by Michael Liss

We got our butts kicked, and kicked very hard. Adlai Stevenson, ruminating about the results of the 1952 Election, recalled Abraham Lincoln's reaction to an electoral loss: We are like the boy who stubbed his toe—it hurts too much to laugh, and we are too old to cry.

It's a few days later, and the damaged digit still aches, so let's take off the shoe and get a closer look. Nasty—swollen with punctured pride and inflated expectation. And, is that yellowish stuff pus?

There is no delicate way to describe why and how this wrenching event occurred. Nor is there any comfort in speculating just what our new leaders in Washington have planned for us. But we need to. If we don't dive in, take our medicine, and prepare for the future history will repeat itself.

We can begin the post mortem with the Clinton campaign's primary complaints: unfair coverage by the mainstream media, and James Comey's intercession. To that, I am going to add the dedicated Trump team at WikiLeaks.

Ah, the press, you can't live with them, you can't live without them. They loved Trump—even though he threatened and mistreated them, he was great copy, he made news constantly, which drew eyeballs and advertiser dollars. To balance out their reporting of Trump's excesses (all Trump had was excesses) they felt compelled to add an equal dollop of negative Hillary stories. To the Clinton's campaign's collective way of thinking, this constantly created a false equivalence of two sinners. Fair? Kind of. I give it 5 out of a possible 10 on the biased scale.

Comey? Very difficult to evaluate. I don't want to impugn his motives and I think he was genuinely conflicted. What we don't know is how many votes he moved because we don't have hard, reliable data. Even with that qualifier, we can't discount the impact of Comey's choices and the possibility that his decisions changed both the Presidential and down-ballot races. I think he is an honorable man—and, because he's an honorable man, he probably is losing sleep over this—and should. 8 out of 10, with the potential for an upward revision.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness. —Italo Calvino

Just a short walk down the portico-covered arcades of Via Roma leads to one of the most elegant Baroque squares in Turin– if not, in all the world…

We were in town to see a particular picture; for Turin is home to a precious painting of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata. Attributed to van Eyck, the picture has an exact –but much larger size– copy in Philadelphia; and art historians have gone back and forth over the years about which one is the copy of which. Both paintings were believed to have been part of the 1471 inventory of the will of none other than Anselm Adornes, the fabulously wealthy Bruges merchant (who happens to be a great obsession of mine).

It seems strange to have two identical paintings created, when the cost was so high to buy a van Eyck, but it turns out that back in the 15th century, the super wealthy sometimes had different sizes of a painting created so they would be able to bring the smaller version with them when they traveled or perhaps give one to a daughter on her wedding day. Why not, right? It is possible the smaller version of the van Eyck, held in the Sabauda Gallery in Turin, was created for just this purpose.

The painting does not disappoint and it was well worth the trip–but to say we got distracted along the way would only be an understatement.

For me, it started sitting in a cafe in the Piazza San Carlo. The piazza is, as I suggested above, possibly the most beautiful square in the world. Being the capital of the House of Savoy, the city is in many ways more French-feeling than Italian. With its standardized building facades made of huge pieces of cut stone adorned with tall windows and wrought iron balconies, the city evokes a more Northern, noble atmosphere. Like Paris, it is a city built for kings. But rather than in the grand boulevards one finds in Paris, in Turin, it is the piazza where the Baroque architecture dazzles.

And no where dazzles more than the Piazza San Carlo.

Read more »

by Evan Edwards

Sometime in November 1944, the U.K. based Vegetarian Society splintered slightly when several members—calling themselves “Vegans”—came to believe that simply abstaining from eating animal flesh did not go far enough in alleviating the suffering of animals. Vegans, if you don’t already know, argue that if one of the pillars of the vegetarian ethos is to not contribute to the death and suffering of animals, then to continue to take milk from nursing cows, wear leather stripped from their bodies, to subject hens to miserable living conditions for eggs, and so on, is in fact not to live up to stated ideals.

