by Jon Kujawa

Emmanuel Candes of Stanford University was a plenary speaker at the recent International Congress of Mathematicians. By chance I saw Candes speak several years ago at an American Mathematical Society meeting. Truthfully, Candes work is miles away from my own and I might not have seen him speak if it weren't for the wine reception scheduled immediately after his talk! That was my great fortune: Candes is an excellent speaker and is doing truly remarkable mathematics.

Indeed Candes and his collaborators are doing something very exciting which has immediate practical applications and endless future ones.

Here is the essence of the problem:

Imagine you have an array of data. That is, imagine you have a spreadsheet in which you have a series of rows of numbers with one number per column. Now imagine that some of those numbers are missing. Perhaps the data has been lost or perhaps you never had the data in the first place. Can you recover the missing data?

Put like that, the answer is certainly no. If the numbers are random, then even knowing all but one of them it will be impossible to recover the last missing number. Candes and his collaborators have shown, however, that the real world isn't random and in fact we can often reconstruct the missing data.

Candes creates data from thin air! [1]

Let me give an example where you can see that recovering real world data is sometimes possible. Imagine that you have a huge data set in which each row of numbers is the biometric data for a single person. The first number is their weight, the second their height, the third their age, the fourth their blood cholesterol level, the fifth their shoe size, and so on. If you accidently delete the weight of the 2,381,773rd person in your data set, you can certainly make an accurate estimate of the missing weight by comparing person number 2,381,773 with others who have similar heights, ages, etc.

That was easy, of course, because you have nearly all the data at hand for working out the missing bit. Candes does something much more remarkable, though. He shows that under reasonable assumptions you can actually usually recover the entire array of data even if nearly half of it is missing! Not only this, but he and his collaborators give us the tools to calculate how much data can be missing and how close we can get to a perfect reconstruction.

Does this so far imaginary problem actually occur in real life? You bet! Once you start you'll find it everywhere you look. Let me mention a couple of examples.

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Add 30 Seconds

add 30 seconds to anytime,
what’s that interval?

hell, double it
what’s that?

have you ever had a day that lasts three
or one that goes so fast it’s past —instantly?

are those durations short or long,
if hours mean anything?

subtract 5 hours from anytime
do we really think we’ve minced minutes?
as we tick them off are they really not there?

there’s a continuum called now
outside of which is guesswork
because our instruments only work here
slice it anyway you want
it remains still,
whole
our clocks do not
affect it

now is never what it was before
because things change
and will change again, now,
not yesterday or tomorrow
it only happens now

now is the only thing we have to work with
now only knocks now

.
.
by Jim Culleny
9/5/14

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

The case for God's existence is unsuccessful. Theistic arguments either beg the question, or involve deductive fallacies, or don't really prove what they promised to. Furthermore, the atheistic arguments all seem decisive – there's no morally acceptable solution to the problem of evil, and there is no need for God in a naturalistic universe. Current theistic replies are mostly rear-guard actions in reaction to the atheist – more apology than apologetics. The evidence overwhelmingly supports the thesis that God doesn't exist. And this is good news, too. God is just a cosmic bully. Such a being might provide the universe with meaning, but in so doing, makes it all pointless, especially human autonomy — which, by hypothesis, would have to resolve itself into God's will. God's existence would be a moral tragedy, so good riddance to bad rubbish.

Call the view expressed above Positive Evidential Atheism (PEA). It is the two-part thesis composed of an evidential claim and a positive assessment: (1) our overall available evidence supports belief that there is no God and (2) God's non-existence is a good thing. We endorse PEA. Paul Moser challenges PEA in his book The Severity of God (2013). Moser argues that if God exists, He would be silent; moreover, He would be particularly silent to those who accept PEA. This “divine hiddenness” explains why PEA's advocates think they have no evidence for God's existence. Given that God hides, the evidence is misleading. In response to Moser, we defend PEA along two lines: (1) PEA needn't be undercut in the fashion Moser takes it to be, and (2) divine hiding can be rendered as supporting PEA.

Let's begin by considering the divine hiddenness view in a little more detail. It runs like this: Even though the problem of evil may seem unanswerable, we humans are not in a position to know that God would not allow severe evils in the world. Moreover, we do not know if God intervenes in this universe with individuals engaged in proper relationships with Him. Access to evidence of God is not a matter of looking and seeing, but a matter of searching, yearning, and then being transformed. God, in fact, wants relationships with us, not just our assent to claims of His existence. And so He hides from us until we are ready for His presence.

