by Matt McKenna

Nobody walks into Get Hard expecting to see a good movie. Likewise, nobody turns to Indiana expecting to find examples of progressive legislation. Still, it's disappointing that Get Hard manages to be so bereft of humor, and it is disappointing that Indiana Governor Mike Pence would sign a bill so bereft of sense as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The similarities between Get Hard and Pence's signing of Indiana's RFRA don't simply end with their being sad wastes of time, however. The plot of Get Hard, as thin as it is, mirrors the buffoonery that has marked Pence's time in office during the run-up to the 2016 election, and the weakness of Get Hard's comedy mirrors the weakness in Pence's political positions.

Get Hard stars Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart in a movie of which producers thought so little, they named it after the film's worst joke: a cheap double entendre that refers to both becoming emotionally tough and forming an erection. One good litmus test for whether or not you'll like this film is if you think it might be amusing to watch Ferrell and Hart repeatedly say “get hard” as if they're unaware of the sexual half of the phrase's meaning. I did not find it amusing.

The film's plot is simple: Will Ferrell's character whose name I can't remember is a Wall Street genius and a moron. Lest you think there is social commentary implied here, rest assured that there is not. Ferrell is accused of embezzling money from his clients and is subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison, a place where multiple characters in the film promise he will be raped. Of course, Ferrell didn't commit the crime of which he's accused, but instead of trying to prove his innocence during the thirty days of freedom he's afforded to put his affairs in order, he enlists Kevin Hart's character whose name I also can't remember to train him to not get raped in jail. In a twist that has implications later in the film, it so happens that Hart's character has never been to jail, but since he's black, Ferrell's character assumes he has. Another good litmus test for whether or not you'll like the movie is if you think it might be fun to watch Ferrell say racist things as if he's unaware they're racist. I did not find it fun.

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by Eric Byrd

Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign is the graspable handle New York Review of Books Classics has given David Townsend’s translation-abridgement of General Philippe-Paul de Ségur’s Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande-Armée pendant l’année 1812, published in 1824. In his original two volumes, Ségur interleaved tedious statistics and technical disquisitions in archaic military French with a vivid memoir of Napoleon and the Russian campaign. The book incensed cultic Bonapartists. A few years after the book’s publication, Ségur fought and was wounded in a duel with another of the emperor’s former aides. No contemporary reader can read Defeat as a scandalous takedown or tell-all. While Ségur did not think Napoleon a faultless demigod – as the opposing duelist must have – he did class him among the Great Men, with exceptional (if fallible) powers of concentration and self-mastery, a majestic (though volatile) pride, and (usually) decisive timing; the hubristic human genius, in short; the hero fated to fall. And Ségur’s view of the Russian campaign as a clash of higher and lower civilizations is really quite chauvinist. Whatever Napoleon’s political overreach and blunders in the field, Russia is a barbarous domain of superstition and slavery. Its greedy lords scorched the earth to keep Enlightenment from the priest-ridden, icon-bludgeoned serfs, and its generals resorted to guerilla tactics because cowed by the hyperpuissance of the Grande Armée. Ségur goes so far as to call the Russians the spectators, not the authors, of the army’s woe.

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by Josh Yarden

The ‘four questions’ are among the most memorable readings in the traditional Passover Haggadah. The answers are not particularly interesting, however, especially if we let them suffice as our children transition to adulthood. Unless we dig deep below the surface of why we ask these questions, and unless we search for new ways to answer them, the exercise of reading the Haggadah is merely about providing predetermined correct answers to standardized questions. Our children may well leave them behind as they search for meaning in their lives.

The Haggadah is a book of answers for a night of questions. It tells a rather limited version of the emancipation of the Hebrew slaves, one that is quite different from the Book of Exodus. It tells a certain story about oppression, miracles and memory, but the rituals prescribed in the traditional Haggadah do not raise—let alone answer—the most meaningful questions we might ask concerning our liberation. In fact, it rather blatantly avoids asking any questions about securing our liberty or grappling with oppression in the future. Those questions may not have answers, which is precisely why we need to ask them.

