by Tamuira Reid

She calls me in the middle of the night. I call her when I know she won't be home.

“How many floors are in your building?”

“What? Mom, I'm sleeping.”

“Tell me how many floors!”

“I don't know. Five? Six?”

“Okay good. As long as it's not a high rise. You know, they always bomb the big buildings first. You're better off moving to Brooklyn.”

She is round and smooth and old. I'm younger, harder, meaner. She's the clear blue rock you find at the water's edge, the one that has been caressed by time. I'm the piece of glass that cuts your finger, the broken cola bottle that you mistake for something else.

I still don't know what I want to be. I don't know where I want to live. I don't know if I'll ever make it.

She cries when no one is around. Dreams in private. Wishes things were different.

I smoke too many cigarettes. My mother has never had a single puff. I take long, poetic walks along the Hudson River. Her shoes give her blisters. I read books. She buys the audio. We listened to Sarah Palin's memoir on the way to Los Angeles last summer for my cousin's wedding. Hours of torture. My mother likes to be entertained while she drives.

I've had several boyfriends. She is a serial monogamist. I know when it is time to get out. She forgives too easily.

Mom likes Mel Gibson. A lot. “I can't stand him,” I tell her. “He's racist and conservative. His politics suck.”

“But he has such an amazing handlebar moustache. I love handlebar moustaches.”

“He doesn't have one.”

“Does, too.”

“Mom, you're thinking of Tom Selleck. Magnum PI?”

Lots of facts exist only in my mother's world. She is never wrong in her world. She is never late in her world. She is never depressed in her world.

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by Edward Rackley

The occasion to commemorate Tim Hetherington's life and work is now upon us; let it not pass in silence. He died on April 20, 2011 from a Libyan mortar on the streets of Misrata. I didn't know him personally, as did many friends and colleagues, but followed his work from the early 2000s in Liberia through the Oscar-nominated Restrepo in 2010. Even in his earliest published work, a new creative force was clearly behind the lens.

An uncanny talent for capturing the grace of strangers amidst the peril of explosive circumstances, he framed them not as cannon fodder or cardboard victims but as dignified members of a forlorn species. “Often we see scenes of disaster and forget that the people imaged are individuals with individual stories and lives,” Tim explained in this clip on his working process. The moral complexity of his subjects matched my own experiences in crumbling dictatorships and nations rent asunder by grievance and the promises of insurrection. From Liberia to Darfur and Afghanistan, Hetherington's different media projects untapped their own turgid fount of memories sweet and sour.

His early Liberia photos were memorable for their fleeting dignity and searing panic of private moments in battle, serendipitous snaps of civilians and combatants with poignant acumen. Others miraculously wove the social, political and economic threads of a conflict into a single image–a West African Breughel sans folly or satire. Child soldiers lording over diamond diggers sprawled in open mud flats, sifting for riverbed gems to fund campaigns of mass amputation, beheading and rape. Portraits of human industry absent any social or political aim beyond self-serving blood and lucre.

This was early Hetherington: still mystified by the paroxysms of humanity in the throes of war. Not a bad start, but embedding in warzones is not hard to do, after all. Anyone can become cannon fodder, and journalists have been accessing armies and frontlines for over a century.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

In the United States, the political season is almost upon us. Campaigns are gearing up, contrasts are being drawn, and debates are beginning to emerge. This is an important time for those who are interested in the norms of argument and public deliberation. Fallacy-detection is a favorite pastime, and we ourselves are enthusiastic participants. However, there is considerable confusion surrounding one of the most widely-known and commonly-attributed fallacies, the ad hominem (“to the man”).

Fallacies are improper inferences, popular ways of drawing conclusions from premises that in fact offer them no support. In its most common variety, ad hominem fallacy takes the following form:

Premise: Subject S is in some specified way vicious.

Conclusion: We should reject the things S says.

The vices identified in the premise of course vary. Depending on the context, it might be claimed that S is philanderer, a hypocrite, an alcoholic, a drug abuser, a child abuser, a racist, a pervert, a neoliberal, a lowbrow, an egghead, a neocon, a snob, a pinhead, a knownothing, and so on. To be sure, some of these traits may not be actual vices, but the effective deployment of the ad hominem depends only on the speaker's audience believing that the trait attributed in the premise is indeed vicious. The ad hominem's strategy is that of identifying the purported vice ascribed to S in the premise as sufficient grounds for rejecting the things S has said.

