by Rishidev Chaudhuri

There is undeniably something troubling about the way we use pepper. Pepper is among the most classical of spices, with a history of trade and culinary use that dates back several thousand years. And this history is laden with vast sums of money, world-spanning trade routes, once great empires and much culinary and cultural theorizing. Pepper is also among the most distinctive of flavors, rarely retreating into the background, sharp, pungent, spicy and characteristic of the tropics (where the proximity to the sun brings forth exuberant aggressive flavors in everything). And yet pepper has now been thoroughly domesticated and normalized, so that we keep it on the table alongside salt (very obviously a basic background flavor), and use it in most of the food we eat. Given that pepper is not native to much of the world and that it has particularly difficult and distinctive flavors, this ubiquity seems unnatural and puzzling. Harold McGee reports that the Greeks used to keep cumin on the table and used it much as we do pepper. This seems strange, and the theoretical problem raised is similar to that precipitated by our use of pepper.

Pepper is used ubiquitously but, unsurprisingly given its intensity, it tends to be used in small quantities. This has lead to it becoming invisible. Recipes that use pepper as a primary note are rare and, correspondingly, are interesting both theoretically and aesthetically. The South Indians have a number of such recipes, probably because South India is part of the ancestral home of pepper. The recipe below is copied from watching my Malayali friend Raghavan cook (the Malabar coast has historically been one of the most important sources of pepper, and pepper has been used there for thousands of years). It is a revelation if you're not used to thinking about pepper as a particular and distinctive spice rather than as a background seasoning.

To my mind, the most interesting aspect of this template is the structural role that pepper plays. Unlike in many Indian recipes, there is little chili here and pepper occupies the same place and seems to perform a similar function to chili. Interestingly, pepper has been used in India for thousands of years before chili made its European-mediated appearance in the Old World. It is tempting to speculate that these recipes give us a glimpse into pre-chili antiquity in South Asia and gesture at the structural role that chili found itself stepping into upon its arrival. It would be fascinating to analyze the role that chili plays in South and South-East Asia and contrast it with older Mexican recipes, though this would require time and money. But, of course, the point is that pepper is not chili, and the differences are striking; at the least, pepper is warmer, woodier and more citrusy.

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by Dave Maier

In his recent book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel Dennett relates that he likes to put to his fellow philosophers the following dilemma: which of the following would you rather accomplish?

(A) You solve the major philosophical problem of your choice so conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history).

(B) You write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required reading list for centuries to come.

The wording of the alternatives suggests a common conception of the distinction between analytic and continental philosophers. On this view, the former are “problem-solvers”, engaged, much like scientists, in a collective search for truth. Most of the time they proceed by focusing on a particular well-defined problem in isolation, in the hope of chipping off a modestly-sized piece of truth and placing it reverently in its honored place in the Repository of Established Philosophical Truths. The latter, on the other hand, have waved off the search for truth as a hopelessly naive fantasy, and instead offer provocative readings of a series of canonical texts. If these new texts are sufficiently scintillating, they themselves join the canon to be interpreted by others, part of a continuing conversation with no end in sight.

Although, or perhaps because, it is manifestly unfair to both sides, this account of the analytic/continental divide has proved remarkably durable. Dennett himself has no apparent love for continental philosophy. (From the Introduction: “Continental rhetoric, larded with literary ornament and intimations of profundity, does philosophy no favors […] If I had to choose, I'd take the hard-bitten analytic logic-chopper over the deep purple sage every time.”) However, he is not using this dilemma to illuminate the analytic/continental divide (i.e. such that it is the virtuous former who choose (A) and the self-serving latter who choose (B)). Instead, as he tells it, it is scientists who universally choose (A), “shak[ing] their heads in wonder (or disgust?) when they learn that this is a hard choice for many philosophers, some of whom opt, somewhat sheepishly, for (B)”. He compares these philosophers, not without sympathy, to “composers, poets, novelists, and other creators in the arts, [who] want their work to be experienced, over and over, by millions”.
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by Brooks Riley

We gave them ‘okay’, they gave us ‘Angst‘ (Did they ever!). We gave them ‘cool’, they gave us ‘kaputt‘. We gave them ‘laptop’, they gave us ‘Weltschmerz‘ (Thanks for that.). We gave them back ‘hamburger’, they gave us ‘Frankfurter‘. We gave them ‘showtime’, they gave us ‘Schadenfreude‘ (just what we needed). We gave them ‘zap’ (which became ‘zapp’), they gave us ‘Zeitgeist‘. We gave them ‘rock ‘n roll’, they gave us Recht und Ordnung (not that it’s helped). We gave them ‘Happy Birthday’ (the lyrics and the music), they gave us ‘Gesundheit’ (the verbal amulet against a cold).

