by Brooks Riley
Arab Muslim Writing in Britain
by Claire Chambers
Since 1855, both orthodox and non-practising Arab Muslim writers have produced an exciting, politicized, and high-quality body of artistic work. Among other aims, it seeks to portray the concerns of British-based members of the transnational faith group, or ummah. My research indicates that, particularly in the years following the riots in northern England in 2001, the attacks on America later that year, and the onset of the so-called War on Terror, British literature, film, and media have become increasingly preoccupied by Islam. In fiction at least, the strategies for representing Muslim communities are beginning to undergo significant alteration. Following the turning point of the Rushdie affair and accelerating since twenty-first-century wars of questionable legality, a surge in Islamophobia, the Arab Spring/Winter, and the refugee crisis, growing numbers of writers are representing specific British Muslim communities in a more nuanced way than had been attempted previously. Non-Muslim authors such as Martin Amis, John Updike, and Ian McEwan zero in on the figure of the terrorist. Arab Muslim writers tend to look at Islam in subtler ways, while often remaining highly critical of the religion's practices and accretions. Novelists such as Leila Aboulela and Robin Yassin-Kassab repudiate as distortions of the religion's pluralist history attempts to constrict Islam into an exclusive, singular identity.
The South Asian community constitute the biggest and most recognizable Muslim migrant population in Britain. However, Arabs, 
Since the discovery that the 2005 London bombers (none of them from Arab backgrounds) were 'home-grown', cultural commentators such as David Goodhart and Trevor Phillips have argued that multiculturalism is to blame for alienation, a lack of community cohesion, and even terrorism. However, I follow Tariq Modood in arguing just the reverse, that more rather than less multiculturalism is needed, if Britain is to inculcate a genuine (and necessarily diverse) sense of citizenship in its populace.
Tee for TOLET
by Maniza Naqvi
Mud, dirt, sand, land- look no further in Karachi or anywhere else for reasons for trouble. Trump cards, these, everywhere, up for grabs, for rent or lease or as it is said in Karachi: to let. Or, as the billboards scream all over Karachi: TOLET. Everything tolet. Perhaps, a Freudian nod to complicity by the scribe, as well as the reader, omitting the 'I', but managing still to point to the pervasive smell wafting all over the city the eau de toilet—or rather 'Ewwww dah toilet!!!' Something indeed is rotten.
Tee for Tolet. Karachi a city the size of a mid- sized country seems to be disappearing in to a golf hole— a vortex, a vortex of greed—into a TV screen, a swimming pool drain or down the tolet—toilet. The teeing off are teed-off if you do protest this too much. Protest the erasing of public spaces, the grabbing of public assets–and you're likely to be whacked or clubbed like a little white ball–and end up barred or down a hole. Players are quick to remind you that golf courses create green spaces and they don't use up water–only sewage water. Stinks?
The city, as a place to protest seems only to exist as pretty on the face of it—on Facebook. It appears pretty, as a dream—or as an idea of luxury—on gigantic billboards above its streets, but where on the streets themselves it more likely that idealism is shot to death and recycled as a cynical sickness: take for instance the poet's command—Bol! Speak! It was turned into a joke in this city. Here: ‘Speak!, means ‘Shut up!' Just as war means peace.
Poem
Mother Writes to Indira Gandhi
The Hon’ble Mrs. Indira Gandhi,
Prime Minister, Murti Lane, New Delhi.
7 July 1975, Dear Madam,
How are you? What’s with this
Emergency? India’s star is
fading while you’re sexing guru Brahmachari?
A pilot bucklemeups in his sexjet.
Pompous rogue has intensified
wireless: whispering, murmuring:
shanti, ashanti. Indira Ji, please heed my plea:
empty the sky. Show your ire. Command him,
at once ceasefire. A woman’s
mind is no man’s land. I hang
my vaginarags out on a string — pale buntings
fluttering Kashmir’s fragrant breeze. My
husband remarried. She burps, yawns,
farts, is fertile and thick as two
planks. Will she leave him alone at dawn to write
his diary? Her two readymade children
call me, Big Mom: Bahdi Ami.
My husband says new wife will be
my caregiver. It’s tearing me apart, Madam,
and I’m again losing my mind. Faithfully
yours, Mrs. Maryam Jan, Raj Bagh
Srinagar, Kashmir ((India).
