by Kathleen Goodwin

There have been 170 homicides in Baltimore thus far in 2015, putting the city on track for a record-setting year. 43 of these occurred in May in the aftermath of Freddie Gray's death, more than double the average number of homicides recorded in May between 2009-2014 and the most since 1971, when the city had approximately 300,000 more residents. The Baltimore Sun has created a homicide database that lists the age and race of the victims—as well as the date and address where each murder occurred, plotted on an accompanying map. In addition to the sheer volume, it's immediately striking that the 2015 homicides are particularly clustered west of Eutaw Place, including the neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester where Freddie Gray grew up. Homicide locations are sprinkled across the eastern and western sections of the city, while there are glaring blank spaces in a swath extending south from the Johns Hopkins undergraduate campus, through the Inner Harbor tourist area, and extending east to the Hopkins medical campus. As has been often repeated, there are two Baltimores—or rather an educated white Baltimore sandwiched between the predominantly black and poor areas that were being shown in the national media coverage of the rioting this spring. Considering persuasive data that suggests that the neighborhood where you spend your formative years is correlated to your relative success and stability as an adult, Baltimore is a case study in the way segregation of neighborhoods has created a concentrated areas of poverty and violence, manifesting in antagonism with the police and dramatically reduced life expectancy.

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by Madhu Kaza

I sit on a bench and a few doors down he's on his bench. We're on Sullivan Street. It's Thursday, it's July, it's late afternoon, it's early evening, and the heat begins to lift. He's an elderly Italian man. His white hair, white shirt, white shorts, white knee socks, and white sneakers are all slightly dingy. I watch the sky, the buildings of this little street, the people passing on the sidewalk. He watches the people. I'm leaning back against the window of a bakery, my body impassive. I imagine I'm taking pictures of the moments unfolding before me, now, now, and now –Thursday and July. I could just as easily be sitting inside at a window gazing out. Except, the man.

Unlike me he sits alert, eager. He leans forward with one hand resting on a cane, the grey plastic and aluminum kind. He faces left, in my direction, looking out for an oncoming pedestrian, his mouth open in anticipation. He engages each person who approaches with his whole body, turning on his bench until eventually he is facing right. Then he watches the figures from behind as they drift towards Houston Street and disappear. He has the look of someone watching a race horse making the rounds. He leans into the activity of the street.

We look at each other, aware but without any demonstration. I'm watching the street, and I'm watching him, and he's looking at me and though he speaks to the children strolling by and to the UPS man and to the young woman sipping an iced coffee, he doesn't call out to me. I'm uneasy and relieved. If he spoke to me it would bring us into a recognizable relation — the I and the you of conversation, of pleasantries, when in fact we are already in a closer relation, tenuously connected but on the same side of these passing moments. For this portion of my day is now fixed to him, we are in tandem, two foci in an ellipse. It is his presence and his distance that keeps me seated, maintaining my vigil for the day.

When the sky darkens I finally stand up to leave. I consider turning South and walking away from him in order to disappear quietly from the scene. But my curiosity leads me in his direction. I am unsure of what will happen. I don't know if he will speak to me as I pass. But even more mysterious to me, is whether I will say anything to him. And if I do, what will come of it? A brisk exchange or something more?

I walk and he turns toward me and follows my movement as he has done with the others. I glance at him and see a deeply wrinkled round face, dull blue eyes. His mouth is slack, he looks at me. I don't smile. I don't say a word and neither does he. As I pass by I sense that something has been lost and something greater has been preserved as I move on into the unspoken reprieve of the night.

By Namit Arora

The highs and lows of identity politics, and why despising it is no smarter than despising politics itself.

Our identity is a story we tell ourselves everyday. It is a selective story about who we are, what we share with others, why we are different. Each of us, as social beings in a time and place, evolves a personal and social identity that shapes our sense of self, loyalties, and obligations. Our identity includes aspects that are freely chosen, accidental, or thrust upon us by others.

