by Jonathan Kujawa

Several weeks ago Alexander Grothendieck passed away. It is hardly possible to overstate his influence on twentieth (and twenty-first!) century mathematics. With the help of others he rebuilt vast amounts of mathematics from the ground up. He had a vision that still seems futuristic many decades later [1]. I compare it to Braque, Picasso, and company blowing up the art world with their entirely new vision of what art could be. In Grothendieck's case you'll have it about right if you imagine him as a visiting scholar from an alien civilization whose mathematics is to ours as ours is to one of those Amazonian tribes who can only count to three.

Grothendieck in the 50's. Photo by Paul Halmos.

Grothendieck's life was as interesting as his mathematics. It's bound to be turned into one of those movies made to win Oscars [2]. His parents were anarchist political activists and artists, he moved to France as a refugee of Germany in 1938, and for most of his life was legally stateless and traveled with a Nansen passport. Grothendieck was at the peak of his public mathematical life during the 50's and 60's, receiving the Fields medal in 1966. Starting in the 70's he withdrew from the mathematical community and, ultimately, his family and friends as well.

For the last two decades he lived in a village in the south of France and only a very few people knew where he was. Grothendieck issued a letter in 2010 insisting that his work not be published and any existing publications be withdrawn from libraries. He was so isolated that it wasn't immediately clear to many in the math community if he was still alive and, if so, if he was the one who had written the letter.

Since that request seems to no longer be in force we should now have the chance to learn what did with himself for the past thirty years. There are rumors of tens to hundreds of thousands of pages of mathematics and political and philosophical writings. I'm sure I'm not the only one who had idle fantasies of running into Grothendieck at a cafe in France and getting on like gangbusters over espresso while hearing all about what he'd been up to [3].

Grothendieck's tools, language, and point of view are now ubiquitous across a broad spectrum of contemporary mathematics. They are certainly part of the everyday lexicon and mode of thought in my area of research (representation theory). Grothendieck reconsidered such fundamental questions as what is a “point” (there's a lot more to say than you might think!). For an excellent overview of Grothendieck's work I recommend Steve Landsburg's recent essay. It was linked to here on 3QD, but you may have missed it in the shuffle.

Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

I like going back to California. I pack my bag days in advance. Organize plane tickets. Make plans with friends to meet at various restaurants. I am going home.

Home is where my family is. Mom. Sisters. An eccentric artist father who paints pictures in the woods. The Pacific Ocean full of sparkling promise. The ex-boyfriends, strip malls, the “first time” for everything. A taqueria on every corner. A golden retriever on every block. A grandmother who is dying.

I haven't packed my bag yet. I keep looking at it like it might disappear if I stare long enough. Just evaporate into the air. I close my eyes and concentrate. But when I open them, it's still there.

Packing is a process for me, one that I usually enjoy. Underwear and socks go in first, then jeans rolled up like newspaper to allow more room for t-shirts and sweaters. Pills, tampax, earplugs, sunglasses. ID. Pictures to prove my life is good in New York. Pictures to prove I am not depressed.

The bag stares at me from the closet. I turn up the radio and lay on my back.

Jet Blue. Row 16. Seat A. Is that aisle or window? In front of or behind the wing? Are in-flight movies still only $5?

She says she's scared to sleep, that what if she fell asleep forever? I don't want her to shut her eyes anymore.

California will be warm. Blue skies and a light, salty breeze. Bonfires on the beach. Kids still tearing down streets on skateboards. 72 degrees. Light winds.

I have to be at JFK in two hours. Maybe the lines will wrap around the terminal like reels of gauze and I won't get to board. “Sorry Miss Reid, but your plane has left.” Elvis has left the building.

I roll my jeans and unroll them. Stack all my underwear. Restack. Smoke another cigarette and turn the radio off.

I'll try to make it till you get here.

None of my socks match. Row 16. There's a big yellow stain on my favorite t-shirt, the one I spilled a fried egg on and forgot to wash. I should call a friend to tell her I'm coming home. See if she wants to meet me for coffee. See if her life is so much better than mine.

I pray for another day.

The cabin is full. The woman sitting next to me has a warm, worn face. A pretty gold cross dangles over the valley of her throat.