Notice that the divine hiddenness view reconciles the fact of widespread disbelief with God's capacity and goodness. God is silent until we are ready to hear. Were He to reveal himself when we are not ready, the relationship He desires and we need would be perverted. God's ways, in short, are not our ways; to expect otherwise is nothing short of idolatry. Divine hiding, so the reasoning goes, is something we should positively expect of a God truly worthy of worship.

God's motivation to hide is especially pronounced in the case of the positive atheist. As Moser has it, “God typically would hide God's existence from people ill-disposed toward it”; as they are ill-disposed toward God, “their lacking evidence for God's existence is not by itself the basis of a case for atheism”(2013:200). Thus positive atheists should expect that their evidence regarding God's existence is misleading, since they are precisely those for whom God's presence will be elusive. Hence PEA's positive assessment undercuts its evidential claim. Moser calls this the “undermining case” against PEA. Yet, as we will argue, the undermining case is not decisive.

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by Liam Heneghan

It says something about a city, I suppose, when there is heated debate over who first labeled it a dirty place. The phrase “dear dirty Dublin”, used as a badge of defiant honor in Ireland’s capital to this day, is often erroneously attributed to James Joyce. Joyce used the term in Dubliners (1914) a series of linked short stories about that city and its denizens. But the phase goes back at least to early nineteenth century and the literary circle surrounding Irish novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) who remains best known for her novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) which extols the virtues of wild Irish landscapes, and the wild, though naturally dignified, princess who lived there. Compared to the fresh wilderness of the Irish West, Dublin would have seemed dirty indeed.

The city into which I was born more than a century later was still a rough and tumble place. It was also heavily polluted. This was Dublin of the 1970s.

My earliest memories of the city center come from trips I took to my father’s office in Marlborough St, just north of the River Liffey which bisects the city. My father would take an eccentric route into the city, the “back ways” as he would call them, which though not getting us to the destination as promptly as he advertised, had the benefit of bringing us on a short tour of the city and its more unkempt quarters.

My father’s cars themselves were masterpieces of dereliction. Purchased when they were already in an advanced stage of decay, he would nurse them aggressively till their often fairly prompt demise. One car that he was especially proud of, a Volkswagen Type III fastback, which had its engine to the rear, developed transmission problems and its clutch failed. His repair consisted of a chord dangling over his shoulder and crossing the back seat into the engine. A tug at a precisely timed moment would shift the gears. A shoe, attached to the end of the chord and resting on my father’s shoulder, aided the convenient operation of this system. That car, like most the others in those less regulated times, was also a marvel of pollution generation, farting out clouds of blue-black exhaust which added to the billowy haze of leaded fumes issuing from the other disastrously maintained vehicles, all shuddering in and out of the city’s congested center at the beginning at end of each work day.

A route into the city that I especially liked took us west of the city center, and as we approached Christ Church Cathedral I would open the window to smell the roasting of the barley which emanated from the Guinness brewery in Liberties region of the city, down by the Liffey. Very promptly I would wind up the window again as we crossed over the bridge, since the reek of that river was legendarily bad.
The Irish playwright Brendan Behan wrote in his memoir Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965), “Somebody once said that ‘Joyce has made of this river the Ganges of the literary world,’ but sometimes the smell of the Ganges of the literary world is not all that literary.”

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by Tamuira Reid

“My daddy stays in that building? Not a house?”

I'm glad it looks more like an office building and less like a hospital. My son has lived in a city long enough to know what a hospital looks like. This is a slate rectangle, with a line of tinted windows overlooking the parking lot. I imagine faces behind those windows, smashed up against the glass. I imagine his face among them and stop looking at the windows.

Oliver dangles his feet from a carseat in the back. He's nervous. I'm nervous. The Los Angeles evening glitters outside our car.

“It's like Dadland.“

“What?”

“Dadland. Like Disneyland but no rides. Just daddies.”

It has been two years since he's seen his father. He's four. Exactly half of his life has gone by.

We wait for him to come out. When he does, we'll get an hour to play family before we return him to the nurse who will dole out his nightly meds, now open your mouth and lift your tongue, please. Good.

I wonder what he'll be wearing. I've scrubbed Oliver down and we both look nice. New jeans. Clean shoes. Like we're going to church not war.

_____

I share a bed with my sister. Cute when you're ten, but not when you're my age. Oliver doesn't have a room, he has a corner. In front of a closet. It's New York, which means every square inch of our apartment is an experiment in strategic furniture placement. But we are teaching the kid to have grit. To appreciate a minimalist approach. The beauty in paper plates and pirated cable television. The mouse in the kitchen doubling as a first pet.

A mother and an auntie. Two women who love him to death and show up at every open house and music class and playdate in the park. Two women who Instagram every haircut, gummy smile, new pair of glasses. But we are no dad. There's a placeholder where dad should be. An ellipsis. To be continued. It's kind of like watching the weather report – and today with a side of dad.

“He's at the store.”

“He's been there a long time,” I say.

“It's a big store.”

And this is the story he has been telling himself. When his preschool teacher or well-meaning neighbors ask. When his best friend points it out. Where's your daddy?

At the store. Works for me.

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by Jalees Rehman

Back in 2001, when we first began studying how regenerative cells (stem cells or more mature progenitor cells) enhance blood vessel growth, our group as well as many of our colleagues focused on one specific type of blood vessel: arteries. Arteries are responsible for supplying oxygen to all organs and tissues of the body and arteries are more likely to develop gradual plaque build-up (atherosclerosis) than veins or networks of smaller blood vessels (capillaries). Once the amount of plaque in an artery reaches a critical threshold, the oxygenation of the supplied tissues and organs becomes compromised. In addition to this build-up of plaque and gradual decline of organ function, arterial plaques can rupture and cause severe sudden damage such as a heart attack. The conventional approach to treating arterial blockages in the heart was to either perform an open-heart bypass surgery in which blocked arteries were manually bypassed or to place a tube-like “stent” in the blocked artery to restore the oxygen supply. The hope was that injections of regenerative cells would ultimately replace the invasive procedures because the stem cells would convert into blood vessel cells, form healthy new arteries and naturally bypass the blockages in the existing arteries.

Image of mouse red blood cells flowing through an engineered human blood vessel- Image from Paul and colleagues (2013)

As is often the case in biomedical research, this initial approach turned out to be fraught with difficulties. The early animal studies were quite promising and the injected cells appeared to stimulate the growth of blood vessels, but the first clinical trials were less successful. It was very difficult to retain the injected cells in the desired arteries or tissues, and even harder to track the fate of the cells. Which stem cells should be injected? Where should they be injected? How many? Can one obtain enough stem cells from an individual patient so that one could use his or her own cells for the cell therapy? How does one guide the injected cells to the correct location, and then guide the cells to form functional blood vessel structures? Would the stem cells of a patient with chronic diseases such as diabetes or high blood pressure be suitable for therapies, or would such a patient have to rely on stem cells from healthier individuals and thus risk the complication of immune rejection?

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Allahu Akbar or God is Great, the anthem stolen by the wicked terrorist, whose attack is aimed at life, what holds life together for me— the zikr: Allahu Akbar, God is Greater, greater than prayer, greater than the spectacularly leaping science, the elegance of logic, the morality police, the lust of the spirit or the intellect, greater than the molten heart of a mother, a day laborer’s fatigue, greater than the beauty of discipline, the disciple of beauty, the ecstasy of disarray, greater than terra firma or the firmament, greater than sorrow. This is the way of the Sufi Rabia of Basra, dousing hellfire with water and setting heaven on fire as she walked with a pitcher and an open flame, declaring how God’s love is greater than punishment, greater than reward.

I peel fruit close to its skin. Life is precious and scarce, not like rubies but like air— will it carry my words faithfully to you? War machine, war machine: Will water keep on rhyming with martyr? Will hospitals go dark, gasping for electricity? Will fathers go on talking to meat in plastic bags— as if it is Omar or Nadia, Hassan or Nur, listening—lifeless, grave-less? Missile from airstrike, missile from drone, bullet, car-bomb, roadside bomb: do you hear: your target was the sacred; out of a living child you made meat and ash.

This is bitter and no anthem.