Never before in the long and complex history of vegetarianism had such a distinction been made. For thousands of years, philosophers and religious figures had made ethical and health-based arguments for not making one’s body “a tomb”—as Leonardo da Vinci reportedly put it—but the exact meaning and limits of this abstention were never quite defined. Some, thinking that fish were not really ‘animals’—in many romance languages, seafood translates most literally as “fruits of the sea”—allowed for their consumption, others like Pythagoras included legumes in the list of forbidden fare for reasons unknown. But due to reason or circumstance, the Vegan Society believed that this ambiguity about what constitutes suffering and cruelty was ripe for clarification.

Perhaps, on a grand historical level, the shift from subsistence farming to mass industrial schemes that accompanied the modern era had brought the evil of these forms of animal exploitation into focus. Perhaps it was due to a heightened awareness of the unfathomable depths to which suffering could sink, brought about by these individuals’ own subjection to a war that had been raging for nearly five years in their home country, a war that had brought the London Blitz, the bombing of Dresden, a total war that summoned as from hell itself the factory-like conditions of the Nazi work-camps, which had delivered more carnage than any war in history, and which had yet to show its greatest instrument of cruelty, the atomic bomb. Perhaps it was just coincidence or fate, because in 1994, to commemorate the break, the Vegan Society declared November “World Vegan Month,” ironically during the very time when over 50 million Turkeys are getting their last plump-up before their national slaughter in America.

Read more »

by Matt McKenna

A population of complacent optimists unexpectedly find themselves at the mercy of a ghastly ogre: Is this the story of the Democrats in 2016 or the plot of DreamWorks’ new animated film, Trolls? As liberal American adults come to grips with how their country could elect the relatively progressive Barack Obama to the Presidency twice in a row only to immediately elect the much less progressive Donald Trump, children around the world are watching Trolls, a hard hitting metaphor for the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.

The filmmakers deserve credit for coming up with a ninety-minute movie based on nothing more than the license for a brand of goofy dolls that was last culturally relevant back in the 1990s along with other collectibles such as Beanie Babies, Furbies, and Pokemon. To turn the toy line into a movie franchise, the screenwriters gifted the Trolls with a strange backstory: Within their songful, permanently optimistic society, the Trolls’ only problem is that they are hunted by the Bergen, a diseased-looking band of ogres who find happiness only in eating the little Trolls. Every year, in fact, the Bergen enjoy a festival called “Trollstice” in which the normally mopey, grumpy, and unpleasant Bergen feast upon the bodies of the radiant Trolls to attain momentary contentment. Unsurprisingly, the Trolls eventually tire of being eaten, and they escape Bergentown by hiding in a nearby forest. After a brief chase, all the Bergen–save one–give up looking for them, and the Trolls appear to be safe forever.

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Dan Everett. Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

I want to approach Everett’s dark matter indirectly. In 1973 David Hays, who soon became my teacher, published an article entitled, “Language and Interpersonal Relationships” [1]. It begins with a simple one-sentence paragraph: “How does language engender love?”

That’s certainly not a question that’s central to linguistics or even peripheral to it. But it was central to Hays’s understanding of language and, if I read him rightly, it’s a question Everett would understand. For both of them see language in the context of social interaction. How natural, you might say, for language is a means of communication, no? Yes, it is. But much of the most important and influential thinking about language over the past six decades, thinking catalyzed by the work of Noam Chomsky, sees language primarily as a tool of thought and only secondarily as a tool of communication. How peculiar, you say, how very peculiar.

Exactly.

Hays went on to discuss communication, reporting that Harold Garfinkel once had his undergraduate students “write down what the participants in a conversation actually said, then in parallel what they understood the participants to be talking about.” Garfinkel concluded that much was unsaid. Much of what’s unsaid belongs to the mind’s dark matter. Some of it could be said if the conversation required it, but much of it could not.

Consider a wellknown thought experiment, something of a parable if you will, by Herbert Simon [2]. He asks us to imagine an ant walking on the beach. Its path is complex, irregular, and difficult to describe. Does that mean the ant had complex intentions and capabilities? No, the ant’s intentions and capabilities were simple, but it pursued them in a complex world, a beach littered with debris and marked with the cliffs and valleys traced the weather, the water, and by larger creatures. In that world the pursuit of a simple purpose by simple means led the ant to trace a complex path.

Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

When we tell people that we write about logic and politics, we let our interlocutors make the big joke. There is no logic in politics! It's a funny joke, for sure. But it's also tragic. And the tragedy is double-barreled. First, good reasons should be behind decision making. Without good reasoning, policy will likely be an irrational hash. There may be no logic in politics, but there ought to be. Second, the politics referred to in the quip is the politics of our democracy. And in a democracy what's true of the politics is often true of the participants. This includes not only the candidates, politicians, lobbyists, and media personalities, but the citizens as well. And it's hard to deny that we, the democratic citizens, are not users of logic when it comes to politics. The joke's on us.

As the current election cycle grinds to its finish, we easily see the toll it has taken on us. As a democratic nation, we are fatigued. We are so exhausted by our politics that it has become a common theme on the news channels and the late night comedy shows. Keeping up with the latest scandal, press release, spin, poll, and decision from governmental investigative institutions has worn us down. Moreover, the months of daily demands for outrage, disgust, and indignation have left the nation drained. Were such a thing conceptually possible, a clever politician would mandate a moratorium on politics beginning on November 9.

There is good news and bad news about our weariness. The bad news is that many of the items that have consumed the citizenry's attention of late have sapped us in a way that has diluted our trust in democracy itself. It is a common observation among democracy's enthusiasts that democracy is, even at its best, hard to love. But it really shouldn't be this easy to despise. The country has spent months feeding on a forced diet of doomsday politics, with each candidate and nearly every political officeholder given an abundance of reasons for thinking that November 8, 2016 marks the beginning of the End Times for democracy. When this message is accompanied by an “unless” clause that conveniently identifies the speaker, his Party, of his favored candidate as the country's only savior, the nausea is only exacerbated. The full-tilt political season, now arguably in its fourteenth consecutive month, has been not only something difficult to endure. It has provided good reason to wonder whether self-government is worth all the psychological trauma.

The good news comes on a few fronts, but is in no case untarnished. The first is that things are almost over. The country votes tomorrow. That brings an end to the phone calls and the advertisements and all of the unbelievably hostile discussions on television news channels.

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

One point six miles from the Pacific, the house with the terra cotta fountain and the carob tree, on Crescent Point Road.

You all came home in rear-facing car seats, swaddled in blankets and matching caps, different colors, different years, but from the same hospital, about ten miles away from here. Each of you was less than a week old at circumcision; Babay looked away at that unbearable moment when you were clamped down for the operation while I learned to cradle your head with one hand and dip your pacifier in sugar water with the other; if you rejected the pacifier, I dipped my finger in sugar water and let you suck on it—all the while speaking to you and praying the Qul in your ear. In those few minutes of excruciating pain for us all, I discovered the emboldening surge of what they call the maternal instinct; I discovered my power to protect and soothe, my voice and touch suddenly transformed by some visceral spell—an empowerment like no other.

Since then, I’ve learned that “rahm” or “womb” is the root of “ArRahmaan,” the most exalted of the ninety-nine names of God; Divine compassion is exemplified in the mother’s instinct to protect and nurture. All the years I’ve been raising you, I’ve trusted this love to guide me. I’ve taught you Islamic values, I’ve taught you American values. I’ve taught you that, contrary to the dominant picture, these values are aligned with each other: respect for divergent beliefs, a strong work ethic, a sense of egalitarianism and justice, cultivating independent thought while engaging in meaningful dialogue, stewardship of the planet, are part of both the Islamic and the American ethos. The world you have grown up in has been savage in acute ways, ways that history will eventually dissect and explain, but you, young Muslims, may arguably be the primary target of the war-terrorism binary which has resulted in a chilling polarization. Against this rising and brutal divide, I’ve taught you that your Muslim-American identity is inherently harmonious and that you must develop an immunity to the poisons of ignorance, politically motivated prejudice and manufactured fear of the other. And that there is no better anti-poison than reading; read widely, read deeply— remember the first Quranic word: “Iqra!” or “Read!”

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

On November 8th everyone will be counting. Counting can be hard. Especially in messy real world situations like elections. But in pure mathematics we get to decide the questions in which we are interested. We can choose to count countable things. The secret to math is the art of asking “good” questions. A good question is one in which you can make progress and learn something you didn't know before.