Read more »

by Madhu Kaza

“Before it happened, it had happened and happened.” Anyone paying attention to recent events, specifically the failure of two grand juries to bring indictments for the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner will readily make sense of this line from Claudia Rankine's new book Citizen. In moments of crisis when we as a nation are explicitly confronted with the state-sanctioned, legal & cultural violence inflicted against black people in America, we recognize a long chain of such violence reaching back to the very foundational chains of this nation.

In Citizen Claudia Rankine not only memorializes key eruptions of racial violence in recent American life, she also documents the ongoing, ordinary, subtle (& seemingly innocuous) experiences that characterize the racism of everyday life; Rankine suggests that the racialized violence of daily life is also what happened before it (the moment of social crisis) happened.

Although Citizen is Rankine's fifth book, in many ways it is a follow up to her 2004 collection Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Both books are subtitled An American Lyric and both use language in innovative ways to convey deeply subjective experience while also documenting larger cultural and political situations. While Citizen might focus on black bodies, Rankine suggests that the positioning of the black body in our culture has to do with all of us, with the very construction of the culture itself. Rankine refers to artist Glenn Ligon's work, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), who appropriated the line from Zora Neale Hurston, to show how the psychological, affective experience of race is always already in relation to the sharp, white background of American racism. This, too, is the American lyric.

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

In the summer of 2010, over 20 million people were affected by the summer floods in Pakistan. Millions lost access to shelter and clean water, and became dependent on aid in the form of food, drinking water, tents, clothes and medical supplies in order to survive this humanitarian disaster. It is estimated that at least $1.5 billion to $2 billion were provided as aid by governments, NGOs, charity organizations and private individuals from all around the world, and helped contain the devastating impact on the people of Pakistan. These floods crippled a flailing country that continues to grapple with problems of widespread corruption, illiteracy and poverty.

The 2011 World Disaster Report (PDF) states:

In the summer of 2010, giant floods devastated parts of Pakistan, affecting more than 20 million people. The flooding started on 22 July in the province of Balochistan, next reaching Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and then flowing down to Punjab, the Pakistan ‘breadbasket'. The floods eventually reached Sindh, where planned evacuations by the government of Pakistan saved millions of people.

However, severe damage to habitat and infrastructure could not be avoided and, by 14 August, the World Bank estimated that crops worth US$ 1 billion had been destroyed, threatening to halve the country's growth (Batty and Shah, 2010). The floods submerged some 7 million hectares (17 million acres) of Pakistan's most fertile croplands – in a country where farming is key to the economy. The waters also killed more than 200,000 head of livestock and swept away large quantities of stored commodities that usually fed millions of people throughout the year.

The 2010 floods were among the worst that Pakistan has experienced in recent decades. Sadly, the country is prone to recurrent flooding which means that in any given year, Pakistani farmers hope and pray that the floods will not be as bad as those in 2010. It would be natural to assume that recurring flood disasters force Pakistani farmers to give up farming and migrate to the cities in order to make ends meet. But a recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change by Valerie Mueller at the International Food Policy Research Institute has identified the actual driver of migration among rural Pakistanis: Heat.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich, if that's what you wanted.”
~ New York State chief judge Sol Wachtler

About a dozen or so years ago, I had the instructive misfortune to be called for Manhattan grand jury duty. To this day, though, it has armed me with plenty of anecdotes for any sort of “that's the way the system works” conversation. Once you see how the sausage of justice gets made in the courtroom, you can never really unsee it, and that's not a bad thing. The grand jury process – and its failures and possible remedies – is obviously central to the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, but in my opinion hasn't received nearly enough attention. Let me draw on some of my own experiences to illustrate why this is the case, and argue why any meaningful response to Brown, Garner and others must, at least for a start, be sited within the phenomenon of grand jury.

As context, New York City is one of the few cities that maintains continuously impaneled grand juries to maintain the flow of indictments that feeds the criminal justice system. When I served, there were four such juries, two of which were dedicated exclusively to drug cases. Fortunately, I was selected for one of the other two; after all, variety is the spice of life. During our month-long tenure of afternoon-shift service, we heard 94 cases, and we returned indictments, if I'm not mistaken, for 91 of those. For this service we were compensated $40 per day, which, in a fit of self-serving civil disobedience, I refused to report on my income tax return.