The prevalence of the ad hominem in political debate is easy to explain. Given the carefully curated and time-constrained forums in which most public political discourse occurs, it is just easier for disputants to talk about each other than the ideas and policies over which they disagree. Consequently, discussions of politics all too regularly become wranglings over personalities. Yet, despite its understandable prevalence, the garden-variety ad hominem is obviously fallacious.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

In a lineated poem, the line-breaks are used to produce verbal or sonic emphasis, in addition to creating a structure that is arranged such that it is easy to parse and comprehend the poem. When line-length varies, emphasis shifts and dramatic tension or narrative effect is produced. Generally speaking, in a free-verse poem, line-length varies without a set pattern, and the variation depends on where the poet wants emphasis, but in his (free-verse) poem “Greed,” C.K. Williams uses a pattern to arrange the lines. He uses long lines (flush right-margin) that are alternated by short lines constituting five to eight syllables. The lines are enjambed and form remarkably long sentences. Such sentences may ordinarily be in danger of becoming unwieldy or out of control. Williams brings aesthetic order to the poem by using a typographical pattern and a pattern of sonic devices, thereby creating a piece that has narrative clarity as well as narrative impact or dramatic tension.
Typographically, Williams’ style of predictably continuing each long line till flush right margin and indenting each alternate line, establishes a pattern that helps the eye get accustomed to this arrangement and to parse the sentences with ease:

A much-beaten-upon-looking, bedraggled blackbird, not a starling, with
A mangled or tumorous claw,
an extra-evil air, comically malignant, like something from a folktale
meant to frighten you,
gimps his way over the picnic table to a cube of moist white cheese into
which he drives his beak.

There is a suspended syntax in this long sentence, but the words are strung together alliteratively and with the deft use of diction that creates sound patterns forming sonic clusters, making the sentence cohere and aiding comprehension. In the above stanza, “bedraggled black-bird,” “extra-evil” are alliterations. There is a sonic partnership or inter-play in diction such as “starling,” “mangled” and “malignant” or between “gimp” and “picnic” or “cheese” and “beak” or in the phrase” folktale/ meant to frighten you.” These patterns of sonic play establish a harmony which can be said to contribute to clarity in its cohesive effect. The pattern becomes more and more vivid as the poem continues:

Then a glister of licentious leering, a conspiratorial gleam, the cocked
brow of common avarice:
he works his yellow scissors deeper in, daring doubt, a politician with
his finger in the till,
a weapon maker’s finger in the politician, the slobber and the licking
and the champ and the click.

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by Stephen T. Asma

Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he is a founding Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture. In 2003, he was Visiting Professor at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia, and in 2007 he lived and studied in Shanghai China. Asma also researched Asian philosophies in Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Laos. And in 2014, he was a Fulbright Scholar, teaching philosophy in Beijing, China.

Recently my Chinese students in Beijing asked me why the U.S. media was so critical of China –always wagging a finger about human rights (forgetting about U.S. violations like NSA spying, drone bombing, Guantanamo, and so on). “Can't Americans see,” one student asked, “that our Chinese way is different but still successful?”

How successful is the Chinese government? Over the last three decades, the Communist Party has pulled hundreds of millions of people from poverty. It has done this partly through controversial but needful policies like the “one child rule.” Moreover, China's annual GDP growth has averaged 10%. China is the world's leading exporter, and second only to the U.S. in imports. Its unemployment rate is between 4 and 7 %, and its literacy rate is 95%. In short, the Party has been very successful, and is not going away anytime soon.

Ironically, the Chinese people already think of themselves as a democracy. But it is democracy “with Chinese characteristics.” China has seen itself as democratic, minzhu or “people driven,” since the 1911 revolution. Even Mao Zedong characterized the early People's Republic of China as a “new democracy” and a “people's democratic dictatorship.”

Surprising to many westerners, Chinese people do vote for their politicians, but it's a hierarchical electoral system. Local people directly elect the regional chapters of the “People's Congresses.” Then the People's Congresses elect the “National People's Congress” (the national legislator). Finally, the president and the State Council are elected by the National People's Congress. The voting is bottom-up, but nominations of candidates are usually top-down. This is precisely the sticking point for the recent “Occupy Central” movement in downtown Hong Kong. They want to reject the Chinese style of democracy (of top-down nominations) in favor of western style voting (at all levels). Beijing's approach, however, is not the reflection of some Orwellian fascist agenda, but an organic result of deep Chinese cultural commitments.

