by Hari Balasubramanian

I’ve spent twenty-five years in a branch of applied mathematics called operations research; I’ve published papers and taught graduate engineering courses on probability, statistics, and optimization. But even with so much exposure to numbers and quantitative reasoning, I’ve never felt comfortable with math. That might sound like false modesty but it’s not: it’s the truth!

It’s been like this for as long as I can remember. In high school, I dreaded questions where different-colored marbles were drawn randomly from opaque jars. Derivatives and integrals in college courses were equally incomprehensible: I did them mechanically, through rote learning, not knowing why they were being calculated or what they meant. These days I am more familiar with notation, but it’s still not easy. Papers in my field are so crowded with sets and subsets, exponents and logarithms, theorems and lemmas, that I tend to give up very quickly.

My academic colleagues, friends, and some of my students, in contrast, seem far more comfortable. They walk through notation like they are reading prose and seem to grasp ideas much faster than I do. This leads to comical situations where I end up nodding sagely in meetings where somebody is explaining an algorithm or an equation, even when I am not getting it. This nodding reflex, I realize, hides certain fears: the fear of accepting to others how little one knows, or the fear of interrupting a conversation with too many naive clarifications.

Mathematica, a recent book by David Bessis (not to be confused with the software of the same name!), spoke directly to my experience. I finally understood why I feel the way I do. Bessis is a mathematician and I was a bit apprehensive about starting the book. But from the very first pages, I was drawn to his engaging and sincere tone. It felt like a conversation. Anyone, especially those who fear math, can draw solace and inspiration from the book. Indeed, the content is so unusual at times – there’s advice on how to remember one’s dreams, visualize the details of a room from a different vantage point (the ceiling, for instance), and discover our latent ability to echolocate – that it can feel quite tangential to its main theme. But that is precisely the point. Mathematics is not what it appears to be. Read more »

by David Winner

Unusual circumstances have given me an odd relationship with bodies, with nakedness.  My father wouldn’t have been caught dead at a nude beach and would have been utterly perplexed if anyone described him as a nudist but tended to walk around the top floor of our Charlottesville home with his lower half exposed.  Which only made me all the more modest about my own body until a coop lottery landed me in a nudist dorm at Oberlin College where suddenly boy and girl bodies were staring me in the face. Decades later, in my thirties, my friend, Louis Lucca, started driving me out to Jersey to the gay end of Sandy Hook’s nude beach where all sort of young, old, ugly, pretty physiques presented themselves to me.

But this writing is also about a very different body, a very old woman’s, that of my Great Aunt Dorle, who died in 2002 at 101.

I remember her old fashioned New York accent, right out of 1930’s movies. I remember the tiny grey hairs that peeked out from her upper lip, the few remaining teeth, the halitosis that was comforting in its familiarity, in its organic assurance that she was still with us. But I also recall her body. When those we love near the ends of their lives, sometimes we encounter their physical selves. My father’s was unfortunately already all too familiar, but I can’t forget his small, pale, wrinkled buttocks peering out from hospital gowns, nor my father-in-law’s thin haggard form in only underpants, and Dorle’s long, thin breasts springing like arms from her torso when I would undress her for bed.

When I was a child, Dorle was in her seventies and hardly seemed old. A publicist, a record producer, a thrower of enormous cocktail parties, she only seemed to age when her husband, Dario, died in 1980. Having recently been introduced to death – my two grandfathers and now Dario – I began to think that Dorle’s might be in the wings, but by the time of the memorial concert for Dario six months later, she’d rebounded, comforting a weeping Leonard Bernstein but back to being unflappable herself. Read more »

Plastic rose among a pile of assorted trash at the side of a road in Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Akim Reinhardt

Medieval historians hate it, don’tcha know, when people talk about the Dark Ages. Scholars haven’t used the term in decades, eschewing it as an unfair and inaccurate description of 500–1000 years of European history, give or take. The Middle Ages weren’t just filth, poverty, violence, and ignorance, historians protest. They were actually a series of eras that featured the development of many knowledges and cultural innovations!

As someone who studies and teaches Native American history, I’m like: Hold my beer. You wanna talk about historical misperceptions unfairly miscasting regions and peoples as backwards, impoverished, and violent? You can’t even imagine. The Indigenous Americas featured numerous wealthy, art-laden empires. Large, orderly, planned Indigenous cities made even early modern European cities seem the filthy, disease-ridden, shambolic wreck by comparison. And all of it erased from popular historical memory so that in the aftermath of violent invasion, the colonial consciousness can be eased with lies about primitive savages.

But whether histories are erased and ignored, like those of Indigenous empires, or studied to the point of saturation, like much of European history, the truth is we can only imagine the past. We can never relive it. Even if it is recent and filmed, we can never be there, we can never participate. And even if we were there, even if we did participate and remember, memories aren’t as real as we think; they are reconstructions. Not merely subjective, memories are also limited and faulty.

