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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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“(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

by Paul Braterman

A 1929 law* imposes three unelected clergy on each of Scotland's local Education Committees. This was based on practice dating back to the 1870s, with the formation of the Scottish educational system from a merger of church and non-church elements, and to the 1918 incorporation of Catholic schools into the system. The Catholic state schools are clearly denominational, the others officially non-denominational, but all alike fall under the control of the relevant Committees. There are currently moves to free Scotland's Local Authorities from this undemocratic imposition, using Scotland's admirable Public Petition process, and you can help with this (see end of post for more).

Few topics are less exciting than the mechanics of local government. Nor would I expect the world to pay much attention to the details of these mechanics in a small, only partly independent, country of no particular economic or strategic importance. Nonetheless, the case exhibits some interesting general features regarding the legacy of religion in an incompletely secularised Europe, and the realities of effecting change in a diverse and pluralist society.

The petition has attracted international attention, most notably from Michael Zimmerman, as director of the Clergy Letter Project, who in a Huffington Post article has eloquently described the current structure as “bad for science education as well as for religion”. The Clergy Letter Project itself is an impressive assemblage of over 15,000 ordained clergy, from various denominations and creeds, who argue that the correct response of religion to scientific discovery is acceptance and celebration. The image above symbolises this view, by combining the memes of DNA and Divine Creation. Accommodationism, in the best and truest sense of this much misused word.

Michael Zimmerman expresses his reasons for concern as follows:

There are many reasons why a law of this sort is inappropriate and undemocratic, and you can read most of them in the petition, but rather than focusing on those aspects of the situation, I want to address the potential for serious problems associated with science education. As we have seen in far too many instances, some with deeply held fundamentalist beliefs, beliefs that are well out of both the religious and secular mainstream of society, feel compelled to promote their narrow perspective rather than the consensus of the scientific community. These extreme views are almost always at odds with the religious beliefs that are held just as deeply by the vast majority of the religious community.

And events have shown this concern to be well justified.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

With very little international attention, a major terrorism trial is entering its final stage in Munich, Germany. Beate Zschäpe, the only survivor of a right-wing terrorism trio, is facing charges of complicity in ten homicides, two bomb attacks, and 15 armed robberies, as well as membership in a terrorist organization, attempted murder, and arson. The victims are mostly people with a Muslim migration background. If the situation had been reversed with a “Muslim” group assassinating “Germans” for over a decade, then international interest would most likely have trumped the reporting on the recent Paris or Brussels attacks. This attentional asymmetry is in many ways also what the trial is about.

Over the course of more than a decade, the self-declared “National-Socialist Underground” (NSU) managed to go on a killing spree across the country, and, in some troubling sense, they did so on the government's watch. Germany's domestic intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz) was aware of the right wing terror cell before they went underground in 1998 and began their series of assassinations. And yet, for more than a decade, the police who were investigating the individual murder cases never considered the possibility of a right wing background as a motivation for the killings. Instead, in all of the various instances, the police only investigated the assumed criminal backgrounds of the victims as possible leads, presuming hidden ties to some Turkish mafia or criminal masterminds abroad. When people from the Turkish community suspected xenophobic motives, they were labeled as conspiracy theorists, as police documents show. The media went along with these assumptions and reported accordingly, and we all ate it up. The extent not only of right wing terror in Germany, but also of stupefying institutionalized racism in the Verfassungsschutz and the police, major fuck ups in the investigations, and collective blindness slowly came to light since 2011. All of this happened before the recent rise of the new right in Germany and elsewhere that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

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by Elise Hempel

Recently, needing a change from my standard breakfast of yogurt, I decided to make myself a nice omelet with cheddar cheese and tomatoes. Not having made an omelet for many months now, I'm out of practice a bit, but everything was going fine, my omelet cooking nicely in our cast-iron pan – not sticking, not burning, looking restaurant-pretty. I was almost done, almost ready to perform the fold, and then…. And then somehow, suddenly, I had a combination of omelet and scrambled eggs, or what, from here on out, I shall call a “scromelet.”

My partner, Ray, informed me a few months ago that this “linguistic blend of words” (Wikipedia) – not to be confused with a compound, in which both/all of the spliced-together words remain fully intact – is called a “portmanteau” (port-man-toe), a term I'd never heard before. My 2002 American Heritage college dictionary defines “portmanteau” first as “a leather suitcase with two hinged compartments” and goes on to define a “portmanteau word.” And a British website tells me that the word “portmanteau” is itself a portmanteau originating from the French word “portemanteau” which blends “porter” (to carry) and “manteau” (cloak). A further look at Wikipedia also reveals another interesting fact – that the term “was first used in this context by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871).”