Take an example. A woman may simultaneously identify as Indian, middle-class, feminist, doctor, Dalit, Telugu, lesbian, liberal, badminton player, music lover, traveler, humanist, and Muslim. Her self-identifications may also include being short-tempered, celibate, dark-skinned, ethical vegetarian, and diabetic. No doubt some of these will be more significant to her but all of them (and more) make her who she is. Like all of our identities, hers too is fluid, relational, and contextual. So while she never saw herself as a ‘Brown’ or ‘person of color’ in India, she had to reckon with that identity in America.

Identity politics, on the other hand, is politics that an individual—an identitarian—wages on behalf of a group that usually shares an aspect of one’s identity, say, gender, sexual orientation, race, caste, class, disability, ethnicity, religion, type of work, or national origin. Any group—majority or minority, strong or weak, light or dark-skinned—can pursue identity politics. It can be a dominant group led by cultural insecurities and chauvinism, or a marginalized group led by a shared experience of bigotry and injustice (the focus of this essay). Both German Nazism and the American Civil Rights movement exemplify identity politics based on the racial identity of their constituent groups, as do the white nationalism of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the activism of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. Both Hindutvadis and Dalits are identitarians of religion and caste, respectively. As Eric Hobsbawm noted in his essay Identity Politics and the Left, labor unions, too, have long pursued identity politics based on social class and the identity of being an industrial worker.

Life, and identity politics, can amplify certain aspects of our identity while suppressing others. During the Sri Lankan Civil War, the Tamil Tigers elevated Tamil national identity over that of caste. Gender identity turns secondary in some contexts: Indian women often close ranks with Indian men when White Westerners lecture them on sexual violence in India. Likewise, Dalit women often close ranks with Dalit men when upper-caste women expound on gender violence among them. Especially after September 11, 2001, many European citizens and residents with complex ethno-linguistic roots faced a world hell-bent on seeing them as, above all, ‘Muslims’.

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by Yohan J. John

Probability theory is a relative newcomer in the history of ideas. It was only in the 19th century, two centuries after Isaac Newton ushered in the scientific revolution, that thinkers began to systematize the laws of chance. In just a few generations, the language of probability has seeped into popular discourse — a feat that older branches of mathematics, such as calculus, have not quite managed. We encounter numbers that express probabilities all the time. Here are a few examples:

• “With a 6-sided die, the probability of rolling a 5 is 1 in 6, or around 16.7%. “
• “The chance of rain tomorrow is 60%.”
• “The chance of Bernie Sanders winning the 2016 US Presidential Election is 15%.”

What exactly do these numbers — 16.7%, 60%, 15% — mean? Does the fact that we use the words 'chance' or 'probability' for all three suggest that dice, rainfall, and elections have something in common? And how can we assess the accuracy and usefulness of such numbers?

Mathematicians, scientists and philosophers agree on the basic rules governing probability, but there is still no consensus on what probability is. As it turns out, there are several different interpretations of probability, each rooted in a different way of looking at the world.

Before we get to the interpretations of probability, let us review the basic mathematical rules that any interpretation must conform to. Let's imagine we have a set of possible events: S = {A, B, C,…Z}. The set S is called a possibility space or a reference class. The probability of event 'A' is symbolized by P(A), and its value must be between 0 and 1. A value of 0 means the event cannot occur, and a value of 1 means the event definitely occurs. For the set of possible events, P(S) = 1. This means that some event from the set S will occur, and nothing outside the set can occur. In other words, the probability that something will occur must be 100%. Finally, for any two events 'A' and 'B' that cannot happen simultaneously, the probability that either one or the other will occur is just the sum of the two individual probabilities, so P(A or B) = P(A) + P(B).