We can re-interpret the annual ritual of retelling the Exodus narrative so that it can be a recurring act of learning to ask meaningful questions and searching together for liberating answers. Not all questions or answers can serve that purpose. There are basically three kinds of questions: 1) Simple questions are about requesting information. They are the questions we ask when we want assistance or permission. 2) There are more involved questions, which require more detailed explanations. They are the questions we ask when we are curious, confused or unsatisfied with what we know. 3) Then there are truly liberating questions, the type we pose when we have come to understand that the answers we have are the cause of our discontent, and we demand legitimate answers. These are the questions which investigate why things are as they are, how they got that way, and whose interests are being served. They are the questions we ask on a quest for the meaning of liberty and justice.

Let’s ask some difficult questions that don’t have clear answers. The environment, for example, is one topic that reveals our dire need for constructive answers to increasingly challenging questions. Let's take a moment to consider how deeply the theme of sustainability is embedded in the holiday of Passover and really in all of human history.

According to the Book of Genesis, drought and then famine in the region brought Joseph to prominence as an economic planner who anticipated a climate crisis and prepared the nation to withstand it. His brothers later went down to Egypt where food was more plentiful, and their descendants ending up enslaved there in later generations. (Beware of the law of unintended consequences!)

After the emancipation from slavery, experiencing freedom meant enduring life in the desert. The Exodus narrative has several references to the problems of finding sufficient food and clean water, and the return to Canaan was described as going not only to the “Promised Land,” but also to a land of plenty.

Fast forward a couple of millennia, and so many of our parents and grandparents left the countries of their homes escaping anti-semitism and also searching for a more comfortable life in the “Golden Medina,” America – where the streets were supposedly “paved with gold.” The Exodus doesn’t quite repeat itself, but much of our history is about the waves of immigrants looking for safe places where they can be free of oppression, and places where they will find sustenance.

Here are three simple sustainability questions about our people and our planet.

1) What might a leader like Joseph ask in our day?

He might begin by wondering what crises we should be planning for in the foreseeable future so that we can sustain our society in the face of drought, famine, scarcity and conflicts over resources.

2) What might a leader like Miriam ask in our day?

She might begin by asking how we can sustain our resources to ensure that everyone in the world will have enough water to drink.

3) What might a leader like Moses ask in our day?

He might begin by asking how one individual can resist injustice in the world, but he'll have to ask and answer many more questions if he is to bring about any sustainable change. In each case, we can dig deeper to reveal more probing questions and meaningful answers. Whose interests are being served by the current state of affairs? How do we engage the people responsible for the problems in generating the solutions? What is the right combination of freedom and responsibility we need to establish and to sustain a just society in the face of the threats we face?

Remember teenage Joseph, sitting in the bottom of a water cistern, imprisoned by his own brothers. He had no idea that future Joseph would end up in Egypt, where he would discover that he was prepared to lead in a time of crisis. And Miriam had no idea as a young girl that she would be the one to save Moses' life and work with her baby brother to lead their people. And Moses the fugitive had no idea that he would return to Egypt to lead the emancipation of the People of Israel. Until each of them came face to face with the dilemmas that pushed them to make difficult decisions, they were unaware of their own potential to become transformational leaders.

A set of the most important questions cannot be complete if it looks only to the past or examines only the actions of others. The stories of these biblical archetypes and others suggest that anyone might come face to face with a momentous decision in a moment of critical awakening. While most of us fade anonymously into the crowd most of the time, there are countless instances when the actions of individuals shape the futures of families, communities and entire societies. When such a moment arrives, will you be prepared to ask the fourth and most important question?

4) How will I change the world?

Begin by asking yourself, “What will I question?” And demand an answer.

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

We've noticed a strange phenomenon in contemporary political discourse. As our politics at almost every level become increasingly tribal — devoted to circle-the-wagons campaigns and on-point messaging of carefully curated party-lines — the dominant images of our politics are all the more dressed in the rhetoric of reason, debate, evidence, and truth. Hence a puzzle: political communication is almost exclusively conducted by means of purported debate among people with different views, yet citizens seem increasingly unable to grasp of the perspectives of those with whom they politically disagree. Indeed, that there could be reasoned disagreement about politics among well-informed, rational, and sincere people is a though that looks increasingly alien to democratic citizens. Consequently, despite all of the rhetoric, citizens show very little interest in actually talking to those with whom they disagree. In short, as appeals to reason, argument, and evidence become more common in political communication, our capacity to actually disagree — to respond to criticisms and objections, to address considerations that countervail our views, and to identify precisely where we think our opponents have erred — has significantly deteriorated. That's an odd combination of phenomena. Let's call it the puzzle of political debate.

