by Madhu Kaza

These are the tears of things, and our mortality cuts to the heart.

–Virgil, The Aeneid

A few weeks ago I spent an afternoon at a friend's apartment while she held a moving sale. I went primarily to keep her company, and I spent hours in the room where she had neatly arrayed books, jewelry, film and camera equipment, exercise machines, clothes, pottery and various knick-knacks. Every sale was accompanied by the story of the object – how she had acquired it, what it meant to her, and what a great deal the customer was getting. The longer I stayed the more I could feel a tinge of sadness in the room, but her friends and neighbors lapped the stuff up, seemingly unaware of the melancholy. When one of my friend's neighbors invited me to visit her apartment upstairs, I left the sale for a while and walked into a large, bright, cluttered apartment. I sat at a dining room table strewn with books, wires, a computer, cookie cutters, takeout containers and piles of papers and thought, what a relief to be in the middle of things. What I meant was: what a relief not to be at the beginning or the end. The room was a mess but the objects carried no self-consciousness. They were at home and settled into the ongoing-ness of days.

I wrote previously about things, but I hadn't really touched upon their sadness, which is to say our sadness towards them. Recently, though, I've been thinking about the Japanese idea of “mono no aware” or “the pathos of things.” The sensitivity to impermanence at the heart of mono no aware is exemplified in this extract from the poet Kenko's 14^th century “Essays in Idleness”:

When I sit down in quiet meditation, the one emotion hardest to fight against is a longing in all things for the past. After the others have gone to bed, I pass the time on a long autumn's night by putting in order whatever belongings are at hand. As I tear up scraps of old correspondence I should prefer not to leave behind, I sometimes find among them samples of the calligraphy of a friend who has died, or pictures he drew for his own amusement, and I feel exactly as I did at the time. Even with letters written by friends who are still alive I try, when it has been long since we met, to remember the circumstances, the year. What a moving experience that is! It is sad to think that a man's familiar possessions, indifferent to his death, should remain unaltered long after he is gone.

Because we invest our belongings with memories they inhabit time with us in peculiar ways. They become our companions through life and when we lose them or give them away we feel bereft not merely of the object, but of some span in our own lives that they marked.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

There is nothing more exciting to me as a writer than catching a new place at daybreak— the moment that marks the beginning of a city's unique rhythms, when a traveler may somnambulate into its most secret, subtle self, its still-dreaming, unspoken quintessence. In this sliver between night and day, before the wearing of masks, arranging of words in functional frames, there is treasure to be collected.

I hunt for stray, untamable truths.

I love breakfast made by others, and relish the morning scene as it unravels; some of it predictable (the clatter of dishes, the smell of eggs, steam rising from cups, waiters stumbling about in a half-awake state), some of it appealing for its novelty value (rice porridge with chicken in Singapore, fresh figs with boiled eggs in Istanbul, sweet-bean pastry in Hong Kong) and some of it serendipitous or unforgettable such as keeping the company of pastry and insomnia and Andalusi ghosts in Granada, where my room was a whisper away from the Nasrid graveyard (which led to the opening piece in my book Baker of Tarifa), or watching a Chinese student copy the calligraphy on Alhmara's walls beautifully in his sketchbook, not knowing about how the Arabic letters work, or beholding sunrays as they hit olive trees in Florence— seeing the sky transform, through a window just as it was being washed by a groggy boy.

At the time of sunrise, history is on equal footing with the present. Ancient ruins, imperial buildings, places of worship, modern shops, parks, all bask in a brief romantic glow; everything is equally vulnerable. I've found this to be as true in Rome as it is in Bangkok, Lahore, Delphi.