And thus, the past always has at least one thing in common with the future. It must be imagined.

Was this time and place a dark age? Is a dark age coming? Look forward or back, we cannot know for sure. And anyway, what do we mean by “dark age.” Perhaps something about pervasive ignorance, the corruption of truth, and great difficulties in overcoming fallacies? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Eric Feigenbaum

In 1965, Singapore’s Founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew corrected an Australian news reporter:

“I am not in fact Chinese. I am Malaysian. I am by race Chinese. I am no more Chinese than you are an Englishman.” He refined the example on other occasions, eventually saying he was “no more Chinese than President Kennedy was an Irishman”.

Like his examples, Lee grew up speaking English – it was a first language for him along with Malay.

In those days, it was far from clear English would continue as a dominant language in the countries spun out of British Malaya, let alone that it would later create an unexpected cascade of successes for Singapore.

One of the pressing issues of Singapore’s early days was the cultural tension related to choosing the fledgling country’s language. The 500 square kilometer island was nearly empty when the British claimed it in the 1820’s, turning it into an open-port city with a very loose immigration policy. When considering the issue in 1965, few if any imagined their choice of language could become an economic asset of untold dimensions.

Even prior to Singapore’s inception, the question of a national language among the major three ethnicities – Chinese, Malay and Tamil Indian – was charged. It highlighted just how much Singapore was a land of immigrants – migrants really – who left their home countries in search of work and opportunity. There was no “Singaporean” ethnicity – just a collection of people who called Singapore home.

Much agonizing led to the Singaporean version of the Connecticut Compromise. Singapore would make Mandarin, Malay, Tamil and English all official, legal languages that could be used in court or on legal documents. Yet it would also make English – the language of no one ethnicity – the working and educational language of Singapore. One common tongue everyone could share. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self portrait with Shutter and Tree, Merida, March 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by R. Passov

There’s a small, interesting book store in NYC, small enough for a pixie-of-a-lady and about 200, mostly rare, mostly old, and almost exclusively, cookbooks. The store is near my favorite bar and that’s all I’m going to say.

I first wandered into that shop while trying to walk off a handful of afternoon beers (at that favorite bar). I’ve since gone back many times, usually in search of quirky presents such as a picture book, made in the late 1970’s that contains a replica of every label for every bottle of Italian wine that had been offered in the prior one hundred years – exactly what to get an Italian friend who makes his own pasta and wine. For another close friend I procured a first edition of Diet and Reform by M K Gahndi, perfectly fitting in my view as I had come to believe that close friend was in need of both.

But this essay is not about that bookstore or the nearby bar nor the books in that store that I have found for others. This essay is about a rambling discourse, written as WWII approached its last summer, written mostly in Culoz, France, a small town much closer to Switzerland than to Paris, where Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas spent the last years of WWII.

Stein’s book, Wars I have Seen, is a repetitive reflection on living in the foothills during the waining days of the war. The French were emerging from one regret – that of having lived meekly under the dominion of the Germans – into another. They had allowed for their own subjugation by such a meek foe, as though the shame was not in having been conquered but rather that the conquerors turned out not to be all that.

I knew nothing about Wars I Have Seen. What caught my attention was first its cover – a distinctive jacket design by Cecil Beaton – and next that, unlike almost all other books in that shop, it was not a cookbook. Read more »

Sublime

I sometimes shudder at old pics,
their bittersweetness, their
cutting edge, their tricks:

….. daughter’s brilliant smiles,
….. mittens hung from cuffs,
….. Kodachrome taunts of time

….. —enough

I’d rather mine old stones, turn up
what’s scattered within my heart and head

….. —the gold

I’d rather stick with what’s been deeply sown,
take joy in what, within my heart, has grown.

I do not like as much, nostalgic risks.
The photo box stays beneath the bed
with CDs and snaps of bygone’s code
on paper, or on disks.

….. When memory goes will it matter?

Then, I may not even recognize the
aliens who peer from three by fours
or smile from screens in pixel splatters.

Love is as it comes in time, as it is in
moments real. Now is breath’s agency.
Now is never still, but alive, not held
in poignant frozen shots—

….. is immediate
….. is not mere blur
….. is true
….. sublime

Jim Culleny
Jan 29, 2011_Rev_032125

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by Christopher Hall

“In 2025, during an event to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term, the richest man in the world gave a Nazi salute to the crowd.” This is a sentence which, circa 2005, would have made for a rather overblown introduction for a YA dystopian novel. But here we are, and it did happen. It did happen – right? No, calling this a Nazi salute was leftist cancel culture in action. No, Elon is just very socially awkward and/or autistic. No, even the Anti-Defamation League says it wasn’t a Nazi salute. In many corners of the media, the message was simple: don’t believe your lying eyes.