To be sure, the images that dominate the landscape of political communication are mere images. Popular tropes such as “the no spin zone,” “fair and balanced” reporting, “straight talk,” “real clear politics,” and so on are merely slogans. And, similarly, the dominant “debate” format of television news is mostly political theater. However, these images and practices prevail. And they prevail because they are effective as marketing tools. So one must ask why citizens should demand that political views come packaged in this way. Here's an answer: an unavoidable fact about us is that we need to see ourselves as reasoners, debaters, and thinkers; and we need to see our own views regarding pressing social and political matters are the products of epistemically proper practice.

Consequently, any vision of democracy that prizes public discourse and civic debate must be supplemented by a properly social epistemology, an account of the ways in which people should go about forming, maintaining, and revising their political views, and a corresponding view of how democratic political institutions can aid or obstruct these processes. In providing a normative account of such matters, a social epistemology can also serve as a critical tool for assessing our present conditions.

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by Alexander Bastidas Fry

The most commonly used noun in the English language is time. Yet time is nothing more than an idea. It is an intangible concept invoked to make sense of the world such that, ‘everything doesn't happen at once,' as Einstein said. The actual most common thing in the universe is dark matter. Dark matter purports to be more than an idea. It has some kind of elusive tangible existence, yet it has never been held in anyone's hands.

The nearly invisible components of nature such as cells or atoms can only be seen with the aid of tools. If you see a cell with a microscope there exists a physical and philosophical stratification between your perception, your eye, the optics of the microscope, and the observed cell. If you see an atom on a computer monitor rendered from data from an atomic microscope then the layers of complex stratification between you and the atom are monumental. What can we truly know about the nature of things which can only be observed through tools? I would argue quite a lot. Dark matter will always remain isolated from basic human perception, but we can know it through tools or imagination.

Imagine a sea of particles gliding through you unnoticed; this is dark matter. Imagine anything, and dark matter doesn't stop for it. Dark matter doesn't interact strongly with earth, fire, wind or water. There are many particles that have elusive existences similar to dark matter like photons or neutrinos. Unfamiliarity with these known particles doesn't hinder your ability to imagine dark matter: even these particles were not discovered without stratification between human perception and the thing itself. Imagine bits of dark matter passing through you brain at this moment, every moment, because it probably is. And if it is, but it never interacts with you in any way, does it matter?

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Any Street

On a street
any street
pick one
odds are
a taste
a scent
a touch
are enough
to make one
pray
..

On a street
any street
pick one
odds are
an unknown
god’s
absent taste
& scent
& touch
are
enough
to kill
one
.

On a street
any street
pick one
odds are
the love
you know
is
touch-me-enough
to-make-me-pray
.

On a street
any street
pick one
odds are
whys
whats
whens
&
therefores
are pointless
in love
.

by Jim Culleny
3/23/12

by Jalees Rehman

All obsessions can be dangerous. When I read the title “Why America's obsession with STEM education is dangerous” of Fareed Zakaria's article in the Washington Post, I assumed that he would call for more balance in education. An exclusive focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is unhealthy because students miss out on the valuable knowledge that the arts and humanities teach us. I would wholeheartedly agree with such a call for balance because I believe that a comprehensive education makes us better human beings. This is the reason why I encourage discussions about literature and philosophy in my scientific laboratory. To my surprise and dismay, Zakaria did not analyze the respective strengths of liberal arts education and STEM education. Instead, his article is laced with odd clichés and misrepresentations of STEM.

Misrepresentation #1: STEM teaches technical skills instead of critical thinking and creativity

Zakaria writes:

If Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country's education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills. Every month, it seems, we hear about our children's bad test scores in math and science — and about new initiatives from companies, universities or foundations to expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities.

and

“The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity.”

Zakaria is correct when he states that a broad education fosters creativity and critical thinking but his article portrays STEM as being primarily focused on technical skills whereas liberal education focuses on critical thinking and creativity. Zakaria's view is at odds with the goals of STEM education. As a scientist who mentors Ph.D students in the life sciences and in engineering, my goal is to help our students become critical and creative thinkers.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

Human beings are tightly bound by the limits of our intuition and imagination. Even if we grasp an idea on an intellectual level, we often struggle to internalize it to the point where it becomes a native part of our thinking. Rather like the difference between being able to comfortably converse in a foreign language by translating on the fly and being fluent enough to think in the language like a native. Or, as the philosopher Stephen Colbert explained, it's the distinction between truth and truthiness.

We struggle to imagine things much different from what we see around us. This failure leads one in four Americans to believe the Sun goes around the Earth. It means we can't truly grasp the staggering, mind-boggling length of a billion years and this fuels skepticism about evolution. And for science fiction readers it leads to raging internet arguments about whether the authors have any imagination at all.

When it comes to geometry our everyday intuition tells us that we live in the planer geometry of good old Euclid. The angles of triangle add up to 180 degrees, parallel lines will never meet, and the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But intellectually we know we live on the sphere called Earth, and that the geometry of the sphere leads to triangles whose angles sum to 230 degrees, parallel lines which meet, and flight paths between cities which follow “Great Circles”.

Spherical Geometry (from Wikipedia).

Media portrayals to the contrary, mathematicians are human, too. From Euclid until the first half of the 19th century, everyone was on board with Euclidean geometry. After all, that was what their gut told them geometry should be. But then Bolyai and Lobachevsky showed us that there are more things in heaven and earth than Euclid could dream of. In two dimensions there are also hyperbolic and spherical (elliptic) geometry. In higher dimensions the possible geometries multiply like rabbits and Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that the geometry of our universe isn't Euclidean [0].

How can we free our feeble minds from their Euclidean prison and develop an intuition for these new geometries?

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by Paul Braterman

“And if he insists on being killed … then at the end, by the authority of the ruling body, it's done.”

Sheikh Kamal El Mekki, who expounds with apparent approval the law on beheading ex-Muslims, spoke this February at Trinity College Dublin. Maryam Namazie, equal law campaigner, ex-Muslim and prominent critic of political Islam, was, after agreeing to speak in March, presented with conditions impossible to accept. We know that El Mekki's talk went ahead without restrictions despite concerns expressed by the President of the Students Union. We know that Maryam's talk was cancelled, and by the College, not by her.

El Mekki is on video (embedded here; see also here), at an event organised by the AlMaghrib Institute (of which more below) in July 2011, describing how he explained to a Christian missionary the law about apostasy. The missionary was complaining because of his lack of success in Morocco, which he attributed to the law [1] against apostasy. In reply, El Mekki, visibly amused at the missionary's predicament, draws an analogy between apostasy and treason (a justification that when examined makes matters worse), and goes on to explain

It's not like somewhere you heard someone leaves Islam and you just go get him and stuff like that. First of all it's done by the authorities, there are procedures and steps involved. First of all they talk to him, yeah, about, yanni, the scholars refute any doubt that he has on the issue, they spend days with him refuting and arguing with him, trying to convince him. Then they might even, yanni, threaten him with the sword and tell him ‘You need to repent from this because if you don't you repent you will be killed.' And if he insists on being killed that means really, really believing in that. And then, after the procedures take their toll, and then at the end, by the authority of the ruling body, it's done.

“Yanni,” a common interection in Arabic, means “kind of.” I wonder how one “kind of” threatens someone with the sword. However, we are left with the impression that El Mekki would be opposed to recent well-publicised Jihadist beheadings, not out of any objection to beheading as such, but because of failure to conform to the proper procedures.

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by Misha Lepetic

“I would like to understand things better,
but I don't want to understand them perfectly.”
~ Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas

A few weeks ago I went to an evening of presentations by startups working in the artificial intelligence field. By far the most interesting was a group that for several years had been quietly working on using AI to create a new compression algorithm for video. While this may seem to be a niche application, their work in fact responds to a pressing need. As demand for video streaming, first in high definition and increasingly in formats such as 4K, hopelessly outruns the buildout of new infrastructure, there is a commensurate need for ever-greater ratios of compression of video data. It is the only viable way to keep up with the reqirements of video streaming, and companies such as Netflix are willing to pay boatloads of cash for the best technologies. But the presentation also crystallized some interesting and important aspects of AI that go well beyond not just niche applications, but the alarmist predictions of people like Steven Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. What are we really creating here?

This startup, bankrolled by a former currency trader who, as founder and CEO, was the one giving the talk, has engaged in a three-step development program. The first step involved feeding their AI – charmingly named Rita – with every single video compression algorithm already in use, and having it (her?) cherry-pick the best aspects of each. The ensuing Franken-algorithm has already been tested and confirmed to provide lossless compression at a rate of 75%, which is already best in its class. The second step in their program, which is currently in development, charges Rita with the taking the results of everything learned in the first step, and creating its own algorithm. The expectation is that they will reach up to 90% compression, which is really rather extraordinary.

So far, so good. The final step of the program – one which expects to yield a mind-boggling 99% compression ratio – is where things get really interesting. For Rita's creators are now ‘entrusting her' (I know, the more you talk about AI, the more hopeless it is to attempt avoiding anthropomorphization) with the task of creating her own programming language that will be solely dedicated to video compression. There was an appreciative gasp in the room when the CEO outlined this brave next step, and during the Q&A I wanted him to explain more about what this meant.

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by Kathleen Goodwin

At the end of February, Laura Kipnis, a professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University, authored a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” which explores the ban some schools have placed on sexual relationships between students and professors and how it relates to the current atmosphere regarding sexual assault on college campuses. Kipnis is funny and perceptive, and I find her essay troubling precisely because I agree with many of her points at the same time that I find some aspects of her argument to be problematic because she fails to acknowledge overarching problems with gender dynamics among college students. I admire Kipnis for writing about a topic that, as she points out, most professors are too terrified to comment on. However Kipnis does not seem to recognize that female students today continue to feel disenfranchised in comparison to their male peers and that sexual assault is just one tangible way the unequal power dynamic plays out. Ridiculing her students and university administrators as paranoid is counter-productive to a dialogue on college sexual assault that has only been given the beginning of its due in the public consciousness.

I don't feel, as some Northwestern students do, that it is the responsibility of the University to condemn Kipnis's article. I respect the students' right to disagree with Kipnis and respond to her opinions; however, as Michelle Goldberg points out in The Nation, “Kipnis could hardly have invented a response that so neatly proved her argument…the demands for official censure, the claims of emotional injury—demonstrated how correct she is about the broader climate.” One of Kipnis's central points is that conflating sexual assault between students with sexual relationships between professors and students reveals how misguided college administrators have become when it comes to handling sexual issues on campus. While many administrators used to try to sweep cases of sexual assault under the proverbial rug, the pendulum has swung so far that they now seek to regulate relationships between consenting adults.

Which leads to another one of Kipnis's points— it appears that both administrators and students themselves believe that undergraduates are not adults capable of engaging with the realities of the world. Kipnis brings up the example of the relationship of a 21 year old Stanford student, Ellie Clougherty and a 29 year old Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Joe Lonsdale, as reported in the New York Times Magazine in February. The two dated for a year and after they broke up Clougherty accused Lonsdale of “psychological kidnapping” and asked that Stanford launch an investigation into her allegations of his sexual misconduct. It is undeniable that there were a number of problematic aspects of the relationship— Lonsdale was both significantly older and wealthier than Clougherty and had been assigned as her mentor in a Stanford class before they began dating. However, as Kipnis observes, in Clougherty's narrative of the events, “She seems to regard herself as a helpless child in a woman's body…No doubt some 21-year-olds are fragile and emotionally immature (helicopter parenting probably plays a role), but is this now to be our normative conception of personhood? A 21-year-old incapable of consent?”

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Fragments from Firefly

after Iqbal

A candle among the roses
In the garden
A shooting star
A loop of the moon's robe
A speck in the sun's hem
In and out of eclipse

Consul of day
In night's kingdom
Unknown at home
Lucid in exile
Unlike the moth
The firefly is light

***

Song is the nightingale's scent
Scent is song of the rose
Rose's scent is the firefly's radiance

by Rafiq Kathwari, whose book of poems, In Another Country, is scheduled for
publication in September 2015 by Doire Press, Ireland. More work here.

by Tamuira Reid

“The world can't just fucking stop. It's ridiculous. We need to move on from this.” It's a week after the Ferguson ruling and Beverley sits across from me, poking ice cubes in her empty cocktail glass with a straw. I don't like her but I'm trying. There's no one else to talk to here. They're all too drunk to care anymore.

“I mean, like, leave art alone. The movies, TV, sports even. Every time anything bad happens in this country it just shuts off. We need dumb stuff, too. I need my Scandal. And my boys need some fucking baseball, yeah? Not CNN all day. ESPN!” She pauses to pull her long red hair into a messy knot on top of her head. Lighting a cigarette, she takes a deep concentrated drag, as if to illustrate the intensity of what she's saying.

“Every magazine, every radio station – all of it. Consumed by racism and hate crimes. I get it, okay? It's not like I don't care about the people that die,” she shakes her head wildly from side to side, striking an uncanny resemblance to a bobblehead doll. “Of course I care about those guys. But, like, why oppress the rest of us, you know? Life needs to go on.”