At dawn, wherever I am, I like to bring a cup of tea, and find a spot —a ledge, a stair, a bench, a rock— ready to become part of a unique panorama that will last for not more than a few minutes but will likely transport and teach me: an otherwise elusive moment of clarity will, for a moment, unveil itself and nourish me.

by Ahmed Humayun

The conquest of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is the latest indication of the Arab world's descent into chaos. Described by Western officials as even more extreme than Al Qaeda, this formidable Sunni extremist army controls chunks of Syria and is marching on Baghdad, intending to establish an Islamist state that will redraw the boundaries of the Middle East. The rise of ISIS is merely the latest development that underscores yet again the tragic folly of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Americans lost interest in Iraq long before the last American soldier departed the country in December 2011. It is remarkable that after having occupied Iraq for almost a decade, how easy it has been to let the entire experience simply recede into the background. (This amnesia applies even in the case of Afghanistan where American forces are still present in significant number. There is a palpable lack of interest with what is to become of that country and South Asia after the imminent U.S. withdrawal). It seems that when banners of victory cannot be credibly hoisted atop aircraft carriers ala ‘Mission Accomplished', then the story simply isn't worth following anymore.

We must reject this amnesia. We must remember what our leaders did in Iraq and follow this story all the way to its sordid denouement, if only because though the United States can leave, the inhabitants of these countries cannot. We should harbor no illusions that the nightmare that began on September 11, when Al Qaeda's henchmen attacked the United States, is over simply because we are in the process of disengaging from Muslim countries. We must understand our contribution to the festering of this problem so that we may instead contribute to its resolution.

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MOTHER WRITES
TO THE LION OF KASHMIR
SHEIKH MOHAMMED ABDULLAH

They tell me
you are buried
on the banks of Naseem
near the Hazratbal shrine,
your tomb heavily guarded
by India’s army.

I tell them
this represents
one of those ironies
history keeps throwing up:
the very people who jailed
you now guard your tomb

And the very people
whose ‘Lion’ you were
are disenchanted
with you for selling out
to your paymasters in Delhi
who now also bankroll

your son and his son,
sexually-transmitted dynasts,
who dare not even sigh
while soldiers shielded by
the Syrupy Secularism Act
silence the Vale of Saints.

By Rafiq Kathwari, Winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2013. More poems here.

by Grace Boey

Philosophy: you either get it or you don't. The field has its passionate defenders, but according to its critics, philosophy is irrelevant, unproductive, and right at the height of the ivory towers. And now, the philosophy-bashing camp can count a proud defector from the other side: Peter Unger, Professor of Philosophy at New York University, has come out against the field in his latest book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy.

Unger has written extensively over the course of his career on various philosophical topics, and his best-known writings include Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism (1975) and Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (1995). As a no-holds-barred critique of mainstream analytic philosophy, Empty Ideas is a continuation of Unger's signature provocative style.

As a former student of his, I spoke to Unger in late May about Empty Ideas, his thoughts on the value of philosophy, Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, David Lewis, and the difference between philosophy, crystal healing and self-help (the answer: nothing that important).

Hi, Peter. To start things off, could you say a bit about your book Empty Ideas, and what it’s about?

Philosophers easily get the idea that somehow or other, just by considering things about the world that they already know, they can write up deep stories which are true, or pretty nearly true, about how it is with the world. By that I especially mean the world of things that includes themselves, and everything that’s spatio-temporally related to them, or anything that has a causal effect on anything else, and so on. They think they can tell a deep story about how it is that all of this stuff really hangs together, that’s much deeper, more enlightening and more comprehensive than anything that any scientist can do.

And so philosophers proceed to write up these stories, and they’re under the impression that they’re saying something new and interesting about how it is about the world, when in fact this is all an illusion. To say new and interesting things about the world — and that’s very hard, things of any generality I mean, or even anything interesting — you really have to engage with a lot of science. And very few philosophers do any of that, at least in any relevant way.