Keep in mind that the purpose of the jury is two-fold: to establish that a crime was committed, and that the person under indictment had some involvement with said crime. This involves the mapping of an often messy reality onto the abstract but finely delineated nature of criminal statutes. To achieve this, the prosecutor – almost always a fresh-faced Assistant District Attorney (ADA) seemingly just out of the bar exam – would present just enough facts to the jury to ensure probable cause for both the crime and the person charged with said crime. The evidence may include testimony from officers, experts or other witnesses, and it ought to be noted that probable cause is a much lower standard of proof than what petit juries encounter in trials, which is the beloved “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Read more »

by Kathleen Goodwin

I struggle to organize my thoughts when it comes to the discourse on race in the United States as catalytic events are playing out in real time each day. I am also struggling to keep up with the tidal wave of articles, tweets, statuses, and photos that my social networks are posting about Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other victims of a deeply unequal America. And like every white person, I feel the need to qualify my analysis of these events by positing that as a white person I cannot possibly fully understand the experiences of people of color in this country. As a consequence of recent events, I have been reflecting on the real and imagined boundaries that separate Americans. Nowhere has this been more apparent for me than in my life in New York City where South Asian men drive the cabs I take, Hispanic women answer the phone in my doctor's office, East Asian women paint my nails, and black men guard the doors at my office. Yet, the people I work for and with are overwhelmingly white and usually male. New York is a diverse city, to be sure, but it seems that interaction between different races and ethnic groups is at most transactional and brief. It appears that most of us are still working for white men directly or indirectly and those who control our government continue to be predominantly white. Only fifteen black executives have ever been CEO of a Fortune 500 company and Obama was the fifth black senator in U.S. history before being elected the first black president.

Linda Chavers, a black woman who teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire, authored a piece on damemagazine.com with a few lines that encapsulated this problem. Chavers attended one of Missouri Governor Jay Nixon's press conferences in August in the aftermath of Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson. She writes that she realized while listening to him speak:

“This man has never dealt with a Black person in his life. I'm sure he's existed among Black people: The people who clicked his ticket on the train, put his items into the grocery bag, panhandlers on the street as he as his driver waited for the light to change. I remember thinking, He has never had anyone like me in his life in a position of authority, in a position higher than his.”

Chavers' realization targets the crux of many of the issues with diversity and white privilege in the U.S.— the lives of black Americans and other minorities, are parallel but rarely intertwined on a meaningful level with lives of white Americans. And different races may exist simultaneously with the diminishing white majority, but white people still hold most positions of power and control most decision making.

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

As I put my wildly colicky baby to bed, I would unclench his tiny fists, and hold each finger, one by one, listing names of desserts in Urdu: gulaab jamun, halva, russ malai, jalebi, burfi. Adam was taught names in a garden; I taught my son names that likely came from the Mughal royal kitchens; names of syrupy, milky, cardamom-scented delicacies which suggested an ecstatic mix of cultures (not unlike Urdu itself which I like to think of as a sweet and sometimes sharp concoction of separate sensibilities); for example, “Laddu” has something of the Indic, “Halva” Arabic, “Gulaab Jamun,” Persian, “Zardah,” Turkish; each dessert distinct not only in appearance and taste but the type of occasion it is associated with, and most importantly, in its verbal flavor. Barely audible over my bawling newborn, I gave myself up to the slow, sustained incantation of the dessert menu.

Postnatal sleep-deprivation is a godforsaken place but the fogginess it causes can also bring clarity; the sound of dessert names became a bridge for me to cross over to my own childhood in order to find something to comfort my child. Words offered themselves as the cradle we both needed. As I rocked him and chanted, I conjured every sensory detail I wanted to pass on, each scent and shape. I pictured the delights— rectangular pieces of silvery burfi, halva garnished with blanched almonds, laddu with roasted melon seeds, orange spirals of jalebi.

Read more »

by Yohan J. John

“Neuroscience is ruining the humanities”. This was the provocative title of a recent article by Arthur Krystal in The Chronicle of Higher Education. To me the question was pure clickbait [1], since I am both a neuroscientist and an avid spectator of the drama and intrigue on the other side of the Great Academic Divide [2]. Given the sensational nature of many of the claims made on behalf of the cognitive and neural sciences, I am inclined to assure people in the humanities that they have little to fear. On close inspection, the bold pronouncements of fields like neuro-psychology, neuro-economics and neuro-aesthetics — the sorts of statements that mutate into TED talks and pop science books — often turn out to be wild extrapolations from a limited (and internally inconsistent) data set.

