by Akim Reinhardt

No, I'm not suicidal. Not that it would matter much if I were. If an adult decides they've had enough and want to call it quits, who are we to say they don't have that "right?" Rights are, after all, little more than make believe: dinner table manners and Christmas gift lists filtered through politics. And if there's only one "right" Santa Clause should honor, it would be the right of a person to cash out at the time of her or his own choosing.

But, barring some painful or debilitating disease or injury in my future, such is not my fate. I have a strong survival instinct. My fight-or-flight works just fine, and while I find life to be meaningless and even ludicrous, I have no interest in offing myself. I'll continue hanging around, not for some hazy, misguided hope that things will get better, but through simple inertia.

Thus, when I say it's perfectly fine if I die now, I am simply acknowledging that I've already lived a very long time, I have no outstanding or important obligations to anyone else, and I've done quite enough.

Should it all end for me today, I'd really have nothing to gripe about. Nor, quite frankly, would my friends and loved ones.

I will soon begin my 50th year. That's as long as anyone needs to live. It's longer, historically, than most people have lived, and I do not think that a particularly a tragic statistic.

Half-a-century gives one the opportunity to experience all that's worth experiencing, particularly nowadays. I've been a child and an adult, relishing my physical prime and now coasting into the early stages of decline. I've filled every family role I wish to fill. I've had more good friends than I'm worth and more kind and willing lovers than I deserve. I've traveled more than would have been imaginable just a hundred years ago. I've pursued a substantial amount of education. I've said everything I need to say and a fair amount of what I'd like to say.

It's not that there's nothing left to do. There's plenty, of course. There's always more one can do and see and experience and feel. But at some point it becomes fair to say that a person, should they reach their expiration date, was not cheated of the opportunity to do and see and experience and feel. Especially a middle class, straight, white, American male of the late 20th and early 21st centuries such as myself. My opportunities have been relatively boundless. Any shortcomings or glaring omissions on my mortal resume are owed to nothing and no one but myself.

However, if I am quick to acknowledge that the world owes me nothing, it is also necessary to ask, what debts do I yet owe?

Drawing up that tally begins with my father.

Read more »

by Humera Afridi

On a frigid winter afternoon in February, in a western suburb of Paris, I stood outside the 17^th century home of the last female survivor of the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine British organization, also known as Churchill's Secret Army, or the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. During World War II, the SOE plotted dazzling acts of sabotage against Hitler's war effort through espionage and propaganda. Their guerrilla campaign was critical to the outcome of the war.

Having rung the bell, I waited in a bemused trance for the 91-year old veteran, incredulous that I would meet her. In the quiet of the countryside, I discerned the faint sound of yapping dogs from beyond the high stone wall. A month earlier, an envelope with her name had slipped out of a folder amid the papers of a Dutch relative of Noor Inayat Khan, an undercover radio operator
recruited by the SOE to serve in the Resistance. A tremor went through me as I examined the handwritten chit from twenty years earlier describing the terrible torture that Noor had endured at the hands of the Gestapo at the Dachau concentration camp before she was executed along with three other SOE women on September 13, 1944.

The note was addressed to a mureed, or spiritual disciple, of the Sufi Order International— the Sufi mystical organization founded by Noor's father Hazrat Inayat Khan in Europe—who had, in turn, shared it with Noor's cousin at The Hague, whom I was visiting. I assumed that the author of this note was dead like everyone else I wished to meet who had known Noor. Days after my return to New York, as I was sitting at my dining table my eyes grazed the spine of a book, The Secret Ministry of Ag and Fish, authored by none other than Noreen Riols.

A witty memoir of her time working as a decoy in the SOE under Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, head of F (for French) section, to which Noor had belonged, the book's discovery felt nothing less than divine intervention. Riols had also worked at Beaulieu, the famous training school for secret agents that Noor attended. I was flummoxed. For the life of me, I couldn't trace how the book had arrived on my bookshelf. I scrambled to contact her publisher, relieved to discover Noreen Riols was very much alive, this woman whose first name is phonetically similar to Noor's in an uncanny assonance that seemed to further intertwine their SOE destinies.

Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

I see him here every night around dusk. Which must mean I’m here every night around dusk. I’m sure I have shit to do upstairs – clean, pay bills, cry – but it’s a hell of a lot less depressing outside. I don’t want to be alone.

We’ve never talked or touched but we have a relationship. A stoop relationship. He sits across the street on his. I sit here on mine. Occasionally we make eye contact and then quickly look away. Other times we’ll hold it for a second, half-smiling. The unspoken bond between two left-behind people.