For me is my zikr, for you, yours. Come, sit; only one tree but I swear its shade stretches for us all.

by Kathleen Goodwin

In recent months a spotlight, or rather a searchlight, has been shone on college campuses throughout the United States as both administrators and state and federal governments have finally been goaded into taking action to address the problem of campus sexual assault in a critical manner. This past May the White House called out 55 schools specifically for their gross negligence regarding a matter that is both endemic and archaic in its treatment. Overall, I find the attention to the subject to be laudable, and it appears that there are some examples of tangible progress in the way colleges are defining sexual assault and reacting to reports of assault by students. However, I fear that this will be too little too late—the structures that make women vulnerable to sexual assault should be evaluated and reformed with the same scrutiny that the aftermath of assault is receiving in recent months. It will take more dramatic change for college campuses to become safe spaces for women and free of the universal scourge of sexual assault, which undoubtedly negatively affects the experience of both men and women.

As a recent alum of Harvard College, one of the schools on the White House's list of institutions in need of sexual assault policy reform, I have reflected on the incidences of sexual assault that periodically occurred on campus, some of which were brought to the attention of authorities, but in many cases were not. One dorm room is empty in Harvard Yard this fall as the College rescinded its offer of admission to a 2014 graduate of St. Paul's, a boarding school in New Hampshire. Eighteen year old Owen Labrie is accused of raping a fifteen year old freshman girl two days before graduation this past May. The senior purportedly emailed the freshman girl and asked to see her as part of a St. Paul's tradition known as a “Senior Salute” where outgoing male seniors attempt to hook up with younger female students in the final days of the school year. Labrie was supposedly participating in a contest with his friends to see who could hook up with the highest number of female lowerclasmen by graduation. When I read about this case on the website of Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson, I found myself shocked, not at Labrie's crime, but rather at the eerie sense of familiarity I had while reading about the details. What I find notable about this case, is that it is shocking not in its awfulness, but in its predictability. In fact, as I read this article and the coverage of the case by the Boston Globe, I was struck by the similarities between this situation and most cases I have heard about at Harvard and colleges of other friends. In most of the instances of sexual assault that have been retold to me, a man capitalizes on ingrained structures that give him perceived power over his female peers in order to sexually assault a woman, often younger than himself and thus further disempowered. In many cases the implied or literal support of his male friends is a contributing factor.

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by Misha Lepetic

“Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now.”
~ Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Marlow, the protagonist of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, remorsefully blames an old obsession with maps for his eventual captaincy of a ramshackle steamship, set on a doomed mission up the Congo River. But Marlow was irretrievably fascinated by the blanks on the map – those were the places that were worth going. These days, when we look at a map, we expect objectivity and specificity, or to put it bluntly, the truth. Our sense of entitlement has only grown with the thoroughness in which maps have enmeshed themselves into our daily lives, whether it is via the GPS devices that guide our cars, or the maps on our smartphones that help us walk a few blocks of a city, familiar or not. We may forego the flâneur's pleasure of asking a stranger for directions, but where a certain calculus is concerned, it seems a small price to pay for getting us, without undue delay, to where we need to be.

There are no more places where cartographers must write terra incognita, or where myths and rumors were recruited as phenomenological filler. For just as nature abhors a vacuum, a map is a canvas that demands to be crammed with seemingly confident observations, and it would appear that every nook and cranny of the planet has already had some physical characteristics reassuringly assigned to it. Thus when maps fail us, we are left to decide whom to blame – the map, or ourselves.

I will give you a hint: we never blame ourselves. Rather, it is the map that is inadequate. But what this really implies is our refusal to abandon the conviction that there will be some future map that will capture the truth. Correlating directly with its pervasiveness, it becomes too easy to pass over the obvious fact that, like anything else, the practice of cartography is a fundamentally social practice. Consider not only how immersed we are in maps, as with the example of GPS, but also how extensively, constantly and surreptitiously we ourselves are mapped. Every time you allow an app on our smartphone to “Use Your Location,” indeed with every swipe of a credit card, you are effectively performing an offering of yourself, or rather some quantifiable aspect of yourself, to some kind of mapmaking project, the vast majority of which you will never be aware, let alone see. We are, in fact, subjects of a distinctly cartographic flavor of what Michel Foucault called clinical gaze.

When we are thus swaddled in information that provides so much convenience and in turn seems to ask so little in return – in fact, what is merely a bribe, but an exceptionally effective one – the occasional failure of maps can be galling (or sometimes entertaining). Because we are convinced that a better map is always already right around the corner, this anxiety does not last. But what comfort is there when we are confronted with things that resist mapping?

