by Liam Heneghan

Dedicated to the students who travel with Randall Honold and me to Wicklow, West Kerry, and Connemara, this summer, following in the footsteps of Synge.

At that time in my life before I realized that such things are rare, I was paid, modestly it’s true, by Glenveagh National Park to travel on foot through parts of northern Donegal to collect and name insects. It is rare to have time on one’s hands, rare to love so fully what one does, and rare to have so little conception of what the future holds. I was, however, a little lonely. Each morning I walked transects across the lonely bog to net flies. In the evenings I had all to myself the park’s administration building which housed a research facility where I would gently boil the preserved flies in beakers of sodium hydroxide and mount their translucent parts in euparol, an aromatic embedding medium, on glass slides. At the other side of the building was the bunk room where I slept. I only rarely talked to another soul.

Seeking company was, therefore, one of my reasons for taking afternoon bicycle rides through the mountainy countryside surrounding the park and when I could I’d chat greedily with farmers standing at the edges of their fields. The occasional walker would also stop and turn on hearing my bicycle approach and would say a word or two to me about the weather. It was oftentimes quite warm on those summer afternoons though, not infrequently, an immeasurable bank of gauzy cloud would roll in from the north Atlantic and obscure the sun. At that time I conjectured that the fine-grained nature of the Irish countryside, the fact that one could see every speck at a distance, every flower popping out from among grassy bog, was because of the immense amount of moisture in the air. Everything in Ireland is viewed through a million wet lenses. I talked one late afternoon in July of 1987 with a farmer who had stopped from his labor to drink cold tea from a little glass bottle. More often than not though the little back roads in Donegal were deserted.

One afternoon I rode an ambitious route which brought me closer to the sea. Many years later I drove those roads with my father, and he and an aging fisherman from Bunbeg assessed my father’s Irish, the latter by glances of incomprehension, as they both looked out on the waves. As I rode my bicycle through one of those small villages back in 1987 a dog who took especial umbrage at me on my bicycle worried me quite persistently. I sped up as best I could with him nipping viciously at my heels. The dog knew the terrain better than I, of course, and as we passed by a house close to the edge of the village he ran up on an embankment at end of the garden. Within a moment or two he was running level with my head. I assumed he was about to take a flying leap at me but he left off the chase, the knowledge of his victory being, it would seem, enough to satisfy him.

Later that afternoon I puffed my way up an especially steep boreen. The afternoon was hot and the birds were quiet in the recesses of the hedges. The road eventually defeated me and I dismounted and pushed my bike up the hill. I walked by a little house at the garden gate of which a woman stood and looking out upon the road. I hello-ed her and she mutely greeted me. I continued on my way. As I made my way to the summit of the little hill I felt a thud on my shoulder and then heard a series of sharp clacks upon the tarmac road. Someone was throwing stones at me. Looking back I saw a small besuited man who had appeared at the door of the house. He bent down to pick up another handful of pebbles and loosed them in my direction. The woman-of-the-house maintained her stance, though now looked in my direction. After my first yelp, none of us uttered a thing. I worked my way up the hill, as one does in a nightmare where one laboriously runs to slow avail. Stones, close by, rained down. On gaining the top of the hill I jumped back on the bicycle and sped off downhill and away from my assailant. Later that day I made my way back to the park by another route and was unmolested by neither man nor dog.

That’s the story! That’s the story!

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by Omar Ali

The May 11th elections in Pakistan represented the first time that a civilian regime completed its term in office and held elections in which power will be transferred democratically to a new civilian regime. In a country where the security establishment has a long history of throwing out elected regimes and manipulating results, this in itself was an important landmark. For this (and for very little else, unfortunately) we can thank President Zardari and his coalition building skills and stubborn determination.

For my pre-election predictions, see here. For immediate post-result thoughts, see here.

In the short election campaign the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) of Imran Khan captured the imagination of the newly educated and elite classes but it did not have the time (and/or the ability) to catch up with the pre-poll favorite, the PMLN. The superior and far more detailed groundwork done by the PMLN while it ruled Punjab for 5 years, its stronger slate of candidates, its relatively energetic performance in the Punjab government, and Mian Nawaz Sharif’s improved reputation, (along with a PPP collapse) led to a PMLN landslide in Punjab. This has practically given the PMLN a simple majority in the national assembly in spite of having only a handful of seats outside Punjab. The newcomer PTI will form a coalition government in KP; PPP, with or without MQM, will rule again in Sindh; and Balochistan remains a unique case, completely outside the national mainstream.

With daily bombings by the Taliban keeping a check on the ANP, PPP and (to some extent) the MQM, and with an insurgency and its frequently vicious suppression going on in Balochistan, traditional campaigning was mostly confined to Punjab. There, an almost millenarian excitement took hold of the middle class in the course of the PTI campaign; This phenomenon was most visible on social media and in the better neighborhoods of urban centers. Meeting each other at coffee spots and snack bars and pushing “like” buttons on each other’s facebook pages, the newly energized middle class supporters of Imran Khan managed to convince themselves that a complete root and branch renovation of Pakistan under brand new leadership was on the cards.

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by Tom Jacobs

There is a story that I want to tell you. It's about a man who lives alone at the edge of town. In a small house without much to recommend it. He finds that there is little for him to do other than to look out the window. Which is something that he does. A lot. Most every day and for most of each of those days. He looks out this window, examining the microscopy of the world outside his window, paying close attention. This is what he does. It provides a certain amount of pleasure to him.

Some begin to worry that he's losing his mind. He begins to think that he is approaching some kind of revelation. Who is to say which is which? Maybe it can be both.

He begins a project. He begins to examine the surfaces of his home, convinced that there is something beneath or behind. The floors, the walls, the ceilings. Eventually he finds himself in the basement, palpating a crack that runs through the middle of his foundation. He becomes convinced that there is something shouldering itself into the floor of his basement from below. So he begins to excavate. As he digs he finds what he believes to be a labyrinth. He excavates this labyrinth like an archaeologist over the course of many years. As he unearths the whole intricate thing he becomes convinced that there is some great secret there, some infinite thing of happiness and hope. He continues to excavate and explore the labyrinth but can never find his way through. Knowing in his heart that that he's uncovered something important, he goes out into the street to tell someone about it. This is the first time he's left his house for as long as he can remember.

The first person he finds is a man who lives down the block and happens to be passing by. He tells him about what he's found. The man is skeptical but intrigued.

Together they go back to his house so that he might show him his labyrinth. They explore the labyrinth. The man on the street had read somewhere that if you keep your hand on the wall, you will eventually find your way in (or out). Eventually they find the center of the labyrinth. At the center there is a door in the floor. They open the door and, holding hands, they walk together, through. And then they disappear and are never heard from again.

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by Mara Jebsen

Should poetry be whispered in the dark? Should it be a communion with the dead, transacted silently through the media of paper and lamplight? Ought it to roll out of the whale-mouths of men on stages (maybe grumpy orators in black fedoras?) Should it arrive from the mouths of girls in sequins and combat boots—or from the mouths of boys in sequins and combat boots—whose whiskey-voices crackle in the backs of bars? Should teachers with elbow patches pass it out in stacks? Does it die in the air if badly read?

The questions are both important and silly. Asking them is like comparing ways of worship. I can’t say that it is better to shout and clap your devotion than it is to believe one must preserve a holy silence. The question is always: how do you honor a text?

On a bright May Wednesday evening in New York, I left the writing class I teach in a dark movie-viewing room in the basement of the NYU’s Tisch building. I stopped in the hall to nervously apply red lipstick, and then I boarded the subway on a secret mission.

I met my co-conspirators beside a fountain in Bryant Park. It was one of those first Spring days in the city—when the late light is white-wine colored and everything feels about to explode. Two journalists with camera and microphone arrived to record our experiment, and their presence was both unnerving and comforting. The camera seemed to legitimize our odd project. But part of the project’s ethos is that it doesn’t need legitimizing.

