Sigmund Freud's iconic study in Maresfield Gardens. The effect is dramatic. Immediately the space is doubled, turned inside out so that top and bottom, reflection and reality all become blurred. What is real suddenly seems like an illusion. Everything is destabilised – the famous couch, the archaeological figurines and artefacts arranged on Freud's desk, the leather books and densely patterned Turkish rugs. It is disorientating. Are we looking at an actual object or its doppelganger? With its heavy red velvet curtains and oriental drapes the room surrounds us like a womb and the couch, with its comfortable Persian cushions, and Freud's chair at the head where he would have sat out of sight of his analysand, invites us to lie down and rehearse our infantile fantasies and dreams. As we look up we catch sight of our own small, isolated reflection peering into this complex double space.

The mirror has been used throughout art history as a metaphor for both revelation and philosophical conundrum. Some of the oldest drawings found on temple walls and papyrus scrolls depict images of Egyptian Neters gazing into hand-held Mirrors. In Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, one of the world's most enigmatic paintings, the artist melds the fabric of reality and the illusion of identity in a game of mirrors. While in his Rokey Venus, the goddess of Love, the most beautiful of all the goddesses, is shown lying languidly on a bed, as her son Cupid holds up a mirror – in an act that is at once both narcissistic and Oedipal. As Venus looks both at herself and the viewer the borders between self and other disintegrate.

Read more »

by Mara Naselli

In the spring of 1917, Alfred Kreymborg brought Marianne Moore to a baseball game. In his autobiography, he recalls how they stood on the crowded elevated on the way to the Polo Grounds, holding the straps as the train lurched. Moore held forth on technical matters of poetics, undisturbed. Kreymborg, the editor of Others, strongly supported Moore’s work and held her in “absolute admiration.” He was not alone. In the early years of Moore’s career, when she circulated among the art and literary avant guard of New York, men and women alike were enthralled. Artists asked to make her portrait. Scofield Thayer fell in love with her. Even Ezra Pound sent her pages of erotically charged prose, which she ignored. Moore was intelligent, striking, and famously felicitous in her speech. “We’re a pair of tongue-tied tyros by comparison,” said William Carlos Williams.

“Never having found her at a loss on any topic whatsoever,” Kreymborg writes, “I wanted to give myself the pleasure at least once of hearing her stumped about something.” Surely baseball was out of her reach. When Moore praised the first strike, Kreymborg asked if she knew who was pitching.

“‘I’ve never seen him before,’ she admitted, ‘but I take it it must be Mr. Mathewson.’”

“I could only gasp,” Kreymborg writes.

Actually, it wasn’t Christy Mathewson on the mound that day, but Moore had read Pitching in a Pinch and knew enough to thwart Kreymborg’s sporting attempt to find the limits of her knowledge. How difficult it is to put a smart woman in her place.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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?

Read more »

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.”

Read more »

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

.

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »