by Leanne Ogasawara

Madonna del Parto

Last summer, marooned with a large group of astronomers in a remote 11th century abbey in the Tuscan countryside, I found myself growing increasingly antsy. Hatching a plan to break out, I dragged my astronomer off on what should have been one of the great pilgrimages of our lifetime–for as luck would have it, just down the road lay what Aldous Huxley considered to be the greatest picture in the world.

I am referring to one of the paintings on the famous Piero della Francesca trail. To see those masterpieces in situ is astonishing, and I consider the Piero Pilgrimage to be one of the great art historical experiences in the world.

Like all pilgrimages, however, this one was not without its mishaps…. Flushing my phone accidentally down the toilet after seeing the astonishingly beautiful and transportive fresco cycles in Arezzo was bad enough; but then to finally arrive at the climax of the pilgrimage where Aldous' “best picture on earth” stood, only to find it unavailable for viewing (and not just that but veiled in such a way as to tantalize us about what glorious beauty we were missing)– was close to unbearable.

Our biggest blunder, however, came when we willfully decided to skip driving an extra half hour to go see the Madonna del Parto. Yes, I want to kick myself! Located in Monterchi, the Madonna del Parto is an extremely rare (perhaps the only?) treatment in Christian art of the Virgin pregnant. “Del Parto” can mean labor or childbirth–and in the picture, Piero depicts a very pregnant Mary.

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by Matt McKenna

Zootopia’s target audience may be a tad younger than Bernie Sanders’ target audience, but youthful Sanders supporters should nonetheless consider watching the film in order to see a dark vision of their potential future. Like many animated Disney films, Zootopia includes talking animals working together to solve a problem. Also like many animated Disney films, the audience is bludgeoned with allusions comparing the cartoon animals’ society to our own (in Zootopia, institutions are specist like real world institutions are racist). There’s nothing wrong with talking animals or ham-fisted moralizing–after all, the film is for kids. What differentiates this Disney film from previous Disney films is that a young voter–pro-Sanders or not–may well see their dreary, hopeless future in Officer Judy Hopps’ transition from plucky bunny to establishment stooge.

The hero of Zootopia is Judy Hopps who, like young voters in reality, starts out as an ardent advocate for the downtrodden. Though she is but a humble rabbit, a child to carrot farmers, Judy dreams of becoming a police officer in the big city of Zootopia, which is an interesting choice for the name of a city built by animals since (at least for me) the name conjures up images of caged creatures on display for human amusement. Anyway, young and full of hope, Hopps enrolls in the police academy, lands a job as the city’s first rabbit cop, and quickly thereafter becomes disillusioned by her role in the force. You can probably guess the challenges she faces: the chief is a jerk, the sleazy Mayor Lionheart (he’s a lion) cares about his image and not about the city’s crime wave, and the people Officer Hopps attempts to protect eventually take advantage of her naïveté. At the film’s emotional nadir, Hopps falls into a depression and heads home to farm carrots with her parents. It's the classic tale of a kid rebelling at twenty only to go mainstream at thirty. Admittedly, Hopps speeds through this transition much faster than a decade, but that shortened time period may be narratively justified by converting the film’s timeline into rabbit-years or something.

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by Bill Benzon

William P. Gottlieb, Library of Congress, c. 1946.

Duke Ellington was one of the great composers and bandleaders of the last century, and his band was one of the great bands. Touring, however, is unforgiving. Long hours sitting in a bus, meals if and when you can grab them, and gigs every night. And when you’ve played the same tunes with the same cats for decades, well, it can be rough to get up for a gig. Fact is there were times when Ellington’s musicians looked like they were asleep on the stage.

That’s how they appeared the one time I saw Ellington live. It was at one of those sessions held by the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom on Sunday afternoons. This was probably in 1970, 71, or 72, long after Ellington’s prime years in the second quarter of the century. The Famous Ballroom was on North Charles Street, not too far from the train station, and up three flights of fairly wide stairs. It too was past its prime years, but the patrons of the Left Bank, they were always primed for good music. Some were dressed to the nines in their church Sunday best, the men in sharp suits, the women in elaborate hats; and some were dressed casually in jeans and sneakers.

That’s generally how it was, but I only specifically remember three things from that concert. Ellington dressed well and had a line of patter smooth as silk and brittle as glass. He’d been doing this a long time. That’s one. The guys slumped in their chairs like they’d just gotten off an all-night flight from Timbuktu. Perhaps they had. That’s two.

And three: Paul Gonsalves burned the place down with his tenor sax. I forget what the number was. All I remember is that Gonsalves strode out on stage to play a solo, but he didn’t position himself in front of the microphone. He stood to one side. A helpful member of the audience moved the mike directly in front of him as he started to blow. He stopped playing for a second, grabbed the mike angrily and shoved it aside. Not for him the brittle reverberations of amplified sound. Then he started blowing again. The pure juice of the natural human essence flowed from his sax to embrace us in its majesty and urgency.

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by Daniel Ranard

Nearly anyone who tells you about quantum mechanics is quick to tell you how weird it is. And perhaps any science that ventures outside the realm of the visible or the human is bound to be strange. Our universe is a strange place, filled with exotic objects whose undeniable strangeness is blunted only by familiarity: the double helix, rippling force fields, supernovae. But physicists will tell you that quantum mechanics is even stranger. They explain that distant photons may be intimately entangled, or that an electron may exist in a superposition of two places at once. They describe a world not only strange in its particulars but strange in its way of being. According to quantum theory, particles may lack definite properties until measured, and the outcomes of quantum experiments are fundamentally uncertain.

What should we make of these claims? Perhaps we should be deeply impressed. After all, quantum mechanics is not some niche of modern physics; physicists expect that the rules of quantum theory underlie all physical phenomena. And if taken seriously, these claims about quantum weirdness are claims about the nature of knowledge or existence itself. Philosophers and thinkers should take note.

But even though we might be impressed, we should also be suspicious. No definite properties, fundamental uncertainty… what could it all mean? It's hard to imagine how scientific experiments (or any line of investigation, really) might yield such bold claims. You worry that the physicists have taken their equations and their metaphors too seriously. Here it's helpful to borrow a perspective from operationalism, a school of thought in the philosophy of science. A staunch operationalist might say the real content of a physical theory lies only in the list of experimental predictions it makes: “If you build an experiment in this way, you will see result X; if you build an experiment in that way, you will see that result Y,” and so on. Any talk about invisible particles or fields then serves only to package and describe these predictions. Most philosophers agree this view is too simple, but it contains a point of truth: the language and concepts we use to describe our predictions are often a matter of taste and historical contingency. In fact, we expect that our most fundamental physical theories will be revealed as only useful approximations, undergirded by new theories with new descriptions.

Before we take claims of quantum weirdness seriously, we must ask whether the weirdness is a property of nature itself or only of our current description. This question is rarely broached in popular explanations of physics, or even in most physics classes. But the question stands: how do we know quantum theory will never be rephrased or replaced, that quantum weirdness is not just a figment of our odd descriptions?

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by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

The television series Person of Interest posits the existence of a machine that can monitor every person’s daily activities and can then use this information to predict crimes before they happen. While such a system may be way off in the future, a system that can at least identify the identity of any person may not be that far off. Annonymity used to be private affair, if one wished to remain anonymous then all that one had to do was to lay low and limit one’s interactions with outsiders. It was easier to adopt pseudo-identities, the nature of the internet even facilitated this to a greater extent. I should know this because I have been blogging as a Chinese Muslim for almost 10 years now. New waves of technologies aided by Big Data however are changing nature of anonymity with evermore levels of sophistication needed to be truly anonymous.

Even in the ideal case where John Doe disengages from the digital world i.e., does not own a smart phone, only carries cash, does not use any online service etc, others can still leak information about John e.g., pictures that his friends might put up on social media platforms, post something on Facebook, geo-tag one another etc. Locating a person, determining their likes or dislikes would really depend upon how much information their family and friends are leaking about them. In short you are only as anonymous as your most chatty friend.

In cases where we think that we are not giving away any explicit information about ourselves, much can be inferred from the digital traces that we leave. The manner in which we shop online, respond to messages, play video games etc can reveal a lot about ourselves even when we do not want to reveal anything. In our previous work we have observed that it is possible to predict a person’s gender, age, personality, marital status and even political affiliation by just studying at how they play video games. This is just the top of the iceberg; a case in point is the case where Target’s data analytics were able to infer that a girl is pregnant even though she was able to hide this from her parents.

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by Tamuira Reid

Part of being a parent is being prepared for anything. Natural disasters. Snake bites. Broken limbs. Tiny fingers getting slammed into heavy drawers. Occasionally, though, I find myself caught off-guard. That moment when I realize my Survival Guide for Mothers is missing an important chapter.

Case in point: Last week. The walk home from school. Ollie, my five year-old stops suddenly, squints up at the sky, then at me.