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Am I my brother’s keeper?
…………… —Genesis 4:9

Not Abel

by Ahmed Humayun

A shepherd tending to well fed sheep on a lush green field, the blades of grass glistening in the sunlight. A bustling marketplace with stalls sparkling with multi-colored fruit and loaves of freshly baked bread. A father looking on affectionately as his young sons frolic in a playground.

These images are culled from the advertising campaign of a highly successful global brand, though likely not the one you have in mind: these are all high quality, high definition images found on pro-ISIS Twitter feeds, advertising life in the self-proclaimed Islamic state. That the brutality of ISIS – the beheadings, mass executions, child soldiering, and enslavement – has galvanized Western media attention is unsurprising but it comprises only one element of its vast propaganda campaign. No other violent extremist organization in the Muslim world has gone to such lengths to define and broadcast a new cultural expression, which amounts to a branded vision of violent extremism as a consumerist lifestyle choice under the ambit of a restored caliphate. Transfixed by the ghoulish atrocities, we overlook the subtle cunning of brand ISIS.

Cultural Innovation and Jack Daniels

According to cultural brand strategy, in mature markets competitors engage in ‘dog eat dog' competition based on incremental feature improvements that yield limited margins. [1] However, social disruptions create crises for incumbents, and present ideological opportunities for innovative niche brands to emerge and capture market share. Effective ideological innovation creates new cultural expressions that repurpose shared cultural content such as myths and cultural codes.

Consider the use of cultural strategy in the case of Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey.[2] By the end of the first half of the 20^th century in the United States, there were dozens of varieties of undistinguished whiskeys, none of them with leading market share. Among them was Jack Daniels. Yet the brand got ahead of its competitors and became a global brand through the deft, deliberate use of cultural strategy.

By the mid-1950s, the U.S. economy had undergone a major transition where traditional occupations of farming and small enterprise had been replaced by white collar professions in massive corporate bureaucracies. Whiskey in the United States is typically entangled with cultural associations of masculinity and class. At this time, virtually all whiskey brands including Jack Daniels touted their customers as successful status seeking, corporate climbing ‘organization men'. Yet by 1965, Jack Daniels had positioned itself as the embodiment of ‘rugged individualism'. It did this, for example, by emphasizing its traditional, pre-industrial methods of making whiskey, and associating the brand with stories from frontier mythology. By jettisoning cultural orthodoxy and advancing an innovative alternative ideology, Jack Daniel's crushed its competition and today ranks among the world's top global brands.

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by Yohan J. John

The DNA molecule is often described as the book of life, as a blueprint for constructing the organism, or as a program for computing the organism. These metaphors have become so pervasive that we often forget that they are metaphors. In this essay I'd like to take this class of metaphor —the life-as-information metaphor — seriously, and investigate what some recent findings in molecular biology look like when mapped onto the world of books, blueprints and programs. I'd like to run with the information metaphor, seeing how far it can take us. I think this will help us understand the limits of the metaphor, but more importantly, it can help us appreciate the richness and complexity of biological processes, and the sheer scale of the ongoing endeavor to understand the science of life. [In part I of this series I looked at the origins of information theory and computer science, and in part II I traced the history of genetics, up to the discovery of the genetic code. This essay continues the themes from those columns, but can be read as a standalone article.]

The discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule in the mid 20th century was the culmination of a quest to understand the nature of heredity that had begun a little over a century before. In the early 19th century, biologists began asking two intertwined questions about organisms: the question of heredity, and the question of development. How did hereditary traits pass from one generation to the next? And what biological, chemical and physical processes were involved in the development of the organism from an embryo? The first question was often described as a question of 'ultimate causes', and was closely linked to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Charles Darwin's theory depended on inheritance, but he could only provide speculative accounts of the physical basis of heredity. Many 19th century cell biologists were more interested in what they saw as the nuts and bots of biology, and preferred to investigate the question of development. They believed that only 'proximal causes' could be tested in a lab, and perhaps even witnessed under a microscope. Evolutionary theory by contrast seemed more like philosophy.

The two sorts of question 19th century biologists were interested in find their counterpart in two broad spheres of genetics research: transmission genetics, which studies how hereditary traits pass from one generation to the next, and developmental genetics, which studies how genes participate in the physical processes by which traits become manifest in cells and in organisms. The concept of the genotype is useful when thinking about transmission genetics: the genotype is the sum total of the genetic makeup of an organism, and in a sense represents all the potential hereditary traits that can become manifest. Nowadays the word 'genome' is used in a closely related way. When thinking about developmental genetics, the concept of the phenotype is central: it is the sum total of an organism's observable traits, which are not just a product of the genetic makeup, but are also influenced by the environment, and by the developmental process itself. Transmission genetics studies how the inheritance, reassembly and mutation of genetic material lead to the formation of a genotype, whereas developmental genetics studies how the potential latent in the genotype is actualized to give rise to the phenotype.

