by Sarah Firisen

People are awful. You only need read the daily headlines to realize how awful so many of us are to each other. Intolerance, prejudice, ignorance, sit behind so many of the evils that men (and women) do to each other. But as bad as things are, they are mostly so much better than they ever have been. You don’t need to go back far in history to realize how much more tolerant and open minded we have tended to become as a species. The further back you go, the worse it is. What has made things, relatively speaking better? Well, not surprisingly, exposure and engagement tend to breed tolerance. We fear and suspect the unknown.

The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the precariousness of one's own lot in life, more palpable—the feeling that “there but for fortune go I.” —Michael Tomasky

And for the most part, what has brought us increasing exposure and engagement with each other has been advances in technology; from better boats, to planes, to computers and the Internet, it seems that while exposure to “the other” often aggravates fears, eventually, the ever adaptable human being learns that other people are far more similar to us than they are different. As we become exposed to people of different religions, cultures, beliefs, sexual orientation, it becomes harder and hard to see them as “the other”. There’s nothing radical or surprising about this. While there were clearly many complex issues at play, there seems to be real evidence that one of the major factors in the radical change in attitudes towards homosexuality in the US can be put down to the TV show Will and Grace, which, if nothing else, exposed gays to be much like the rest of us: self-absorbed, looking for love and acceptance and really in need of best friends who get us no matter how self-absorbed we become.

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by Bill Benzon

Martha Mills came to Mississippi as a young civil rights lawyer, looked racists judges, lawyers, and Ku Kluxers in the eye, and never backed down–in court or out. Small in stature, huge in guts, as far as I was concerned she was the smartest, bravest, and just plain toughest of that corporal’s guard of dedicated lawyers committed to giving life to the law.

—W. Hodding Carter III

The 1960s were tumultuous years in American politics. The nation blundered into a disastrous war in Vietnam that sparked years of protest and deprived Lyndon Johnson of a second full term as president. His boss, John F. Kennedy, and been assassinated in November of 1963, leaving Johnson to pursue that terrible war, but also to work with Kennedy’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. They brought the civil rights movement to fruition with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when Robert was a U.S. Senator. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, 1968, only two months after Martin Luther King was assassinated. King’s assassination fulminated race riots across the nation.

On February 7, 1969, The New York Times ran a story on page 20:

Woman Lawyer, 27, Jailed on Contempt In Grenada, Miss.

Special to the New York Times

GRENADA, Miss., Feb. 6–A 27-year-old woman lawyer was jailed for three hours here today after being held in contempt of court by Circuit Judge Marshall Perry when she attempted to file a bill of exceptions to a case involving a Negro civil rights worker.

Miss Martha M. Wood, an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, based in Jackson, was released under $300 bail.

An offense that merits release after only three hours in jail and with bail at $300 can’t have been much of an offense. And it wasn’t. But it involves a kind of
intricate legal obfuscation that defies easy summary and that is characteristic of race relations in the United States, then and alas now. If the prospect of summarizing it brings me to the edge of extreme annoyance you can imagine what it did to those who suffered through and by it, day after day.

Such is the texture of the story that Martha Mills recounts in a memoir of her years as a civil rights attorney, Lawyer, Activist, Judge: Fighting for Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi and Illinois (2015). In this particular case the obfuscation was also the occasion of a little theatrical detail in the manner of arrest: “The deputy grabbed my arm roughly and hauled me out of the courtroom. As soon as we were out of the courtroom, however, he dropped my arm, apologized, and said he had to do that for the judge” (p. 277). You gotta’ love it, the delicate egos of those racist judges. The Lord does indeed move in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

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by Matt McKenna

Sully isn't a movie about a pilot’s heroic skill to land a plane on the Hudson river and save the lives of the hundred-fifty-five people onboard. Instead, it is a movie about the decision by a pilot to land the plane on the Hudson River and what it must feel like to be both praised and second guessed for that decision. The movie is therefore an analogy for living in the aftermath of any tough choice made in public, and has there ever been a choice made in public tougher than Apple CEO Tim Cook’s choice to remove the headphone jack from the new iPhone?

Sully is based on the real life story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger who, after having a bunch of birds slam into both engines of the airliner he was flying, lands the aircraft on the Hudson River. Miraculously, everyone on the flight survived. Understandably though tiresomely, the movie repeatedly revisits the moment the birds hit the engines, probably because it's one of the few dramatic events in an otherwise pretty thin story. Not that I mind a short movie, but even after showing a dozen views of the plane splashing into the river, Sully still clocks in at only ninety-six minutes. And outside the water landing, the story that does exist is mostly fictional including the comically evil antagonists of the film, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigating the incident. For unexplained reasons, the NTSB desperately wants to prove that Captain Sullenberger should have turned the plane around to land back at LaGuardia Airport instead of dropping it into the Hudson. In reality, the NTSB didn’t try to prove that at all, but it’s hard to blame screenwriter Todd Komarnicki for adding this twist since it is the film’s only source of drama after the landing itself.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

These days there is a nearly constant clamor among academic philosophers for more public philosophy. We've already expressed puzzlement about what public philosophy is and what public philosophers are trying to achieve. It's likely that our puzzlement has been dismissed among public philosophy enthusiasts as nothing more than the imposition of the norms of academic philosophy on to an alternative vision of philosophical activity. Clarity about public philosophy is apparently not on the public philosopher's agenda. Perhaps the idea is that we can find out what public philosophy is only by publicly philosophizing? Fair enough. But there's still a question about how to we are to publicly philosophize. What are we to begin doing that we're not already doing? Presumably, public philosophy is in part the project of bringing philosophical insight into public discussion. How can this be practically pursued? Two related paradoxes arise.

To begin, consider the fact that so much of what is called public philosophy is politically oriented. Some candidate's pronouncements may come under philosophical scrutiny, a conceptual argument for one policy or another gets given, problematic assumptions are laid bare, hidden premises are challenged, or certain norms are critiqued along some theoretical line or another. That's the philosophical part, and it is nothing new; it is the kind of thing has been done by academic philosophers since the inception of academic philosophy. The distinctively public component emerges as the commitment to philosophizing about public matters in a mode that is accessible to the public itself rather than only to academic philosophers. Public philosophy, then, is philosophy about social and political matters that is for public consumption. Put otherwise, public philosophy is political philosophy intended for uptake by the public.

So far, so good. But notice that the need for philosophical examination, critique, and elucidation is most pronounced when matters are deeply conflicted. Philosophy does its work when intellectual materials stand in need of clarification, when disagreements prevail and there is no clear or obvious way of finding a resolution. In this way, philosophy is driven by conflicts that appear to be intractable. It is the controlled attempt to rationally address conflicts that look like impasses. And the deeper the conflict, the more urgent the need for philosophers to go to work.

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by Misha Lepetic

The Spectacle is not a collection of images,
but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
~ Debord

Now that Pokémon Go has had a few weeks to work its way through our collective psychosocial digestive tract, we can begin considering the effects of this latest, and by far most successful, manifestation of augmented reality (AR). Because it has been so successful, it's worth asking the big questions. Does Pokémon Go really make us more social? Does it make us better as individuals, or as a society? What gets amplified, and what gets obscured? (Hereis a brief overview of how Pokémon Go works.)

It's worth mentioning that augmented reality broke into the national consciousness in the form of a game. Educational tools have a limited audience and their effectiveness is difficult to measure. Workplace applications are either niche or still undercooked – for example, if we're to go by this recent video by AR darling Magic Leap, work seems to entail checking the weather and stock prices, at least until you're interrupted by your kid sharing his school report on Mt. Everest. After buying some spiffy orange boat shoes, there's not much left to do but look up and zone out to the jellyfish languidly passing across the ceiling. Clearly, this is a job that is safe from automation.

Games, on the other hand, are the perfect vessel for distributing a technology such as AR. Software is a contained system; it is built according to specifications and anticipates a gamut of interactions. There are rules – visible or invisible – that tell you what the system may or may not do. And engagement with the system is based on the fact that identity and progress can be established and measured, with performance compared and contrasted with other players.

All of this makes software ideal as the substrate for the gamification of, well, everything. If you've ever used Uber, you can see the available cars trundling along the streets in your vicinity. Once you complete your ride, you rate your driver. What's a rather lesser-known fact is that your driver rates you. Silicon Valley abhors a data vacuum, and a great way to get people to provide data about anything is to make a game out of it. The genius of this is that, consequently, people are really convinced that it's just a game.

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by Olivia Zhu

Grumbling and stumbling in the night: this is Philip Larkin’s self-introduction in “Sad Steps,” dissatisfied with his aging and driven awake by a compelling need to urinate. Over the course of the poem, however, his evident discomfort with growing old is replaced with first a burst of poetic dynamism before ending with a settled acceptance of his lot. These transformations take place under the poem’s moon, an ever-present and unemotional image that prompts the speaker to confront, correct, and ultimately console himself. His psychological shifts are paired and illustrated with corresponding changes in the poetic language, ranging from the types of phrasing to the use of punctuation to descriptions of distances. Larkin communicates his increased contentment with his varying portrayals of the moon and his environment, clarifying that he understands not merely the inevitability of growing old, but also the linguistic lessons that can only be learned with age.

The poet examines his assured aging first by casting himself as small in comparison to the world that surrounds him. The sky is “cavernous” and the moon is “high,” situating the speaker far below either. This very careful placement makes it impossible for Larkin—someone who has difficulty returning to bed at night—to have any effect on the heavens, let alone the passage of time. Critic Nicholas Marsh agrees, suggesting that the speaker’s realization of his physical size in proportion to that of the universe “reminds him of his own insignificance and mortality” (124). Moreover, the moon is incredibly powerful in “Sad Steps.” It is emotionally striking and compelling, certainly, but it is also described as a cannonball that “dashes through clouds that blow,” making it unlikely that the speaker would be able to resist its momentum and pull. Just as the moon wanes after it waxes, so must Larkin. He recognizes his youth “can’t come again,” so unlike youthful “others,” he is not “undiminished.” The period in which he was able to be strong is over, and all young people are aware of the “pain” of the prospect of growing older. The speaker has cast aside the “thick curtains” of the very beginning of the poem, no longer living in some form of denial, to stare openly on the moon and remind himself of who he is now.

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Don W. in Manhattan

—eating the dust of 2001

Dining in Soho alone, a man
served by a girl with lip studs, nose ring,
and serpent tattoo uncoiling
from deep cleavage,
sees the new man of La Mancha,
in dim light across the room,
seated with his back to the street:

This new La Mancha man
topples a pepper mill with his fork
gesturing to his wife, Sancha,
vowing he'll avenge New York

Sancha smiles and re-sets the mill in place
among constellations of pepper stars
strewn across formica space

Between them supper's done:
spent dinnerware, filaments of flaked filo
circling half a buttered bun,
remnants of dense moussaka,
and that pepper mill now standing like a dustbowl silo
near languid cubes in tepid water

Don Doble U, enemy of disorder,
sweeps a hand through this small universe
upending the pepper mill once more
and plows a thousand minuscule black galaxies
into his cupped palm
and dumps them on the floor

He takes his tined baton
between forefinger and thumb
and sets a cadence in the atmosphere
thumping on his different drum

Then Don (el hombre fútil),
maestro of mishap,
conducts the ice and water glass
into long-suffering Sancha's lap………………..
……………….
Jim Culleny; 2001

by Dwight Furrow

The question of whether food preparation can be a fine art turns on two issues:

1. Does food have the rich assortment of meanings typical of fine art? and

2. Does food express emotion in the same sense that music or painting does?

As I argued in American Foodie, both these questions depend on whether food can function as a complex symbol or metaphor. Food exemplifies or shows what it's trying to say via its flavors and textures, just as a painting displays its meaning in colors, lines, and brush strokes or a piece of music in its melodic/harmonic structure and timbres. As a conceptual matter these questions can be answered in the affirmative. However, the problem is that chefs must satisfy hunger, cater to taste preferences, and make a profit, and these practical constraints often limit their artistic aspirations.

Thus, when restaurants make an effort to highlight the artistic aspirations of their chefs, it is a special occasion, so I could not resist a trip to Chicago to sample the Art Menu of Rick Bayless and his chefs at his restaurant Topolobampo. Bayless is the acclaimed auteur of refined Mexican cuisine. Each summer his chefs create a tasting menu in which each dish expresses an emotion. The chefs then select works of art from the restaurant's collection of Mexican art that expresses the same emotion as each dish—all explained and depicted in a helpful brochure that is given to guests who order the menu. This is a fascinating experiment in cross-modal metaphor that if successful adds another data point favoring the artistic credentials of food.

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by Gerald Dworkin

From time to time my friends, knowing that I watch many television series, ask me what current show I recommend. I always start by asking if they have watched The Wire. If they say they have not, I suggest they watch all five seasons and then I will make suggestions about what to watch now.

The Wire, which ran from 2002 to 2008, was created, and largely written, by David Simon, a former police reporter on the Baltimore Sun. It is a systematic examination of the oppression of poor and black Baltimore citizens by five major institutions as they interact with the criminal justice system. These are drug trafficking, the seaport and its unions, city hall (politicians and bureaucracy), the school system, and the press.

The series is brilliant both artistically and sociologically. Using mainly unknown–at the time–actors, kids from the streets of Baltimore, as well as real-life characters from Baltimore, superbly written and directed, it exposes how these institutions not only oppress the poor but corrupt and compromise all those who act with power within these institutions.

This spring HBO introduced a new eight part series The Night Of, henceforth TNO. It was presented as a crime series with the crime being the murder of a young woman, and the person arrested for the crime being a young Pakistani college student, Naz. The show received quite favorable ratings although also some criticism as to pacing and some implausible plot points.

Considered as a police procedural or as a mystery I think it is excellent watching although not in the same class as, say, the first series of True Detective, the first series of Broadchurch, Happy Valley, River, or the Fall.

However I am going to argue that viewing the series as the sixth episode of The Wire it is a brilliant success as a portrait of the criminal justice system– the institution that The Wire never got around to portraying in detail.

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Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
……………….. —Bob Dylan
.

Wabi-sabi

upon first hearing
I knew the perfection
Dylan wove that verse around
(as if anything on earth could be so flawless
as to deserve the divinity of that word)
which says:
………………...could be here now
and so well timed that all the angles
of Pythagoras and all the angels
of Einstein’s curly gravity
and all of Kepler’s mathic motions
and all of Shakespeare’s mythic tragedies
are met in streets laid in English Bond
as beautifully sublime as the Pietá
whose only imperfection
is in the brutal timeless tale it tells in stone
in which Michelangelo distilled so perfectly
the failed perfection of the world
.
Jim Culleny
3/25/16

__________________________________________________
Note:
Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art
of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature.
.

by Katalin Balog

This is the third of a series of four essays on the mind and the brain. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Conscious will is our curse and blessing. It can seem our highest faculty, to be used for good or ill; it also can seem as the source of a particular kind of disgrace – or rather, lack of grace. As Heinrich von Kleist points out in his short story “On the Marionette Theater“, the conscious effort to succeed can be the death of innocence and genuine charm; the ruin of the dancer and the actor; more generally, can cause any of us to seem stilted and inauthentic – as the political arena amply testifies.

Nevertheless, conscious will, our capacity to act or refrain from action voluntarily, is widely held to be our most human capacity, a condition of human dignity and worth. But there is reason to think that on the most natural understanding of what this capacity involves, there is no room for it in the scientific world view.

There are two, radically different ways to understand the mind: one is to look within, to understand oneself (and by extension, others) as a subject, a self; the other, to study the brain and behavior, in ways that are similar to our study of any phenomenon “out there” in the world. The first method is subjective, humanistic, and is essentially tied to a particular point of view. The second method is objective, it is based on observation of brain and body and it is accessible to anyone, irrespective of their personal idiosyncrasies or their point of view. Its best embodiment is the scientific method. How the subjective fits in with the objective is one of the most vexing questions both in philosophy and life.

In the first two parts of this series of essays, I have looked at how each side can – mistakenly – see the other as wrong or irrelevant. In this essay, I will continue to explore the conflict between the two approaches in our understanding of agency and the self. In the last part next month, I will argue for the need to better balance the role of the subjective and the objective in theory and practice.

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by Paul Braterman

Part 1 of this series, “Atoms Old and New: Atoms in Antiquity” can be read here.

The transition to modern thinking

“It seems probable to me, that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles… even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God Himself made one in the first creation.” So wrote Sir Isaac Newton in his 1704 work, Opticks. Apart from the reference to God, there is nothing here that Democritus would have disagreed with. There is, however, very little that the present-day scientist would fully accept. In this and later posts, I discuss how atoms reemerged as fundamental particles, only to be exposed, in their turn, as less than fundamental.

The scientific revolution and the revival of corpuscular theory – 1543–1687

In 1543, on his death-bed, Nicholas Copernicus received a copy of the first edition of his book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, in which he argued that the Sun, not the Earth, was thecentre of what we now call the Solar System. In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, commonly known as the “Principia”. With hindsight, we can identify the period between these events as a watershed in the way that educated people in the West thought about the world, and number the political revolutions in America and France, and the economic revolutions in agriculture and industry, among its consequences.

Before this scientific revolution, European thinking about nature still followed that of Aristotle. The Earth lay at the centre of the Universe. Objects on Earth moved according to their nature; light bodies, for instance, containe, air or fire in their makeup, and these had a natural tendency to rise. Earth was corrupt and changeable, while the heavens were perfect and immutable, and the heavenly bodies rode around the centre on spheres within spheres because the sphere was the most perfect shape. By its end, Earth was one of several planets moving round the Sun in elliptical orbits, the movements of objects were the result of forces acting on them, the laws of Nature were the same in the heavens as they were on Earth, and all objects tended to move in straight lines unless some force deflected them from this path. The Universe ran, quite literally, like clockwork. This mechanical world-view was to last in its essentials until the early 20th century, and still remains, for better or worse, what many non-scientists think of as the “scientific” viewpoint.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

A dominating figure in the contemporary imagination is the strong, authentic man breaking the rules of some institution in which he is playing a key role. Many acclaimed TV series of the last decade feature not only “difficult men,” but also those men – such as Jack Bauer, Don Draper, or Dr. House – who are pitted against an institution that they are leading in some way. Despite their differences, these shows exhibit a certain nostalgia for an original mind behind the institutional procedures. This nostalgia is itself not such a new sentiment. Older forms and narratives have influenced the current perceived opposition between system, administration, and procedure on the one hand, and a free (if difficult) spirit outside of it on the other. (In The Kindgom and the Glory Giorgio Agamben has traced the model back to the first centuries of Christian theology). There is much actual need for change in political institutions, as well as for real political discourse despite and beyond them. But in today's political imagination, those needs seem to manifest themselves mainly in terms of an opposition between an inscrutable institution (like the bureaucratic apparatus of the European Union) and some ‘real character' as its alternative and as its potential future source. The need for such a character, however, is created by the institution itself.

No other show seems to capture the schizophrenic dynamic between an apparatus and its leader quite as well as The West Wing. The show mainly features the behind-the-scenes life of politics and reflects its apparatus and machinery, its procedures and mechanisms, not only on the level of ‘content,' but also in the makeup of the show itself: the famous walk and talk in the literalized corridors of power, the dialogues switching between different topics (as befits the specific medium of television with its program switching possibilities). Everything is procedure in action, and every piece and every person is part of the procedure and influenced by it – be it regarding the internal political negotiations of the government itself or the exchange with the ‘outside world.'

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by Elise Hempel

I just got back from a quick trip to Chicago, where I attended the funeral of a childhood friend's mother, who died in her sleep at the age of 93, survived by her husband of 65 years. I have many memories of my friend's yellow ranch-style house on a quiet side street in suburban Chicago – the neat, clean living room where their Wurlitzer organ stood, the large picture window that faced the cemetery, the basement with its foosball table and stacks of board games we'd play, my friend's bedroom she had once been so excited to make over herself, painting a big purple psychedelic design across her wall. But I have very few memories of interactions with my friend's parents; somehow they always seemed separate from us – her mother putting out a plate of cookies, perhaps, then heading off to sew, her father reading the paper or watching a ballgame in the den, leaving us to do whatever we wanted. My main memory of her parents, I suppose, is that they were both always neatly dressed (skirt, slacks), both always kind and nice, and both always cheerful – two people who fit together well, a combined aura of goodness and stability over the house, over my friend's childhood.

And that was the aura over the visitation and funeral service this past Wednesday and Thursday, with the TV-sized electronic picture frame and its continuous loop of photos, as well as all of the traditionally framed photos around the room – photos of family vacations in Michigan, of my friend's parents in a wedding party together before they were married, of my friend's mother in 1951, posing in her own wedding dress she had sewn herself, complete with satin buttons. For those who don't believe in auras, there was the tangible presence of my friend's 90-year-old father – stooped and small now, more white-haired than when I'd last seen him decades ago – who steadfastly sat in the first pew before the open casket festooned with yellow flowers, unbudging from that final view of his wife. It was impossible to leave the visitation and service without dwelling on their partnership, on the idea of a marriage lasting 65 years.

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Thirteen Ways of looking at Kashmir (if you can see)

1
Perjured eye
Perjured I

2
Hindustan ka atoot angst Kashmir
Pakistan key jugular vain Kashmir

3
Purani Kahani
#JesuisWani

4
Mujahideen
Summer of 2016

5
The vale of Kashmir
The wail of Kashmir

6
The right to bear arms
The right to bare arms

7
#MannKiBaat
Insaneyaat

8
The art of crewel embroidery
The heart of cruel embroidery

9
Days of Vishnu
Nights of Curfew

10
Kashmiri Pundits praying
Kashmiri Pundits preying

11
AFSPA
Reason for “Halla-Gulla”

12
Chahe lathi maro/ Azadi
Chahe jail bhejo/ Azadi
Chahe goli maro/ Azadi

13
Haramzaadi ka Matlab Kya?
Jumhooriyah Jumhooriyah

by Rafiq Kathwari, whose new collection, In Another Country, is available here.

by Max Sirak

Everything I believe about love I learned from an animated fox when I was seven. Needless to say, it hasn't really gone well for me since. It turns out, Disney movies from the 70s aren't the best teachers. At least, not when we're speaking about the intricacies of love, romance, and human relations in the non-animated world we all happen to inhabit. Thankfully, it only took me 28 years to learn this.

For whatever reason, the 1973 version of Robin Hood influenced me greatly. In fact, it's the only Disney feature I own. It's the cartoon tale of an oft-cross-dressing fox and his best friend (a bear) as they take down an usurping tyrant (a lion) with mommy issues. There's a lot of singing. And, for some reason, neither the fox nor the bear ever seem interested in eating their rabbit or mice friends.

There's a lot about the film I love. The charming roguish hero who bucks the system and goes his own way speaks to my heart. The emphasis on giving to the less fortunate is a nice sentiment. The truth that wealth and legal power do not for virtue make should be a part of our cultural narrative. Just like the idea that being poor isn't a crime. These are all good messages.

It's the love story that kills me. Maid Marian and Robin Hood. The only two foxes in an anthropomorphic, musical world full of mammals (with a couple of reptiles and birds scattered about). They were born – not only to be together – but to be married. A perfectly matching pair. Soul Mates. True Love. And, at one point, both wistfully daydream about being with the other – Maid Marian, high aloft in her tower, gazing out a window with her chin in her paws, and Robin Hood, pleasantly distracted, absently burning dinner. “Ah, young love,” we hear repeated over and over by Friar Tuck and Lady Cluck.

Before the fated archery contest, Robin Hood says to his pal, Little John, “Faint hearts never win fair ladies.” And, after he wins both the contest and his vixen, we hear lines like, “I can't live without you,” “I love you more than life itself,” and, “Life is brief but when its gone love goes on and on,” are sung or said.

Sure, it's sweet and innocent, right? No. It's destructive and toxic.

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by Christopher Bacas

(Here are “Midnight in Moscow”, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.)

Backstage, old friends were stopping by, bringing hugs, booze and sweets. In an embossed box tied with ribbon, a Kievski (Kiev-style) cake rested on a gold foil base: stacks of merengue ovals held with mortar of the richest, densest buttercream imaginable. One small piece made my teeth ache and fell brick-heavy into my belly. If I could prevent vertigo by opening my eyes, maybe I was immune from diabetic coma, as well.

All conversations stayed in Russian. Through the cacophony, Drum Doctor began to mention the names of American musicians. It seemed he was throwing out names with possible Russian connections. Equating nationality and ethnicity with instrumental skill is a fool's errand, but I offered great composers Vernon Duke (Dukelsky) and Irving Berlin (Balein). He wanted players, though. I added Stan Getz. Drum Doctor looked shocked.

“Jewish family from Kiev” I said.

He waved his hand majestically.

“Aaaaah. Special category!”

I looked around. Pianist never flinched. Another day at the office for him.

Each musical genre collects myths; of origin, personality, prowess and transcendence.They are passed around, misconstrued by dilettantes, written down, challenged by academics, reversed and re-reversed. Phylogeny can't explain greatness nor its' relation to place. Tales about Russian musicians include feats of flawless execution and prodigious memory; gifts nurtured by colossal workhorses while epic snowstorms raged outside their practice rooms. During the Cold War, Soviets paraded one phenomenon after another. Gilels said “wait until you hear Richter”, and he was right. Heifetz and Horowitz got out before Milstein, while Kogan and Oistrakh stayed, the latter teaching Kremer. I wouldn't appreciate how overwhelming their approach was until I heard others play the same notes. Connecting tone and articulation to written music in the moment is a thespian feat. We are what we play, an act that places anyone, sufficiently aware, in the eye of that howling storm.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

Of the 7097 languages in the world, twenty-three (including the usual suspects: Mandarin, English, Spanish, various forms of Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese) are spoken by half of the world's population. Hundreds of languages have only a handful of speakers and are disappearing quickly; one language dies every four months. Some parts of the world (dark green regions in the map) are linguistically far more diverse than others. Papua New Guinea, Cameroon, and India have hundreds of languages while in Japan, Iceland, Norway, and Cuba a single language dominates.

Why are languages distributed this way and why such large variations in diversity? These are hard questions to answer and I won't be dealing with them in this column. So many factors – conquest, empire, globalization, migration, trade necessities, privileged access that comes with adopting a dominant language, religion, administrative convenience, geography, the kind of neighbors one has – have had a role to play in determining the course of language history. Each region has its own story and it would be too hard to get into the details.

I also won't be discussing the merits and demerits of linguistic diversity. Personally, having grown up with five mutually unintelligible Indian languages, I am biased towards diversity – each language encapsulates a unique way of looking at the world and it seems (at least theoretically) that a multiplicity of worldviews is a good thing, worth preserving. But I am sure there are opposing arguments.

Instead, I'll restrict my focus to the following questions. How can the linguistic diversity of a particular region or country be numerically quantified? How do different parts of the world compare? How to account for the fact that languages may be related to one another, that individuals may speak multiple languages?

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