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists 6 major interpretations of probability, but for our purposes it makes sense to look at the three that are most common and easily understood. These are

• Classical probability — a way to quantify “balanced ignorance”
• Frequentist probability — a way to quantify observations of a random process
• Subjective probability — a way to quantify subjective degree of belief

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Ataturk

Turkish Embassy, Karachi

16 August, 1957

Mrs. Mariam Jan, “Katrina”

Pindi Point, Murree, West Pakistan

Dear Madam, I have received your letter.

Thank you very much for good wishes

expressed therein. I have pleasure

enclosing herewith a photograph

of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,

as requested. Yours faithfully

for Ambassador of Turkey

Ercument Yavuzalp, First Secretary.

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by Mara Naselli

One evening in early March, my husband and I ventured into the French Quarter in New Orleans. We were merely tourists, exploring that old settlement at the elbow of the Mississippi River, its strange contradictions of high and low, youth and age, Old World and New World—shop windows of silver sets and sequined masks alongside alligator heads and beads. We had walked through Jackson Square in the hush of a thick fog in the early morning. We had seen a subdued bronze plaque noting a slave market, though there is nothing to remind passers by of the men and women dressed in blue suits and calico and made to dance. That evening after nightfall, we turned onto Bourbon Street. Bar after bar, live bands blared classic rock covers. Young men strolled with their oversized hurricane drinks. A wispy silhouette of a woman danced in a window. On one balcony, young women danced topless and slung themselves over the ironwork while a gaggle of men ogled. A certain currency of bodies persists. Bourbon Street assaults the senses, alcohol numbs the effects. After a block of this abuse we turned the corner. Diminutive creole cottages leaned into the street with wooden shutters and prim geraniums. Down the way we noticed a bookshop. The light was on.

The tiny shop smelled of old paper and dust. It was crammed with books stacked on the floor, on the counter, sideways on shelves. After some time, my husband emerged with a 1950 special edition of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. The boards were decorated with a green marble haze and the interior was printed in two-color ink. It had lithographs and an ex libris plate from a certain Bertha Ernestine Bloodworth (who, I later discovered, finished a dissertation on Florida place-names in 1959). I had read the Confessions before and dismissed them. Virginia Woolf’s mother admired De Quincey, but I could not muster any affection for him. He was too damn full of himself, I thought, and reading him felt like tolerating someone who takes too much pleasure in the sound of his own voice. But now this green volume and its mysterious provenance, fine printing, strange angular illustrations—it was too interesting to pass up. To find it after wandering through the kaleidoscopic delirium a couple blocks away seemed providential. The bookseller mistook my enthusiasm. He handed me How to Grow Your Own Opium and offered a deal for the two. I declined the how-to and handed him $12.50. We returned to our foul-smelling hotel, made tea to preoccupy our senses, and I gave Mr. De Quincey a second chance.

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by Mara Jebsen

“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”

—James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village”

Two years ago this summer, Miley Cyrus 'twerked' against a backdrop of several bent-over black women, Trayvon Martin’s death created a nightmare vision of hoodies and skittles, and Kanye West marketed Confederate flag t-shirts. A horror movie called “Purge” 'treated' American audiences to a dystopic image of a future in which the white residents of gated communities sadistically torment a homeless black man as part of a sanctioned new order. It was a strange time in the history of American violence and cool, one that we are currently living out, and trying to make sense of.

Ten years before what I call in my head “The Summer of Bad Moves,” Rick Moody published “Against Cool,” an essay which attempts the impossible: to trace the history of coolness in this country. The essay knows it can't do that, but wants to, nonetheless, because:

“. . .in an absence of clearly delineated American ethics, in a period of cultural relativism, in a political environment in which both American parties have amplified their rhetoric to such a degree that the other side is beneath contempt, in which religion seems no longer able to rationally or effectively deploy its messages except through moral intimidation or force, in which families are no longer the ethical bulwarks they felt themselves to be in the past, in such a millennial instant cool has become the system of ethics in America.”

He is talking about 2003. Cool has changed, clearly, but the cultural climate seems familiar.