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by Yohan J. John

The osmosis of neuroscience into popular culture is neatly symbolized by a phenomenon I recently chanced upon: neurochemical-inspired jewellery. It appears there is a market for silvery pendants shaped like molecules of dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine and other celebrity neurotransmitters. Under pictures of dopamine necklaces, the neuro-jewellers have placed words like “love”, “passion”, or “pleasure”. Under serotonin they write “happiness” and “satisfaction”, and under norepinephrine, “alertness” and “energy”. These associations presumably stem from the view that the brain is a chemical soup in which each ingredient generates a distinct emotion, mood, or feeling. Subjective experience, according to this view, is the sum total of the contributions of each “mood molecule”. If we strip away the modern scientific veneer, the chemical soup idea evokes the four humors of ancient Greek medicine: black bile to make you melancholic, yellow bile to make you choleric, phlegm to make you phlegmatic, and blood to make you sanguine.

A dopamine pendant worn round the neck as a symbol for bliss is emblematic of modern society's attitude towards current scientific research. A multifaceted — and only partially understood — set of experiments is hastily distilled into an easily marketed molecule of folk wisdom. Having filtered out the messy details, we are left with an ornamental nugget of thought that appears both novel and reassuringly commonsensical. But does neuroscience really support this reductionist view of human subjectivity? Can our psychological states be understood in terms of a handful of chemicals? Does neuroscience therefore pose a problem for a more holistic view, in which humans are integrated in social and environmental networks? In other words, are the “chemical self” and the “social self” mutually exclusive concepts?

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by Carol A. Westbrook

The single most important skill you need to practice medicine is the ability to pass multiple-choice exams. Most people saw their last standardized test when college or grad school ended. No so for us doctors– exam taking continues until retirement. The process begins with the high SAT score required for entry into a good college, then a high MCAT to get into medical school. In medical school we complete Steps 1 and 2 of the USMLE (US Medical Licensing Exam) and in residency, Step 3. After residency come the Specialty Boards (e.g. Internal Medicine, Surgery, etc.), then the Subspecialty Boards (e.g. Cardiology, Oncology). It continues with re-certification exams in your specialty every 10 years. It does not end until retirement.

So here I am, in my 60's, having to sit for an exam in order to renew my credentials as a Medical Oncologist. If you haven't taken a standardized test within the last decade you will be surprised to find how things have changed. There is no paper, no filling out circles with No.2 pencils, and no exam booklets. The questions are read on a computer screen, and answered by point-and-click with a mouse. The exams are given at a testing center in a strip mall, where other test-takers may be fireman, manicurists, or hairdressers taking their state licensing exams. After passing triple security (two ID's and a palm print scan) you enter the exam room, where you will be directed to a workstation containing only a computer on an otherwise empty desk. No purses, wallets, watches, pens, cell phones, or calculators are allowed into the room. It is dead silent, and anonymous. Nonetheless, you quickly adapt to the computerized routine, and the exam itself is remarkably similar to any other multiple-choice exam. As always, there are a series of single questions and 4 answers, of which only one is right, including the notorious “all of the above” or “none of the above.”

Scoring well on a multiple-choice exam requires certain skills. You do need at least a passing familiarity with the material, of course, but just as important is a feel for the psychology of the exam–are they trying to trip me up on this question? Is there a hidden trick? Does the exam phrasing suggest a certain emphasis? Also required is precise reading of the question, and facility with English grammar (beware of the double negative!). The most important skill for the test-taker, though, is the ability to “cram”. By cramming, I mean the ability to review and retain a large amount of detailed information for a few days prior to the test.

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by Mara Jebsen

One of my favorite memories is also a mysterious one.It is 2006, and I am in Togo. The first goal struck for the continent of Africa has just been shot by Mohamed Kader. He’s representing the Togolese team, who are making their first and only World Cup appearance. A near-hysterical roar goes up in the neighborhood. I suspect I can hear roars from across the nearby Ghana border, too.

The sound is the invigorating effect of many groups of fans rising out of their seats in thatched roof bars and in courtyards under sticky mango trees. I run up to the balcony at the top of our house to see what’s happening in the street. A parade of shouting boys has collected on a road near the ocean. They are running and waving Togolese flags. An intense color combination results: the yam-dirt road, the brown boys, the dirty whitewashed city walls– and the whipping grass-green, and primary red and yellow of the cheap plastic flags. The boys march and deliver their holler into the big wide sound. Now one particularly small boy, wearing only green underwear, does not have a flag. As I watch, he shimmies his skivvies down over his dry knees, raises them in the air, and, belly thrust out, waves the green underpants round and round, whooping buck-naked for all he’s worth.

