by Rishidev Chaudhuri

I

It's impossible for me to leave a place well. I used to think that I was merely bad at logistics and planning (and I am), but I manage to conspire against myself with such sinister competence that this explanation no longer seems viable. As the time to leave approaches my consciousness starts to fragment, and I become exhausted and flee into sleep. I wait too long to do things, unable to act unless I have killed my inertia with drink or other confusion, or distracted myself sufficiently that anything I do is useless. I spend hours on minutiae, reorganizing my book collection and cataloguing my kitchen equipment; they're happy hours, once I forget why I'm doing it.

Perhaps it's that leaving is quite obviously a rehearsal for death, disrupting even the faint illusions of permanence that spatial and environmental contiguity offer us. So is everything, if we have learned to listen to the philosophers and to live well, but of course we have not learned to listen and who has the time to rehearse for death these days?

I have trouble even with leaving hotel rooms and getting off of airplanes. I'm haunted by the sense that I've left traces of my self behind. Maybe in the shape of things: do I have my keys? has my wallet finalized the escape it has been plotting all these years? Perhaps these things I've left are important and their absence will make the self who leaves unviable. Eventually I get frustrated and resentful of the unreasonable claims of that future self but by then it is too late: I am nearly that future self and the instincts of self-preservation take over.

II

With leaving comes the return of beginner's mind, that flush of seeing things fresh as you did when you first arrived, of being once again surprised at the particularity of things, troubled by their contingency and delighted by the odd way the fragments of a world fit together (Louis Macneice's delightful “drunkeness of things being various”). As everyone knows by now, the only time it is truly possible to appreciate anything is when you are faced with its transience and, by then, it is too late and the moments are inextricably entangled with the melancholy of their endings. Sometimes, though, the melancholy parts to reveal intimations of an exuberant noonday joy, as when the sun stands still and makes the world bright and shimmering for a few moments before it begins to fall towards the horizon.

Read more »

by Eric Byrd

There's a subgenre of military memoirs produced by elderly emeriti, the crew-cut close readers of postwar English departments, who in late career published personal recollections of they and the other terrified teenagers who mostly fought World War Two. Alvin Kernan (Shakespeare editor, torpedo bomber crewman) is like Paul Fussell (Johnsonian, infantry officer) and Samuel Hynes (Auden biographer, Marine aviator). Seventeen year-old Kernan joined the Navy before the war, to escape the bleakness of Depression Wyoming: Ma and Pa down on the ranch, hard winters and harder times. Kernan's mother had a representatively difficult life. She killed herself while he was at sea. Home on leave, he inspects her grave “already collapsing and pocked with gopher holes”:

The World War I generation to which she, born in 1900, belonged was the first to leave the land, and with a little education, she married a soldier, moved to town, went to Florida, lost the money from the sale of her father's farm in the land boom, had a child, divorced, and began wandering—Chicago, Memphis, a ranch in Wyoming. She remarried, became a Catholic, and put a determined face on it all, but she was part of the first generation of really rootless modern Americans, moving restlessly by car about the country, emancipated socially and intellectually to a modest degree, but lost, really, without the supporting ethos and family that had protected people in the years when the continent was being settled. Alienation was the familiar state of my generation of Depression and another world war, but the old people had few defenses against it when it appeared.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos are the favorite writers of young Seaman Kernan. He could be one of their characters. As with Hemingway's Nick Adams, death-shaded excursions in the American wilds precede and forebode initiation overseas. And Kernan must have recognized his family in Dos Passos' panorama of the wandering and the unmoored, the war-mobilized, the desperately migratory. The down but not out, bumming the freights, going to sea, following work; displaced but for all that able to dream of landing somewhere better:

Returning from out baseball game, we came alongside the ship and began to send sailors up the gangway. At that moment another landing craft came up carrying officers, including the executive officer of the Suwanee—a small, dark, mean man—who stood up in the bow, dead drunk, shouting in a loud voice to the officer-of-the-deck, “Get those fucking enlisted men out of there and get us aboard.” Protocol was that officers always take precedence in landing, and our boat shoved off immediately, circling while the officers staggered up the gangway after their afternoon drinking in the officers' club. The gap between enlisted men and officers in the American navy during WWII was medieval. Enlisted men accepted the division as a necessary part of military life, but it never occurred to us that it in any way diminished our status as freeborn citizens who, because of a run of bad luck and some unfortunate circumstances like the Depression, just happened to be down for a brief time. “When we get rich” were still words deep in everybody's psyche. But the exec's words, “those fucking enlisted men,” spoke of deep and permanent divisions. He obviously really disliked us, and his words made shockingly clear that he, and maybe the other officers he represented, had no sense that we had shared great danger and won great victories together.

Dos Passos' Three Soldiers, in a paragraph.

Beyond the charm of the Lost Generation atmosphere, the virtues of Crossing the Line are its swift pace and concision of evocation. No episode lasts longer than is necessary to make the essential impressions—usually Kernan's fear and awe (at times laced with boyish glee) before the military juggernauts whose savage collisions he is witnessing. Kernan did not set out to reconstruct the birth of his literary consciousness, or find the boy in the vitae. Quite the opposite. Seaman Kernan is a small animal in a world of threats. He thinks with his gut, senses through the soles of his feet.

