by Sarah Firisen

I expected China to be different; exotic, challenging, overwhelming in its otherness. But, in many ways, it was depressingly familiar; the mall next to my apartment building had a Gap, an H&M, a Subway and a Baskin Robbins. The New York Pizza restaurant was always at least as busy as the excellent Dim Sum restaurant a few doors down from it. Beijing and Shanghai each have a 5th Avenue equivalent sporting a Louis Vuitton, an enormous Cartier, an equally huge Tiffanys, gigantic Apple stores and all the brands that you'd expect to accompany these. I saw a few Aston Martin and Porsche dealerships and it seemed like every other person was driving an Audi.

My tour guide at the Great Wall of China, Leo, looked at my iPhone and asked, “4S?” I replied yes and he bemoaned the fact that his was only an iPhone 4. By the way, you can get great 3G phone reception at the Great Wall. The Pudong area in Shanghai, which was all farmland 20 years ago, is now adding fantastical skyscrapers so quickly that, when I left for a week to go to Beijing, I thought buildings would pop up while I was away.

There is restricted access to the Internet in China, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be and clearly the barriers are pretty easy to work around. Leo asked if I'd like to be his Facebook friend and told me he'd friend me when he got home and could get on the VPN that went around the country's firewall.

But in ways that I wasn't expecting, China was as foreign and incomprehensible as anywhere I've ever been in my life. In the roughly 5 weeks (on and off) that I was there, I had more truly inexplicable encounters and conversations than in the rest of my life put together. My colleague Diana and I coined a phrase, WTF in China (WTFIC). We'd say this to each other every time there was really nothing else to say because words failed us.

One day in Beijing, we were sitting in a taxi in heavy traffic. We noticed a few vendors going between the cars selling mobile phone car chargers. This seemed like a clever idea. Then Diana noticed that each vendor had chargers in one hand and a live turtle in the other. What was the deal with the turtles? Were they selling them? Were they a marketing gimmick? We emailed Leo, who had offered to help us post-tour with any questions. Before I got his reply back, I said to Diana, “you know, even once he answers us, we're not going to be any more illuminated. I just know it's going to be a WTF in China issue.” And indeed, this was Leo's answer, “For turtles, they are the symbol of longevity and fortune, so people may buy when they get bored in traffic!” Clearly, this answer made perfect logical sense to Leo. And to all the people sitting in rush hour traffic jams making a spur of the moment purchase of an animal that would probably outlive them.

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by Evan Selinger, Thomas Seager, and Jathan Sadowski

A highly publicized Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study depicts Millennials as more egoistic than Baby Boomers and Generation Xers. The research is flawed. The psychologists fail to see that kids today face new problems that previously weren’t imaginable and are responding to them in ways that older generations misunderstand.

The psychological study seems persuasive largely because the conclusions are supported by massive data. Investigators examined two nationally representative databases (Monitoring the Future and American Freshman surveys) containing information provided by 9.2 million high school and college students between 1966 and 2009. Such far-reaching longitudinal analysis seems to offer a perfect snapshot of generational attitudes on core civic issues.

Comparison makes Millennials look bad. According to the study, they aren’t just primed to consume more electricity and pass on community leadership. Overall, they’re ethically deficient: concerned less with the environment and keeping up with political affairs, while driven more by extrinsic values (money, fame, image) than intrinsic ones (self-acceptance, community, and group affiliation). The media couldn’t wait to spin these characterizations into headlines, running pieces like “Millenial Generation’s Non-Negotiables: Money, Fame, and Image” and “Young People Not So ‘Green’ After All”.

Jean Twenge, the study’s lead author, seems entitled to sit back with a told you so look on her face. For some time, she’s contested portrayals of Millennials as “Generation We.” The new study updates her anti-entitlement manifesto, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–And More Miserable than Ever Before, and she presents more damning information in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article accusing Millennials of declining empathy.

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by Vivek Menezes

Nigeen Lake 27/05/2012

I am writing this lakeside in Srinagar, at the end of a month-long stay in this amazing, ancient city, along with my wife and three young sons (12, 8, 4). This is high season in Kashmir – the authorities expect as many as two million tourists by the time winter sets in. But with the exception of Dal Lake – certainly one of the great marvels of the subcontinent – we’ve found ourselves just about the only “outsiders” almost everywhere we’ve gone. It has been quite a strange phenomenon, I think largely explained by the reluctance of most travel agents and tour operators to venture off a narrow beaten track that takes in Dal, the (vastly over-rated) Mughal Gardens, and day trips to trample snow in Gulmarg, etc. There needs to be more and better information about Srinagar made available for travellers, and over some time I hope to contribute some.