And so it goes, the ebb and flow of language exchange. In reality, Germans borrow more from English than we do from German. But this has much to do with ad campaigns in search of short, catchy words to get the message across, instead of the traditional three-or-more-word pile-ups. These days, who has time to read a 34-letter word, let alone twitter it? That’s why words like ‘tip’ (which is spelled ‘tipp’) and ‘okay’ enjoy universal acceptance.

Years ago Volkswagen tried to introduce the word ‘Fahrvergnügen’ (driving pleasure) into the American language in an effective attempt to grab your attention, so that they could sell you a car. You might still remember trying to put your mouth around the word before it slipped into oblivion stateside as soon as the ad campaign was over, and rightly so. ‘Driving pleasure’ is an American invention, one of our pursuits of happiness, and immune to German invasion, although it could be debated who has more Fahrvergnügen hurtling down their respective highways.

Given globalization, why aren’t there more verbal transactions going on? Every language can lay claim to inadequacies and English is no exception. Take the word ‘nonsense’: The German exclamation ‘Quatsch‘ (pronounced ‘kvatch’, meaning ‘nonsense’) is an onomatopoetic grenade that explodes from the mouth in reaction to a blatently wrong declaration by someone else. Compared to it, the exclamatory ‘nonsense’ seems faded, almost quaint: So do ‘ridiculous’ and its abused cousin ‘absurd’. Even ‘rubbish’ is in remission. It’s no wonder that ‘bullshit’ is knocking at the door of respectability.

The German language may have a reputation for exhaustively long words, but when it’s pithy, it’s penetrating: The word for ‘scene of the crime’ is ‘Tatort’, a linguistic slamdunk.

And then there’s the economical ‘doch‘, an invention that should have been imported years ago. I say, ‘The world won’t end today.’ You answer, ‘Oh yes it will.’ A German answers, ‘Doch‘, a four-letter contradiction instead of a four-word one. ‘Doch‘ has an elegant finality about it—having the last word without spelling it out. ‘ You’re not going out dressed like that!’. ‘Doch.’ Try to argue with that.

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by Maniza Naqvi

It's 5.00 am in Frankfurt. Still a couple of hours before the flight is called. The Business lounge is beginning to fill up. The staff is busy replenishing breakfast food on the counters. I keep nodding off.

“What's she called?” The man seated behind her asks someone.

The guy replies: “Soho.”

“Shih Tzu?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey—puppy— baby you're so pretty…yes you are…yes you are.”.

The two guys talk. About dog poop. Soho's owner has spread out a newspaper for her to poop on but Soho won't oblige. “C'mon darling—come on baby—”

The other guy says:” Maybe I can make her go ” I'm a magician.”

Soho's owner laughs “Oh yeah? What kind of magician?”

“Emotional.”

“Emotional? Like you cry?”

“Well, no. I read minds.”

“Uh huh. Okay.”

“Really?” I join in.

“Yeah,” Says the magician turning in his seat half way to look at me.

“Okay read mine. Tell me what I'm thinking.” I say.

“Well two minutes ago you were thinking about the rain.”

The guy with Soho looks at me: “Well were you?”

“Yes! I was! I am amazed! I was absolutely thinking about the rain. I was thinking about the Queen's jubilee and about how the duke was sick…and how it rained and rained….and how he may have had a hand in Diana's death, maybe. No really! See, look here– I was reading the IHT, this article about the rain at the jubilee. And I was thinking about how over there they need to have all that pageantry and uniforms, and colors and the pomp and you know the tiara…they have to cheer themselves up because they have rain….All the time. Rain and they have reign…get it the other kind–Reign?”

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by James McGirk

To hurtle through space we had to live on asteroids; to live on asteroids, flesh and bone were rasped from our bodies. Glass blowers found three cavities in the porous galactic stone and blew bubbles to contain us. Topped us off with nutritious fluids, and pushed us out—

It’s dark. I am the navigator but don’t know the coordinates. Was it a flaw or was it my fault? I don’t remember. We are hatchlings never to hatch. We sip bitter yolk and squirm in the dark. The others turned against me. I felt them plotting, but my terror fizzled out long ago. If I were to die it would poison us all. Instead they transmit memories: a bucket of squirming, limbless, helpless things gnashing their teeth as they die; a bacterium contaminating a sample in a dank spot; a broken shell; a low flame guttering that takes forever to finally sputter out.

It’s getting brighter. Rays of starlight perforate our golden coat. My friends squirm against me transmitting warmth. We twitch with anticipation. The light gets brighter. We droop down a gravity well. Our broth begins to bubble. We bath in radiation. Our broth is scalding. Translucent membrane turns opaque. Gold light turns white. The bubble pops. Crushed glass circles the sun.