* * *
Indira Gandhi
Teen Murti Lane
New Delhi
30 July 1975
Dear Maryam Jan,
I am delighted to pen this in my own hand. “You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens,” says Rumi, but I wish I had said it, for after my husband died, I took solace in poetry to heal my bruised heart — a very hard thing to do, perhaps the hardest thing to do as I am learning myself. Many say I am mad. They have no clue about the fine line between madam and madness. You have your pilot, his sexjet. I have my guru who drives me insane. There is an insurgency in my own emergency with Brahmachari. Indians are unruly. Elite talk only of civil rights. No one thinks of responsibilities, for there are no rights without responsibilities. A dose of self-enlightened Madam Rule should give India pause. I wish I were there inhaling the fragrant breeze, for Kashmir is my ancestral home too.
Yours, Indira
* * *
By Rafiq Kathwari, winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, who would like you to read more epistles from his mother to the Prime Ministers of the World, here.
Akeel Bilgrami’s Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s “What Kind of Creatures Are We?”
by Akeel Bilgrami
Lecture 1 presents with clarity and precision, his own basic ideas in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science (both fields in which he has played an absolutely central founding role) recording the progress achieved over the years but recording much more strenuously how tentatively those claims to progress must be made and how a very large amount of work remains to be done even in the most fundamental areas of study. Changes of mind over these years are also recorded, some of the most striking of which occurred only in the last decade or so.
The lecture begins by motivating the question its title announces, “What is Language?” It behooves us to ask it because without being clear about what language is, not only will we not get the right answers to other questions about various specific aspects of language (perhaps cannot even correctly frame those specific questions), but because we won’t get close to investigating or even plausibly speculating about the biological basis and evolutionary origins of language.
LEE CHILD, JONATHAN FRANZEN, AND JOUÏSSANCE ON 57TH STREET
by Andy Martin
Lee Child and Andy Martin
It was typical Lee Child.
Not long before he had been ranting on about how you really ought to ‘kill off all your relatives' (speaking aesthetically, but with a definite sense that art is murder) and how much he hated all those family trees in the classic novel. He was anti-genealogy. No begats. You can't have an XXL ex-military vigilante drifter roaming about and he has to call up his old mum every couple of weeks.
Now he was saying, ‘What if his mother comes back? Madame Reacher. You know, but young. In the Resistance. A kid. Before she became a Reacher. I love that period. The Nazis marching down the boulevard. Sartre and Camus writing in the Café de Flore. Most of the Resistance fighters achieved nothing, beyond getting themselves tortured. Useless, a lot of them. But the couriers – they were really something. They saved lives.'
We were crossing the street at Columbus Circle, weaving around cars and buses, riffing on the phrase ‘San Fairy Ann' (the Anglicization of Ça ne fait rien), deriving from our Second World War-era franglais-mangling fathers. Neon-lit darkness. Only a hazy idea where we were supposed to be going. We'd just finished the New York Times job in the Starbucks across from Lincoln Center Plaza. Lee was looking particularly disreputable for some reason. Maybe it was the stubble or the jeans-and-t-shirt look. Piratical. Like, if you were sheriff, you'd want to run him out of town before he started anything.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Venerating the Army: A Pathology of Nationalism
by Namit Arora
A cloying veneration of army men is yet another pathology of nationalism that’s more pervasive than ever in India today. Army men are now widely seen as paragons of nobility and patriotism. Whether their deaths are due to freak accidents or border skirmishes, they’re eulogized for “making the supreme sacrifice for the nation”. Politicians routinely signal their patriotism by chanting Bhārat Mātā ki Jai, victory to mother India, and fall over each other for photo ops where they’re seen honoring soldiers, dead or alive.
Curiously, this adoration for army men seems most intense in urban middle-class families, including those who don’t desire or nudge their own kids to join their nation’s army. Instead, they want their kids to prepare for more lucrative professions, pursue office jobs in multinationals, live in gated high-rise apartments, and own nice cars. A textbook case of hypocrisy?
These folks may claim that their reverence for army men stems from their appreciation for the sacrifice the jawans (soldiers) make for others by enduring great hardship and risk, even death. And yet these same people certainly don’t glorify other risky jobs that benefit the nation no less, like unclogging the nation’s sewers, mining the nation’s coal, building the nation’s infrastructure, or toiling in the nation’s shipping graveyard—all jobs that apparently have lower pay and benefits combined with higher fatality, injury, and illness rates than Indian army jobs. Clearly, something else animates all that adoration for army men.