But right now, because connectivity is deeply intermittent here, I am going to quickly post a few images, and scribble comments postcard-style

Our first few days in Kashmir couldn’t have been more eye-opening. This is because we became immediately immersed in the fourth annual festival hosted by the Dara-e-Shikoh Centre. The initiative of Jyotsna Singh, grand-daughter of the last monarch of Jammu and Kashmir, the event was mostly held outdoors, and had a terrifically positive energy. There were art, writing and puppetry workshops, training sessions for teachers and counsellors, and terrific interactions between the overwhelmingly young audience and visiting resource people, most notably Gopal Gandhi – grandson of the Mahatma, senior bureaucrat and diplomat, and author of several books, including a play about Dara, the Sufi Prince. It was a remarkably inclusive event, with every possible viewpoint freely exchanged with an unusual spirit of acceptance. Here at the Dara Shikoh Centre, I realized that this is actually a bedrock Kashmiri virtue. This was particularly underlined during a spellbinding performance by one of the last surviving Bhand Pather (folk entertainers) groups of Kashmir, directed by M. K. Raina. It turned out that most of the almost entirely Kashmiri audience had never seen such a performance – big-shots, students, security guards, drivers, all screamed with delight together all through the show. No translations needed for my kids either, they laughed along with everyone else.

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by Liam Heneghan

Quum fructus maturus semina dispergat. Linnæus, Philosophia Botanica, 1751

1. In The Beginning Was the Verb

In the beginning was the Verb, and the Verb was with God, and the Verb set all things in motion. More than just any Word (Latin verbum, word) the God who is, was, and shall be a Verb commuted motion of an Absolute form to Relative Motion. In the universe created of the Verb everything moves; absolutes have no meaning.

And some things rose and other things fell. Those which rose remained in constant motion until impeded and of those which fell some acquired spontaneous motion. These self-moved movers, called motile, include some cells, spores, the quadrupeds, and the bipeds. The Philosopher studied the motile keenly, since the prime mover and all that had risen remained less accessible to knowledge. Since the self-moved require the unmoving for motion they must themselves be, he concluded, comprised of a series of both fixed and moving parts at the seat of which is an unmoved mover – the animal soul. In this way the motile mimic the first mover.

Living things move and they share this characteristic with every other thing; stasis, that is, there can only ever be relative stasis. Movement differs from motility in as much as the latter, in its most fully expressed form, is movement where a purpose that goads, a desire that compels, and a body that advances, converge.

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Boy in an Apple Tree Grappling
with Happiness

sun through leaves shadows
on his face
as on a dappled stallion

time was a tick, a heartbeat
drawn out
long as the orbit of Uranus

84 to 1 of our years
slomo
heartbeat that sustains us

in a capsule with companions
in a memory
in a moment that contains us

thread of something through the raptures
of the changes of dominions that remains us

in our sky nearby a star affirms
holds feet to fire
a blistering gold medallion
.

by Jim Culleny
5/26/12

by Misha Lepetic

There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements

An empty downtown, with boarded-up shops and desolate sidewalks, is truly a sad sight to behold. It is also symptomatic of much larger forces, namely the flight from the urban core into the suburbs that wound up decimating the vitality of American cities during the second half of the 20^th century. Last month I argued that the urban form of the skywalk was a partial and misguided response to reviving the emptied-out downtowns of American cities. In most instances these structures, which sought to connect buildings without touching the street, were a prolonged, painful failure, because they further segregated street life and did not succeed in drawing people back into that urban core, at least in a way that could be considered dynamic and responsive to the larger needs of the urban fabric. In a sense, much was expected of skywalks, but in fact they were little more than a Band-Aid, and served to only exacerbate the problem through the fundamentally anti-social tendencies that underlie their design and use.

And yet, like any other urban form, skywalks are agnostic – what determines their success is not just their design and implementation, but also the problem that they seek to address. It is perhaps more accurate to say that skywalks, along with many other forms of intervention in the urban built environment, reveal the question that designers have posed themselves, believing that that question, whatever it might be, is in fact the correct and most pressing one. So, in the case of American cities, skywalks were employed to revive downtowns, and, generally speaking, failed. Other cities around the world have enlisted skywalks not because there is too little density, but because there is too much. Does this new context increase the possibility of success? In order to understand what a difference a difference makes, we first need to consider the forces that shaped cities in the West, and what the difference might be between this phenomenon and that of the global urban South.

The narrative describing the development of American cities can be retold as a narrative of excessive space. When energy and labour are cheap, economic logic drives growth outward; it is always easier to build on virgin ground rather than re-organize an existing built environment. This is especially true when urban areas are not bounded by geographic obstacles such as water or mountains – a condition true of most mid-Western cities and not a few coastal ones.

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by Namit Arora

It is often said that humans are the only animals to use symbols. So many other claims of human uniqueness have fallen away—thoughts, emotions, intelligence, tool use, sense of fairness—what's so special about symbols, you ask? I share your skepticism, dear reader, and in the next few paragraphs I'll tell you why.

Let's begin by clarifying what “symbol” means here. One way to do this is to contrast symbols with signs. A sign, such as a red light, a grimace, a growl, or a thunderstorm, signifies something direct and tangible, making us think or act in response to the thing signified. Issuing and responding to signs is commonplace in Animalia. A symbol, on the other hand, is “something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention”. A symbol allows us to think about the thing or idea symbolized outside its immediate context, such as the word “water” for the liquid, “7” for a certain quantity, and “flag” for a community. What is symbolized doesn't even have to be real, such as God, and herein lies the power of symbols—they are the building blocks of abstract and reflective thought. Evidence of material symbols used by humans dates back at least 60-100K years, when burial objects and decorated beads start to appear in archaeological finds. Linguistic symbols were almost certainly in use long before then.

According to Susanne Langer, symbols serve “to liberate thought from the immediate stimuli of a physically present world; and that liberation marks the essential difference between human and nonhuman mentality … Words, pictures, and memory images are symbols that may be combined and varied in a thousand ways.” It is only through symbolic thought that we imagine the past or the future—mental time-travel, including episodic memory, requires the use of symbols. Indeed, language is really a system of symbolic communication, combining words (which are symbols) and syntax. If non-human animals lack symbols, what and how do they really think?

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My breathing system seems to be:
these lungs within; without: those trees
……………………….. —Inspiration.

Conjoined

There are mountains in this pic of withered leaves—
as from a satellite

and voids

in shadows they recede

but I see
brittle peaks

bright spines
curling from dead stems
dry as earth desiccated by the practices
of men:

light filaments
that have broadcast life and breath:

sucked dioxide carbon in,
transmuted it like alchemists then
expired it as oxygen

dry lungs of trees
alveoli complements

sister lungs as close and tight as twins; consider:

when that one dies
this one withers
.

by Jim Culleny
5/15/12

Withered Leaves

by Randolyn Zinn

Ed Bilous, the composer and teacher, met me the other day at Juilliard where he has created the Center for Innovation in the Arts. Last month he was awarded the William Schuman Chair at Juilliard and you will be able to watch a video of his stirring speech at the end of this interview where he makes the case for re-imagining our educational system with the arts placed at the center of the curriculum.

Ed and I met In the early 1980s when we were teaching artists together at Lincoln Center Institute–the aesthetic education program that matches artists with schoolteachers to prepare students for seeing productions of dance, theater and music.

Randolyn Zinn: What year was that exactly…?

Ed Bilous: Had to be between ‘81 and ’83. I was working on my PhD at Juilliard at the time.

RZ: Just think, no cell phones or Internet. The extent of personal technology were our SONY Walkmans and telephone answering machines with tiny reel-to-reel tapes inside. You couldn’t dial in for your messages from outside the house.

EB: That’s right.

RZ: So how did you become so adept with technology and its interface with music?

EB: Technology has always been a part of music making. The shift from harpsichord to piano was largely a technological revolution, as was the creation of the organ. When you think about early composers a thousand years ago, their resources were fairly undeveloped, basically just primitive string and wind instruments. Bit by bit, technological changes brought them to life in a way that allowed far more expressivity and creativity until we got the kind of instruments we see in the orchestra today. The transformation from harpsichord to piano is amazing. The harpsichord doesn’t really have dynamics; you play loud or you play soft, but you can’t really achieve a crescendo. Having that ability with the piano transformed music making and a whole new kind of playing and composing. Trumpets went from just being bugle-like things, cones of brass, to instruments with valves that allow all kinds of sophisticated chromatics and articulation. So…technology has always been a part of music.

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by Rafiq Kathwari

As a boy, I stole
into grandpa’s study.

An art merchant,
he loved books

with gilded edges,
Aristotle to Zola

all stuck together
in the humidity.

I snuck Lo out
to his black Chevy,

rifled for dirty bits,
steering her away

for a spin,
teen tunes swirling

in my head. ‘I want
to hold your hand.”