This was my first time. Members of PUP (Poets in Unexpected Places) have been performing poems on ferries, in laundromats and in subways around NYC for a while. I’ve known a number of its members for as long as ten years and asked to join the group months ago. But at the last minute I’d always chicken out.

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by James McGirk

The Moranbong Band is best imagined as a North Korean version of Celtic Woman: an all-female ensemble band swaddled in fetching formalwear, blasting highly produced, energetic nationalist kitsch. Of course, no matter how much vigorous fiddling Chloe, Lisa, Susan and Mairead can manage, Celtic Woman is unlikely to attract as much scrutiny from intelligence agencies as the Moranbong Band’s cover of Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now”, which is perhaps better known as the theme from Rocky, and was performed – complete with a video backdrop featuring cuts of Sylvester Stallone working out – for none other than Kim Jong-un, the number one of the sinister and secretive Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Peculiar things have been crossing North Korea watchers’ desks lately. Witness The Sun’s revelation that Kim Jong-un’s father liked to nosh on hippo meat, spider and snake sushi. Or how in March, Kim Jong-un took time away from playing nuclear chicken to host flamboyant former NBA player Dennis Rodman. (Rodman says he’s been invited back for another visit in August.)

Decadent as this behavior might seem for the rulers of one of the world’s poorest countries, Kim Jong-un’s oddball behavior suggests a media-savvy spin on a classic diplomatic game. George Freidman, leading analyst and CEO of the geopolitical analysis firm STRATFOR, describes North Korea’s decades-old strategy of prying subsidies from its neighbors as “fearsome, weak and crazy.”

Fearsome is easy to understand. The South Korean capital, Seoul, is within howitzer-range of the DPRK’s enormous Cold War-vintage army. A sneak attack could kill hundreds of thousands of people and rip apart one of the world’s most important manufacturing centers. And that’s assuming the DPRK confines itself to conventional munitions: North Korea tested an atomic weapon in 2009 and probably has cheap, nasty weapons of mass destruction (germs and gas) stockpiled and ready to go. North Korea’s population is even scarier. They’re kept on the brink of starvation and forbidden from any contact with the outside world. Children are raised ready for war and taught to adore their leaders and obey without question. This is a frightful enemy, but it’s also a weak one.
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(Written in 1932 on Spanish soil,
mainly in the Mosque of Cordoba)

BY MOHAMMED IQBAL

I
Chain of day and night
Fashioner of events
Basis of life and death
Two tone silken thread
Fiber of attributes
Pitch of prospects
Chain of day and night
Sitting in judgment
Setting a value on us
When we're lacking
Death is your destiny
Death is my destiny
What else is reality
The flow of one age
Neither day nor night
All crafts vanish
Black and white fade
Annihilation the end

II
But in this form
Hues of eternal life
Splendor of man's love
Love is life's base
Death has no claim on love
Love itself the tide
Stemming the torrent
Love is unnamed eras
Love is Gabriel's breath
Love is the Prophet of God
Love is the Word of God
Love is the radiant rose
Love is raw wine
Love the goblet of kings
Love draws life's music
Love is passion for life
Love is fire of life

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by Carol A Westbrook

In a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine1, Drs. Stavert and Lott used the tem, “The Bystander Effect,” to describe a new health care phenomenon, in which multiple physicians participate in the care of a patient, while none acknowledges primary responsibility for managing it. In their example, a patient was hospitalized with an undiagnosed, complicated illness, and over 40 physicians were involved in his care, yet none stepped forward to take charge.

The term “Bystander Effect” was coined after the 1964 stabbing murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City, which was witnessed by 38 people, none of whom intervened or called for help. The term refers to the tendency of people to be less likely to offer help in emergency situations when other people are present. In other words, it's not my problem, someone else can take charge.