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by Dwight Furrow

Wine tasting has become one of the favorite playthings of the media with articles appearing periodically detailing a new study that allegedly shows wine tasters to be incompetent charlatans, arrogantly foisting their fantasies on an unsuspecting public. But these articles seldom reflect critically on their conclusions or address the question of what genuine expertise in wine tasting looks like. In fact, articles in this genre routinely misinterpret the results of these studies and seem more interested in reinforcing (partly undeserved) stereotypes of snobbish sommeliers.

The study that seems to get the most attention is from 2001. Frédéric Brochet asked 54 wine experts to assess two glasses of wine, one red, the other white. But in fact the two wines were identical white wines, the “red” wine having been dyed with food coloring. All the experts used descriptors typical of red wines and failed to notice the wine was in fact white. But this study does not show that wine tasters are incompetent. The study relied only on smell, not taste which would more readily yield clues to the wine's nature. More importantly, wine tasters are taught to use visual clues when trying to identify a wine using the deductive method. Given that the wine appeared red, trained wine tasters would have logically ruled out white descriptors. The study proves nothing about the expertise of wine tasters; only a lack of expertise in designing the study.

In a follow-up study, Brochet served wine experts two bottles, one with the label of a Grand Cru, the other labeled as an ordinary table wine. The wine in both bottles was identical and ordinary. The expensive wine was highly praised; the less expensive one roundly criticized. The conclusion this article attempts to draw is that all wine tastes the same and there is no distinction between cheap and expensive wine. But there is an alternative hypothesis that is much more plausible. We aren't told who these experts were, but the results are not surprising. There is ample scientific evidence that judgments about wine, including those of experts, are influenced by reputation, price, and expectations. That is why wine tasters often taste blind so their judgments are not distorted by these factors. All this study shows is that our judgments are influenced by background beliefs—this is not news and the tendency of wine tasters to be influenced by price and reputation has been incorporated into wine tasting practice for decades.

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by Madhu Kaza

In the borrowed apartment where I'm living for a while, on the top floor of a brownstone, a stone Buddha sits on a low table in front of a center window. The crowns of trees some thirty feet away float in the window; they belong to the park across the street. Many of these trees are rooted near the street below, and the park slopes up behind them, so that through the canopy I sometimes catch flashes of figures moving inside the park at the top of the hill. Through my window I hear the squeaking of swings, and though I don't see them, I hear the squawking of children throughout the afternoon.

One afternoon this summer – it had been dark and humid all morning—I was sitting at my desk working, when suddenly I heard a boom of thunder, immediately followed by the shrieks of children. I looked out the window at the swaying branches of the trees and imagined the scared and thrilled children leaping out of the swings and scattering home before the rain came down. I watched the trees long after the voices emptied out of the park and the rain began tapping the leaves.

I love looking out of windows. I have spent whole afternoons watching the light change inside a room and watching the movements of the world outside. I lived for nearly fifteen years in a studio apartment in Manhattan, where ninety percent of my waking hours at home were spent sitting in a chair by the window, where I worked, ate, read, talked on the phone and idled. I think of the years racked up looking through glass, listening to the muted sounds of the city.

Looking through a window has always felt akin to looking at art. Painters have long made the connections between the canvas and the window. In his 1435 essay, “On Painting,” the Renaissance artist Leon Battista Alberti wrote, “Let me tell you what I do when I am painting. First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen.” In more recent paintings of the 19^th and 20^th century the window has become a prominent motif, one that can organize or frame the subject of the painting. In Matisse's Open Window, Collioure, for instance, very little (and no detail) of the domestic interior is shown. The painting itself becomes a view from a window.

Even if paintings sometimes open up views onto the world, I recognize that it doesn't necessarily follow that looking out a window is like looking at art. Features that brings these two experiences together for me, however loosely, include the frame and the distance– my position apart from the action. When gazing out a window I am more still in my looking than when I am out in the world. I find myself slightly abstracted from my body and in the position of a spectator. It's great if a window looks out onto a street or a meadow where horses roam, but the view needn't be spectacular or even beautiful. It certainly helps if the view is not of a grim shaftway, if instead it's of a dynamic space where people or animals or clouds come and go, where vegetation comes into leaf, flowers, and dies – anywhere where you can watch things change throughout the day. Through a fixed frame viewed over time the scene becomes cinematic.