And who are the jawans who comprise the majority of the army? Most come from the rural poor and are hired after 10th grade. Some follow in the footsteps of other soldiers in their families, at times going back to British colonial times. As happens in all societies with volunteer armies and a severe lack of equal opportunity, most recruits join to escape poverty, get a stable job and a pension, and pursue a ticket to a higher social class, prestige, and some adventure. Indeed, in recent years, economic distress in parts of rural India has forced army recruiters to lower their physical fitness standards in some centers because the pool of candidates is too undernourished. Though the army does not release demographic data by caste or religion, it is well known that Muslims are severely underrepresented in it—as low as 2-3 percent—raising a host of awkward questions about its commitment to secularism.
Monday, March 14, 2016
Should collective action be protected by the law (as labor law would suggest), or prosecuted by it (as antitrust law would suggest)?
by Sanjukta Paul
One of the most visible manifestations of precarious work is in the so-called on-demand or gig economy, exemplified by companies such as Uber. Companies in this sector generally argue that their growth is due to technological innovation, while many labor and community advocates argue that is largely due to the avoidance of socially beneficial regulation, which in turn enables them to undercut existing businesses. These companies also take the position that people providing the services in which they deal (such as cab rides) are not employees, but independent businesspeople, and thus that labor regulation does not apply to them. One response has been to argue, in the courts and the legislatures, that such workers are legally employees, and have been misclassified by the companies engaging their services. The City of Seattle recently took a different and more direct approach, enacting an ordinance granting collective bargaining rights to drivers for taxicab, limo, and “transportation network companies” (encompassing Uber, Lyft and other companies in the on-demand sector) who are classified as independent contractors rather than employees. The approach of the policy-makers and advocates who passed the Seattle ordinance is novel in that it guarantees these rights to workers directly, rather than endeavoring to first establish their employee status, whether by legislation or by litigation. As expected, an industry group (the United States Chamber of Commerce, no less) has now filed a lawsuit challenging the ordinance on grounds that it is barred by antitrust law and by the National Labor Relations Act.
Monday Poem
Standing at the East End of a Patio
Seeing a Mountain and a Moon
I have no ears for moons
nor eyes for the snapping of limbs
against each other in the wind
these come to me piecemeal by different senses
to be assembled in a dark place
into a dream of moonlit-windy-night
where all up sides are glazed in silver
while underneath are shadows,
and shadows (forever)
have no tongues
.
by Jim Culleny
3/11/16
.
Why have we lost faith in science?
by Thomas R. Wells
And yet despite dominating the modern world, the authority of science has declined. The general public are losing faith in its relevance to our lives, and are increasingly distrustful of its specific claims. This attitude is regrettable but not entirely unreasonable. Scientists have long claimed the status of public servants but exhibit little interest in living up to that role, for example by investigating boring but deadly diseases. Furthermore, science as an industry – Big Science – is entwined with power and money. That undermines the credibility of scientific pronouncements on politically contentious issues such as GM crops or climate change.
Choose the Axiom
by Carl Pierer
***
M.C. Escher: Three Spheres II.
*
If we take an infinite collection of sets, all of which contain at least one element, is there a way to choose exactly one element from each of them? This seems to be just obviously true. After all, there is something in every set, so we can just take any of those things. Certainly, it holds for finite collection of sets. Even if this number is very large, we could just go to each set and pick an element. However, if the collection becomes infinite, this becomes more worrisome. We would need a principled way of choosing one element of each set. Consider, for instance, all non-empty subsets of the natural numbers (the natural numbers being those we use to count: 1, 2, 3, …). By the nature of the natural numbers, such a set will always have a least element. Hence, we could simply pick the least element of each set in our collection. Compare this with an infinite collection of sets of pairs of gloves. As a pair of gloves always consists of a right and a left glove, we can always pick the left glove, say. But this is not so straightforward with other sets. For example, considering all non-empty subsets of the real numbers (containing the natural numbers, but also ¼, e, √π,…) it is far from obvious how we could ensure that we can pick precisely one element from each of those sets. Contrast this with an infinite collection of sets of peas. You know that each set will contain at least 1 pea, but which one are you going to pick if there are more than 1?