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by Rafiq Kathwari

My friend Irfan and I drove a Gypsy with faulty brakes to Baba's shrine nestled in the Himalayan foothills. “You must go show your respect,” Mother had urged when I told her I was flying to Srinagar. “Say a prayer for your health and wealth.”

Her father, Sultan Bastal, a prosperous cashmere shawl merchant, who made Kashmir home after wheeling, dealing on the Silk Route, had married three times hoping for an heir, but his wives had proved barren. “Or, perhaps, it was him,” Mother said.

And so, Sultan Sahib, invoked his faith in Sufism, went on a haj to Baba's shrine. He wore a white turban, customary in his era; rode shot gun as his tonga-wallah drove their one horse buggy on a dirt road fringed by miles of poplars all the way from Srinagar to Tangmarg,

where the dirt road ended and a foot trail started, a journey in those days, Mother said, of at least three days in late summer when past winter's snow melts. Sultan Sahib and tonga-wallah rested often to give their horse a break from his uphill task. Glacial streams laughed

by the road. Sultan Sahib flung his arms wide in wonder at a view of a virgin valley diffused in light. Clouds flirted naked peaks on the horizon. He trekked a pine-scented forest to the thatched-roof shrine, where he tied a thread to carved wooden roses, and wept as he

prayed for a son, “O, Baba, beloved saint, make me a model of your mercy.” And 90 years later here we were, Irfan and I, parking our rusty jeep in an ersatz bus stop littered with rubbish. Baba Reshi, resting for five centuries under alabaster, preached Divinity lives in the

garden within and in the wasteland without. The first thing I saw was a bunker, an example of many bunkers in the Kashmir valley: bold white capitals on blue tarpaulin:
RESPECT ALL SUSPECT ALL.

A fascist credo packed with sad irony, baring a strategy of the world's most populous democracy —a lie I'm tired of hearing—to subvert teachings of saints who brought Sufism to Kashmir, Kashmir to Sufism. I strolled around the barbed wire, a tote slung over my

shoulder, grinned at a para-military, an Uzi slung over his shoulder, his belly prosperous.
“Namaste,” I said joining my hands. “Where from?” he asked. “Mumbai,” I lied. “And you?” I asked. “Allahabad,” he said. “O,” I said, “Where Ganges and Yamuna merge.” He nodded,

waved me through without rifling my tote, but asked, “Where friend from?” “A local,” I said, realizing at once I had pushed Irfan under the clichéd bus. O, Fuck. “Open
bag,” para-military barked. Irfan did as told. “Who you? Why here? Where going?”

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by Mara Jebsen

I cross the country.

Beneath me
Towns crackle, bullet holes bleeding light.
Yellow, hard, a bright-mustard honey.
There are bees and bees in the skull in the sky.
Amnesia, I think, is the white air inside
an airplane. And fears, I expect, are bizarre
infant-plants that grow without sun
in the very wee hours. To share
these wee hours with suited up-bodies,
— odd, erect, banal—
is a warm thing. I can’t find my worry.
My mother’s ______, my brother’s
______, No. These
Are in the ground, steaming up, up, up.
We go fast, some empty-headed angels.

by Carl Pierer

Introduction

The standard case of epistemic peer disagreement has two people going regularly to a café, where they regularly drink and eat. Sometimes A has to pay more, sometimes B. Often, they disagree about who has to pay how much – sometimes A gets it right, sometimes B. This time, A calculates that she has to pay £14, while B thinks A has to pay £12. Both are equally smart, they have access to the same information and because of the stipulated regularity, neither of them is particularly likely to get it right on this occasion. They are so called epistemic peers on this question. What should A do now, in light of the further information that B disagrees with her sum of £14?

Suggestions for what ought to be done when disagreement arises between epistemic peers (EPs) fall either under conformism (backing off the initial confidence) or non-conformism (remaining unmoved). I am not aware that anybody suggested opportunism (losing confidence altogether and taking the opponent's view). All three positions work with the following definition:

Epistemic Peers: A&B are EPs iff:

(i) A&B are cognitive equals (equally smart, diligent, thorough, etc.)

(ii) A&B have access to the same evidence. Whether or not this just means same amount of evidence or exactly the same evidence is disputed, but irrelevant for the present discussion.