Little did I know that I'd been creating portmanteaus for many years already. And since the term has come up, Ray and I can't seem to stop ourselves from creating them almost continuously. For instance, our dog, Groucho (neither “cockapoo” nor “puggle” but, as genetic testing revealed, a combination of Akita, greyhound and boxer, or a “groxita”), who likes to lie (with his front paws crossed) across the threshold between the porch and the living-room, or between the dining-room and the kitchen, is now a “threshound.”

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by Maniza Naqvi

For the past eight years, when I walk past it in the early mornings on my way to work, I've imagined the elegant, refined, educated, decent family that currently lives in the White House. They look so good and they talk so fine. A made for TV family. Making most of us feel good and feel great. Making America look good. I always pause at dusk to gaze at their residence, on my way home and think how lovely it seems because of them inside it. Change is coming. They are leaving soon.

But beyond the poetry and photogenic poise they don't matter. And whoever comes in after they are gone from here, won't matter either. The change won't matter. The incoming scandals won't matter. No one who lives here ever does. Matter. Much. You live here as a servant. No, not of the people.

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by Christopher Bacas

After Allen fired Mike, I replaced him the next Friday night. Mike showed up for the gig anyway. That's how we first met. He was not tall, solid, short grey hair, onyx eyes, and all Baltimore: the accent, the indestructible Hunky genetics, the edge that let you know it might get real, right now. Before he spoke, he cleared his throat; that reflexive grunt, grammatically sound and ever present. His voice wasn't just gritty, it came out in cinderblocks; the kind with corners shorn, that scuffed skin off your palms when you picked them up. He often used the word bark. It described a responsive saxophone (“that horn barked”), the ability to play something (“you barked off those fourths”), or an aggressive person (“they barked at me, but fuck 'em!”). Mike's voice barked, too.

I was uncomfortable walking in on his gig. Allen was solid on his invitation. Earlier in the week, on the phone, he precisely quoted, in Bela Lugosi accent, Lenny Bruce's bit where a junkie jazz musician gets a gig with Lawrence Welk:

“you're perfect boy for my band…..YOU'RE DEAF….we play a lotta college dates,mostly industrial colleges.”

Selling me on a fifty-dollar-a-night weekend gig in menagerie of drunks. With travel, it amounted to seven hours.

Immediately, I said yes.

Before the drive to Baltimore, Allen invited me into his apartment. He lived alone and was raising two sons with a combative ex. It smelled of sandalwood inside. A Ben Webster record was playing. Allen always taught me, even things I thought I already knew. Ben shaped notes with exquisite varieties of breath: some had glowing El Greco halos, others popped like champagne corks or made panting dives into nothingness. I knew his sound, but hearing his loving care was the night's first lesson.

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by Holly A. Case

Alen R. (left) and Arkan (right)

Is there a relationship between politics and madness? The history of the legal strategy known as the insanity defense offers some clues. One thinker, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, was so haunted by the moral confusion of the insanity defense as to wonder whether there is a way to tell right from wrong without reference to right and left.

Last month before a packed courtroom in Graz, Austria, a man stood trial for three counts of murder and 108 counts of attempted murder. The defendant, Alen R., appeared each day in a white suit. His face, like his last name, was obscured in the Austrian media, but the case was such a high-profile one—all seven days of the proceedings were broadcast live and it was front-page news in every one of the Austrian dailies—that Alen R. became something of an anti-celebrity.

On June 20, 2015, just after midday, Alen R. ran down pedestrians and cyclists with his SUV along a route stretching more than a mile through the city center of Graz. Witnesses estimated his maximum speed to be over 60 miles per hour. At one point he stopped to attack two people with a knife. Over the five-minute duration of his “mad driving spree,” he killed three people and injured thirty-six, many of them seriously.

The focus of the trial came down to one question: “Is Alen R. so mentally ill that he can assume no responsibility for the apocalyptic drive in his SUV through the pedestrian zones of Graz?” At issue were the conflicting expert assessments of psychiatrists and a psychologist regarding the defendant's sanity: one had concluded that he was “of unsound mind” and should therefore be referred for psychiatric treatment rather than given a prison sentence, and another believed Alen R. to be very much “of sound mind” and said he should stand trial as an accused criminal. To break the tie, a third (German) psychiatrist was called in who diagnosed him with schizophrenia. In the end, the jury deferred to the testimony of a fourth expert, a psychologist, who declared Alen R. to be of sound enough mind to be criminally responsible for murder and attempted murder. He was given a life sentence (though it is not yet binding) along with a referral for incarceration in a facility for the criminally insane.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

There are interests that lie dormant within us, waiting to take hold some day. If someone had said ten years back that I'd be into birds, I would have been skeptical. It's true that I always had a fondness for animals: in high school, I spent a lot of time following neighborhood stray dogs and watching cheetahs chase gazelles on National Geographic. After moving to Arizona for grad school, I sought out every opportunity to hike and visit the famous national parks of the American southwest. But despite all the time spent outdoors, birds had never intrigued me. I used to be puzzled, even amused, by people who showed up at a trail with binoculars.