Unlike many of my fellow scientists, I have occasionally grappled with the weighty ideas that emanate from the humanities, even coming to appreciate elements of postmodern thinking. (Postmodern — aporic? — jargon is of course a different matter entirely.) I think the tapestry that is human culture is enriched by the thoughts that emerge from humanities departments, and so I hope the people in these departments can exercise some constructive skepticism when confronted with the latest trendy factoid from neuroscience or evolutionary psychology. Some of my neuroscience-related essays here at 3QD were written with this express purpose [3, 4].

The Chronicle article begins with a 1942 quote from New York intellectual Lionel Trilling: “What gods were to the ancients at war, ideas are to us”. This sets the tone for the mythic narrative that lurks beneath much of the essay, a narrative that can be crudely caricatured as follows. Once upon a time the University was a paradise of creative ferment. Ideas were warring gods, and the sparks that flew off their clashing swords kept the flames of wisdom and liberty alight. The faithful who erected intellectual temples to bear witness to these clashes were granted the boon of enlightened insight. But faith in the great ideas gradually faded, and so the golden age came to an end. The temple-complex of ideas began to decay from within, corroded by doubt. New prophets arose, who claimed that ideas were mere idols to be smashed, and that the temples were metanarrative prisons from which to escape. In this weak and bewildered state, the intellectual paradise was invaded. The worshipers were herded into a shining new temple built from the rubble of the old ones. And into this temple the invaders' idols were installed: the many-armed goddess of instrumental rationality, the one-eyed god of essentialism, the cold metallic god of materialism…

The over-the-top quality of my little academia myth might give the impression that I think it is a tissue of lies. But perhaps more nuance is called for. As with all myths, I think there are elements of truth in this narrative. To separate truth from poetic license, four questions need to be asked:

• Was there ever an intellectual golden age?
• Is there really a crisis in the humanities?
• Why should we care about the humanities?
• Who are the invading forces?

I suspect that addressing the first question will require a master's thesis worth of research, so for now I'll accept that there really was a golden age, at least for argument's sake. The second question is also a matter of debate, but there is some interesting data suggesting that the crisis in humanities may have more to do with perceived quality than with quantity [5, 6]. For this essay I will restrict my attention to the third and fourth questions.

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

My previous post here described Siccar Point, where an 80,000,000 year time gap is present between near-vertical tilted strata, and their roughly horizontal overlay. This gap corresponds to the formation and subsequent erosion of fold mountains thrown up when Iapetus, precursor to the modern North Atlantic, closed. Today's post is (mainly) about the Giants' Causeway, part of the enormous lava field first produced when the modern North Atlantic began to open, and still growing at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and, most spectacularly, in Iceland. Fragments of the initial outpouring were separated as the Eurasian and North American plates moved away from each other, and now can be found as far apart as Greenland and Denmark.

The Antrim Lava field shown within the British Tertialry Volcanic Province, itself part of the North Atlantic Lava Field. By Hazel Muzzy (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons.

The Antrim Lava Field, of which the Causeway is part, was formed in three separate phases each consisting of many individual episodes. The most spectacular feature of the Causeway is provided by the second of these. Here, the lava cooled slowly, to generate a solid layer which stressed as it cooled, finally fracturing to give a complex array of columns, up to 10 metres high, and showing in places an almost regular hexagonal pattern. The lava of this second episode shows subtle chemical differences from the first, evidence of changes in the hot lava plume feeding the outflow. But what most excited me at the site was the existence of a band around 5 metres thick, between these columns and the lava beneath them. This layer is not a sediment, but a palaeosol, an ancient soil formed by in situ weathering of the top of the lavas deposited in the first episode. Its nature is confirmed by the presence of occasional unweathered lumps, and there are occasional round scars (“Giants' eyes”) in the exposed surface where these lumps have come away. Humid conditions are confirmed by the presence of valleys carved by streams, and filled in by the later lava flows. The chemical composition is like that of tropical
soils, which have undergone extensive prolonged leeching under warm and wet conditions, with the
most insoluble materials, iron and aluminium oxides, predominating towards the top, and there are traces of charred plant roots in the topmost layer. So here we have direct evidence of an extended interval, variously estimated at between 100,000 years and 3 million years, between the first and second phase of eruptions. After my visit, I discovered that this interbasaltic layer is found across the whole area of the Antrim Lava Field, and that there is another such layer between the middle and upper lavas. There are also extensive dikes, penetrating all the lower levels, caused by the eruption of the lava layers above. The entire coastline has been extensively reshaped and eroded over the intervening millions of years, and most dramatically during the Ice Ages, and subsequent exposure to the storms of the Atlantic. For more extensive descriptions, see here, p. 30, or here, and references therein.