Moody's strategy for tracking cool in this essay is odd, but impressive. He moves fluidly between moments in music and casual language, in literature and eventually commerce–roughly dating the beginning of coolness with Miles Davis' “Birth of the Cool”–until he has constructed a sort of narrative in which cool (sometimes the word, sometimes the spirit) gets passed around from jazz musicians to beat poets to punks and hippies to Kool-Aid and other products.

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by Carl Pierer

Fig. 1

Braids are fairly simple to picture. A few interleaved strands of string, say, gives a complex and mesmerising object. They are aesthetically appealing, as their widespread use as ornament testifies. While most will be familiar with the standard braid used for braiding hair, there is basically no limit to complexity and beauty. Yet, braids are more than merely nice, artistic adornments for clothes and jewellery. The more and deeper you delve into braids and their complex interconnections, the more fascinating they become. Trying to look at them with a mathematical eye opens up pathways and connections to many deep and beautiful fields of pure mathematics.

Studied as mathematical objects, braids need to be defined rigorously. However, for present purposes it is enough to specify what we intuitively have in mind when thinking about braids. (Fig. 1) may well serve as an example. A braid consists of a certain number of strands n, say, together with a specification of how and where these strands cross each other. Furthermore, these strands (if they are not crossing) run parallel and we may adopt the convention that they are running from top to bottom. To avoid ambiguity, we require further that there are no two crossings at the same horizontal level. It is clear that for the braid to have any crossings at all, it must have at least two strands. If a braid does not have any crossings, it is called the trivial braid.

Fig. 2

Braids also have a close connection to (mathematical) knots. Mathematical knots are simply everyday knots where the loose ends have been joined together. If you take an overhand (or trefoil) knot (Fig. 2) and join the loose ends, you have a mathematical knot. Imagine an extension cords where one end has been plugged into the other. One important feature is that there is no way of undoing this mathematical knot by pulling or stretching or any other deformation that does not break the connection. If you reconsider our

Fig. 3

initial braid (Fig. 1), imagine that the ends have been joined up as in (Fig. 3). As all loose ends are now joined up, we can consider (Fig. 3) as a mathematical knot. Indeed, every mathematical knot can be expressed as a braid. Unfortunately, this is not a one to one correspondence. So, two different braids may end up as the same

Fig. 4

knot. Or one and the same braid may give you two different knots. One problem is that there is no particular reason to join up ends of the braid as we did in (Fig. 3). If we have an even number of strands, we can equally well join up the endings that are next to each other (as in Fig. 4), which would give a very different beast altogether. Indeed, this is not a knot anymore but a so-called link, because it consists of 4 different components. A knot is a one component link. However, this connection between braids and knots is not the main concern here.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The sun burnishes the walls every day for just over three quarters of an hour out of the fourteen I spend at my shop; the mannequin assumes a buttery glow then, her organza scarf liquefies in the golden light. The CD skips at mi amour every time but this hiccup is also golden and otherworldly. The sun lifts my surroundings, the merchandise, the credit card machine, the shelves, during this portion of time in a grandiose gesture; it’s our secret— the book I’ve been writing for years has a life somewhere and this is a furtive daily reminder. I’d rather not have customers at a moment so personal in a public place; I’m at a shopping mall, selling jewelry and shawls.