The axiom of choice, then, claims that this is always possible. It is, what some may call, somewhat theological, as it asserts the existence of something (a choice function) – even though we might have no idea at all how to construct it, as for instance in the real number example. Yet, it just seems very obvious that this principle should hold. After all, there is something in every set to choose from. The axiom is probably one of the most contentious of the standard axioms of set-theory[i]. On the one hand, it is very powerful and many important proofs in mathematics – explicitly or implicitly – use it. On the other, it leads to some highly counter-intuitive consequences.
Where Probability Meets Literature and Language: Markov Models for Text Analysis
by Hari Balasubramanian
The key phrase, as we shall see, is ‘dependent quantities'. Broadly speaking, Markov models are applications of that basic rule of conditional probability, P(A|B): the probability of Event A happening, given that B occurs. The uses of Markov chains are many and varied – from the transmission of genes through generations, to the analysis of queues in telecommunication networks, to the movements of particles in physics. In 2006 – the 100th anniversary of Markov's paper – Philipp Von Hilgers and Amy Langville summarized the five greatest applications of Markov chains. This includes the one that is unknowingly used by most of us on a daily basis: every time we search on the internet, the ranking of webpages is based on the solution to massive Markov chain.
The focus of this piece, however, is the analysis of letter and word sequences as they appear in text. In what follows, I'll look at four examples where Markov models play a role.
Is unpunctuality a moral failing?
We all know people who are routinely late. We may even be one of them. These people aren't necessarily late for everything. They usually manage to catch their trains or planes, get to a concert before it begins, and make it to their job interviews on time. But if it's a matter of rendezvousing for coffee, not holding up dinner, or being packed for a trip by the prearranged departure time, they are systematically hopeless.
Surprisingly, English doesn't seem to have a noun for this kind of person akin to words like “slob” or “scruff” or “lazybones.” The term “latecomer” won't do since it denotes one who is late for a specific event, not one who regularly keeps other waiting. So for the sake of convenience, let's label these people “unpunctuals.”
On several occasions I have heard amusing little speeches given about such individuals, at birthday parties, anniversaries, and graduation celebrations. The spirit is always the same: the subject of the toast/roast is a lovely person in many, many ways but he/she has a unique (although, in truth, it obviously isn't unique) sense of time. A familiar consequence of this has been that the unpunctual's nearest and dearest have spent a goodly proportion of their earthly existence hanging around wondering when the unpunctual will show up/be ready/finish a task etc..
This charitableness toward the unpunctual is interesting. We are less ready to laugh at other little failings which inconvenience us. Imagine a similar speech about someone who regularly borrows money and doesn't pay it back. Or who routinely fails to pick up their share of the tab at a restaurant. Or who insists on inflicting loud music on us when we are trying to concentrate or are suffering from a migraine. In such cases, the humour would be more barbed, the implicit criticism more pointed.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent
by Sue Hubbard
Small areas of cold white light glow against the foreboding brick walls of this looming Victorian Gothic façade with its dark stairwells and fire escapes. In the empty street below beams from a wrought-iron lamp post flood the crepuscular corners. Like a Christmas advent calendar there's the sense that behind every window of this building is a secret. If we look hard we can catch a tantalising glimpse of a coat hanging on a rack – who does it belong to? – an empty brass bed or a woman at an office desk, who might well be awaiting the arrival of a character from a Raymond Carver novel. Like some 50s film noir these lit windows draw us into the possibilities of the building's many hidden and possible stories.
Monday, March 7, 2016
A Black Hole Valentine
by Tasneem Zehra Husain
It just so happened that when the discovery of gravitational waves sent ripples through the world, Valentine's Day was right around the corner. News stories about this victorious verification of ‘Einstein's last remaining prediction' were as ubiquitous as the pink and red cards, making grandiose claims – or extravagant promises – about an undying love. It was an interesting juxtaposition.
With gravitational waves very much on my mind, I was wandering the aisles of a local store, when suddenly I came across a display full of cards dripping saccharine sweetness, and a stray thought wandering into my head almost made me laugh out loud. These cards would be completely appropriate, I thought, if sent from one black hole to another! After all, it would not be out of place for a couple of black holes, spiraling into each other, to exchange ardent promises that they will merge and become one; they would be entirely justified in claiming that the story of their love will reverberate across galaxies and through millennia, and that people far away will delight in discovering their tale. As LIGO proved last month, all these claims are true!