I begin to wonder how many crap movies, Lifetime specials, 60 Minutes segments will come out of this newest tragedy. What the profit margin will be. It's perfect Hollywood fodder.

“Watch,” Beverley continues. “Every awards show next year will have some fucking tribute to this. Some stupid montage, slow-mo crime scene shit.”

It becomes clear to me that Beverley is more obsessed with the impact of racial injustice on popular culture than anything else. This obsession seems to be fueled by another; chain-smoking some obscene little white cigarette, the skinny kind the trendy girls smoked in the bathroom of my high school.

“Censorship. Denying the public access to culture. That's the true crime here. That's where it's really at. I turn on the TV and it's nothing but old assholes in bad suits talking about this cop and that man and this fucking gun and this fucked-up town. It gets sooo old after a while, you know?” I don't.

Her voice carries to all four corners of the room and someone applauds her sentiment. “Fuck the fucking news!”

I think about my four year-old son back at home. How, without fail, he will approach any cop — on the street, in the train station, at a diner — and smile, say Hi and Good job, guys. He still believes, without absolute faith and certainty, that those in positions of power are helpers. That those in positions of power use all their superhero skills for good.

I'm in a college dive bar with kids light years younger than me. I swapped vodka for fake beer years ago and sip on club soda tonight. Sometimes the loneliness of my occupation, writer, pushes me out of the apartment and into places like this, with people like Beverley. I feel out of place and worried, worried that that humanity is going to Hell in a hand basket, as my grandmother used to say. Worried because my family is on the other side of the country and I am forgetting what they look like, feel like. Worried that an entire police force let a bullet-riddled teenager lay in the middle of a hot Missouri street for four hours before moving him into an SUV. Where's the ambulance, I remember thinking. Where's the fucking ambulance?

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

WRITING IS ALL ABOUT EXTENDING: When I was a child, I heard the story of the scholar jinn disguised as a boy, who once extended his arm all the way to the end of the palace courtyard to reach his ink pot, thus exposing his identity to his human tutor and risking rejection. Was he that absorbed in what he wrote, how he wrote? The tutor forgave his pupil’s deceptive guise on the grounds of his deep attention to the work at hand.

BEFORE LITERATURE, CAME WRITING: Penmanship was a dying art even in my school days, but luckily I learned to use a traditional bamboo pen at home; forming letters of the Nastaliq script of Urdu in jet-black ink. Layering the hand held wooden board with white clay paste, drying it in the sun, and writing with a reed pen that needed to be filled every few minutes, was messy and frustrating. As I fumbled with the materials, I began to acknowledge the muscles that are engaged in the physical work of writing. Forming letters became a fascinating study of lines and curves, symmetry and alignment. Soon I began to have a deeper appreciation for the calligraphic pieces hanging in the house. I noticed how well the artists conformed to rules and how gracefully they deviated, playing with form to create visual effects that influenced the meaning of the words. In learning to see patterns and variations, I was learning to extend myself, to make imprints of my inner life onto the outer reality of the page. Words had created visual fields for me—allowing endless possibilities for expressing meaning.

AND OF COURSE, MUSIC: There were the sonic fields too, the textures of my mother tongue Urdu, as well as the other languages around me, chiefly English, but to varying extents: Arabic, Persian, Pushto, Punjabi. I heard each or a mixture of these languages on the street, in the class room, on TV, on tapes of Shakespeare’s plays, recited or sung on my parents’ LPs. Words collided, chimed, made leaps across different worlds: from the abstract to the concrete, emotional to intellectual, imaginary to the palpably real. Words became a means of extending experience into expression.

I've learnt that poetry picks up from where dreams get interrupted; it extends our inner lives by allowing us entry into mystique, a space we navigate not only through the sound and meaning but also the shape and form of the written word.

by Yohan J. John

In Part I of this series, we looked at how the concept of information brought communication and computation together. Claude Shannon and the other pioneers of information theory showed that discrete symbols could be used to encode and transmit almost any sort of message, and that binary digits were the simplest possible symbols. Meanwhile Alan Turing and the computer scientists demonstrated that strings of symbols could serve as the inputs to simple machines that could transform them into new and useful output strings.