I’ve named my business “Moriama”— a variant of “Moraima” (or Mariam), the last empress of Al Andalus; my manuscript is a series of poems set in Al Andalus. No one knows or cares about this but I’m advised by friends to do away with the “World Gem Bazaar” part of the sign— too “middle-eastern” in 2003. The spectrum of emotions in response to the pressure to hide my identity for fear of hostility will permeate the poems describing the atmosphere of the inquisition as my book on Al Andalus progresses. Across from me is a mattress store. As I polish and arrange African garnets and checkerboard-cut citrines, nomad jewelry from Afghanistan and London Blue Topaz pendants, someone rolls and rolls dough next door, breathing in cinnamon powder and sugar I imagine, or mops spill after spill of coffee. We’re connected to each other by repetition, as if we were phrases of the same poem.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

The bell clangs loudly and I shuffle back into class trying to avoid the boys running in at dangerous speeds. I find my desk and sidle into place. I almost bump into Solomon. Solomon never studies, so the teachers always ask him to sit by me. All he does, though, is copy my notes. The afternoon sun sends bright rays into class and I inch away from him to find a cool spot on the tiny bench. The room smells of heat and dust, and I see particles floating. I feel temporarily dizzy.

I often daydream through classes. Things come easily to me, and I both know and doubt this. I am deeply suspicious that this will someday be found out, and exposed as fraud. So I am most always simultaneously attentive, and anxious at school. But daydreams come easily, because school is boring.

Solomon is gazing out of the window in his sleepy manner. Some day, I want to be Solomon, who is so cool, so uncaring, and hardly ever worried about the teachers. Mostly, it just seems to be that the world passes him by, and that he is on some other mission; something dangerous, and adult-like. I often see him hanging out by the school stile with the older boys. They all must know something about him that I don't, because there he looks happy, instead of sullen, and quiet. Solomon is really, really, dark and his white shirt often soiled. My blue pinafore, in contrast, is always immaculately pressed, its pleats like the lines of a ruler. Solomon's knees are scruffier than mine, and mine a little, only because I fell down the colony hillock last week. He never says anything in class, so I am not even sure what his voice sounds like. I imagine it to be deep. I often turn my eyes away when he looks at me. It's easy, because we sit side by side, parallel to each other, like the eyes of a cow. The only time he looks towards me is English class, where I cover my notes with my left arm, even as I can feel his eyes boring into my flesh.

Mrs. D walks in, brisk and monochromatic. She is wearing a beige sari today, and I stare up into her almost double chin. She is so tall and so pale. Her severe light brown hair is capped close to her head, but falls at her nape into a wispy ponytail. Her mouth is set in a straight line, but two front teeth escape and soften the severity. Her name is Roda, or at least, that is how I think it is spelled. I found it by accident, when Mrs.R called out to her in the teachers' room. She is pretty when she smiles. She might smile any moment, and she always smiles at me. The noise drowns as she commands us to settle down and hand in our homework.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

A selection of facts, research and personal impressions.

In February this year, I traveled to the small town of Angangueo in Central Mexico. A 4-hour bus trip from Mexico City, Angangueo is in a rural part of the state of Michoacan, in the mountainous trans-volcanic belt. Here, in a few select high elevation forests with oyamel (fir) and pine trees, millions of monarch butterflies from east of the Rocky Mountains congregate each year, after an astonishingly long journey – over 3500 km – from Canada and the northern reaches of the US.

The monarchs stay in Mexico from November to March. When the sun is shining, the butterflies – which otherwise huddle together in tightly packed and well camouflaged clusters on the branches and bark of oyamel trees – take to the air, like a beehive that has been stirred. If the sun stays up, as it did the day I visited, the monarchs quickly fill the sky and everything around you; you can even hear the faint flutter of their wings. I was in the very thick of things when this photograph was taken [1]. Every speck in the picture below, however faint, is a butterfly.

Monarchs have fascinated me for years now. In Massachusetts, a few months prior to my Mexico visit, I'd seen the odd monarch or two flying unhurriedly, seemingly without a purpose. So languid was their flight – the classic flap, flap and glide – that there was no way to tell that each butterfly, following some mysterious signals – its reproductive system having been put on pause, allowing the organism to focus on the rigors of the coming journey – was leaving for a distant forest in Mexico.