A gloved tentacle taps the glass. “One of the cavities is intact.” The two astronauts carefully chisel the globe from the porous rock. The terrarium looks like a marble, fragile blues and green and white. “Did you ever read Goldilocks?” One asked the other, before he unsheathed his tentacle, snapped the glass and sucked our innards out.

by Justin E. H. Smith

1.

Marina Abramović is seeking to found an institute that will bear her name, in the Hudson Valley, which was formed by the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. She has been on a publicity campaign recently to promote the project, including most importantly a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. Please click the link and donate, it ends soon!

On the phone last week (she at a fine hotel in Oslo, I at the Ibis in Bucharest), I asked Abramović about the possible difficulty of carrying over her well-known conception of the performer-audience relation –namely, that in performance art it is precisely this relation that constitutes the work itself, that makes the work happen– into an institution that bears her name, where she is no longer a person standing in one-to-one relations with the members of her audience, but rather, now, a name etched in stone: a person who becomes a building that becomes a monument to the idea of the mere person she once was.

“The institute is not actually related to my work,” she explains. “It's built on experience from my work, and my life.” Abramović hopes that by this distinction the institute will remain centered on experience rather than monumentality. “I like, really, ‘institute' because it's really not ‘foundation'. Most of the artists make foundations, and foundation is something that you actually leave after you die.”

It seems, here, we're getting to the heart of the matter: a foundation is a mausoleum to a person who did something at one time, but of whom the Romans would say, vixit: the perfective form of the past tense of ‘to live', conveying with understatement that by now all the living has been done. Foundations are for artists who can only figure out a way to have lived; Abramović thinks she has found a way to continue to live.

She happily acknowledges that her project is ‘utopian', and that most utopian projects fail. Hers will avoid failure, she thinks, because in giving her own name to the institute she is quickening it with the “symbol of that kind of vitality, that, you know, ego is not standing in front of it, everything is happening in it that's possible, and I'm open to that.”

“But isn't that placing a big bet on your name,” I ask her at this point, “that it will always be associated with vitality?” Abramović is unconcerned. She has a strategy, based in large part on the cultivation of a younger generation of successors. “I… have the very big respect and adoration of young people and the young public,” she explains.

In pursuit of her strategy, Abramović has selected a few young, and not-so-young, megacelebrities who, she hopes, will be able to serve as conduits for her vitality. “I just made a workshop with Lady Gaga,” Abramović tells me, “and at the same time, you know, Lady Gaga has 43 million followers on Facebook. This is a generation of kids from six years old, and these kids now are looking into performance art because Lady Gaga did it, and they are my future followers.” The idea is that after her brush with Abramovic, Gaga is no longer only doing whatever variety of popular entertainment she had being doing before, but rather, now, something more elevated: performance art. Performance art, on this understanding, is stuff famous people do, plus the approval of Marina Abramović.

I personally can think of few things more tedious than to get individually rapped at by Jay-Z, to mention another member of Abramović's retinue, while being expected to make that somber art-appreciation face the whole time. The Black Album is a masterpiece and the artist behind it deserves his place in our cultural canon, but the faces it causes us to make –even if these are the faces of dorky white guys borrowing a bit of phantasmic street cred in the privacy of our own cars and bedrooms– are different from the ones we have learned we are supposed to make at MoMA. This is a social fact, and Abramović's christening can do little to change it.

One danger in Abramović's investment strategy is of course that a grown-up, even a genre-defining performance-artist grown-up, might not be in the best position to predict long-term trends in youth culture. Lady Gaga, for example, might turn out, as I suggested to Abramović, “to be less of a transmitter of the sort of vision of art and creativity that you're hoping than it had seemed earlier on.”

“What do you mean, 'early on'?”

“Well, than it would seem in the present.”

“No, I think she's in a perfect place,” Abramović insists, “because, you know, she came to the museum in MoMA to look at my work, and because she was there all the young kids around her did the same, she left, but the kids stayed, and now they're my public… I have this huge amount of people Googling and asking what is performance art now.”

I'm still not sure I understand by what secret Verwandlung a performing artist becomes a performance artist. This is not the transfiguration of the commonplace, to invoke Arthur Danto's helpful term for ready-mades. This is the diversification of the celebrity portfolio, which only works because the celebrity was already elevated, glimmering, not at all commonplace, prior to receiving the Abramović stamp. Jay-Z is no Campbell's soup can.

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by Akim Reinhardt

I. A Sneeze for All Seasons
II. God Bless You
III. The Poetry of Sneezing
IV. Sneeze vs. Cough

Sternuisso ergo sum. I sneeze, therefore I am.

It defines me. It is at the core of my very existence. It is hell on Earth.

I. A Sneeze for All Seasons

Most people associate sneezing with a particular season, usually spring. For me, however, sneezing is hardly relegated to any quarter of the year. To the contrary, those respiratory convulsions afflict me all the year long. Spring is merely a furious crescendo of snot and burst blood vessels, with all the other seasons taking note and following suit to a lesser degree.