I want to know God, mama.

Ok.

Text him. Lets have pizza with him. God like pizza?

I don't know.

But you know everything.

Except this. This is not really in my wheelhouse. I go to church for weddings or funerals and not much in-between. I was raised in a family that half-followed Christian Science, a religion that favors unwavering faith in God and self-healing over traditional medical intervention. Even as a child, I could never understand why someone would suffer through a pounding headache or horrible menstrual cramps or a hellish fever instead of simply popping a Tylenol like the rest of the world. My father was bitten by a black widow one Easter, and instead of going to the doctor, he decided to heat a needle and systematically cut the infected tissue from his arm. While this obviously made him superhuman to me, you are so fucking cool, dad, I was also confused by it.

Being a Christian Scientist meant going to Sunday school, but only if Taco Bell was a solid reward for good behavior. It meant knowing a few commandments, part of the Lord's Prayer. It meant the annual clearing out the medicine cabinets before the “real ones” came over on Christmas Eve, those relatives so devout that our aspirin or Rite Aid cough syrup might actually make them sad.

Later in my life, Christian Science meant losing people. A grandma. An aunt I adored. A cousin who took me roller-skating for the first time. Women who believed their cancers could be treatable only by miracle, not by chemo. Women who died long before they should have.

So when Ollie asks to know God, my immediate reaction is no, baby boy, not you, too.

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by Misha Lepetic

“The secret of my influence has always been
that it remained secret.”
~ Salvador Dalí

Last month I looked at the short and ignominious career of @TayandYou, Microsoft's attempt to introduce an artificial intelligence agent to the spider's parlor otherwise known as Twitter. Hovering over this event is the larger question of how best to think about human-computer interaction. Drawing on the suggestion of computer scientist and entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram, I put forward the concept of 'purpose' as such a framework. So what was Tay's purpose? Ostensibly, it was to 'learn from humans'. But releasing an AI into the wild leads to unexpected consequences. In Tay's case, interacting with humans was so debilitating that not only could it not achieve its stated purpose, but neither could it achieve its real, unstated goal, which was to create a massive database of marketing preferences of the 18-24 demographic. (As a brief update, Microsoft relaunched Tay and it promptly went into a tailspin of spamming everyone, replying to itself, and other spasmodic behaviors more appropriate to a less-interesting version of Max Headroom).

People have been releasing programs into the digital wild for decades now. The most famous example of the earlier, pre-World Wide Web internet was the so-called Morris worm. In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, then a graduate student at Cornell University, was trying to estimate the size of the Internet (it's more likely that he was bored). Morris's program would write itself into the operating system of a target computer using known vulnerabilities. It didn't do anything malicious but it did take up valuable memory and processing power. Morris's code also included instructions for replication: specifically, every seventh copy of the worm would instantiate a new copy. More importantly, there was no command-and-control system in place. Once launched, the worm was completely autonomous, with no way to change its behavior. Within hours, the fledgling network of about 100,000 machines had nearly crashed, and it took several days of work for the affected institutions – mostly universities and research institutes – to figure out how to expunge the worm and undo the damage.

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by Maarten Boudry

Maarten Boudry

A man walking in the forest at night arrives at a house with lights burning inside. Looking through the window, he sees people jumping frantically and flailing about. Poor fellows, thinks the man: they are having seizures, or they must be terribly ill, or they have become insane. What the man doesn't hear is the music playing inside. The people are dancing and singing for a wedding. Gershom Gorenberg recounts this Jewish-Chassidic parable in his splendid book The End of Days on the danger of apocalyptic belief systems. Its morale? If you don't hear the music of faith, you will conclude that the dancers are out of their mind.

In our secular age, many have grown estranged from religion and turned a deaf ear to faith. All we hear is its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”, in the words of Matthew Arnold. Religion seemed like a distant echo of times gone by.

Now, alas, we can no longer ignore the ear-shattering blasts of suicide belts, the rattle of machine rifles, and the shouting of “Allahu Akbar” invariably preceding it. Terrorist attacks dedicated to the greater glory of a Supreme Being are being carried out across the world almost on a daily basis. The religious motivation of ISIS and numerous kindred groups is blatantly obvious for anyone who cares to listen to their faith-imbued songs. The atrocities are justified on the basis of religious scripture and tradition. They are intended as punishment for our decadent and sinful ways, for our refusal to accept the final revelation of Islam, and for our resistance against the divinely sanctioned caliphate.