For many, it's the sighting of a particular species, usually a rare or colorful one, that sparks an interest. In my case, it was a very common North American bird – the cardinal. This was in 2011. I'd been living in Amherst, Massachusetts for three years. I had heard of cardinals, mostly as the name of a football team, and had never spotted one.

But in March that year, I suddenly starting seeing them: outside my apartment, during my walks in the woods around Amherst and while driving (they would often fly across the road). The crested bright red male was a thrill to watch. I felt privileged every time I saw one. Something was being revealed just to me! I asked others if they had seen any and would feel proud if their reply was negative. There was probably a simpler explanation of course. It snowed and rained a lot that year, and the population could have spiked for some ecological reason. Or the sight of the first made me look for more every day, with the result that I had simply begun to see what had always been there.

Whatever the reason, cardinals sparked a wider interest in birds and indeed all other species. It all seemed a tremendous mystery.

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by Richard King

The late Alexander Cockburn once suggested – mischievously, as was his wont – that the principal reason The New York Times published a “Corrections” column every morning was to convince its readers that everything else in the previous day's paper had been 100% true, morally as well as factually. In this way The Gray Lady maintained her reputation as America's premier clearing house for “All the News That's Fit to Print”: by reminding the world that she, too, was ever-so-slightly fallible.

Observing the meltdown in the US media in the weeks since Donald Trump became the GOP's man, it is hard not to think of Cockburn's zinger. Faced with the prospect of a President Trump – now highly unlikely, post-the Access Hollywood controversy – the media has moved from shock to repentance: Grub Street is jumping with journalists eager to take their share of the blame for the elevation of the Orange One. Nor, I think, are they wrong to do so, though the terms in which the mea culpas are currently being offered in the press manage both to miss the point and to highlight the very attitudes for which they should be apologetic. I'll get to those a little later. Suffice it to say, for now, that the media's self-flagellation in this instance smells strongly of self-aggrandisement.

The self-flagellation was discernible even before Trump's nomination. The New York Times' Jim Rutenberg, for example, suggested as long ago as May that the media was failing in its duty to voters, so wide of the mark had its predictions been. But it is only in the last few weeks that the sound of hats being dutifully chewed has yielded decisively to the rustle of sackcloth. Nicholas Kristof, also writing in the Times, struck an especially masochistic note: “Those of us in the news media have sometimes blamed Donald Trump's rise on the Republican Party's toxic manipulation of racial resentments over the years. But we should also acknowledge another force that empowered Trump: Us.”

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by Emrys Westacott

Donald Trump epitomizes extravagance. Not the imprudently living beyond one's means sort of extravagance criticized by Ben Franklin, but the kind that spares no expense in the quest to gratify one's desires and impress people.

Gold-gilded towers, marbled mansions, emblazoned private jets: all of them scream out, “Look how f____ing rich I am!”

There is a paradox here. You'd think that Trump flaunting his wealth so unabashedly would turn off the majority of voters. You'd expect it to especially turn off the ones that the polls say make up his base–men without a college education who feel they are losing out in a changing world. After all, most people aren't rich. That's why politicians like to present themselves as commoners: so that voters can identify with them. Even those who ate baby food off silver spoons will typically tell stories about some parent or grandparent who was dirt poor and worked their way up.

There is also a deep strain in American culture that has always been highly critical of luxury, extravagance, boastfulness and pride. These are, after all, the opposite of: simplicity, frugality, modesty and humility–the traditional Christian values taught by Jesus, practiced by the Puritans, and associated with the rural homestead.

Furthermore, a preference for frugal simplicity and related values is not just a Puritan prejudice. It's supported by a rich philosophical tradition, from Socrates and Epicurus in ancient times to Thoreau and Wendell Berry more recently. Like our religious heritage, this tradition has left its mark on our thinking. According to these sages, frugal simplicity is the path to both virtue and happiness.

Now some might argue that these traditional values are out of fashion. But that's not entirely true. Simplicity is still respected. When the current pope was chosen in 2013, his simple lifestyle was hailed on all sides as a sure sign of his moral integrity. Warren Buffet, “the sage of Omaha,” has a reputation for wisdom that is decidedly enhanced by his choosing to live in the same unexceptional house that he bought in 1958.

So how is Trump able to turn not just his wealth but his showy, extravagant lifestyle into political capital?

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