Summer. This would most likely be my annual respite from sneezing if not for my fellow Americans' horrid fetish for artificial environments. Once you move south of the upper Great Lakes or northern New England, air conditioning is King. Indeed, I now believe most people are pathetically weak, shrinking and wailing in the face of an 85F degree day (nearing 30C) as if Satan had finally triumphed and unleashed Hell's searing fireballs upon us.

In particular I look gravely askance upon those who set their thermostat at 72 in Winter and 68 in Summer. There really is no pleasing them, and their convoluted, soulless lives are so far removed from the of beauty of this world that I hope Mother Earth rejects them in the end, spitting their bones back out after they're buried.

My burning hatred for A/C is multi-faceted. To offer just a few complaints, it gives me a headache, it makes my face numb, it dries my natural perspiration into a fetid crust, and in any event, I'm a skinny fuck who prefers to be warm and adjusts easily to summer, even muggy ones here along the Chesapeake Bay.

But back to the point. Air conditioning sometimes induces sneezing fits. Probably not, Lord help me, if I'm just sitting in some vapid air conditioned box all day, breathing particulate matter and contemplating the finer points of a nuclear holocaust. But if I'm in and out of air conditioning on a hot day, perhaps doing some shopping, moving from natural warmth and humidity to the artificially dry and cool, and back again, a sneezing fit can descend upon me rather suddenly.

As best I can tell, it results from the ping pong of fluids loosening and tightening in my head. Much like muscles, my sinuses seem loose and relaxed on a warm day. Walking into some frigid little hell hole instantly tightens everything up. I leave, and everything is loose again, perhaps so loose that it demands instant expunging. The mucus, previously calm and unmolested, now descends in a torrent, accompanied by an onslaught of staccato explosions.

Man, that sucks.

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by Maniza Naqvi

The 50th anniversary of Dr. King's civil rights march on Washington is to be celebrated this week. The bullet points in the news are that Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking military documents and the White House hasn't stopped its military aid of US$1.3 billion to Egypt despite the military take over there and the killing of over one thousand citizens. Trouble is the poor White House is in a bind. Egypt doesn't need the weapons—it seems, it's the American contractors who do. US weapons contractors need the contracts for those weapons. If this aid is stopped, then the poor Pentagon Procurement office will be stuck in litigations for reneging on contracts and US weapons firms will suffer—Who knows which firms are involved and which senator in which State will be held accountable come election time. Fixing elections by changing voting rights might not be insurance enough. Civil liberties must take a back seat to commerce. You can't eat civil liberties. And elections aren't about civil liberties!

As I walk towards the statue of Lafayette on the Southwest corner of the park, I pass by the brick building which is on the blocked off street adjacent to the park on its eastern side and called Madison Place. I can see through to the courtyard, the wrought iron gates are open—a fountain gurgles in the courtyard—it is the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (here). This court, set up in 1982 during Reagan's reign, deals with litigation and appeals on money matters related to veterans claims, patents, intellectual property, tax, and international contracts. Interesting, that this should be the appeals court in such a prime location nestled so near the White House. I hesitate at the sight of the K-9 unit and Security but then I cross the street, go up the stairs and into the courtyard. There are windows of offices on three floors, which look down onto the courtyard, what a lovely setting this is, idyllic almost, with a shaded walk way to the side with tables and chairs: a quiet serene nook where perhaps anyone could come and sit and write, or have lunch.There's a certain whiff of southern sensibility here, a nod to Charleston, perhaps? This garden, the sound of the water gurgling–this discovery, the lack of time that I have to stay—make it familiar and even more special. How peaceful it is here.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

According to my Japanese almanacs, of the four seasons, it is autumn alone which is heard before it is seen.

This can happen after a windless, blisteringly hot Japanese summer, when autumn arrives around the end of August. Ever so slight, it makes itself known by the sound of the stirring of the leaves in the trees–for autumn arrives carried by the wind.

秋来ぬと目にはさやかに見えぬども風の音にぞおどろかれぬる　　　

–藤原敏行朝臣

Nothing meets the eye
to demonstrate beyond a doubt
that autumn has come–
yet suddenly we are struck
just by the sound of the wind
— Fujiwara Toshiyuki no Ason

The great Sei Shonagon also reminds us to stop and listen:

秋は、夕暮。夕日のさして、山の端（は）いと近うなりたるに、烏の寝どころへ行くとて、三つ四つ、二つ三つなど、飛び急ぐさへあはれなり。まいて雁などの列ねたるがいと小さく見ゆるは、いとをかし。日入り果てて、風の音、虫の音など、はたいふべきにあらず。