Tonight is different though. Tonight I have balls and decide to do something I’ve never done before: cross the street and talk to the guy. Out loud, not subliminally.

He sees me coming and at first I think he’s going to pick-up his beer and run inside, but he doesn’t. His eyes are soft and brown and he’s prettier close up like this.

Hi. I’m Tamuira. I live over there. I point to my building.

I’m Mike. I live here. He points behind him.

Uh, got an extra cigarette?

Sure. He gives me the last one from his pack and tries to light it for me, but his hands are shaking and he drops the matches. I pick them up, and sit down next to him.

I quit smoking, I tell him, giving him back his cigarette. Just didn’t know how to start a conversation like a normal person.

He laughs and stares up at the darkening sky. A moving van speeds by in front of us. Some kids chase it, throw rocks at it. A woman sells flavored ice from a cart, calling out the flavors in Spanish. We talk about the weather for a while – muggy, crappy, unbearable – and he eventually leaves with a quick goodbye.

I sit there for a while before going home, ignoring the magnetic pull of my life waiting for me.

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Also known as Tottle and Stutter. But the real name was Tudor and Stuart: The Tudor and Stuart Club.

The Tudor and Stuart Club was a literary society at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – yes, they insist upon that “the” before “Johns” – and I was the club secretary for several years back in the late 1960s and 1970s. I don’t know just how that honor came to me. But I’d taken many literature courses as an undergraduate, half of them or so with (the now legendary) Richard Macksey and the others with members of the English Department: Earl Wasserman, Donald Howard, D. C. Allen, and J. Hillis Miller. They must have decided that I had a future as a literary critic and so deserved this honor, though, naturally, it came trailing a few pedestrian duties. I was pleased. I’m pretty sure it was Dick Macksey who told me.

T&S was established athwart the boundary between those pesky Two Cultures academic reformers are wont to natter on about [1]. The club room was located on the Arts and Sciences campus (where I was), but the Medical School (across town in East Baltimore) had an equal partnership in the club’s affairs. Sir William Osler, FRS, FRCP [2], one of the four founders of The Johns Hopkins Hospital – yes, you read right, “Sir” in the New World no less – endowed the club in 1918 as a memorial to his son, Edward Revere Osler, who was killed in World War I. Osler was a legendary character, the Father of Modern Medicine, but also a bibliophile and historian. Part of his son’s book collection went to the club, along with some of his fishing tackle – at least I think it was his Revere’s. But it might have been Sir William’s. I don’t rightly recall what I was told at the back then. Anyhow, I assure you, there was fishing tackle in the club’s oak-paneled room in Gilman Hall and it had a distinguished provenance. Had to, it belonged to T&S!

The Tudor and Stuart Club Room, c. 1929

Meetings were organized around an academic presentation, which was followed by cold cuts, tobacco, beer, conversation and, on a good evening, conviviality. As Sir William had been a physician, not a literary scholar or critic, the Medical School contingent and the Arts and Sciences contingent alternated in picking topics and choosing speakers for the monthly meetings.

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Deema Shehabi & Kazim Ali

As a Pakistani writer who grew up during the Soviet war in bordering Afghanistan, and one who has never known a time when Muslim-populated cities across the globe were not under attack, I insist on defining my “Muslim-ness” outside the gallery of war, turning away from the qibla of Empire that would have me forever circumambulate its own game, its own naming. I have found much to celebrate in my Muslim identity, especially since researching my first book Baker of Tarifa which is based on the history of the “convivencia” in al-Andalus or Muslim Spain (711-1492) and traces the near-millennium of Muslim influence on European civilization in fields as varied and modern as architecture, fashion and the book arts, navigation technology and surgery; Muslims served as a bridge not only in establishing legendary interfaith bonds in Iberia but also served as a bridge between Greek learning and Latinate cultures via translations in Arabic— the lingua Franca of educated Europe of the time. But the dominant narrative about Muslims in the West, as we know too well, paints a negative picture of Muslims of the past, present and future.

Imagine then, my astonishment and delight, on receiving a note from Professor Charlotte Artese of Agnes Scott College inviting me to present at an event titled “Celebrating Three Muslim-American Writers.” I had never before seen the word “celebrate” in such close proximity to “Muslim-American,” though I’ve never doubted that we are worthy of celebration. These poetry/panel events at Agnes Scott were remarkable in every way but the conversations they spurred among the presenters were truly extraordinary. Professor Waqas Khwaja, himself a poet, led an excellent panel discussion, one which elicited such responses from my fellow-panelists, Kazim Ali and Deema Shehabi, that I really wish I had written them down. Both Deema and Kazim brilliantly described the complexity, beauty and challenges of their journey as Muslim writers in America. In an effort to continue our conversation, I asked them further questions.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi: How does poetry figure in the sacredness of everyday life?