Like Goldilocks, a mathematician looks for questions which are neither too easy nor too hard. An easy problem is boring, unenlightening, and not much fun — a 2x2x2 Rubik's cube of mathematics. But, like a 7x7x7 cube, a too difficult problem is also boring, unenlightening, and not much fun. The secret is to land somewhere in the middle.

If we want to count, we should start by picking something easy to count, but with the promise of mystery. When I was in elementary school we spent hours and hours playing Dots and Boxes. This is the game in which you draw a grid of dots on a sheet of paper. The players take turns drawing horizontal and vertical line segments between dots trying to enclose boxes while blocking your friend from doing the same. The person with the most boxes at the end, wins. You can play it against a computer here.

If I had played less Dots and Boxes and paid more attention in my math classes, I would have learned that our initial dots were nothing but lattice points. These are the points in the xy-plane where both coordinates are an integer. So (1,3), (0,-6), and (2,127) are lattice points, but (1, 3/2) and (1.6, π) are not. Lattice points are easy to count in any geometric shape we may draw. For example, here is a 3×3 square with lattice points for corners:

Counting we see there are 12 lattice points on the sides of the square and 4 in the interior. Stuck in a boring math class for long enough, we might even notice that the area of the square, 9, is also what we get from 12/2 + 4 – 1. And that a 1×1 square has area 4/2 + 0 – 1 and that 2×2 square has area 8/2 + 1 – 1. In fact, it seems like for any square we draw if it has S lattice points on the sides and M lattice points on the interior, then the area always works out to exactly equal S/2 + M – 1. A strange coincidence, indeed! This is when our mathematical sense starts tingling. Coincidences are rare in math.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“On the way from mythology to logistics…
machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.”
~ Adorno & Horkheimer

A few years ago I heard the Seattle Symphony play Carnegie Hall here in New York. There were three pieces on the program. The first two – Claude Debussy's La Mer and John Luther Adams's Become Ocean – are clearly of a type. They share the subject matter of the sea and its sonic representation. More importantly, Become Ocean is a clear stylistic descendant of Debussy's seminal, impressionistic work. Written a hundred years apart, both pieces nevertheless explore shimmering textures and slowly shifting planes of sound. The emphasis is not on seafaring – a human activity – but rather on the elemental qualities of the ocean. So far, so good.

The third selection, however, was Edgar Varèse's Déserts. As the title implies, Déserts is possessed of its own vastness, but this is an expanse that is jagged and abrasive. Written in the early 1950s, that is at about half-way between La Mer and Become Ocean, its exploration of timbre is arid and dissonant, and is an early example of a score that calls for interweaving the ensemble's playing with pre-recorded electronic music. Some listeners may be reminded of avant-garde movie music where the scene calls for danger and uncertainty; one YouTube commentator wrote that “parts of this remind me of the music on Star Trek, when Kirk is facing some Alien on a barren world, kind of thing”.

Varèse has always been a favorite of mine when it comes to the canon of twentieth-century “new” music. Prickly and uncompromising, he was a passionate and broad-ranging thinker. After meeting him for a possible collaboration, Henry Miller mused that “Some men, and Varèse is one of them, are like dynamite.” Indeed, Varèse envisioned Déserts to be accompanied by a film montage – what we would casually characterize today as a multimedia experience. While the pitch to Walt Disney never went anywhere, the music is still with us today. But be that as it may, what is Déserts doing, sharing the stage with the marine masterpieces of Debussy and Adams?

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

Political jokes were no laughing matter for the East German state security service., The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS, more commonly known as the “Stasi“) viewed humorous quips about the political leadership as a form of political resistance during the Cold War years. The culture of repression enforced by the Stasi in the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the official name of East Germany) outlawed anti-government propaganda and sedition, and these anti-sedition laws enabled the Stasi to arrest citizens who shared political jokes.

Just a few months after the Berlin Wall was constructed, the Stasi arrested a 32-year old building painter at his workplace in the town of Sassnitz, hand-cuffed him and drove him to an undisclosed location. The Stasi agents provided no explanation for his arrest until late at night when he was lay down on a plank bed in a prison cell, trying to make sense of what crime he had committed. Exhausted and befuddled, he was just about to fall asleep when Stasi prison guards dragged him out of his cell into an interrogation room and informed him that he had been arrested for sedition. A Stasi interrogator wanted to know exactly what his opinions were about the party leadership, the relationship between the DDR and the Soviet Union and which Western radio channels he listened to. The painter provided all the details in a reasonably honest manner, without hiding his critical views.