“In autumn the evenings, when the glittering sun sinks close to the edge of the hills and the crows fly back to their nests in threes and fours and twos; more charming still is a file of wild geese, like specks in the distant sky. When the sun has set, one’s heart is moved by the sound of the wind and the hum of the insects

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by Joy Icayan

It’s a rainy morning in Manila, where sixty thousand people have converged in Luneta Park to protest against the misuse of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), regular allocations to legislators amounting to millions in pesos. The protest, dubbed the Million People March is happening around the country with key rallies in all three major islands. It has materialized following a series of events. Whistleblowers surfaced two months ago accusing a certain Janet Napoles of spearheading the transfer of PDAF money (amounting to P10 billion pesos) over the course of many years towards fake NGOs and fake projects. A friend of Janet Napoles’ daughter leaked pictures of her Instagram account showcasing her lavish lifestyle: luxury cars, bags, shopping trips. Then just a week ago, the country was besieged by monsoon rains which caused intense flooding in the metro and nearby provinces. As always when this happens, residents blamed politicians for lack of flood control mechanisms. But this time, the anger had a new dimension to it – corruption, through the misuse of taxpayers’ money (PDAF) or more commonly called pork barrel, had been allocated not for public projects but to support the lives of the few rich.

Perhaps like any colonialized developing country, the Philippines’ history has been one of protests. From the Spanish colonization, to the American and the Japanese to the protests against our own governments, protests took on a form of slow quiet simmering before finally coming to the fore. During the declaration of Martial Law and its human rights violations, activists trooped to the streets, denouncing the government. The deaths and disappearances of many activists silenced many. It was the death of popular opposition leader Benigno Aquino that rallied everyone to go to EDSA to remove the current dictator in what would be termed People Power 1. They harnessed the same People Power to remove President Joseph Estrada, accused of plunder in 2001.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The camera, on the roof of a teashop, was abandoned for two reasons:

In the winter mist of a Persian garden, the camera had caught a green-cloaked figure.

Then, at the moment a village lorry belched, tearing the song of a Snow Finch into confetti, there were five seconds of static on the camera before it ran out of battery.

Khidr — the “green one,” the wise, the longest-living saint of the road— is nearly impossible to pursue. I know that but I try. Often I’m woken up by the image of Khidr and the fur that shimmers green with him. What follows is an elusive map plotting the mornings I have lived and the ones yet to live. Mortality’s math is a fur map that smothers, so I rise and wander— the house, the street, land and sea.

And by wandering, rub against the possible particles of an answer— salts of the land are pounded desire, salts of the sea melt desire into shape. Between them, a green curtain that lifts and carries you into peace as if it were the planet’s mighty sail.

When the abrasions of the quest cool, I hear a footfall in the clock of my mortality. It is Khidr’s, who drank from the fountain of life to become the traveling sage, the saint of the lost. The metaphors are more real than me, and Khidr, a man of quest, is of common proportions and immeasurable grace.

I look for him in library lobbies, bazaars, cafes, festivals and conferences, on ferries and trains— all desolate places. Mortality’s helmeted shadow lengthens on my door. I recall that Alexander the Great wanted to conquer death after he had conquered the world. More fixed on finding the elixir of life than recognizing the journey itself as the elixir, he lost his way. When he lay dying he is said to have instructed his men to open his palms for all to see that he was leaving empty-handed; Khidr found the ancient fountain Aab e hayaat while quietly helping other children of the road find themselves. To get to the rest of the story, you must slowly climb the rickety ladder of wisdom.

The ladder is made of millions of weak magnets. I have yet to reach there but I hear the magnets are the voices of elders— the same voices we become adept at subduing.

The lorry has brought tourists to the teashop. Some are here for tea and sweets, some will buy postcards of the garden and pet the cats. Some know they are lost. They will keep their ear to the wall for broken songs, will strain to see through the mist.

Built by Thought

all that we are arises with our thoughts,
the Dhammapada says,
with our thoughts we make the world

………. one, tour the foundation
………. scraping down it’s roughness
………. with the edge of a hammer head
………. dissing the mason who left behind a lumpy job
………. who forgot what a trowel is for
………. who was halfway home already when he bent into his forms
………. smoothing like a dilettante, fatigue calling the shots,
………. the day’s dregs, the ache in his legs

with our thoughts we make the world

………. two, eyeball the foundation top
………. to get a handle on what he’s up against
………. noting bulges humps and dips, or not—
………. with luck he’s been left the work of a perfectionist,
………. a Michelangelic cement mechanic
………. doing god’s work as he smoothed loose Portland
………. to a chalkline while in the background,
………. the symphonic smell of oil-soaked wood
………. played to a concrete vibrator’s percussive drill
………. driving trapped air from aggregate,
………. time and chemistry turning wet concrete to stone
………. upon which a carpenter will set a sill

all that we are arises through our thoughts

………. three, set the sill straight to lines struck on the top of the wall
………. parallel and square and fix with bolts

the world is made with thought

………. four, make cycles to the lumber pile grabbing two at a time
………. snap to shoulder and carry over sun-baked soil raising dust
………. until the need for sweat and beams has been fulfilled
………. and the house is framed by god’s good must

all that we are by thought arises, says the Dhammapada.
we make the world with thoughts