Stavert and Lott argued that the Bystander Effect is becoming prevalent because of the way our system of hospital care has evolved. But I have noticed it is beginning to appear in the outpatient setting as well, where it is eroding the quality of medical care while increasing its expense.

Consider Mr. Miller, a fictional patient referred to me for anemia. I ordered blood tests, referred him for a colonoscopy, and scheduled a return visit in 2 weeks. During those two weeks, he also saw his cardiologist (heart), his orthopedist (joints), his urologist (prostate), his internist (blood pressure), his primary care physician (cholesterol). Mr. Miller is elderly and retired. When I asked him what he does with his leisure time, and he replied, “What free time? My wife and I spend most of our day in the doctor's office.” From my perspective, Mr. Miller received the expert attention of 7 highly trained medical specialists, and the best possible medical care in the world. From his perspective, he has to deal with two more doctors, more prescription medications to use up his limited income, and no assurance that any of this will make him feel better or live longer.

It is disheartening to see an elderly couple who measure out their days by the number of doctors' visits in a week. It is frustrating for their caregivers, who try their best to attend these multiple clinic visits. And it is dangerous, as multiple physicians may give contradictory recommendations, prescribe medications that interact, and overlook test results ordered by another doctor.

Mr. Miller is definitely getting more medical care than he would have received, say, 10 years ago. But is he getting better care? For that matter, is he even getting care?

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by Dave Maier

In a previous post I considered and rejected the idea that music and noise (= non-musical sound art) are entirely incompatible – that noise is the very negation of musical meaning. This left open the question of how these things might co-exist – or, turning the question around, how composers might make use of both resources in the same composition. Today I revisit that issue. If you've heard the podcasts I've posted here, you know what sort of compositions I'm talking about, even if I haven't been able to explain how or why they work. If you want to skip the theoretical blather and check out another fab mix (a bit noisier than usual this time), scroll down now.

In his book Aesthetics & Music, philosopher Andy Hamilton seems to position himself to answer this question, but then skirts it, on the way to what he takes to be more important questions which we will not discuss here. However, that he does even this much is interesting, given most philosophers' attitudes toward music, so let's take a look. The context is the traditional philosophical question of what music is. It's clearly an art of sound in some sense, but what makes a sound musical and/or artistic? According to Hamilton, the traditional assumption (“universalism”) that music is the only art of sound has gone together with another assumption “that music exploits as material a particular range of sounds, namely tones” (45). As music has “embraced more noise elements,” he says, these two assumptions have come apart. This allows a variety of positions on the matter. We might, for example, keep the former stipulation, but expand the range of “music” to accommodate the new forms it may now take (i.e. after a century of experimentation).

Hamilton, however, goes the other route: “[P]aradoxically, the tonal basis of music has been clarified by the rejection of instrumental puritanism. Thus I reassert that music is the art of tones, while rejecting universalism and recognizing an emergent non-musical sound art which takes non-tonal sounds as its material.” In support of this, he insists that the fact that any sounds can be incorporated into music doesn't mean that any sounds can constitute music. Music, he says, is on a continuum with non-musical sound art; which something is depends on which type of sound is “predominant”. However, “this distinction is not in any way evaluative and is not intended to mark any great metaphysical divide.”

Well, I'm glad to hear that, I suppose, but now I wonder what exactly we're supposed to take away from it. In the context, it seems like he's simply making whatever concessions he needs to make to recent musical/sound-artistic history in order to continue with his story about music as the art of tone. But that gray area between tone and noise is where I live, or at least hang out a lot, so that's what I want to hear about. It's not just a theoretical exception to be swept under the rug. How does this stuff work?