I'm not sure why I like this image so much. I’ve tried, in storytelling, to re-enact (without actually undressing) the fluid motion of the boy stripping and whooping without deliberation. He may have been about 7, and he swung the underpants around like a lasso, but with his head held high, proud.

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by Jeff Strabone

Kristina Williamson is a multimedia visual artist who can find the erotic in a Cheese Curl, the surreal in the every day, and signs of globalization in the empty village left behind. Her photographs span the globe from her small-town origins somewhere in America to the islands of Greece and Spain. Like Byron's Childe Harold in the ruins of the Acropolis, her new book of photographs in Greece contemplates in the contradictions of modernity what endures of the past and what is 'Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were'. Her work alternates between domestic, global, eerie, surprising, revelatory, and beautiful—sometimes all in the same image. On the eve of her book's publication I caught up with the artist at her studio in Brooklyn to talk about the project and her new work, which she describes as 'the accidental surreal'.

Q: Your new book One Year on Kythera is a monograph of photos from a Greek island no one's ever heard of. Why Kythera and what is this strange vision you had there?

A: I've always been interested in rural communities having grown up in a small town. My first exposure to Greek culture was while living in the Greek precinct of Melbourne, Australia during a semester abroad. I was fascinated by the community's efforts to maintain a satellite of their homeland. So it was a combination of these two things that inspired my research into photographing in rural Greece.

Q: But why Kythera specifically? How did you end up there?

A; It actually started with a book called Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village by Juliet du Boulay. It's an important sociological study of rural Greece written in the late 1960's, early1970's illustrating village life on the island of Evvia and its response to modernization. Originally, I had the idea to revisit this same village thirty years later to see what has become of it. However, when I managed to track down du Boulay she refused to reveal the name and location of the village for concerns that it might bring it some 'uninvited publicity'.

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by Emrys Westacott

Some things are simpler than the experts would have us believe. Recently I watched the EUFA Champions League final between Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid. In the build up to the match there was, naturally, a great deal of expert analysis focusing on matters such as the history of games between these clubs, the psychological stratagems of the coaches, the defensive systems to be used, and the potential impact of the rival superstar strikers Cristiano Ronaldo and Diego Costa. These were supplemented with all sorts of statistical data made possible by modern technology. Here's an excerpt from a preview of the game in The Guardian:

“[Real Madrid] have won a higher proportion of their games without Alonso in the starting line-up (80%) than with him (65.2%) in the league this season, but they will miss his ability to break up play in front of the back four. The side have conceded 1.13 league goals per game with him compared to 0.91 when he has been in the line-up……”It's no coincidence that since [Arda] joined in 2011, Atlético have scored more goals per game 1.81) with Arda in the starting line-up than without him (1.56).”

Here's what happened. Costa was not fully fit and had to be substituted after nine minutes. Ronaldo had a fairly quiet game, effectively neutralized by excellent defending. Atlético took the lead due to a rare and hence very surprising error of judgement by Real's goalkeeper, the great Ikar Casillas. It looked like they were going to win 1-0, but deep into injury time Real's defender Sergio Ramos equalized with a simple direct header from a corner kick . (The header could have been easily blocked had Atlético placed men by each goalpost, and why any team doesn't do this, especially when defending a corner in the last minute of the game, is a total mystery to me…..but I digress.) After having had the cup dashed from their hands, Atlético were finished, and in extra time Real always looked like they were going to win, which they eventually did 4-1.