Deema Shehabi: Poetry is an act of cognizant observation, of transformative listening and of ebbed consciousness. In quietude a poet can apprehend (even when fleeting) the sense of what’s sacred and what’s otherworldly in a seemingly quotidian scene. Poetry brings us closer to that vacuous space that looks and reflects upon the interior. The poet Mary Oliver, in the poem “White Owl Flies Into And Out of the Field” writes of a “scalding/aortal light—/in which we are washed and washed out of our bones.” Her rendering in language of this metamorphic, sacred light is only possible because of observation and sustained attention to what’s sacred in the everyday.

Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

Perhaps the most important development in cuisine over the last 20 years has been the emergence of what has come to be known as modernist cuisine. Originally referred to as "molecular gastronomy", it is a form of cooking that uses materials and techniques first employed in the food industry to create new dishes and taste sensations. Its proponents now prefer to call it "modernist cuisine" because they view themselves as an avant-garde dedicated to revolutionizing traditional cooking and radically transforming the emotional and sensory dimensions of eating. In traditional cuisine, diners expect what is familiar and the chef delivers. Modernist chefs aim to create novel foods that provoke a reaction, disrupting expectations and forcing diners to revise their conception of what is possible.

As Nathan Mhyrvold, the most prominent theoretician of the movement and author of the cookbook Modernist Cuisine writes:

This movement is the true intellectual heir to Modernism, and for this reason I think it should be called Modernist cuisine. It shares a number of key characteristics with Modernism. A small avant-garde seeks to overthrow the establishment rules. Change and novelty are valued both as a tool for reforming the intellectually bankrupt rules of the past and as a virtue unto themselves. The Modernist kitchen could easily adopt the command made decades earlier by Ezra Pound to "Make It New!" The creative process is informed by theory and deliberate conceptualizing—these chefs explicitly seek to confront diners and have a dialogue with them. Finally, these chefs are distinctly and self-consciously modern in their outlook, taking whatever technology is available to push forward the realm of the possible.

Thus, dishes such as cocktails that look like marshmallows, egg and bacon ice cream, and orange, flower-shaped lollipops that taste like octopus are among the stranger-than-fiction concoctions these techniques make possible. The rap against modernist cuisine is that it's idiosyncrasy for its own sake, dishes that are interesting without being satisfying, pleasing to the chef who can display virtuosity but not necessarily to the diner who is confronted with unfamiliar mash-ups of incongruous flavors. Thus, there are real questions about whether such cooking will secure a sufficiently large audience to make it viable.

Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

Apples… colorful foliage…Halloween….pumpkin spice latte…There are a lot of things we love about fall, but setting our clocks back is not one of them. Every year in early November, 300 million of us, in every state except Hawaii and Arizona, "fall back" an hour from daylight saving time (DST) to standard time. I have yet to meet one of those millions who like it. It's about time we stopped this awful tradition and stayed on DST forever.

Doing away with seasonal time changes is not likely to happen because it would take an act of Congress–literally. More to the point, everyone thinks its an important sacrifice that we have to make for our country, though most can't say why. Popular belief has it that daylight saving time is necessary to help farmers. That is far from the truth. Farmers were strongly opposed to daylight saving time when it was instituted in 1918, because it led to increased labor costs. That is because farming is done by the sun, although shipping schedules and farm hands followed the clock, so more overtime pay was required. Led by the farming lobby, DST was repealed in 1919 and not reinstituted until 1943, and it has remained on the books every since, though with some minor tweaking.

DST was enacted into law in the US in 1918 because we were at war, and our enemies the Germans were doing it. The Germans introduced DST in 1916 to conserve energy and coal resources during wartime; the rationale was that adding an extra hour of daylight at the end of the work day meant less artifical light would be needed at home before bedtime. Britain and its allies, as well as many neutral European countries, followed suit, as did the US. Today, about 40% of all countries in the world have adopted seasonal clock changes, mostly those in temperate or cooler climates (green, on the map below). Some formerly used DST but stopped, or are on permanent DST (blue), while other countries have never adopted DST, primarily equatorial states (white).

Daylight saving time's primary effect on energy savings is on residential lighting, which consumes 3.5% of electricity in the US. Yet times have changed a great deal, and so have energy usage patterns.

Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

North Korea’s development of atomic fission bombs and ICBMs is very worrying. Unfortunately the analysis of it in the news media is woeful. Some commentators assume that North Korea works like a normal country (like their country); some clearly don’t understand how war works; some believe the regime’s propaganda; some seem unable to think in a straight line at all. Some manage to make all those mistakes at the same time and more. One can only hope that the US, South Korean, and Japanese war ministries have better experts. In the meantime, at least we can throw out the worst nonsense.

Myth 1: This Will Lead to World War III

The exchange of threats between Kim Jong-un’s regime and Trump’s leads some to assume that world war is imminent. It is never explained how. The Cold War was the last time we seriously thought about an exchange of nuclear weapons and it seems that a lot of people who write for newspapers still think in the same patterns, in terms of extraordinary powers of annihilation and hair trigger global alliances.

But this situation is nothing like that.

War is the use of military might to achieve political objectives against the will of another government. Killing lots of people isn’t the point of a war; only a means to an end. North Korea could already do that with its arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. The fact that Kim Jong-un will soon be able to kill lots of Americans in spectacular fiery explosions doesn’t mean he can now beat the USA into submission in a war. In any nuclear exchange, America’s government would be the only one left standing.

It is possible that nuclear weapons might allow Kim Jong-un to achieve certain political objectives against America by their threat rather than their use. For example, getting America to renounce its defence treaties with S. Korea and Japan. Although you may have noticed that countries with nuclear weapons don’t generally have much success in using them to order other countries around. After all, if it worked then America would already have used it on North Korea.

Read more »

by Samir Chopra

The American philosopher Ivan Soll attributed "great sociological and psychological insight" to Hegel’s remarks that "the frustration of the freedom of action results in the search of a type of freedom immune to such frustration," that "where the capacity for abstract thoughts exists, freedom, outwardly thwarted, is sought in thought."[1] The perspicuity of this insight of Hegel—one found in Nietzsche and Freud’s explorations of the depths of human psychology too—is visible in a species of literary and intellectual production intimately associated with physical confinement: prison literature. This genre is populated with many luminaries: Boethius, John Bunyan, Marquis De Sade, Antonio Gramsci, Solzhenitsyn, Bukharin, Elie Wiesel, Henry Thoreau, Jean Genet—among others. These writers found constraint conducive to creativity; the slamming shut of one gate prompted the unlocking of another; confinement produced a search for “substitute gratification”–whether conscious or unconscious–and the channeling of the drive to freedom into the drive for concrete expression of abstract thought. Like Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals these writers argued—by the act of writing their works—that if pathological repression is to be avoided, our drives must be appropriately and masterfully directed toward alternative, creative, expression. The prison writer thus demonstrates the truth of the claim—with which Hannah Arendt and George Orwell’s visions in The Origins of Totalitarianism and 1984 resonate—that the prison officials who place prisoners in solitary confinement convey crucial information to future oppressors: mere imprisonment of the political or moral gadfly is not enough; if confinement is to work as a mode of repression, it must aspire to totality.

The Peculiarities of Prison

The central irony of the prison—as the prisoner quickly discovers—is that it is a zone of legal enforcement and lawlessness. Prisoners confront unblinking, resolute bureaucracy, beholden to its procedures and their utter rigidity, all the while knowing their guards—the corrections officers who can ‘correct’ them at any time—can violate them with impunity. The incarcerated are always aware they are powerless, that their guards can exert all manner of power over them. Prisoners do not just fear other prisoners; they fear the lawless application of the law too. Any formal legal redress available will not diminish the terrifying powerlessness in the face of a guard exerting total and final control over body and mind. The long arm of the law rarely reaches out to accost a prison guard; the prisoner is at the guard’s mercy.

Read more »

by Dave Maier

Nowadays the term “postmodernism” is synonymous with a certain sort of trendy, obscurantist philosophical nihilism, the self-consciously radical negation of solid common sense (“Words have no meanings!” “There is no truth!”). This is a shame, as it seems that one might very well criticize certain aspects of the modern era in an effort to move beyond. Indeed, to the extent that one sees the fundamental presuppositions of the modern era as both questionable (or at least past their sell-by date) and feasibly revisable or replaceable, one’s thought would thereby count as “postmodern” in a purely descriptive sense.

But words do indeed have meanings, and vox populi has spoken in this matter. Still, we are allowed to stretch out a bit if we think it helps. Here, for example, a neutral sense of the term helps make sense of my title. For if “postmodernism” is nonsense, then clearly no one should be postmodern. On the other hand, if it’s simply (potentially) unobjectionable philosophical criticism of modern dualisms, then why shouldn’t we be, science critic or not? A neutral term leaves open the latter possibility (thus necessitating an argument for my title claim) while reminding us that such things can easily go very badly wrong (not to mention hewing more closely to actual contemporary usage).