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fireflies
.
every time a new intersection’s built
around me
it winds up bristling with cameras

omniscient light poles sprout
a cornucopia of lenses spills out

a thousand robot retinas
recording everyday ephemera

the little things we do in cars
we might not want the world to know about

all snagged, digitized
and set in a binary log
for some bureaucratic lout
to survey, to scrutinize

to better get to know
the fireflies in his jar
.

by Jim Culleny
5/11/13

by Maniza Naqvi

It's a place of darkness. People are poor and hail from tribes and clans. They live in basic shelters in remote villages, with no running water or electricity, and no access to clinics. Subsisting on seasonal work, hunting and fishing to stock up food for the lean months, they worship nature's beauty. They consider themselves hardy, descendants of those who suffered war, famine, and religious persecution. They resent that their part of the earth gets attention only through the prism of movies or when natural or manmade disasters strike. Then oil is found and they are blessed.

Nope, this is not one of the 53 countries in Africa. It is not a “fragile state” the term often used for the richest in oil and gas and other mineral resources countries in Africa with the poorest citizens affected by the curse of resources: foreign meddling, conflict, war, corruption and autocratic dictators. This is Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in the 1970s.

In 1975 the Alaska legislature asked itself: Was it morally acceptable or ethical for the generation whose presence in Alaska coincided with the oil boom to get all the benefits, leaving the following generations to deal with the decline and fall? No said the majority who thought the Alaskans of the future should have a nest egg and be allowed to share in a temporary windfall from the finite oil resource.

Alaska set up the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (AHF). In 1987, the APF was worth US$11 billion, and by 1997 it was US$24 billion, exceeding total state oil and gas revenues. As of March 2013 it was US$45.5 billion (here). The lesson is that managed professionally, a national asset can grow into the future beyond the finite resource. You can read the whole case study by Steve Cowper, a former Alaska Governor (no, not that one), in a book edited by the World Bank's Jennifer Johnson Calari here. In neighboring Alberta in Canada the Alberta Heritage Fund had been set up a year earlier (here).

Iran's Citizen Income Scheme (here), along the lines of the APF, is the largest in the world providing cash transfers to all its citizens, universally from its oil revenues. Per capita $500 is transferred to over 75.3 million citizens costing about $45 billion a year (here) and will amount to 15 percent of national income, while Alaska's average is 3-4 percent (here).

If ever there was ever a notion of a perfect nationalization then this would be it, to give to the people in a country what belongs to the Nation, its wealth earnings while making sure that the earnings keep growing for future generations. This is redistribution and growth of wealth. Other examples of such funds: The Future Generations Funds in Kuwait (here and here); Norway (here), the Diamond Empowerment Fund in Botswana (here)and Wyoming's Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund (here). A list if countries and their sovereign wealth funds is here.

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by Sarah Firisen

[See Frank Bruni in the New York Times.]

Today we are all equal, right?
No more damsels and their brave knight
I can fight, I can vote
Choose on whom I will dote
And any wage difference is slight

But is this the end of the tale
Of the fight for the rights of the female?
Is there further to go?
Is a lot just for show?
Is progress the hare or the snail?

A woman's a tramp or a whore
If she finds sex more than a chore
But a man, he's stud
No name dragged through the mud
No loose morals for all to deplore

When men cheat, it's news for a while
Yes, called pathetic and vile
But the news' cycle roll
Is a balm for the soul
And soon the man's back to beguile

For Clinton, Petraeus and Weiner
Such blips are a mere misdemeanor
They retreat for a while
Their wives bravely smile
And to make a fresh start, no one's keener

But if a woman commits such an act
It's a tear in the social contract
No doubt she's a slut
Just look at her strut
And what from this view can detract?

So when will we all be the same
Transgressions no worse for a dame?
When will our sexual sins
Be societal twins?
And not unequal parading of shame