………. thus a house, conceived and brought about
………. by hammer blows in the skull of a carpenter
………. driving nails through a sawyer’s vision of finished joists
………. its walls and roof arranged in architectural imagination, arises

………. because, as the Dhammapada says,
………. the world is brought about by thought

with our thoughts the world arises

………. when you think about it (as the verse apprises
………. and Buddha taught)
………. our home —our world, is built by thought
.

by Jim Culleny
8/16/13

by Liam Heneghan

1. On 16 June 1904 before leaving his home at 78 Eccles Street, Dublin, Leopold Bloom sat and took one of most momentous and leisurely shits in literature. Joyce reported: “Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper.” Bloom browsed a while, then “midway, his last resistance, yielding he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly, as he read.” A significant portion of those people from whom I recently solicited information on their favorite sitting places side with Bloom on this one. They confide this seated pleasure as if it was their secret alone. My father, in contrast, claims his favorite place to sit was beside the Minister for Education in the Irish Dail (parliament) during question time. My mother’s sitting drinking coffee in front of The Colosseum. Mine is on the Old Kenmare Road, near Killarney, my back against a rock, facing the mountains, bog cotton fidgeting,a stream murmuring in the middle distance.

2. Dr Dov Sikirov, an Israeli internist, studied the straining forces applied by 28 healthily defecating volunteers when sitting versus squatting. The defecators were equipped with stop watches and were asked to subjectively assess the intensity of their efforts. Each volunteer recorded six shits, producing data on a grand total of 168 stools. All metrics indicated that sitting required the most excessively forceful evacuations. The reason for this is connected to the human anorectal angle, measured between the longitudinal axis of the anal canal and the posterior rectal line. At rest the angle is typically 90°; sitting keeps us in “continence mode” whereas squatting reduces the angle for a smoother launch. Dr Sikirov holds a patent for a Toilet device (US 7962973 B2) designed to facilitate defecation in a natural squatting posture over a conventional toilet bowl. Others recommend elevating the feet on a small stool.

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by Jalees Rehman

The “Reclaim Scientism” movement is gaining momentum. In his recent book “The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions“, the American philosopher Alexander Rosenberg suggests that instead of viewing the word “scientism” as an epithet, atheists should expropriate it and use it as a positive term which describes their worldview. Rosenberg also provides a descriptive explanation of how the term “scientism” is currently used:

Scientism — noun; scientistic — adjective.

Scientism has two related meanings, both of them pejorative. According to one of these meanings, scientism names the improper or mistaken application of scientific methods or findings outside their appropriate domain, especially to questions treated by the humanities. The second meaning is more common: Scientism is the exaggerated confidence in the methods of science as the most (or the only) reliable tools of inquiry, and an equally unfounded belief that at least the most well established of its findings are the only objective truths there are.

Rosenberg's explanation of “scientism” is helpful because it highlights the difference between science and scientism. Science refers to applying scientific methods as tools of inquiry to collect and interpret data, whereas “scientism” refers to cultural and ideological views promoting the primacy or superiority of scientific methods over all other tools of inquiry. Some scientists embrace scientistic views, in part because scientism provides a much-needed counterbalance to aggressive anti-science attitudes that are prevalent on both ends of the political spectrum and among some religious institutions. However, other scientists are concerned about propping up scientism as a bulwark against ideological science-bashing because it smacks of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Science is characterized by healthy skepticism, the dismantling of dogmatic views and a continuous process of introspection and self-criticism. Infusing science with ideological stances concerning the primacy of the scientific method could undermine the power of science which is rooted in its willingness to oppose ideological posturing.

As a scientist who investigates signaling mechanisms and the metabolic activity of stem cells, I am concerned about the rise of some movements that fall under the “scientism” umbrella, because they have the possibility to impede scientific discovery. Scientific progress relies on recognizing the limitations and flaws in existing scientific concepts and refuting scientific views that cannot be adequately explained by newer scientific observations. An exaggerated confidence in the validity of scientific findings could stifle such refutations. For example, some of the most widely cited scientific papers in the field of stem cell biology cannot be replicated, but they have had an enormous detrimental impact on the science and medicine, in part because of an exaggerated faith in the validity of some initial experiments.