By “science critics” I mean a broad range of people, from sociologists of science to creationists, as well as the sort who gave “postmodernism” its bad name in the first place. Each is worried in their characteristic way about the dogmatism they perceive in science’s self-conception as the royal road to truth. Science is, they may claim, overly obsessed with objectivity, or with its own characteristic method, or with knowledge for its own sake, or with its epistemological status relative to other kinds of inquiry or other human activities more generally, or the metaphysical status of the laws or entities its theories are concerned with. In reply, critics may emphasize the essentially human (i.e., discursive, embedded, embodied, perspectival, etc.) nature of scientific activity as a corrective.

At this level of generality, any or all of these correctives might be appropriate. We cannot simply rule such judgments out of court from the beginning. Let’s let the critics make their case at least, lest we confirm the verdict of dogmatism right up front.

Read more »

by Michael Liss

What happens when you get a bunch of lawyers together to discuss the possibility of a coup d’état? A Constitutional coup d’état?

Don’t faint. To the obvious disappointment of a journalist who attended, this wasn’t some Trotskyite meeting in a small room with nicotine-stained walls, but a conference at the Fordham University School of Law, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the 25th Amendment “Continuity in the Presidency: Gaps and Solutions. Building on the Legacy of the 25th Amendment.”

Lawyers being lawyers, there was a lot of talking and hypothesizing and arcana, spiced up with some name-dropping of the still and once-famous, and more than a little inside baseball. I can’t do justice to the whole story, but it makes for fascinating hearing: How Birch Bayh, then Indiana’s junior Senator and 99th in Senatorial seniority, managed to keep alive the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments without money or space (they met in a tiny converted bathroom) and apply his extraordinary tact to accomplish something people thought impossible. How the ABA, then a considerably smaller and less influential group still tainted by a prior obsession with Communists in the profession, saw this issue as both the right and strategically important thing to do, and provided support in Washington and critical infrastructure at the state level. And how John Feerick, as a lawyer in his mid-20s (later Dean of Fordham Law School, and a featured speaker at the conference), had an Orson-Welles-makes-Citizen-Kane moment when he managed to have published and distributed a Fordham Law Review article on Presidential Succession—in October 1963—and became an instant authority when national tragedy the very next month made it relevant.

Feerick’s issue was ripe and had been discussed for decades, but JFK’s assassination gave the reform efforts an energy that had previously been lacking. Yet success was also due in no small part to Bayh and Feerick’s insight that the enemy of the good was the perfect. They remained disciplined and focused on the two issues that were critical, filling Vice Presidential vacancies, regardless of their cause, and the voluntary or involuntary (but possibly temporary) replacement of the President due to incapacity. Because these were largely apolitical, freshly and painfully in the public eye, and perceived to be of national importance, the pair were able to convince many in Congress to put aside technical differences and turf disputes to reach consensus.

Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

Factor 1: More than anything else in the world, more than having a happy marriage, more than raising healthy, well adjusted children, more than God, Mom, or Apple Pie, Donald J. Trump wants to be a WINNER.

Trump has always been hell bent on publicly proclaiming himself a winner. And for him, being a winner means not just being successful, but being the best. Better than anyone and everything at whatever he does.

It's not enough to be rich; he has to claim he has more money than he actually does. It's not enough to screw starlets and gold diggers; he has to "anonymously" phone the press so that everyone can know about it. It's not enough to host a long running, highly rated tv show; he has to claim it’s failure to win an emmy damaged the emmys’ credibility. It's not enough to win the presidency; he has to claim he won the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally. It's not enough to take the oath of office in front of the entire world; he has to claim more supporters showed up at his inauguration than for any other president, despite the all the aerial photographs revealing him to be a infantile liar. He can't help himself. He must lie and lie and lie, exaggerating every legitimate success and adamantly denying anything remotely smelling of failure.

No wonder then that of all the many insults that Trump lobs like handfuls rice at a wedding, in his mind the biggest, baddest one he can hurl at someone is calling them a “loser.” Because losing is sad.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

This is a true story.

I first noticed Marco a few years ago when he was playing in a local university orchestra here in town. It was around Easter. My mom happened to be playing as an extra second violinist in the orchestra since they didn't have enough student musicians. And while they were not the Berlin Philharmonic, still the musical director at the college had great style, and I had come to really look forward to seeing the group perform several times a year.