Read more »

GARDEN IS AIR

after Iqbal’s Shabnum aur Sitaray (Dew and Stars)

A star said to a dewdrop: “Tell
the story of a garden
far from the heavens
to which the moon sings.”

The dewdrop replied: “O star
not a garden, but a world of sighs;
the breeze visits only to return;
the rose, garden’s flourish, blooms

to wither, bears the pain,
is silent as a nightingale laments,
can’t gather pearls even from its
own hem. The humming bird is

imprisoned, thorns concealed
by roses, eye of the ailing iris forever
moist, the box tree scorched,
free only in name: An outrage!

The moon revolves to cure her heart.
Stars are sparks of man’s burning.
I am the sky’s teardrop. The garden is
air, a sad image on the horizon’s canvas.”

by Rafiq Kathwari, whose first book of poems is forthcoming in April 2015 from Doire Press, Ireland. More work here.

by Debra Morris

For some time I've wanted to write about anger in politics, more specifically the conditions under which it is necessary. Necessary in the sense that there is no better response—one more appropriate, say, or more effective. As far as possible, I want to consider anger's necessity apart from the question whether it is justified. The latter question, though a difficult one, is in one sense more easily parsed: since we justify anger by giving reasons for it—it is a response to a palpable injustice, for instance—it is possible, at least in principle, to carry on an earnest discussion or reasoned deliberation about it, since any of us may call upon these reasons (as opposed to a minority of us who, through dint of superior resources, or effective power, or a monopoly on force, may compel a certain response from others, whether or not we ever bother to supply good reasons for our actions). I don't want to be merely philosophical about this; indeed, I'd like to move the conversation away from philosophy as far as possible. Still, even in a cautiously philosophical consideration of the “necessary and sufficient conditions for” something like anger, I would want to focus on the first term, which (I suspect) tends to get folded into the latter. Are there times when the necessity for anger can be established independently of whether there is sufficient (meaning, usually, a “reasoned”) justification for it? Times when anger is felt, or shown, for a different kind of objective or end, one that is only partly described—and rather inadequately, at that—in terms of reasons? I think it bears asking: If it is ever possible to say, of anger, that it is “fully justified,” then is it really anger—”anger” as opposed to something that can and maybe should be expressed in more political terms, e.g., righteous indignation in the face of injustice, defense against harm or suffering, a self-respecting virtue (or felicitous middle way) in Aristotle's sense?

It may be helpful to say what prompted my interest in the legitimate place of anger in politics, given that it wasn't this week's events in Ferguson—though the latter, at the same time they've convinced me that there is a vital and unavoidable issue here, have also made clear how limited are our terms for thinking and talking about anger. As I was reading Matt Taibbi's recent The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wage Gap, an examination of the ways in which the non-prosecution of the gross malfeasance and irresponsibility underlying recent financial crises is inextricably tied to the hyper-policing and punishing of the politically marginal, I found myself thinking, repeatedly, “Why aren't people pissed about this? Why aren't we in the streets now, preparing to take our government back?” That I could confess to the same exasperation after reading pretty much anything by Thomas Franks will only invite derision, I'm afraid, especially in light of Ferguson: oh, so this is what a privileged, Nation-reading white girl gets worked up about. (That and, of course, the fact that I am not currently in the streets.)

Read more »

by Ahmed Humayun

Two weeks ago the United Arab Emirates (UAE) put dozens of Muslim groups around the world on its terrorism list. While the list includes organizations such as Al Qaeda, al-Nusra front, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), which is uncontroversial, it also includes many other cultural and civic organizations in the United States and Europe, such as the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS).

The inclusion of this second group of organizations has perplexed Western governments, who have asked the UAE for an explanation. There is no real mystery here, however. The UAE alleges that these groups are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which tops the UAE list, and is the dominant Islamist organization in the Middle East. In outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood and organizations that are alleged to be connected to it, the UAE is following in the footsteps of Saudi Arabia, which declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization in March.