My point is this. The sophisticated analyses of the experts seemed to bear little connection to the crucial events that actually decided the outcome of the game: a goalkeeping error and a poorly defended corner. This happens often. For instance, the 2010 World Cup semi final between Spain and Germany pitted against one another teams with interestingly contrasting styles of play. The pundits discussed at length such matters as whether Spain's intricate passing game would or would not create openings behind the German midfield, and so on and so forth. But in the event Spain won when seventeen minutes from the end their muscular centre back Carlos Puyols barged through a crowded penalty area and headed in a corner. That was the decisive event.

I see examples of excessive sophistication in analysis­ in many areas.

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by Mara Naselli

“However insipid and perhaps superfluous details so well known may appear,” writes Duc de Saint Simon of
his recollections of court life at Versailles, “lessons will be found therein for kings who may wish to make themselves respected, and who may wish to respect themselves.” Saint-Simon claims his formal purpose is to give a robust critical account of the Sun King’s court—indeed he is unsparing in his judgment of the king’s vanity—yet his attention in the memoirs, on a paragraph-to-paragraph level, is fixed on the individual characters at court. His memoirs are more like a collection of portraits, one after another, with thin transitions, and scant overarching narrative. Most interesting, each portrait is unequivocally embodied. Saint Simon enacts for us the dance of court life: the sitting, the standing, the bowing, the washing, the dressing, the kissing, the confiding, the eating, the removing of hats, the donning of hats, the touching of hats, the screaming, the moaning, the kneeling, the whispering, the wringing of hands. Open to a random page in the memoirs: you will find living, breathing, thriving, ailing, moving bodies.

Under the Sun King, everything was seen. The most intimate activities had a public dimension. The design of Versailles itself was intended to surround Louis XIV with his court, to keep them close under his supervision and convey a singular magnificence and power. Versailles was designed as a symbolic and practical instrument to unify a fragmented state. Aristocrats were persuaded to leave their landholding estates to attend court. Courtiers were on display, many struggling to finance and maintain the right fashion and entertainments so as to earn a glance from the monarch. To be away from Versailles risked a rebuke from the king (“I do not know him”) that could have lasting consequences.

The gardens at Versailles were also designed to convey a sense of wealth and total control. The ornate, rigid geometry suggested a kind of god-like omniscience over the vast grounds that extended as far as the eye could see. Landscape architect Ian Thompson has noted that one of the most memorable fountains at Versailles also issued a warning. It depicts Enceladus, a mythical giant who attempted to revolt against Zeus. Zeus punished Enceladus for his rebellion by striking him with a bolt of lightening. The fountain featured Enceladus drowning, with a jet of water from the giants throat thrust eight meters into the air—a clear warning to anyone who might suspect they might tamper with Louis's power.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Bomblet (1937), Julian Tervelyan, 1910-1988; Tate Modern, Surrealism and Beyond.

Display Caption: Trevelyan was living in Paris in the early 1930s when the Surrealists began to explore the idea of the Surrealist object, which appeared to embody hidden or repressed desires. Following the same tradition, Bomblet is at once disconcerting and vaguely comical. The tactile forms, suggesting organic or body parts, contrast with the elaborate framing. It was, apparently, the discovery of a baking tray that triggered the potential for the unsettling object.

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by Brooks Riley

In or around 1970: It was one of those humid hot nights in New York. At a party on someone’s brownstone roof, I was hawking my theory of how the world would end, to a couple of contemporaries I’d just met. It went like this: We would never be able to save the planet from the multiple disasters of our own making because we are incapable of preventive action, only reaction. When disaster strikes we react. Warned of imminent disaster, we try to react. But warned of a disaster at some indeterminate point in the future, we don’t react at all, we merely furrow our brows sympathetically and continue on with the here and now. It’s built into our genes. Now is everything. Someday has no meaning, except to a squirrel.

“Far out!’ said my interlocutor, if you could call him that. Suddenly I felt uncouth, a reluctant soothsayer with egg on her face, a Cassandra manqué. Was that all that could be said about my pessimistic view of the world? Was there no valid counter-argument brewing under the bushy brows of the young dissident I was talking to–or at, in this case?