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by Gerald Dworkin

In a talk given some years ago at the University of Illinois Urbana (UIUC), which is the object of a boycott protesting the Salaita decision, I described myself as a “first amendment fanatic.” Having grown up in the era of McCarthyism as the child of a member of the Communist Party, having endured a mild amount of FBI scrutiny of my travel and organizational affiliations, surely contributed to this bias in favor of freedom of speech. The text I most enjoyed teaching by the philosopher I admire most, John Stuart Mill, is his defense of freedom of speech in On Liberty.

I have always been suspicious of bans on “hate speech” and thought a bit about how it might or might not differ from crimes which created additional punishments for particular victims of assaults. I was inclined to favor such additional sanctions for, say, the elderly who were more likely to be seriously injured by such assaults, and to be more fearful of using the streets. But I was inclined to oppose such increases for those attacked because of their race or sexual orientation. It smacked too much of punishing not just the acts but hateful thoughts as well.

This is where I stood when considering the question of whether to sign on to a petition to the Chancellor of the University UIUC condemning her action of de-hiring, or not appointing, or firing –depending on arcane views about the nature of contract law — Steven Salaita. I assume that many of the readers of this blog are aware of the wide-spread controversy, and proposed boycott–refusing to speak at the campus– of UIUC, by the academic community. Philosophers have been particularly prominent in this effort. For those who are new to this issue, here is some basic information, a critique of the decision, and a defense of it:

1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/25/u-illinois-officials-defend-decision-deny-job-scholar-documents-show-lobbying
2. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/08/08/essay-criticizing-u-illinois-blocking-controversial-faculty-hire
3. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/08/08/essay-defends-university-illinois-decision-not-hire-steven-salaita

The issue is, as a matter of law, very complicated. Experts in contract law–does he have a valid contract before the Board of Trustees approves the appointment?– are divided on the matter. The constitutional issue seems clearer. The First Amendment has been long interpreted as forbidding state agencies–including public universities– from punishing employees for the expression of political viewpoints. But this is consistent with such agencies being able to ensure they can discharge their legitimate functions. So there is room–given various empirical assumptions–for the decision being upheld. But, absent any evidence that Salaita has made his classroom a hostile one by his tweets, it is likely that he is protected by the First Amendment.

However, I think that there are moral, political and institutional issues that arise in this case , and which are invoked by the protesters and the defenders, that need to be discussed in isolation from the purely legal issues. These are my focus in this blog post.

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by Debra Morris

Along with thousands of others that day, I emerged from the South Tower of the World Trade Center with a crippling fatigue in my knees. Of the walk down, in my case from the 61^st floor, certain things stand out: the speed with which one can descend a flight of stairs and smoothly pivot on the ball of the left foot, to begin again; a few stray remarks from strangers (“I think something hit the North Tower.” “They're saying the building's safe and we can go back up.”); our slowing pace as we continued downward, to make room for those entering the stairwell at each floor. And this, of course: at a standstill, just outside the 18^th floor; a pause no more than a half minute but time enough for the second jet to slam through floors 78–84 above us, with a sound like a freight train, jolting us against the handrail and blurring the stairs at our feet. Seconds more, waiting—unaware, mercifully, that we were waiting—for the unmistakable sound of a building's slow, groaning collapse. Then someone saying quietly, “It's OK; let's go,” and we began the descent again, our steps suddenly desperate and clumsy.

And now, certain disclaimers, which are always on my mind on the rare occasion I relate any of the above. I, and thousands of others that day, emerged from the South Tower with no obvious wounds—no burns, no cuts, no eyes bloodied by pulverized glass and concrete. Because my floor was below the plane's point of impact, I always had hope of making it to safety, and hope is an especially precious and bounteous thing under certain circumstances. It's remarkable, too, how quickly a person can get down even 61 floors when she has been told to do so—meaning that I was outside and away from the tower with time to spare. Enough time to wonder: how different, really, was my experience from that of the millions traumatized by the televised accounts of the day?

Perhaps I recount it now with the hope that you will tell me where you were at that same moment—and confess: did the world blur before your eyes, too?

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GABRIEL AND SATAN

after Iqbal

Gabriel
All right, mate. Dish out the dirt.

Satan
Suffering, seeking, yearning, burning
I have the strength of hopelessness

Gabriel
Heavens! Will you ever return?

Satan
No bazaars, Jaguars, rouge et noir—
Bestow these gated lawns on the pious

Gabriel
Angels are bright still, after all.