The antipathy of the dynastic Arab rulers to Islamists is well established. Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood call for political reform but Arab tyrannies see this as the end of their stranglehold on power. Hence, the opposition of the Gulf states to the Muslim Brotherhood after its success in the 2011-2012 elections in Egypt, and their subsequent support for the overthrow of Mohammad Morsi, the elected President. Of course, Islamists are far from Jeffersonian Democrats and they are illiberal on many issues, but they represent an ideological alternative to the status quo that has local appeal, a terrifying prospect for the current crop of Arab rulers.

This terrorism designation, then, is a signal to Muslim groups worldwide that they should align with the Arab status quo or else expect to be stigmatized, even when they are an innocous organization like CAIR, which has actively worked to counter terrorism in partnership with American law enforcement.

So much for the politics of this ‘terrorism' list. That the rulers of countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE think they can define terrorism and be taken seriously is extraordinary in itself. It is well and good that they condemn ISIL today but they provided the key financial support that fueled ISIL's conquest of Sunni provinces in northern Iraq as part of their war against Shiite influence in the region.

Read more »

Elemental

Earth

Today I troll for a poem of humus
dark and rich as the French Roast
which always starts my day
and always is a gift

In this four billion year terrapoem
fungi, woodlouse and eelworms
spend millennia decomposing
in concert with nematodes
actinomycetes and protozoa
doling water and, with bacteria,
fix nitrogen in a scheme
age old and symbiotic,
while on it men
women and other animals
troll and plow,
think and sweat
—animals who draw their own life from it,
who build their lives upon it,
from which come their bones
and to which their bones
and breath go (come and go)
in intervals of comets

Air

in this rambling walkabout
with friends who’ve shed
conceits together, dropping them
as one sloughs old clothes:
into the low pressure system of our lungs
comes new atmosphere, November cool
and out
and in again
and out
in a rhythm old but not antique
for which we thank our
lobe-finned fish progenitors
who learned to suck sweet gas to reap its oxygen
and in return (until we’re absolutely through)
we essentially reply with gusts of CO2

Fire

Heraclitus said that all is flux
or, I’d say, fire

never still
the more we yearn
the more things move
they hotter burn
.

Water

rivers fall by rules of space
obliged by banks that hem obedient livers in,
pulled, it seems, by tugging mass we acquiesce,
are dragged to bottom
— inclined to give, to toss
to push to swell and plunge
(by some dark scripts)
from Paradise to Sodom

.

by Jim Culleny
11/20/14

by Mara Naselli

When my children entered the gallery at the Grand Rapids Art Museum that contained Anila Quayyum Agha's installation work, Intersections, they took off at a run. The sound of their little feet filled the space. I felt that cinch of parental panic and scanned the room for what they might inadvertently destroy. The room was empty. Empty in the sense that it contained no objects, save the large wood cube illuminated by single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The gallery, about thirty-feet square, was transformed into something larger by the tapestry of shadow projected onto the walls. I hesitate to use the word sacred, but it was impossible not to feel a certain vastness. The contrast of light and dark created an immersive architecture. “You should have seen it when they were installing it,” said the security guard. “The whole room spun.”

~

Every September since 2009, Grand Rapids, Michigan, has hosted an open art contest called ArtPrize. Anyone can enter. Anyone can judge. Anyone can win. ArtPrize winners are elected by popular vote. The rules have been adjusted each year, but the basic idea has remained intact: bring art to the public, let the public judge art.

Grand Rapids is a small, quiet city. But when ArtPrize opens, art is everywhere: parking lots, rooftops, bars, bridges, abandoned buildings, churches, even the river. This reserved city transforms into a minimetropolis of raucous, unedited expression.

The cultural context of ArtPrize—that is, the culture of Grand Rapids, Michigan—bears mentioning. When ArtPrize began, I had just moved here from Chicago, and so I watched with some interest at what looked like a large-scale democratic experiment. Some called it a rich kid's art party (the founder, Rick DeVos, is the grandson of the co-founder of Amway). But I thought of it as an experiment in civic discourse, where good art and bad art would duke it out through the intelligent discernment of public opinion. In many ways, the location of ArtPrize made perfect sense. The city has a venerable history in furniture making and design. There's a vibrant arts community here, a grassroots artists' collective, a sculpture garden, a symphony, a ballet, an opera, and a fine art museum—all this in a town of fewer than 200,000. The community in many ways is steeped in arts funded by local philanthropic families such as the DeVoses. Grand Rapids is also conservative and Christian. The fact that ArtPrize was in a very red region of a blue state made the democratic aspect of the contest all the more interesting to me. Taste, culture, and politics would converge as the public would play patron.