On that particular evening, Marco, as a graduating senior, gave a stunning final solo performance.

The kid definitely had the right stuff.

Coming out on stage, he casually carried his cello like a rock star.

I recall he played the Sonata for Solo Cello by Zoltán Kodály.

I had never heard that piece of music before and was delighted to hear the strains of Hungarian traditional music. I would call it gypsy music, and the technical skills required to play the piece meant that only the most skilled musicians need apply. And Marco did more than play it. He knocked the ball out of the park. I think what really grabbed me about him was the soulful quality of his playing. He nearly broke my heart that night. His playing was that beautiful.

Everything about this kid was unexpected.

First, was his name. He didn't look anything like a Marco, looking more like a Mark. He was good-looking by sheer virtue of his talent and charisma. I remember wondering how he would look without his cello. Stout, with a manicured beard and very light blonde hair, his pale skin was so thin you could see every passing emotion wash over him in flushes of color. My mom told me his face would turn as red as an apple during the frequent rows he had with the artistic director during orchestra rehearsals. It wasn't that his talent was unusual for our town but it was his charisma and the soulful way he played that took him into orbit beyond mere skills. He was out of place somehow. The school too was an unexpected place to find such talent. This was not Julliard but a private liberal arts university, known more for football than music.

Like a lot of young musicians in my mom's town, I knew Marco from his mentoring and volunteer work with the local youth orchestra. He was a dedicated volunteer mentor to the children.

So fast forward to maybe six months ago when a photo of Marco shows up in my newsfeed on Facebook. There he was in what looked like the desert wearing fatigues and holding an assault rifle. He had dark shades on and what looked to my eyes like a white and black keffiyeh tied around his neck. What? Mad Max in Kabul? He had joined the military maybe? What on earth was going on?

And no cello?

Read more »

by Evert Cilliers (original visuals by David Thall)

I want to suggest a new fault line that runs through the American psyche. It's not about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ideology (conservative or liberal, feminist or sexist), geography (north or south, east or west coast) or any of the attitudes about these basic differences.

It's about being cool or uncool.

Are you a cool American like Obama? Or an uncool American like Trump?

You can tell cool and uncool by how people walk.

Obama walks like a sleek panther, while Trump walks like a constipated duck.

Michelle walks like an athlete, while Melania walks like she's got a poker stuck up her back going all the way through her neck.

You can also tell cool and uncool from people's tastes.

When it comes to music, Obama listens to Jay Z and Florence and the Machine, while Trump listens to old-school rock 'n roll.

Obama is the first really cool president we've ever had (JFK was charismatic, but it's hard for a Catholic to be cool; Clinton was very personable, but too bubba to be cool).

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Coal, by Alexander G., April 7, 2012

No, I wasn’t a miner. But the job WAS all about coal. And you know what? I for damn sure know more about the coal business than President Trump.

Let me explain.

I spent the first three or four years of my life in Ellsworth, Pennsylvania, but I don’t remember much, if anything, of that life. It was a “company town”, as they called it. The company was The Bethlehem Steel Corporation. My father worked for the mining division, Bethlehem Mines Corporation.

Ellsworth was a coal town. The steel industry used coal to make coke. Used coke to fuel the blast furnaces that turned iron ore into iron. From iron, steel. From steel, mighty industries. Jobs: the United Steelworkers of America, the United Mine Workers too.

It’s a brutal business, and a dirty one.

When I was four the company moved my father to its headquarters in Johnstown, Pa. You may have heard of it, flood city – three floods, 1889 (the big one, the one that put Johnstown on the map), 1937 (my mother – whose folks came over from Cornwall some time in the 19th century – lived through that one, though she lived in Westmont, a suburb high on a hill), and 1977 (by which time I was gone, so was my family). We settled in Geistown in Richland Township: 315 Cherry Lane. Like Westmont, a suburb. Whereas Westmont was high class, more or less, Geistown was middle class, a mixture of blue and white collar workers.

For a number of years our house was heated with coal. There was a coal bin in the basement, a small room with a hatch opening to the driveway outside. A truck would pull up and dump a load of coal down the hatch. It was up to Dad to shovel the coal into the furnace that heated the boiler that heated the house. I suppose Mom shoveled the coal when dad was away on business, as he often was – visiting coal mines and coal cleaning plants in West Virginia and Kentucky. Sometimes I’d help.

Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. —Peter Ustinov

President Trump is no laughing matter. Paradoxically, he’s become just that, a side-splitting political earthquake triggering a tsunami of jokes and routines that fill the late-night air with barbs so sharp no ordinary ego might survive, the limits of humor now stretched way beyond the nagging of one’s mother-in-law, the Kardashians, the dating game, or the darndest things kids say, all ripe for a laugh or two in the past.