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Like the rest of us poor mortals, wandering in constant confusion between things and the names for things, bewitched by language and unable to resist it, mathematicians and physicists are constantly struggling with their representations and yet entirely reliant upon them to grasp the world.

Many of the fundamental intuitions that we start to describe the world with are geometric or spatial: this is a point; this is another point; walk in this direction to get from the first point to the second; this is the path a particle takes. If we want to make this precise, to describe and classify and manipulate and compute, we need to be able to make these statements precise. The simple act of drawing a pair of coordinate axes on a flat surface and using pairs of numbers to describe points is extraordinarily powerful, yoking algebra and symbolic manipulation to geometry and spatial intuition, and it unlocks for us a language within which to watch spatial and temporal processes unfold. Similarly, describing points on the surface of the Earth by pairs of numbers (latitude and longitude are the most common) allows us to specify locations relative to other locations, to calculate distances and trajectories and to describe and communicate quantities that vary across the surface of the Earth, like weather patterns and temperatures.

But in picking a particular representation we've done a certain violence to the geometric structure we started with, by forcing an arbitrary layer of description on top. We might have decided to describe points relative to axes at right angles, like so:

But we could equally well have rotated the axes, or shifted the center, or chosen axes that were at other angles, like so:

Similarly, the standard way to describe points on the surface of the Earth is by their distance from the equator (i.e. latitude) and their distance from a line perpendicular to the equator and passing through Greenwich (longitude), but I could choose to describe places by how far away they are from my house and in which direction relative to some local landmark. And this is how we generally give directions locally.

And so, now that we've introduced a way of describing space, we have to be careful that we don't get led astray by our representations, and that we keep separate the convenient descriptors that we use and the spatial and physical quantities that we're trying to describe. Depending on our system of representation, the particular coordinates attached to London and New York might vary dramatically. But our calculation of the physical distance between them shouldn't depend on how we've chosen to represent them.

Physicists and mathematicians have developed a lot of theory to derive and explain which quantities are physically meaningful (e.g. the distance between London and New York) and which quantities are simply consequences of the particular representation that we have chosen (e.g. the longitude of New York). This is often not trivial. For example, as Einstein famously found, the distance in space between events will be calculated differently by observers moving at different velocities (a form of coordinate dependence), but there is a quantity called the interval that combines the distance and time between events that all observers can agree on.

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by Mara Jebsen

I met a tipsy older lady in a place;

She said, “Honey, it doesn't really come clear

'til you're sixty.” But she wouldn't say

what. The television was blaring

about chimpanzees. Some journalist

had likened our president to a chimp.

Meanwhile, a chimp named Travis

was reported to have sipped

wine; and more recently tea, laced with Xanax,

before his “unprecedented

killing spree.” The reporters said Travis

“had no history of violence,” but one of

my students, who'd grown up in T's town

knew a guy Travis had attacked-back

when they were kids. The bartender, Gene

checked it on his i-phone, and there were photos

of the owner–or should I say “mother?” snuggled

up tight with the chimp, before bed.

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by Omar Ali

Saadia Toor is an assistant professor of sociology and social work at the City University of New York and recently published a book about Pakistan titled The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War politics in Pakistan. She states that the book grew out of her PhD thesis (a doctoral thesis in developmental sociology titled “”The Politics of Culture and the Poetics of Protest: Pakistani Women and Islamisation, 1977-1988.”). The book’s official blurb states:

The State of Islam tells the story of the Pakistani nation-state through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, in order to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the rise of militant Islam across the world. Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam, and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined political realm, The State of Islam is a Gramscian analysis of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. The author uses the tools of cultural studies and postcolonial theory to understand what is at stake in discourses of Islam, socialism, and the nation in Pakistan…

She also states that:

I wanted to subvert this discourse by highlighting the complexity of Pakistan’s history and the primacy of people’s struggles within it, as well as the role of the US-aligned establishment (and, at key junctures, liberals) in quashing these struggles and the alternate political and cultural visions they embodied.

It is indeed possible to write a good work of history that is also a subtle work of socialist (or other) propaganda and that appeals to the author’s in-group while reaching a larger audience. But this takes a lot of skill and experience and Ms Toor, unfortunately, is unable to manage this feat. In her youthful enthusiasm for her version of the socialist cause (a cause she formally joined by becoming a member of the Pakistan workers and peasants party or Mazdoor Kissan Party, while back in Pakistan researching her PhD thesis) leads her to shoehorn every event into an academic-Marxist narrative that owes more to to Tariq Ali and fashionable Wesern academic prejudices than to the actual history of Pakistan. Of course, it is possible for youthful enthusiasm to produce a great book (John Reed’s “Ten days that shook the world” comes to mind) but unfortunately, this is not that book.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

Spring has arrived, Summer is just around the corner and once again I must deal with the enigma that is my yard. As I look around town, there is a wide range of lawns spanning from, what Michael Pollan (2001) would call, Apollonian control to Dionysian abandon. Mine is towards the Dionysian end of the spectrum.