by Jalees Rehman

I grew up in a culture of guilt. One of the defining characteristics of post-war Germany was the “Vergangenheitsbewältigung“, a monstrous German word that describes the attempts to come to terms with the horrors of Nazi-Germany and World War II. How could Germans have abandoned all sense of humanity and decency? Why had millions of German actively or passively engaged in the mass murder of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, socialists and so many other minorities? This Vergangenheitsbewältigung resulted in a deep-rooted sense of collective shame and guilt, one which transcended the generation which had lived through the war and even engulfed Germans born after the war and Germans with immigrant backgrounds, whose families obviously had no historic link to the atrocious crimes committed in Nazi Germany. We did not feel blameworthy in the sense of having to answer for the Nazi crimes, but we did feel that the burden of history had foisted a responsibility on us. We felt that it was our responsibility to be continuously vigilant, watching for any signs or symptoms indicating a recurrence of right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism, fascism, racism, militarism, nationalism, discrimination or other characteristics of Nazi Germany. Our obsession with collective introspection at times became so excessive that it paralyzed us, such as when we developed a general paranoia of expressing any form of German patriotism, because it might set us on a path to Nazism. Many Germans also had near-hysterical responses to any discussions about genetic engineering, because it evoked haunting memories of Nazi eugenics. But despite these irrational excesses, I think that we Germans greatly benefited from our post-war soul-searching which helped us build a mostly peaceful country – no small feat, considering our past.

Roughly one decade ago, “mirror neurons” were among the hottest items in neuroscience research. These neurons in the brain of an individual were thought to fire upon observing behaviors in other individuals: When I see someone eating a delicious piece of chocolate, my mirror neurons fire and help create a proxy sensation or awareness in my brain that mirror the observed behavior so that I might have some sense of eating the chocolate myself. If this were true, mirror neurons would play a central role in generating a sense of empathy. Newer scientific research has questioned whether “mirror neurons” truly exist, but there is little doubt that our brain has some neurobiological substrate that enables empathy, even if it does not consist of the exact same set of anatomically defined neurons as has been previously suspected. I therefore still like to use the “mirror neurons” metaphor, because it aptly evokes the image of a neurobiological mirror in our mind. I would like to extend that mirror metaphor and also propose that our mind might contain “guilt neurons”, which fire when we observe some degree of resemblance between ourselves and perpetrators of crimes. Part of being immersed in the post-war German tradition of collective guilt and soul-searching is that it endowed me with ultra-sensitive hypothetical “guilt neurons”. When I hear about a tragedy or crime, I not only feel the natural empathy with the victims, but in a reflex-like manner ask the question whether I bear some degree of responsibility – not blame – for this tragedy and crime and how to best work towards preventing it in the future. This “guilt neuron” activity is strongest when I sense that the perpetrator is a member of an in-group that I also belong to, such as crimes being committed by fathers or husbands, by Germans, by scientists or physicians, by Muslims, by people with a South Asian heritage and so forth.

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By Liam Heneghan

“One should wander solitary as a rhinoceros horn.” – Rhinoceros Horn Sutta

“I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” – T.S. Eliot

Sixty-three days after his solitary stay on Desolation Peak, Jack Kerouac came down the mountain leaving behind him a “column of feces about the height and size of a baby.” Though Kerouac may not be everyman – at times he’s jubilant, at times morose, verbose, braggardly, brilliant, invariably drunk, incessantly dissecting, sullen, always writing, experimenting, vagabonding, observing minutely, oedipally strange, holy, obnoxious, and not infrequently full of shit – nonetheless, Jack’s ordinary failure in the wilderness is perhaps a more honest reckoning on the meaning of wilderness for us everyfolk than all the successful accounts written by the hard men of the great American Wilderness tradition.

In the summer of 1956, at the suggestion of beat-poet and Zen Buddhist Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac worked as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in Washington State’s North Cascades. It’s a story he tells in Desolation Angels, a “chapter” of The Duluoz Legend, his sequence of thinly veiled autobiographical novels. Jack went to the mountain with big ambitions. Coming out of the wilderness a couple of months later he left behind that great mound of shit, and the carcass of a murdered mouse, Kerouac’s first kill (“it looked at me with ‘human’ fearful eyes”[1]). But what had Kerouac taken away with him; taken down from the solitude to the cites and to his now famously garrulous writer friends? That is, what was the value of Jack’s time in the wilderness, to him or to us?