(iii) There is no reason to suppose that one of them is particularly apt to figure out the right response in D.

Call such a disagreement between EPs an epistemic-peer disagreement (EPD).

In this essay I will argue that, without a telos in relation to which we hold and modify our views, opportunism cannot be ruled out. First, I outline the arguments for conformism and suggest these cannot exclude opportunism. Second, I present the non-conformist argument, thereby illustrating that an analogous argument supports opportunism. Third, I suggest that only with an agreed telos for our views can opportunism be rejected.

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by Michael Lopresto

Moral realism is the view that there are moral truths irrespective of what anyone thinks about those truths. In other words, moral truths are mind-independent—a condition that is often taken to characterise any form of realism, be it scientific realism, mathematical realism or even aesthetic realism. So according to the moral realist, the Holocaust still be objectively morally wrong even if we were all brainwashed into believing it was morally right. Equally for scientific realism, if a true scientific theory posited the existence of quarks, quarks would still exist even if we all believed that quarks did not exist. And so on for every other form of realism.

Moral realism is sometimes challenged on scientific grounds, namely that we can't fit value into a scientific world view. I've addressed this concern before, as part of a distinctively philosophical project often described as reconciling the manifest image with the scientific image. However, moral realism has recently come under a new sort of attack on scientific grounds, put most forcefully and ingeniously by Sharon Street. The argument begins from the empirical premise that evolutionary forces have influenced our moral beliefs, something that is plainly true, to a sceptical conclusion that our moral beliefs are unjustified. So the argument is essentially that since moral beliefs were not caused by moral facts, we have no reason to think that our moral beliefs could be true.

Firstly, some clarifications are in order. What distinguishes the evolutionary debunker from other anti-realists is that she is not trying to show that there are no moral facts, but rather that there is no moral knowledge. Furthermore, what distinguishes the evolutionary debunker is that her premises are empirical, and that such empirical premises entail that our moral beliefs have a highly suspect origin. So this is an epistemological argument for moral scepticism. However, this may also be taken as a reductio of moral realism, since moral realism would be rather useless indeed if no moral facts could ever be known.

So let's examine the premise that the origins of a belief could undermine its justification. In good cases of belief formation, our beliefs are often caused by the things that they are about. For example, I currently believe that there are about three dozen books in front of me. This belief is caused by my perception of the books themselves, and as far as I know, my perceptual faculties are working pretty well. But consider a case where I take a hallucinogenic drug and start hallucinating books in front of me without even knowing it. I would have the exact same belief, that there about three dozen books in front of me, but rather than being caused by the books themselves, the belief is caused by the drug. Therefore, the belief is not justified because it's not caused in the right way, even if the belief is true just by chance.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Anthropologists are supposed to be masters of the art of the rooting and uprooting. I learned very early on in my graduate school career the art of attaching, but never too much. Never owning a place, always on the move, and becoming excellent at thrift store shopping for furniture were some of the skills I carried with me into adulthood. These things I only realized recently when I experienced intense panic as I stood in my adult living room looking around at all the “good” furniture I owned, things that were too solid to find takers on Craigslist.

Nevertheless, some of my most striking memories of “im”permanence are of the housed I inhabited, especially during the time I conducted fieldwork in the city of Pune. Over the course of a year and a half, I moved three times across four houses. For the first three months, I was a paying guest at the house of a friend. She had a beautiful home on the outskirts of the city. While the location was hardly convenient, the pleasure of her company and the promise of good food kept me rooted to the place. I had a lovely first floor room with its own bathroom, a bed, and a carved wooden desk. Her two dogs were an added joy. She had glass baubles in the windows, classical music wafting out of her room in the mornings, and a kitchen stuffed with interesting chutneys and condiments. Eclectic crystal and glassware dotted the cupboard in her dining room, and we spent many evenings conjuring cocktails and sipping wine.

The house was my respite from the frustrations of fieldwork, and its objects were sources of contemplation when the city offered none. Even the light filtering through its corner windows seemed imbued with its own enchantments and possibilities. It smelled of a delightful comfort.

It was, of course, too good to last.

After three months, I commenced nighttime work at a place far away from her home and it was time for me to find a new place. She came to my rescue however, and suggested that I meet her sister who lived in another part of the city and had a studio apartment to rent. The catch was that I would have to fend for myself for two months before the current tenants were ready to leave.

The two houses I inhabited for the two months that I was ungrounded were remarkable in the ways that they evoked emotions that can only be said to be in opposite quadrants of the affective pantheon.

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