American comedy on TV has hummed along for years at the same apolitical level of mild, affectionate offense, with some notable exceptions like Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory or Chris Rock, who etched their humor with the acid ironies of racism, or Jon Stewart, a retiree from political comedy before his time.

Now we no longer laugh at what we used to laugh at, mainly ourselves and sometimes our culture: Now we roar at a man who borders dangerously on a joke—a man who, significantly, can’t take a joke. The more he can’t take a joke, the more we howl. When he doubles down, we double over.

The moment of truth, a memorable one in our early awareness of outsider Trump, came at the annual White House press dinner in 2011, a must for movers and shakers in Washington and wannabe candidates. When President Obama lobbed a few comic jabs in his direction, followed by Seth Meyers with a few more, the camera zoomed in on Trump. Instead of laughing at the jokes at his expense—something that might have made him just a teensy-weensy bit likeable—Trump sat stone-faced, wounded, angry. This should have been the first warning sign that this dark horse, whose quadrennial run for the White House was itself a running joke, would eke revenge on the man who mocked him, dragging a whole country down into the pathology of his grudges and vindictiveness as he goes about systematically dismantling not only Obama’s legacy but that of our founding fathers. We don’t have to ask ourselves why Trump refused to take part in this year’s White House Press dinner.

Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

When I first encountered the claim that our perception of wine was influenced by the music we listen to while imbibing, I was skeptical. It would seem to have all the hallmarks of a magic trick–barriers to accurate perception due to the vagueness of wines' properties and subject to the power of suggestion. However, the considerable empirical evidence amassed to support the idea has made the thesis impossible to ignore, and I'm persuaded not only by the science but by my own experience that there is something to the idea, although discovering the explanation of how this works remains a challenge.

Winemaker and wine consultant Clark smith started the ball rolling in the mid-1990's testing the relationship between wine and music and carrying out seminars on the subject that continue today. More recently, experimental psychologist Charles Spence and his associates have performed reasonably rigorous empirical tests of the idea (summaries here, here, and here), and there now seems little doubt that there is something going on beyond mere personal association.

The earliest experiments in psychology were testing cross-modal correspondences—the associations we make between features of one sense modality, taste, and the apparently unrelated features of another sense modality, sound. In simple, matching tests, where subjects are encouraged to choose which of two wines, a white and a red, best matches music chosen specifically to "go with" each wine, there has been, consistently over many tests, statistically significant agreement about the best matches. In some cases the agreement was up to 90% of the test subjects. Such evidence, of course, does not tell us what the basis of the matching is. Is there some perceptual similarity between the wines and the music or is the music perceived to be complementing the wine independently of any similarity just as olive oil goes with tomatoes?

There is now a large body of research showing that sweetness and fruit aromas are matched with musical sounds that are high in pitch, notes that are connected smoothly together (legato), as well as consonant harmonies, and instruments such as piano and woodwinds. Sourness tends to match very high-pitched sounds, fast tempos and dissonant harmonies. Aromas of musk, wood, chocolate, and smoke along with bitter tastes match brassy or low pitched sounds. Loud music also seems to be associated with taste intensity.

What explains these perceptual correspondences between sounds and tastes?

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The author as a student at Kinnaird College

I began writing poetry on a campus of red-brick corridors, ancient oaks, belligerent crows, and sharp-witted, lively women who thrived on critical thinking— Kinnaird college, in Lahore, Pakistan. In my earliest writing, I seem to have tested truths, grappled with the abstract, as many young people do, building a dialectic between the sensory, cerebral and emotional, in an attempt to catch the elusive. And then, from my immediate surroundings, came news of an incident that shocked me out of my juvenile navel-gazing: it was the news of a campus staffer’s son committing suicide. Rumor had it that he had been unwilling to join his father’s vocation of managing the college café or “tuck shop” as we called it. To compound the matter, he had found the family’s Christian faith hard to reconcile in a society that unfortunately did not look upon minorities as equals. The young man’s father, “Chaudhry Sahab,” who carried himself as a campus elder and enjoyed well-deserved popularity among the students, may have missed the early signs of his son’s anxieties and aspirations, neglecting to acknowledge that he belonged to the new generation and rightly envisioned a life different from the one into which he was born. The details of the story were never clear to me but my emotions were— I wrote my first “protest poem.” This incident opened my eyes to other forms of social injustice and exploitation, as well as the dehumanizing effects of the war in bordering Afghanistan; I wrote about child labor, refugees, famine, about young women becoming war-widows and children losing their limbs in landmines.