Godless westerners, however, for whom God's name mainly evokes sweet childhood memories, find it exceedingly difficult to understand the mental universe of religious fanatics. Religion, in the eyes of these people, cannot be more than a convenient pretext for violence, a façade disguising true motivations. Besides, does anyone reallybelieve in those juvenile fantasies about a heavenly brothel with 72 dark-eyed virgins and wine that doesn't give you hangovers?

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by Yohan J. John

Ridiculing the intellectual backwardness of our forebears is a popular pastime. How silly our ancestors were! They thought the earth was flat! They believed in dragons and fairies! And even when they started to emerge from humanity's childhood, they came up with ideas like phlogiston! And luminiferous aether! Among neuroscientists, one of the most well-known cautionary tales is that of phrenology: the 19th century “science” that claimed to be able to peer into your soul by measuring bumps and dents on your head. The idea was that these hills and valleys were signs of size differences in areas dedicated to mental faculties such as “amativeness”, “concentrativeness”, “aquisitiveness”, “wit” and “conscientiousness”. So a bump near your zone of “amativeness” would mean that your brain has allocated additional resources towards the pursuit of love and sex. It all sounds quaint and Victorian — I imagine steampunk authors have taken the idea and run with it.

But if we strip away the old-fashioned terminology, how different is the concept of a brain area for “wit” from the concept of a “cognitive area” in the brain? How different is the idea of a center of “amativeness” from the idea that oxytocin is a love molecule? And is the idea that conscientiousness is baked into the brain any different from the idea that morality or altruism is baked into the genome?

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Search a Little Longer

A version by Rafiq Kathwari
After Sir Mohammad Iqbal

Lift the veil from your face
The stars are witness

Stop teasing
Reveal yourself

Passion is in your heart
Become a healer

Stop begging on the mountain like Moses
The flame is within you

Create a new Mecca with every breath
Rid yourself of idolatry

Observe the limits of this garden
Even if you want to boast

First create the confidence of Alexander
To lust after the glory of Darius

Rafiq Kathwari’s debut collection of poems is available here.

By Namit Arora

On being transgender in India and glimpses from The Truth About Me, a powerful memoir by A. Revathi. It aims to introduce readers ‘to the lives of hijras, their distinct culture, and their dreams and desires.’

Most Indians encounter hijras at some point in their lives. Hijras are the most visible subset of transgender people in South Asia, usually biological men who identify more closely as being female or feminine. They often appear in groups, and most Indians associate them with singing and dancing, flashy women’s attire and makeup, aggressive begging styles, acts and manners that are like burlesques of femininity, a distinctive hand-clap, and the blessing of newlyweds and newborn males in exchange for gifts.

Most modern societies embrace a binary idea of gender. To the biologically salient binary division of humans into male/female, they attach binary social-behavioral norms. They presume two discrete ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ identities to which all biological males and females are expected to conform. These two gender identities are imbued with ideal, essential, and distinct social roles and traits. In other words, the binary schema assumes a default alignment between sex, gender, and sexuality. In reality, however, gender identities and sexual orientations are not binary and exist on a spectrum, including for people who identify as transgender—an umbrella term for those whose inner sense of their gender conflicts with the presumed norms for their assigned sex (unlike for cisgender people). Transgender people often feel they’re neither ‘men’ nor ‘women’.

According to biologist Robert Sapolsky, ‘Gender in humans is on a continuum, coming in scads of variants, where genes, organs, hormones, external appearance, and psychosexual identification can vary independently, and where many people have categories of gender identification going on in their heads (and brains) that bear no resemblance to yours’. Many cultures have granted a distinct identity to various types of transgender people, including South Asian, Native American, Indonesian, Polynesian, and Omanese cultures. A landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2014 legalized a third gender in India, including hijras and other transgender people.

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by Saurabh Jha

The conventional wisdom in the circles I hang out in – pro-Hillary, morally conscious, happy bunnies who pretend to specially enjoy French wine, and opera – is that the greatest scourge visited upon humanity after the plague is inequality of wealth. These people worship Pope St. John Paul Piketty and canonize Bishop Paul Krugman. Not only is inequality bad for its own sake, they say, it actually makes people ill, like medically ill.

Their premise always struck me as being specious. I once took them through a thought experiment. Imagine, I said, you travel in time to the Bengal famine. There was a lot of equality then – people were equally malnourished. The muscle wasting from marasmus made sure that everyone’s ribs protruded equally. The loss of protein from kwashiorkor made sure everyone’s belly popped out without prejudice. Starvation because of poverty is a great leveler. It cares not about gender, caste or religion. It is non-judgmental.