The interrogator then asked him to write down every political joke he had ever heard or shared. He knew of nine jokes that he had told and wrote them all out for the Stasi. Here is one of the nine jokes:

Three DDR citizens are sitting in a prison cell and talking about why they have been arrested. The first says, “My watch always went ahead, and I would arrive too early to work so they said I was spying.” The second says, “My watch was always behind, I always came too late so they said I was engaged in sabotage. The third said, “My watch always worked perfectly, I always arrived on time, so they said my watch must have come from the West.”

After spending several months in Stasi custody where he underwent repeated interrogations, he was sentenced to three years in prison for engaging in anti-government propaganda and sedition by a penal court. The summary report by his Stasi interrogators was a central piece of evidence in the mock trial and it specifically listed the political jokes as well as the names of fellow citizens who heard him tell the jokes.

Read more »

by Yohan J. John

I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything. He doesn’t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy.

—Alan Watts

Some years ago I had my third eye opened. I was spending the summer in Bangalore, doing an undergraduate physics project at the National Aerospace Laboratories. I was staying with my sister's friend, and his landlady insisted that I participate in something called the “Kyudo ceremony”. My friends warned me that she was a bit of a kook — her house was filled with nude self-portraits in garish colors and flattering proportions — but out of sheer curiosity I acquiesced. The landlady whisked me away on her scooter to a nondescript house in a residential neighborhood that doubled at a Japanese Buddhist temple of some sort. In the waiting room, one of the assistants (devotees? students? acolytes?) asked me my name, which she carefully wrote on a very thin piece of paper. No explanations were offered. I was then taken to the main prayer hall, i.e., the living room. There was an altar, atop which say a statue of the Buddha, a few packets of biscuits, and a bunch of bananas. The priest who led me through the ceremony was a little old Japanese lady who communicated via a plump and slightly nervous-looking Indian translator. I stood and knelt and mumbled as instructed, occasionally wishing I had a translator for the translator. At one point the piece of paper with my name on it was set aflame —a rather stylish touch, I thought.

Once another inductee was put through the motions, we were given the opportunity to learn what it is we had actually accomplished with that fifteen-minute-long ritual. A middle-aged Indian man emerged from nowhere with an instructional chart. It looked like one of those poorly drawn anatomical diagrams that are endemic to Indian schools. But instead of anatomy, we were confronted with a diagram of… eschatology. The Kyudo ceremony (I have been unable to find any mention of it on the internet) is based upon the belief that when you die, your soul will leave through one of several orifices in your body. Your rebirth (or liberation thence) depends on which hole in the body your soul evacuates from. If I remember correctly, leaving through the mouth means you come back to earth as a fish. If you leave through the nose, you are reborn as a regular land animal. If you leave through the ears, you become a bird. If you leave through the eyes, you become a sky god. This sounds like a sweet deal, but it is apparently only a consolation prize. The real goal is to leave through the third eye, and escape from the whole repetitive cycle of birth and death. But the third eye is blocked: something is needed to clear the way for the soul's egress. Normally it is your conduct — your karma — that determines this sort of thing. And Buddhism usually suggests that certain steps, like the eight-fold path, will help you break the habit of being reborn. But these Kyudo folks believe that their ceremony is a shortcut to transcendence.

Read more »

“(Swifts) feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air.
They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can't really land on
the ground.”— Researcher Susanne Åkesson

Swift

I’ve been airborne since
Augustus layed the footings of the Roman Peace
……—in that alone I flew two hundred years
without alighting once. My forebear’s bodies
so studied the inclinations of drafts
they bequeathed me wings and means
to defy grounded predators (their craft
is stealth and might while mine is
lift and flight)

Angels I’ve known I met
in clouds real as the dust
of parched whirlwinds,
but sweet and wet

free in vapor we rolled and bet
that a universe of soil and stone
may last but that of blood and bone,
ligaments, limbs and breath
will be snapped as short
as the short straw
in the short-sighted lottery
of man
…………………. alone
…………………. bereft

Jim Culleny
10/30/16