What is inescapable is the sense of the ludicrous – you either think it’s ludicrous that we’re debating at all what was clearly a fascist gesture, or that there are people who think so, because it clearly wasn’t. The interpretational gambits being played here are both nettlesome and exhausting. And it isn’t solved by simply dismissing Musk as a troll. The strange loop of trolling, where we’re moving forward but we somehow end up at the beginning, usually involves the question of intention, always daring you to think both that he really means it and that it’s all a joke. And so maybe Musk’s gesture was innocent and maybe it wasn’t – but that’s all part of the troll. How can you take such a thing so seriously? (How can you not?) An arm raised at roughly a 45 degree angle – that’s what upsets you? (It’s literal Nazism, so of course it does!) But his hand was raised at a slightly higher angle – isn’t that just a wave? (Oh, stop bothering me and go read your Trump Bible.) It may be that Kekistan is long past its expiration date (the half-life of memes being pretty short), but the spirit remains intact and present. Trolling is a language game, and you lose if you react to it at all.

Trolling is also, as is frequently said, an art, and as perverse as it may sound, I want to look for a moment at The Gesture as a work of performance art. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Today (June 13) is W.B. Yeats’s birthday. He would have been 157. I am compelled to remark upon the similarities between Yeats, the Nobel prize winner, and Peterson, the scribbler in the corner. I quote from a short Yeats biography, “he was lackluster at school,” an elementary report card said he was “Very poor in spelling,” and his early poems were described as a “vast murmurous gloom of dreams.” Peterson’s academic career and early poems could be described in a similar fashion. Where they differ is noted in that Yeats’s elementary report, “Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject.” Peterson says of himself that the “D” he received in Latin was not earned, but a gift.

Yeats said of the woman he loved that she affected him as “a sound as of a Burmese gong, an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes.” Peterson says that that’s got it about right, “an over-powering tumult…[with] many pleasant secondary notes,” but adds “There are ‘dis-chords’ too. Music that is too sweet for too long gets tedious. One needs notes that grind against each other as well as those that get along.”

Yeats wrote that “Bodily decrepitude is wisdom.” Peterson is testing out that hypothesis. He’s not yet convinced. Yeats says, “This is no country for old men….” Peterson wonders if there is such a place, not wanting to end up as Yeats seems to as a mechanical cuckoo hanging in a cage in the emperor’s palace. Yeats thought of himself as kind of a jester, Peterson thinks himself as more of a clown. Both are useful, though the jester is more likely to get the Nobel prize.

Yeats, towards the end of his life after a dry period, wondered what the source of his poetry was and found it in “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart where the “old kettles, old bones, old rags” of his life lived along with “that raving slut/Who keeps the till.” He thought he “must go lie down there again” amidst the objects of his life to be refreshed. Peterson finds himself “Down in the Dumps” where he “sits on a bucket feeling/ supple as a seal” and bangs on “a bottle with his lost wooden horse leg, chinka chink-a chinkety-chaw-chaw-chaaah!” Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

What do an intoxicating drink and an ancient beauty ritual have in common? How did a word once linked to Roman roads become synonymous with insignificance? And what strange connection exists between human strength and a tiny, scurrying creature?

Language is a traveler. Words cross borders, crisscross centuries, and sometimes transform so completely that their meaning is completely altered. A term that once conveyed insult might, centuries later, become a compliment. A spice that once evoked luxury may later come to symbolize the ordinary. A simple verb in one language may be borrowed and reshaped into something spectacular in another.

The English language, restless and ever-expanding, is a patchwork of borrowed words, forgotten histories, and surprising transformations. While the English language’s primary roots lie in Old English, Old Norse, Latin, and French, it has also incorporated words from languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Dutch, Italian, and Japanese. Some words have arrived quietly, slipping into common speech without much notice. Others are shaped by conquest, trade, or scientific discovery. But every word has a journey—a story hidden beneath its surface, waiting to be uncovered.

Here are seven words whose unexpected and dramatic voyages through time and place remind us that language is not something static – it’s always moving and always changing.

1. Nice

For a word that now suggests something bland, colorless, and ineffectual, nice has had quite the rip-roaring journey. It started off as an insult. Originating from the Latin word nescius meaning “ignorant” or “unaware,” it entered Old French as nice, as in “careless” or “clumsy.” By the late 13th century, Middle English adopted nice to describe someone as “foolish” or “senseless.”

Over the subsequent centuries, nice experienced a series of dramatic shifts in meaning. In the 14th century, it conveyed the sense of being “wanton” or “lascivious,” a far cry from its modern use. By the 15th century, it had transformed again, then used to describe someone who was “fastidious” or “fussy.” It was only in the late 18th century that nice emerged as the polite and pleasant word we recognize today. Read more »