And then I came to America, to study. I continued writing poetry in response to the news, but in this environment, I was the minority. As a young Muslim woman, I was not just any minority, but the one which perhaps bears the burden of a peculiar otherness signified by a foreclosed discussion more than any other minority group in America, one which is expected to be unable to speak for itself, imagined to have emerged from under a mountain of oppression. I found myself in the midst of people who not only knew nothing about Muslim women, but very little about Islam itself. I found myself confronting rigid stereotypes, at a loss to extract language from its Orientalist baggage, to decolonize my identity in an environment of little historical knowledge and a great deal of certitude about it, a culture of discussion and debate, yet a culture that insisted upon promoting, via a mammoth media, a preconceived, inaccurate narrative of who I was and where I came from as a Muslim. Here is when I asked the critical questions: where do I really come from as a Muslim? What is my place as a Muslim in the West?

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

The wise learn from everyone.¹ The freak success (half a million reads) of my recent piece How to slam dunk creationists, and the subsequent discussion, have again set me thinking about how to learn from creationists. It is not enough to say, as Dawkins notoriously said, "[I]f you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." Conversation is a two-way street, I have certainly learnt from creationists' attacks on evolution, and if I am learning from them it is at least possible that they are learning from me.

Types of comment

Comments I have had from creationists fall into three broad groups (and note that contrary to what Dawkins says, some of these are at least partly informed, highly intelligent, and completely rational):

1) Simple misstatements

2) Appeal to the Bible

3) Purportedly scientific arguments, some without merit, while others refer to important issues.

From simple misstatements, not very much can be learnt, except perhaps the source of the misinformation. Remember that if someone quotes wrong information, the burden of proof is not on you but on them. Leave it there, as in this actual exchange:

Creationist: Chimps are not our relatives. The genomic similarity between humans and chimps is only 29.8%.

Me: "The genomic similarity between humans and chimps is only 29.8%"; if so, I have been seriously misinformed. Please give your source for this information.

I am of course being disingenuous. I do not really think that I have been seriously misinformed, and I could have cited the standard literature value of over 98%. But much better to leave the burden of proof where it belongs. Meantime, I have (truthfully) presented myself to bystanders as open to new information, if only the creationist would supply it (he didn't).

What about the Bible?

When it comes to arguments based on Genesis, I have seen two different strategies employed: you can either

a) Denounce the Bible as the ignorant writings of bronze-age goatherds, or

b) Describe the Bible as the written and rewritten work of scribes and scholars, over many generations, doing their best with the knowledge they had at that time about how the world works, and constrained to express their beliefs in language that made sense to them and their contemporaries.

Which do you think is more likely to win new friends, and which, for that matter, is more accurate?

Read more »

by Katrin Trüstedt

Something like a culture war is raging around the "People's Theater" (Volksbühne) in Berlin. In the last act for now, new director Chris Dercon had the police remove a collective of activists from "his" theater who occupied the place during the last week. In the acts leading up to this occupation and its forceful dissolution, the theater's longtime director, Frank Castorf, who had run the place for the last 25 years with a diverse array of dedicated collaborators (directors, playwrights, actors, set designers and craftsmen solely employed by this theater) was ousted by Berlin politicians and replaced with Chris Dercon, the former director of London's Tate Modern. Outcries, protests, and petitions ensued, and almost the complete ensemble of actors and collaborators has left, as they refused working with Dercon and his team. Dercon, it was argued, does not know the Volksbühne and its place in Berlin; and, maybe even more fundamentally, he does not know much about theater in general. Nor do, needless to say, those who made the decision to have him replace Castorf. What had become an iconic radical avant-garde theater where the most interesting and most incalculable productions and ideas grew out of a very particular constellation of people, backgrounds, and techniques, is now set out to become a venue for a flow of guest performances, internationally acclaimed but developed somewhere else and suitable to work as events for the international tourists passing through the city.

This culture war is about many things currently debated in many places of the world – gentrification, the economic exploitation of creative capital, and the contradictions of local and globalized culture. But it is also and decisively about theater as a distinguished art form, and its role as a public institution in a changing world. From the plays of Heiner Müller to René Pollesch's Kill Your Darlings, the Volksbühne has shaped a form of theater that was both more and less than traditional dramatic theater, but exactly in this way has remained theater in the full sense of the word. What happened at Berlin's Volksbühne was theater challenging itself instead of theater being replaced with something else.

Read more »