Read more »

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Scott Schuman is in India. On the 6^th of November, he announced that he would be posting to his immensely popular fashion blog “The Sartorialist” from the cities of Mumbai, New Delhi, and Varanasi. I must confess that for a few minutes, I cursed my luck at being in the deep South and not on the fashionable streets of Mumbai and Delhi, where Mr.Schuman would most likely be lurking, camera in hand. Surely being spotted by Mr.Schuman would be the rightful validation of my many years of changing clothes four times in a row in order to get to the library? After all, academics, especially those in the fields of cultural studies and contemporary socio-cultural anthropology need necessarily to be fashionable I had often argued to myself. (Let the convenience of this categorization be conveniently ignored for now.)

My sartorialism is highly suspect in any case; dressing up for particular environments has always been a particularly harrowing task. Fashion never came easy. My sensibilities were shaped, first and foremost by a socialist secular republic of few choices and many cut corners. During childhood, a popular sitcom lampooned the state of the market thus; the titular character of Wagle Ki Duniya (Wagle's World), Mr.Wagle marks a festive occasion by procuring large quantities of the same bolt of cloth out of which emerge clothes for himself, his wife, his children, and the drawing room curtains. Despite this situation, I did marvel at the effortless beauty of my parents' and their friends' wardrobes, chiffon and polyester saris and factory uniforms. I, however, thanks to particularly unfashionable school uniforms and awkward teenage years, had no possibility of displaying either ingenuity or taste.

Graduate life in America brought forth another set of quandaries. While well schooled by now and comfortable in “Western” clothing, I longed uncharacteristically for loose cottons and salwar kameezes and allowed myself in the Texas heat to switch back and forth, even as I kept away from events conducted by the Indian Cultural Association. Neither their Diwalis nor their Holis held any attraction to my thoroughly disdainful anomic self. But those few kurtas declared my allegiance to some culturally specific India, and brought me attention nevertheless. Many years later, I was told that people had seen me as performing ethnicity for their benefit.

Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

“The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by…” so sang Andy Williams in 1967.

Boys looking at girls, and then reacting with admiration; what could be more natural? In movie after movie a barrage of wolf whistles following Sofia Loren and Marilyn Monroe as they sashay down the street are meant as innocent signs of appreciation. To today’s men, who often react with a distinct lack of sympathy to modern women’s complaints about callcalling and its associated behavior, what we’re complaining about is no different, at least in intent, to behavior that 40 years ago was seen as a badge of honor for attractive women. I have no idea whether it was really felt and taken that way by women in past generations, perhaps that is nothing more than a romantic rose colored view of what was clearly felt as harassment even then. I truly have no idea. What I do know is how the modern forms of this behavior looks and feel to me and any woman I’ve ever asked about it.

If you’re on some form of social media these days, it’s almost impossible that you haven’t witnessed some of the latest volleys in the catcall wars. There has been a steady stream of women trying to fight back in one way or another: one of my personal favorites, a young lady who handed out cards to the men harassing her on the street trying to educate them, almost always without success, about how it felt to be the recipient of that attention. Another one I really like is http://stoptellingwomentosmile.com/; because what could really be more innocuous than telling a woman how pretty she would be if only she would smile, or telling her “hey, smile, it could be worse”? Except, how the hell do you know it could be worse? Perhaps someone just died. Perhaps I just got a cancer diagnosis. Or maybe I have really bad cramps. Or maybe, it’s none of your business whether I smile or not.

And of course, one of the more infamous recent examples, where a woman (an actress hired for the video) walks around New York for 10 hours with a cameraman surreptitiously recording what this woman has to put up with. She doesn’t say anything to these men, she doesn’t look at them, she’s not dressed in provocative clothing and she engages with them in no way, and yet she is harassed over 100 times. As female Facebook friend after friend reposted this video, there was a very predictable explosion of comment threads and some got pretty nasty. One friend posted an interesting observation, which I’ve now tried to verify for myself: she says that when she’s all dressed up (as she often is quite beautifully), she actually attracts less attention from men. But it’s when she’s in her sweats, no makeup, hair unwashed that she can’t seem to shake the catcalls, the men following her, harassing her.

Read more »