Information theory arose from the question of how best to transmit discrete signals from point A to point B, with little to say about the purpose of the signals. Computability theory was born of a complementary quest: the study of how to transform and manipulate symbols in the service of some purpose. The birth of modern genetics reveals a similar complementary relationship. Two broad research questions arose in the tumult of 19th century biology: the question of how hereditary information was communicated from one generation to the next, and the question of how an organism develops, starting from the moment of conception. The first question gave rise to transmission genetics, while the second gave rise to developmental biology. These questions proved to be intimately related: progress in answering one was often contingent on developments in answering the other. The overlap between the answers to these questions was recognized in the twin roles of the DNA molecule: it has been described as both the vector of hereditary transmission, and the bearer of a developmental program that 'specifies' or even 'computes' the organism. We will now follow the path that led to the DNA molecule, a path that emerged from the confluence of evolutionary theory, cell biology, and biochemistry. [1]

The nature of heredity

An awareness of hereditary inheritance must have arisen very early in human culture. It can't have been very difficult to realize that the properties of an organism — its traits — tend to reappear in its offspring. Children typically share many features with their parents. Ancient peoples clearly recognized inheritance of characteristics in plants and animals too. Humans have been selectively breeding plants and animals since prehistoric times, gradually amplifying useful traits with every generation. The dog is believed to have been domesticated from a wolf-like ancestor between 11 and 16 thousand years ago. And rice and wheat were domesticated between 8 and 13 thousand years ago. The ability to make use of hereditary inheritance precedes the dawn of civilization.

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by Namit Arora

A review of Odysseus Abroad, a novel by Amit Chaudhuri.

Ananda Sen, the young Bengali protagonist in Amit Chaudhuri’s sixth novel, Odysseus Abroad, is an aspiring poet, singer of ragas, and seeker of the romantic spark in London, 1985. Raised in Bombay but with ancestral roots in Sylhet, Bangladesh, Ananda has been studying English literature for over two years at a university in London—all details that also describe Chaudhuri’s own past. Ananda’s maternal uncle, Radhesh Majumdar—a character based on Chaudhuri’s own uncle—is in London too, in a Belsize Park bedsit for 24 years. Odysseus Abroad is a portrait of Ananda, Radhesh, and their relationship, rendered through their memories, everyday experiences, and responses to contemporary British culture.

Odysseus Abroad is not a traditional novel. It has no plot, no existential crisis, no darkness lurking in any soul; nor does it abound in moral conflicts or messy heartbreaks. In a recent interview, Chaudhuri, professor of contemporary literature at a British university, claimed to have ‘rejected the monumental superstructure of the novel in favour of the everyday rhythms of the day.’ Sadly, in Odysseus Abroad, this feels like the author taking away the cake and not offering any pudding either.

The novel opens with Ananda, 22, who dreams of getting published in Poetry Review, practices singing twice a day, and frets about his noisy Indian neighbors above and below his flat. From the daily rhythm of noises—creaking floorboards, kitchen sounds, a new kind of ‘angry, insistent’ music called ‘rap’—he has figured out the patterns of life of the young Gujaratis upstairs. Though ‘disengaged from Indian politics’, he is ‘dilettantishly addicted to British politicians—the debates; the mock outrage; the amazing menu of accents’ on TV. We learn that his privileged class status in India—marked by a ‘cursory but proud knowledge of Bengali literature’, ‘lettuce sandwiches as a teatime snack’, speaking English at home, ‘a diet of Agatha Christie and Earl Stanley Gardner’ in his early teens—meant that he remained largely oblivious to class until he came to England.

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I’m still dwelling on how ironic all the feverish proclamations
of capitalism are going to look someday.
…………………… —Justin E.H. Smith

Gabriel’s Mad Ave. Apocalyptic Horn

I’m through with dumpster dinners
at the corner of Wall Street and New

I’m so unsold by the Coke sign’s faded blush
that thrusts from desiccated dollar dunes
—an embarrassment

a crass embellishment
stuffed in the cleavage of a spent whore
who promised lasting bliss but ended a hag
with smeared lips and hellish scent

The cyclone’s gone that slew the sacred cow
when gangs of suited crooks blew through
with milking stools to sit beside her tits of gold
with digits itching to draw her dry
with lips pursed to suck her blood
with that singular sort of lust,
twisted as a rusty screw,
that drills down and down
until nothing’s left to suck or bust

I’m done— we’ve lurched too long through
spoiled earth as Gabriel’s Mad Ave. apocalyptic horn
more croaked than blew
.

by Jim Culleny
9/13/14