As you have doubtless read many times by now, gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime, caused by accelerating masses. What does that mean? Using the cliched, but still useful, metaphor of spacetime as a rubber sheet, a heuristic description of general relativity is as follows: mass deforms spacetime, much as a heavy ball would a rubber sheet – the heavier the mass, the deeper the ‘dip'. Other, smaller, objects in the vicinity (assuming they are far less massive and the dips they cause are not appreciable in comparison) are then obligated to modify their paths as they approach this mass. So as to avoid falling into the valley created by the larger object, they steer around it, and in effect, end up tracing an arc. This mechanism explains the planetary orbits, as well as all other phenomena encompassed by Newton's theory of gravitation – and it goes much further.
One key difference between Einstein's theory and Newton's, is that of philosophy. Where Newton viewed gravity as a mysterious force of attraction, wielded at a distance, Einstein revealed it to be a natural consequence of the shape of spacetime. This has ramifications. For instance, with our post-Einstein understanding of gravity, we would conclude that if a massive object were to move, the spacetime deformation it causes would propagate as well. In particular, if the mass accelerates, it causes a rhythmic disturbance that ripples outward; which is another way of saying that gravitational waves are predicted by general relativity.
Monday Poem
Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity.
They have observed (gravitational waves) the warping of space-time generated by the
collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth. —BBC, 2/11/16
Gravitational Waves
when I entered your orbit
and you swept into mine
I gave a gravitational wave
which you returned and I received
without the help of lasers
now a billion years have passed
black holes have come and gone
and those waves are rippling
through the universe still
clear and sharp as razors
.
by Jim Culleny
2/12/16
A Man Takes His Cabbage on a Walk (遛白菜漫游记)
by Leanne Ogasawara
Listening to the Ligo scientists playing talk about their role in this forty year idea, I couldn't decide what was more amazing, that they had had detected these waves that so perfectly corresponded to Einstein's magnificent 100 year equations or that the NSF had stayed with the program for such a long time to see it through!
Really, what a project–not just in terms of long-term investment but to have over a thousand scientists working for decades on something that had such a nominal chance of success –or to put a different way, they simply had no idea it was possible until they actually had done it! That is something, isn't it?
On Writing a Coffee Table Book
by Akim Reinhardt
Up until that point, whenever an adult had posed that most rote of questions (What do you want to be when you grow up?), I typically responded “baseball player” or “president of the United States.” The former because I loved playing baseball, even if I wasn't very good at it. The latter because, if you had to make an abstract choice about the far distant future, why not just pick the top thing?
But after assiduously penning that first set of verses into lined loose leaf paper, another idea began to take vague form: Perhaps I could write for a living.
During the next decade-plus, I found various ways to entwine myself with written words. I continued composing lots of poems. I wrote for the 9th grade yearbook. I struggled and failed with short stories. As a freshman in college I took an introductory creative writing class. As a sophomore I began writing about music for the college newspaper. As a junior I took a second writing course. After graduating I did some freelance work for alternative weeklies. Around that time, I began writing songs, and my earlier interest in poems was eventually usurped by the crafting of lyrics. I took another swipe at short stories; they were now a lot better, but highly derivative.
During those years of knock around jobs and cheap rent, I thought very hard about being a writer and put in a fair amount of practice. Could I actually do this?
Compared To The F-up Presidents That Reagan, Clinton And George W. Bush Were, Donald Trump Will Be A Brilliant President
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Bill Clinton exported our manufacturing jobs with NAFTA, and signed the two bills that repealed Glass-Steagall and removed derivatives from all oversight — to bequeath us the crash of 2008 and the Great Recession.
George W. Bush lied America into committing a war crime by invading Iraq and causing the deaths of over 4,000 of our young men, and giving countless more soldiers brain damage, loss of limbs, PTSD, and driving many to suicide, and killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi women and children.
There's no way that Donald Trump can be that bad as our president.
He's not that dumb, for a start.
In fact, he's smarter than the entire GOP (not that this says much).
What people forget is that Trump is basically bullshitting his way to the nomination. After Eric Cantor lost to Dave Brat, who played the immigration card hard and accused Cantor of being in favor of “amnesty,” Trump stuck his finger in the wind and realized he could get somewhere as a presidential candidate if he got hard-assed about immigration.
He was right.