You say to a starving Bengali: “I have a solution. It’ll give you food, occasional shelter, internet and a mobile phone. But here’s the catch. An ostentatious man called Mukesh Ambani will own the most expensive house in the world, and because you’ll always be reminded of his house, you might feel like crap. You’ll live longer, be well fed, but will feel like crap when you see someone driving a Mercedes. Want it? It’s called capitalism.” I suspect the starving Bengali might say “hell yes, please bring on this inequality. I want food. I don’t give a damn about this Ambani fellow.”

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by Elise Hempel

It took about a week to sell my house. The real estate agent came in and took a look around, we arrived at a price, there were a handful of showings, a few offers were made, and counter-offers, and it was done. If you list at a low enough price and use a few euphemisms (my house had “good bones,” for example, and my spider-webbed back porch with no door – ripped from its hinges in a storm – was a “sunroom”), it's a piece of cake.

Then came afterward. My daughter had already started clearing out her things back in July, as she prepared to join her boyfriend in Texas, and I'd begun my own, more severe clearing out in November (dining-room table, a bed? – who needs those?). But now I had to do the “deep cleaning,” the hands-and-knees phase where you discover that your house had all along been merely a roofed dumpster. Now I had to scrape from the kitchen junk drawer an amazing number of somehow-glued-down pennies. And figure out what to do with a thousand Aeropostle and Abercrombie bags my daughter had accumulated over the years and I'd stuffed into the closet, removing them in a compact “closet shape” like can-shaped cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. I had to sift through boxes of tossed photographs, and all of my daughter's artwork I'd saved since her birth, some of it bearing her crayoned command SAVE, KEEP, like an official government stamp, which I'd obviously obeyed. Most of it I'd meticulously dated and labeled myself (“first drawing of a smile,” “first drawing of a smile with cheek marks,” etc., etc.). It took a long time. But I savored my tunneling journey into the time-capsule, the little “treasures” I kept finding, like my daughter's black and shriveled pacifier at the back of a kitchen cupboard, or a dusty dog-chew that had rolled under my dresser out of a snout's reach.

I should have done it as my brother had with his own house several years ago – toss it all into a pod, some storage lockers, and call it a day. But I had time, at least a month, until closing. Each day, I'd leave my boyfriend's house around 10 a.m. and linger at my own house until 4 p.m. I'd eat lunch at my house, take my dog, Groucho, for a walk on our usual routes, wander through the widening rooms and gaze out the windows, sit and write my melancholy poems.

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by Aasem Bakhshi

This letter was written in 2013 as a self-reflection exercise in response to Karen Armstrong's letter which she wrote in 2011 to the people of Pakistan to discover compassion in their daily lives ¹.

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

Earlier this week, I was visiting a small roadside bookstall when I discovered your letter. I picked it up, almost offhand, as if it was dropped in my mailbox. It proved to be a page-turner and unable to resist, I skimmed it standing right there in next half an hour. Needless to say that your earnest and sincere demand to rediscover compassion was not only compelling but also based on universal values of reason and harmony.

While driving back, I kept reflecting on some finer nuances of your discourse from various angles, as well as your 'charter of compassion' and found it necessary to engage with you at a more intimate level.

I should perhaps mention, right from the start, that I am cognizant of all your work. I do not claim to have read each word of it, but I have at least read each and every word you wrote about Muslim tradition and of course, about God. I mention this so you must not misconstrue me for a biased and misplaced prattler; rather, contrary to that, I am so overwhelmed by your desire to see a harmonious world that I thought it necessary to convey to you that you must know a little more about it.

Should I tell you about my favorite work of yours? No, it's not about histories of God or fundamentalism, or genesis of faith-based traditions; rather, it's the one about your own climb out of so-called darkness through that proverbial spiral staircase ². On a lighter note, I do understand that you love to tell the world about yourself, since it's your third autobiography. However, I found it amazing to find in you a person who has opted for religious truth, found it uncongenial, learnt ways to handle that uncongeniality and finally ended up being empathetic to it; that too, despite your ultimate disregard of its metaphysical truth value.

But I tend to digress, since this missive is not about you, but me and the world I live in. I am neither a critic nor a scholar, and not even a formal student of any religion or tradition. I do not claim to have any solutions, neither short-term nor long-term. My motivation is merely to open up and reveal more of my true self and underlying societal being, that in my humble opinion, you do not seem to know too well.

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