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by Misha Lepetic

“The whole arrangement is as cozy and comfortable as the
front basement dining room of a first-class city residence.”
~ Scientific American, 1870

Is there anything that is not deserving of disruption by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs? Last week the world came to understand that in addition to pretty much everything else, high-speed rail is heading for a makeover. The irrepressible Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, unveiled, in a somewhat anticlimactic press conference, what is essentially a giant pneumatic tube for people. Also known as the Hyperloop, it intends to shoot people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in something like 35 minutes, at a top speed of nearly 800 miles per hour. Remarkably, Musk declared that he has no intention to build the thing; as John Oliver said on the Daily Show, “That's like saying ‘Hey, you know what we should do? Find a vaccine for cancer…Someone get on that! I'm just the ideas man.'” I suppose this is the flipside of what Musk generously termed the “open source” nature of the project. However, the proposal is worth examining both for its implicit attitudes towards what is being designed, and what the real purpose of the Hyperloop might be.

Once Musk had finally opened the kimono, the critics naturally pounced. It's easy to dish on a multi-billion-dollar design proposal that is all of 57 pages, and contains such breezy gems as: “short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where things get tricky” (p3). Tricky, indeed.

But it's not so much the technology, or Musk's indifference to building it, that is at issue here. Most of this has been developed and is fairly uncontroversial. In fact, the idea of using some combination of air or vacuum to propel people through tubes was successfully prototyped back in the 1870s. Of course, the issue of scale will certainly produce its own set of challenges, but this will arrive in due time. Nor is the cost “where things get tricky,” either: even though critics have called out the $6bn price tag as laughably low, since when has an infrastructure project ever been priced realistically?

What is more interesting to me is the way people themselves are considered in the design proposal.

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by Maniza Naqvi

A woman, her cart of belongings next to her, sits on a park bench, feeding the pigeons, squirrels and ducks. She throws bread crumbs to them, and calls out in a voice, cured by cigarettes and gin: “Have a nice day working for the war! You know we all work for the war! Even these pigeons are eating off the war!” She must be seventy, she wears a string of pearls, a checkered white and blue gingham dress, her eyes are bright blue, her hair silver and long, her skin tanned and weathered. I stare at her, for a moment I think I know her and then I move on.

In front of the White House, another diaspora pleads and protests against a repressive regime, as if the White House were a temple, for such things. Helmeted curious tourists whoosh by on their Segways. A few days earlier, it was the Egyptian diaspora, here, demanding that the White House recognize the ouster of Morsi's government by the military as a coup d'etat. But this prime temple, the White House, has maintained a monumental Sphinx like silence on this term, surrounded as it is, perhaps, by so many edifices to Generals. Now over one thousand Egyptian protesters are dead at the hands of their military. Who manufactured the bullets, guns and gas? But there are balls and chains that stop the White House from breaking with its tradition of supporting the military in Egypt—weapons sales from US companies based on vouchers considered as aid to Egypt. This is the way the world is organized, trapped like insects in honey, unable to resist the viscosity of an elaborate system of commerce, war and aid: vouchers as aid to militaries overseas to purchase from the weapons industry —and subsidies to the food industry for surplus maize as aid to the impoverished citizenry of those places overseas.

I look at the sculpture of General Lafayette at the Southeast corner of the park, at whose base a statue of a woman, half crawling half naked, reaches up to him to hand him a sword: Lady Liberty, I presume.

Even so, there is another protest—a monumental piece de resistance —in fact, an act of supreme resistance installed, quite literally, in its own back yard.

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by Mara Jebsen

First day of May, and the roses on my block
all boiled into bloom, as if following a summons–
water-logged and lewd they nodded as I passed
and I wanted to touch them, but didn't have time–
Then I watched a rat pull an entire poppy-seed bagel
along subway tracks. He kept falling. I'd never seen
a rat so happy. Give us this day
our daily bread, I thought. But then came the next part:
something about forgiveness and daily
trespasses. When I was a kid, I found it silly. Only once
I'd trespassed on the way to school-drawn onto private
property– by roses, in fact–it was a rich person's garden
In Philadelphia. My mother had warned me
not to take the back-paths, but that's where I'd found
a secret city–whole shadow-alleys crammed with azaeleas
crocuses, roses, one actual
No Trespassing sign. It did not strike me
as bad to be there. It seemed a strange thing for God
to fuss about. Once, in a period after my college years,
I could not find a job and it made me weep. When I came home
I thought to myself: I am lost. I'm lost. In a big fat
onion. No one can find me
here. It is a wonderful thing to be in
the right place; to trust the arrival of daily
bread, tossed by some invisible
hand. After work, I saw a man
with his pants around his thighs
rest his bare bottom
on the warm concrete. His flesh was loose
and wasting; his head lolled forward like a rose.
I could not see his face. He was dreaming on the steps
of the the public library. I have been lately feeling
very grateful, as if all were falling
into place. May is the month of the possible,
of roses and bread.
Forgive me my daily trespasses.