It was a sign of the times that my contemporaries were activists, pacifists, and also, like this one, ‘passivists’. ‘Go with the flow ‘ was the motto for my generation, and the flow was anti-establishment, countercultural but also counterproductive. Many yelled their heads off against the war in Vietnam, against the domination of big business, against inequality of all kinds, and against nearly everything their parents stood for. I stayed away from these social gatherings, but I nodded in agreement.

Were we for something? We were for peace (‘Give peace a chance’), but as we’ve since learned, one man’s peace is another man’s compromise: Sooner or later a simmering détente will come to a boil again, it always does, sometime, somewhere.

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by Carl Pierer

Often, people don't do a particular thing. Even if they are supposed to. Tamino didn't talk to Pamina, Kant didn't leave Königsberg and Peter Singer doesn't donate all his money (to the point of marginal utility) to charity. We like to take this not acting as evidence for something more. Tamino's silence for unrequited love. Someone never leaving their hometown as a conservative old bore. Singer's “selfishness” as falsifying his philosophy. While intuitively plausible, this reasoning is flawed. It is the lover's fallacy.

In Act 2, Scene IV, of the magic flute, Pamina hears Tamino playing on his flute and hurries to talk to him. But he, undergoing the second ordeal, is bound to remain silent:

“You're here, Tamino? I heard your flute and ran towards the sound. – But you are sad? Will you not say a word to your Pamina?”
Tamino motions her to go away.
“What? I am to keep away from you? Do you love me no more? Oh, this is worse than an offence – worse than death.”

Pamina, deeply disappointed, reasons: “There are two possibilities, either Tamino doesn't talk to me or he loves me. So, if he loves me, then he talks to me. He doesn't talk, so he doesn't love.”

The fallacy is based off a close link between or and if-then sentences, or disjunctions and conditionals. A truth table will readily illustrate this:

~P is the negation of P, so whenever P is true ~P is false and vice versa. We see that for a conditional to be false we need the antecedent (~P) to be true, while the consequent (Q) is false. Here, this is the case when P is false and Q is false. It is important to notice that if the antecedent is false, the conditional is necessarily true. Now, a disjunction is true as long as at least one of the disjuncts (P or Q) is true. Since the truth table entries for P ∨ Q and ~P → Q are the same, we say they are (logically) equivalent.

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by Charlie Huenemann

Generally, in any conflict between long-held, seemingly obvious beliefs and new research challenging those beliefs, defenders of the old beliefs will find themselves charged with sitting in armchairs. It never is a rocking chair, park bench, hammock, or divan. It is an armchair, the sort of chair one finds in venerable, wood-paneled clubs where stodgy old men opine about the world's events more from preconceived opinions than from any well-grounded knowledge. An armchair represents both laziness and privilege, a luxurious class of opinion-mongers who simply will not bother themselves with actual empirical research – the original La-Z-Boys, as they might be called.

Such armchairs – unfortunately, from my perspective – are often associated with philosophers, for those who argue from the armchairs are arguing from broad, philosophical perspectives. These perspectives are allegedly grounded in a priori truths, but those “truths” are in fact little more than prejudiced opinions born of casual reflection. But of course the world has no obligation to pay any attention to what philosophers take to be obvious, and if we want to know what really happens, then we must rise from our armchairs and take up residency in the sciences.

Reflective and informed people will recognize that this is a poor characterization of philosophers, who usually are very well aware of empirical research. One could not find a more ambitious researcher than Aristotle, who is said to have spent his honeymoon collecting biological samples (and no, that's not a euphemism). Descartes busied himself with experiments and dissections. Leibniz knew all the science known by anyone of his day. Kant offered expert lectures on physics, anthropology, geography, and mineralogy in addition to topics in philosophy. Hegel knew his physics, and even the latest research findings in phrenology. Russell and Cassirer published good books on general relativity, and, in general, the bulk of 20th-century philosophers working on matters connected to science have suffered the requisite pains to know what they are talking about – to a far greater degree (I pridefully add) than have scientists who take it into their heads to write philosophy.

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