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

To my mind, the most fascinating biological systems lie in the uncanny interstices between the physical and the intentional, between systems that can be understood as purely material objects, in the mould of physics or chemistry, and those that seem to require some notion of self (and other) or intentionality or that use complex regulatory loops to maintain themselves as some sort of consistent entity. For example, how should we make sense of the immune system which, on the one hand, seems obviously physical (and hence avoids the debates associated with consciousness) and yet seems to contain at least a primitive notion of self and other, that maintains representations of and long-term memories about its environment and that seems to regulate in a way that feels teleological (or most easily understood this way). These systems challenge us theoretically partly because they are fiendishly complicated, typically consisting of many interacting parts and levels of interactions. But more than this, these parts and levels of interactions seem to form a consistent whole in a way that, say, a gas in a box doesn't, and in doing so they elude our theoretical frameworks. It's not that we know what a good theoretical description would look like and haven't found it yet¹. Instead we seem to lack the right level of general principles of understanding and organization. At some point the principles we use to understand physical bodies (energy, entropy, conservation laws and so on) seem to break down, but the principles that we use to understand other subjects in the world (desires, goals, representation and such) don't yet hold. Thus these are material collections that are simultaneously coherent entities, inextricably embedded in the world and insensible without it. At the risk of sounding like one of those Continental metaphysicians whom physicists are always raising their eyebrows at, much of what is exciting about this realm is that it hints at new metaphysics, new categories of making sense of what a system is, what a meaningfully describable entity is, and so on. And reassuringly, these theoretical projects are anchored in the study of physical systems; this doesn't guarantee truth but does provide a set of constraints that nudge speculation in interesting directions.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

In the wake of the bombings in Boston, Katie Roiphe's post at slate caught my attention. She says:

Those obsessively poring over emerging news about the Boston bombers should take a break from their iPhones and laptops and newspapers and read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, (and see Mira Nair’s film version out later this week). The novel will go further in answering the general bewilderment about the Tsarnaev brothers than the little snippets of their lives we have so far, in answering the bigger mystery: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?” as Obama put it.

The comments to the piece are pretty disturbing and say more about things here than anything else. No, it isn't anything about the immigrant experience, but rather is something inherent to Islam, they say in the comments. But were these young men politized or involved with fundamentalist fanatics? Or were they (at least one of them) mentally ill– end of story? We just don't know yet, do we?

However, I do think Roiphe makes a good point about identity issues and how cruel and damaging they can be.

In 2000, the conservative critic and Tokyo University professor Susumu Nichibe wrote a book about Japanese virtue and national morality, in which he strongly discouraged teaching a foreign language to Japanese children before they had mastered their own language. I didn't agree with much of anything in his book including that piece of advice (!!), but his description of how bilingualism in languages as different as Japanese and English can cause something which he called cultural schizophrenia stuck in my mind.

I think anyone who speaks two unrelated languages at a high level of fluency will agree that they quite simply think different thoughts depending on the language in which they are thinking at any given time. This is part of the huge attraction, of course, in learning a second language and living overseas–since that experience opens up for a person all kinds of new possibilities: new ways of thinking, new ways of looking at the world, new behaviors, and new ways of understanding the world. It is tremendously expanding.

Japanese is something that has added an indescribable richness to my own inner life and often affords me two very different perspectives on things. At the same time, however, it can be a strain.

The constant cultural comparisons and negotiating back and forth between worldviews can make a person feel the are never wholly at home anywhere. There are also power issues that can generate feelings of humiliation and shame–such as brilliantly portrayed in Hamid's novel. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is at base a novel documenting what it feels like to be between worlds, specifically where one is not in the privileged position (a Pakistani in post 9-11 America).

Maybe unbelievable to me was that the character was only meant to have lived in America four years. Though on second thought, that seemed to be the most common period when people experience nervous breakdowns resulting from culture shock–within the first five years. And, just as Roiphe suggested, what is really interesting about the story is just how so wildly successful by American standards the character was in terms of the “American dream.”

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