Satan
From my despair: Gods’ fire.
I am the warp of wisdom’s robe.

by Rafiq Kathwari, the present winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award.

by Ahmed Humayun

The 2013 elections in Pakistan gained the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) the government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province as well as the third most prominent position in parliament. This striking success was a vindication of Imran Khan, PTI's leader, who had struggled for many years to break into a sclerotic system dominated by autocratic political parties organized around familial and financial interests.

But the results were a crushing disappointment for Khan and many of his supporters who became convinced that the elections had been rigged against them. Over the last several weeks, the country has become embroiled in a severe political crisis in which Khan and some of his followers are staging protests in Islamabad against last year's election results and the current government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the head of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N).

Some of Khan's arguments deserve to be taken seriously. There are undoubtedly deep flaws in an electoral system that is still nascent. Last year was the first time, after all, that one elected regime transferred power to another in Pakistan's history. To the extent that the PTI has elevated the issue of improving electoral accountability in the country's national debate, it deserves credit. Yet Khan has advanced a series of improbable, evidence-free conspiracy theories that have muddied rather than clarified the debate. Worse, by intriguing to overthrow Sharif's regime, he has damaged Pakistan's fragile democracy.

Khan's allegation that ‘rigging' took place is almost certainly true, but the assertion that a host of Pakistani institutions connived to rig elections in Sharif's favor is almost certainly false. Here are just a few reasons to be skeptical of Khan's sweeping claims. First, while claims about a stolen election have been asserted with great certitude, no evidence for a vast conspiracy has been provided. Khan has leveled highly specific allegations, incriminating the Chief Justice, the head of the election commission, and various others, without any proof. Second, consider the sheer improbability that some 70,000 polling stations, where perhaps 600,000 people worked, under the direction of a cabal consisting of the election commission, the superior judiciary, and Nawaz Sharif, worked in unison to deliver a result adverse to Khan. Third, at the time of the elections, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) was in power and oversaw the holding of the elections. If such a vast conspiracy is possible, then why did the PPP suffer a drubbing, and why did it allow its political nemesis, the PML-N, to triumph? Fourth, why is only PTI and not the other political parties—who presumably would be equally suspicious of the adverse election results—protesting? Instead, while happy to see the Sharif government flounder, the parties have stood by the government. Fifth, if the election was stolen by the PML-N in order to prevent PTI's victory, it was done in a rather half-hearted manner – awarding the PTI rule in a province, and making it into the third largest party in the national assembly.

All independent observers, including international monitors, concede the flaws in the 2013 elections but aver that, nonetheless, these were the freest and fairest elections in Pakistani history. This is not a high bar to cross, but it suggests why all of Pakistan's parties accepted the results when they were announced and formed the government.

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by Ruchira Paul

“And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade … I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this… not this year or any other year… I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.”

The city was Alexandria, Egypt, the year 1964 and the person thinking the thoughts, a thirteen year old boy whose family was about to depart from the city the next day – for ever. André Aciman’s Out of Egypt is an enchanting memoir that draws from history, childhood memories and probably a bit from the author’s imagination. I recently re-read the book after a gap of more than a decade and found it just as absorbing as it had been the first time.

Out of Egypt recounts the story of the author’s extended family, Sephardic Jews with their footprints in many parts of Europe and the Middle East – Italy, France, Germany, Syria, Turkey and finally, Egypt. The large, loud, colorful clan was polyglot (Aciman’s two grandmothers spoke to each other in six different languages), contentious, sharp of tongue and at times snobbish. Even after three generations in Egypt, they hadn’t learnt to speak Arabic well except to communicate with the baker, the butcher and the domestic help in a pidgin version. They considered themselves French, Italian and German although most arrived in Alexandria via Constantinople. Used to seeing their fortunes wax and wane, Aciman's great uncles were forever ambitious and optimistic that the next financial scheme was bound to strike gold. To that end they tirelessly utilized their social and political connections, a bit of chicanery and if the target was a family member with means, arm twisting. Their sisters and the women they married were by turn shrewd, neurotic, theatrical, acid tongued and in times of crises, generous and supportive. In the midst of many near disasters and real catastrophes, the whole family rallied to help each other. By the time the book ends, several older family members had died and others were scattered through Europe and America. The events after WWII and the burgeoning nationalistic fervor made Egypt an inhospitable place for its non-Muslim residents.