by Omar Ali

The first thing that strikes you on landing in Pakistan after a few years is how much more “modern” it is and how dramatically (and frequently, painfully) it is changing with every passing day. One is reminded that Pakistan is as much a part of “rising Asia” as India, Bangladesh or Thailand and is not all about terrorists, conspiracy theories, Salafist nutjobs or the clash of civilizations. But since more qualified people are writing about the economics of rising Asia, the destruction of the environment, the breakdown of traditional society, the future of the planet, and the meaning of life, I will try not to step too much on their turf. And since there are countless articles (and more than one famous book) detailing the Westernized elite’s view of how the underclass lives and dies in rising Asia, I will not intrude too far on that well-trodden terrain either. Instead, without further ado, here are my personal and entirely anecdotal observations from 3 weeks in Pakistan.

1. The uncertainty is real and deep. Not only are people unsure about what may happen next, they are unsure about how uncertain they are! Someone can start off by saying life will go on, it will probably be more of the same, things will slowly get better but there will be no big sudden transformation. Then, as the conversation proceeds, report that he (or she) is afraid it’s all going to fall apart next year in one big apocalyptic disaster. A few minutes later, the same person confidently assures you that we are about to turn the corner and Pakistan will be the next China (or at least, the next Chinese colony, which is pretty much the same thing). If asked which of these three theories (more of the same, impending disaster or turning the Chinese corner) he thinks is more likely, he seems genuinely surprised to learn that he has just confidently predicted three different outcomes. This seemed like a new trend. Different people used to have different theories about what may come next but now the same person has many different theories and seems equally unsure about all of them. It did cross my mind that maybe this happens everywhere but is just more noticeable here. But the fact remains, it was more noticeable this time than it has ever been in the past.

2. “Real life” economic calculations so consistently trump ideology that one can be excused for starting to believe in the crudest forms of Marxism. Of course, no one I met actually believes in crude Marxism because the people I met were anything but crude. A number of them claimed to be Marxist, but mostly in the latest postcolonial postmodern post-industrial sort of way. Anyway, coming back to “real life” in Pakistan: Islamists and anti-Islamists seem to run very similar (and similarly profitable) schools and colleges all over Pakistan. Friends who were in the Islamic student parties and friends who led their leftist opponents and battled on the streets with club and guns, now run the same private clinics and hospitals and take the same pharmaceutical junkets. Their children go to the same colleges and take the same Cambridge and SAT examinations to go to the same elite institutions of higher education in the developed world (of course, a world that now includes Shanghai and Singapore in addition to New York and London). They start businesses, launch careers and file patents the same way, though the Islamists all say Allah Hafiz and the leftists still resist by saying Khuda Hafiz. In short, capitalism is thriving. But the environment and social harmony are not. The water is literally undrinkable all across Pakistan. No one can drink tap water and avoid typhoid or hepatitis, but even if you only drink genuine Nestle bottled water, your dishes are still washed in tap water, your veggies are grown in raw sewage and your milk may be mixed with it. This probably sounds like typical expat griping, but this was the universal opinion of every doctor I met. Public health is a nightmare and since an unhealthy proportion of public intellectuals is either waiting for Mao or dreaming about the caliphate (see below), no one seems to be able to fix mundane things like water and sewage.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Cigarette smoking is an insidious and on-going public health disaster. If a new virus were killing as many people – more than 400, 000 Americans each year – there'd be widespread panic. Yet smoking-related deaths and disease garner little of the public's attention.

Perhaps we reason that smokers deserve the consequences of their actions because their habit is a choice. But according to the American Cancer Society, almost 90% of adult smokers take up the habit before the age of 18. Adolescents aren't known for their level headedness and a lifetime of addiction seems a harsh penalty for a bad teenage decision.

Tobacco advertising is an important influence on teens' smoking-related decisions. We like to believe that we make free choices as consumers, but the tobacco industry, which better appreciates how impressionable we really are, spends 8 to 10 billion dollars per year on marketing in the US alone. And it works. The CDC acknowledges that there is evidence of a causal relationship between advertising and tobacco use by young people. Studies confirm that teens are exposed to cigarette advertising and that these ads do increase their desire to smoke.

We would never allow ads to feature cartoon characters encouraging kids to drink toxic household cleaners; but for some reason, when it comes to smoking, we do tolerate the marketing of toxic substances to young people. Tobacco advertising will predictably influence teens' behaviors and many of the new smokers it creates will develop serious or fatal disease. The marketing of cigarettes is essentially criminal and it isn't those who succumb to its influence who deserve to be punished. Today's youngsters need protection from the sinister tactics of the tobacco industry. A complete ban on advertising would be ideal, but doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. The CDC offers suggestions on how to reduce the influence of these ads on teens, which may be especially useful to parents.

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