This is by choice. I have never understood lawns. What exactly is the point? A uniform swath of green grass seems so contrived and unnatural. As practiced in much of 21st century North America, that monoculture is a triumph of technology. It takes a lot of inputs to maintain such a beast: Regular mowing, herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizer, and in some areas, water. Perhaps that is the point.

I remember growing up in upstate New York, helping to fertilize the yard, mowing its weekly growth, and then putting the clippings in bags to be taken to the dump. It just seemed wasteful at the time (not to mention that as a fifth or sixth grader, it really cut into my playtime). Now I would probably mulch the grass in place and skip the fertilizer. Later, as a teen in southern California, I had to religiously apply water, herbicide and fungicide to maintain our lawn. Again, it seemed colossally wasteful. I tried to convince my parents to switch to more drought friendly vegetation, but they weren't that enthusiastic about it. As it turns out, I now happen to live in one of the few areas in the country where it is possible to grow lawns without irrigation or fertilization. I mow it when it gets shaggy, and that's about it. I'd rather spend time gardening than trying to achieve a “perfect” lawn.

A few square feet of my lawn resemble the chemlawn ideal (an example of modern Platonic essentialism?), but it is mostly a patchwork of grass, clover, creeping charley, dandelions, and many other species that I have not identified. In the heat of summer, with little rain, the grass will retreat as it is displaced by crabgrass, which is a hot-dry specialist. If the rains return, the grass fights its way back. I enjoy witnessing this tug-of-war. My lawn is diverse and dynamic.

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by Hasan Altaf

One of the few reliable characteristics of the institutions of the government of Pakistan is that they will only rarely stick to their mandates, that they will only occasionally consider themselves bound to fulfill their theoretical functions – the idea of the “public servant,” for example, seems to have passed ours by entirely. Given that the results of this tendency are so frequently destructive, or at best neutral, we should look kindly on Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa's recent bout of poetic inspiration at the conviction of Prime Minister Gilani for contempt of court. It's easy to say, as the prime minister's lawyer did, that judges should refrain from adding poetry to their judgments (“especially” their own; maybe Iqbal would have been acceptable?) and just make their decisions and let that be that, but in a country where that is so rarely that, a little bit of riffing off Khalil Gibran is hardly the end of the world.

“Pity the Nation,” Justice Khosa's addendum to the court's decision, has struck quite a chord. It has earned slaps on the wrist not only from the Prime Minister's counsel, but also from a former ambassador (who would like to shift the conversation entirely – “cit[ing] poetry instead of law while sentencing an elected leader on questionable charges reflects Pakistan's deep state of denial about its true national priorities” – as if the accountability of leaders were not a hallmark of a functioning democracy; as if in focusing on extremism and terrorism we should ignore all the other injustices of the country; as most of what happens in the government of Pakistan is not “questionable”) and an Express Tribune columnist who saw Khosa's Gibran and raised him a Byron. It has also become a Twitter catchphrase that within a few days has been used across the political spectrum (PML, PPP, PTI, P-ick your own), for matters personal (“…where children of judges get admission in aitchison college even after failing the entry test”) and national (loadshedding), for criticism of literature (“…where bad poetry is appreciated”) and tradition (“…where political parties are transferred over a will like family property”), and even the requisite clever meta-tweets invoking pity for the nation that pities itself on Twitter.

Justice Khosa's cri de coeur led me to feel pity mostly for Justice Khosa – and, by extension, the rest of our “public servants.” Being a Pakistani has become hard enough; seeing what has become of the country (what has been done to it, what has been done to us, what we have done to ourselves and to our country and to each other and to others) is hard enough; caring about Pakistan has become, in a time when every day brings bad news, hard enough. Imagine being one of those who truly does make it what it is, who truly has the power to shape and control some portion of the country's destiny; it must be impossible to sleep at night. Considering the bizarre situation in which the Court has been placed and has placed itself (the chain of causes and effects here, the schematic of who is scratching whose back and how and why and when, is so ridiculous that to talk about is pointless), the justice's poem seems to me an entirely understandable response, the breaking of the camel's back by a particularly absurd straw. And sometimes, as any self-respecting angst-ridden teenager will tell you, there really is nothing to do but write a poem and put it online.

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