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by Lisa Lieberman

My favorite line from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), spoken by the late, great Eli Wallach, captures the essence of the Spaghetti Western. Here's Tuco, the Mexican bandit played by Wallach, taking a bubble bath in some half-destroyed hotel room, when a one-armed bad guy barges in, holding a loaded revolver in his left hand. The last time we saw this guy, Tuco had left him for dead after a shoot-out. He's been thirsting for revenge ever since, he says, and in the time it's taken him to find Tuco, he's learned to shoot left-handed. Blam! Wallach's character blows him away. “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk.”

Sergio Leone loved Westerns and the image of America they conveyed. You see this in his craftsmanship, the careful attention to detail, the gorgeous panoramas reminiscent of John Ford's best work. Even when Leone undercuts the conventions of the genre (as in the scene with Tuco and the one-armed bad guy), he pays them tribute, substituting his own, more nuanced myths for the old cowboy clichés. “Fairy tales for grown-ups,” he called them in an interview with Christopher Frayling.

Of course, Europeans are the grown-ups: worldly, cynical, not prudish about sex, more concerned with surface style, it must be said, than with the moral underpinnings of their heroes. Who is “Blondie,” Clint Eastwood's character in the film? We never learn his real name, where he came from, who his daddy was. A man of few words, he's unconcerned with social niceties, having no interest in women, good or otherwise, no long-range plans, dreams, or ambitions. He dresses well, however.

Clothes Make the Man

The trademark hat with tooled leather hat band. The poncho. In his later masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Leone put all of his actors in dusters like the one Blondie wears when Tuco is forcing him across the desert, kicking off a fad for the long, fawn-colored coats among trendy Parisians. But those dusters are really dusty. Compare the nice, clean hero of an American Western to his sweaty counterpart in one of Leone's films. At the end of a hard day's ride in The Searchers (1956), John Wayne's horse is pretty sweaty, but apart from needing a shave, Wayne himself is fresh as a daisy.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Just Wow! At every turn, and corner in Istanbul—you are bound to say—Wow.

The obvious example is, of course, at the Basilica of Aya Sofiya—built by Emperor Justinian in 537 AD. Legend has it, that Justinian wanted this magnificent Eastern Orthodox Church, in its beauty and scale to rival Solomon's great Temple. So that even Solomon would have been Wowed. Whether, Solomon would have been Wowed, or not, subsequent emperors, certainly were—And in 1204, the Aya Sofiya, was converted to a Roman Catholic Church, and then in 1453 the Ottoman Emperor was certainly wowed, because he appropriated the Basilica, and converted it into a mosque,—which it remained till 1935, when it was turned into a museum, for a Basilica and a church and a mosque, by the State of Turkey. The histories of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires, were now showcased, and encapsulated in one space. Istanbul, is afterall, just that kind of an ‘and-and' place. The word Aya, in Greek means holy, and Sofiya means wisdom. Aya Sofiya: Holy Wisdom.

When I visited, the Museum of Aya Sofiya, again this Spring, I moved away from the hordes of tourists, to a quieter corner, and found there a small display of calligraphy. Here, I saw depicted, in a single stroke of ink, the Arabic letter pronounced as wow. Letters of the Arabic alphabet are used as symbols in Sufism, to signify a greater meaning of perfection.

The letter Wow, shaped like a bowed head, like a tadpole—like an embryo like a germinating seed, like the sun's millions of warm smiles on the waves of the water, takes just one stroke to create: one stroke, in a swirl like a strand of honey, dripping or a whirl—like a whirling dervish. It caught my eye, and reminded me of itself, in the thriving, pulsating streets, and cafes and mosques and later even on a friend's posting on facebook. Wow, wow, wow.

This letter Wow, has the numerical value of six, which also symoblizes perfection and resembles the number six as written in English. The Arabic word Wadood which begins with the letter Wow means love and is—one of the attributes of God. Thus, the letter Wow is shorthand for aspects of loving, in Sufi Orders. It symbolizes the sense of being spiritually elevated. And, the letter Wow is the first letter of how the word ‘and' is spelt in Arabic—Wa. Several verses of the Quran extolling love begin with words starting with the letter Wow. And so many of the verses begin with the word Wa meaning and. For example in the Chapter Al Buruj ‘And He is the Forgiving, the Loving, Lord of the Throne of Glory, Doer of what He wills.

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