It's worth reiterating this: each butterfly that migrates south starts the journey alone and has never made the journey before. When birds make long journeys, there are often older individuals that guide the young. In the case of monarchs there is no guide. The recent discovery that the thin, seemingly inconsequential antennae of monarchs house circadian clocks that help in orientation only deepens the wonder [ref. and figure]. Traveling by day and over land, a monarch, “with a mass 20% that of a penny” [2], covers thousands of kilometers in a two month period.

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by Charlie Huenemann

How wonderful it would be to be a systematic thinker! One marvels at the Aristotles, the Aquinases, the Descarteses, the Kants, and the Hegels and the Marxes (well, the Karl Marxes anyway), the Freuds – those who know how to approach anything, how to incorporate any material into a systematic empire, those who can see the universe as fulfillments of their own plans. It may sound like I am satirizing them, but I really do admire them: I admire their imagination, their enthusiasm, and their persistence. Chiefly I admire their ability to take their own thought so seriously, since every time I have tried to construct a system, it turns into fits of giggles.

What causes such a mindset? Let us first see if we can discern its preconditions – those elements necessary for the possibility of system-building, as it were. One must first be convinced that reality, or human experience, is coherent – a big assumption, granted, but absolutely required for a system. And the coherence must be intelligible to a finite human mind, and specifically the specific mind of the specific system-builder. One must further believe that the coherent, intelligible world order has a kind of hierarchy that allows for some parts of it to be more basic, more foundational, or more universal than others. For the system builder is not so deluded as to believe that all of the facts can be fit within a single head: only the organizing principles need be grasped and kept forever in one’s mental field of vision.

That the world is a coherent, intelligible hierarchy – this much at least must be believed by any would-be builder of a system. But no one is going to leave it at that! To harbor that belief is to have the ambition to explain the hierarchy, and propound it to oneself and to the world. I’d say the belief and the ambition go hand in hand – but then again, if anyone has ever had the belief without the ambition, we probably would not have heard of them. Oh yes, a final thing: the system has to be new, if we are dealing with a genuine builder, and not a worker bee.

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by Thomas R. Wells

The proponents of gun control in America are losing the argument and will continue to do so. Their complacency, typical of the left, that they are on the right side of history has blinded them to the fact that they have chosen to fight on the wrong ground. They keep harping on about guns killing people. As if guns were like cigarettes, and as if the numbers were big enough to matter.

I. The Public Health Argument Doesn't Work

Guns are indeed an excellent killing technology. They are really very good at transforming an intention to kill into its achievement. However, that doesn't mean that they are a particularly significant cause of death and it is rather ridiculous to imply that removing guns from citizens would change death rates much. America is not 42^nd in the world for life-expectancy because of guns, but because of much more significant effects like the social gradient in health.

Let's go into this a little more.

We hear a lot about the large number of deaths caused by guns in America – now up to 33,000 per year. This seems like a big number. It is nearly as big as the rate of death from car accidents (another area in which America is an international outlier, by the way). But 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides. Most of those deaths would still occur if people didn't have access to guns. Many murders committed with guns would also go ahead without them, albeit with a smaller chance of success.

Mass killings by individual loonies get far more attention than they deserve. It feels like there are a lot of them, and perhaps they are even increasing – 133 between 2000 and 2014. But in a country with 320 million people and poor funding of mental health services there are always going to be murderous loonies making the national news somewhere. These atrocities make for wonderful news stories, full of pathos and inspiring great moral indignation. But they are statistically irrelevant to Americans' public health. They are not an argument for gun control.

The overarching assumption that murders are caused by weak gun control laws is weak. The decline of gun control began in the 1980s, but the murder rate in America has actually fallen by half since then (back to what it was in 1950). The reason is that rates of violence have a lot more to do with social conditions and inequality than with particular technologies. Most of America is nearly as safe as Western Europe, but some areas of concentrated hopelessness have the murder rates of Central America. The real causes of violence are something America is particularly bad at addressing, among rich countries, perhaps because the left in America spends most of its time campaigning for things that have little to do to with social justice.

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