Read more »

by Josh Yarden

I posted a story last month about biblical metaphor, entitled “What Fruit Grows on the Tree of Knowledge?” The class discussion I related there continues with this question from a student:

“When you said that the Tree of Knowledge is not an actual tree, didn't you just make up a story that's completely different from the one in the Book of Genesis?”

“Ok, let's get back into to the mythical garden.”

“So, you're saying it's all just a myth?”

“It's not just a myth. When I say a text is mythic, I don't mean that it is false. I mean that the power of the story is in the way it reflects experiences that happen over and over again in our lives. That's how people in different cultures over thousands of years can relate to these essentially human stories. We do know for a fact that the story has existed for millennia, and it has had a powerful and a memorable impact on our society. That makes it real, whether or not the events happened as described.

“Ok, but that doesn't explain whether or not the tree of knowledge of good and bad is an actual tree.”

“You can decide for yourself, but keep in mind that Torah does not claim to be ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.' There aren't enough details in these brief stories to suggest that any of them are full accounts of actual events, but they do contain enough symbolism to be read on three levels: the myth, the moral and the metaphor.

Read more »

by Matt McKenna

At the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, there is much rejoicing by the citizens of the noble planet of Xander after their having been saved by the film's titular ragtag bunch of lovable anti-heroes. What is interesting to note, however, is how unconcerned the individuals on Xandar are by the troubling labor dynamics made apparent in their pyrrhic victory against the evil tyrant, Ronan the Accuser. Consider that a mere five “Guardians” (three humanoids, a tree, and a raccoon) were required to protect the Milky Way, a galaxy containing three hundred billion stars and, in the Marvel canon anyway, is so utterly teeming with bipedal life forms that one can't even land a spaceship on a random abandoned husk of a planet without running into at least one English speaking vigilante/mercenary/henchman who has dedicated her/his/its life to finding one lost relic or another. For goodness sake, just imagine the sheer number of plots against freedom-loving Xandarians that would arise in such a galaxy. And yet, Marvel's Milky Way apparently only requires a handful of part-time crime fighting goofballs to prevent evil from running roughshod over the forces of its PG-13-themed justice. Though it may sound as if I'm suggesting this implausibly small cosmic police force is a plot hole in Guardians of the Galaxy, it is precisely this miniscule ratio of guardians-to-villains that constitutes the film's most salient point about the real world: In our Milky Way as in Marvel's, the good jobs of the future will be dominated by a lionized elite few.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

One of my favorite 3QD associates recently wrote a wonderful blog post, Old Man Bush: The Last Motherfucker. Reminiscing about the good ol' days, he asks the inevitable question, what happened to today's youth?

It's true, George HW Bush was old school. Despite being accepted at Yale, he postpones college to fight in the war, becoming a young aviator and then war hero… and not just that, says Akim, but the badass is still jumping out of helicopters at 90 years old today. Akim is impressed and wonders how it is that we all became so soft?

Honestly. How else do you explain seedless watermelons? Nope, we can’t be bothered to spit black watermelon seeds anymore, much less just eat the white ones. Cause we’re soft.

I mean, good luck finding regular grapefruit juice. No siree Bob, it’s gotta be ruby red on every grocery store shelf, cause the plain old yellow grapefruits are a little bitter. Can’t be expected to put up with that.

Or reading a map. Or cooking dinner from scratch. Or getting up to change the channel. Or waving a hand fan. Or walking anywhere. Nope. Middle class America is too soft for any of that. Just gimme a smart phone, a remote, some takeout, a shit ton of air conditioning, and a good parking spot.

You know things are bad when you start looking back at old HW's presidency with nostalgia, right? What is really scary, though, is I had just been thinking the exact same thing!

Read more »

by Bill Benzon, appendix by Charlie Keil

Writer’s Cypher, UMMI Living Village Community Garden, Jersey City, NJ

Adolescents seem gifted in the belief that, if only the adults would get out of the way and grow up, the world would be a much better place. In that sense I am still, at 66 going on 67 (Pearl Harbor Day of this year) an adolescent. I still believe that the world needs changing, though it’s been decades since I naively thought that letters to The New York Times were a reasonable means to that end. And I still believe that it’s the adults that need changing.

But I must also move forward in the realization that I too am an adult, and have been so for some time now.

What to do?

I painted this when I was nine or ten.

I was ten years old when the Russians put Sputnik into the heavens. I still remember the October evening when my father took me outside and pointed to a moving light in the night sky. “That’s it.”

That’s when my personal history joined world history. That’s the first event that was both personally meaningful to me–I’d been drawing sketches of spaceships for years and had even done a painting or two–and was also of world historical importance. By the time I was old enough to be an astronaut, however, I’d changed.

I’d gone to college, marched against the Vietnam War, done my conscientious objector’s alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Johns Hopkins, and lost all interest in becoming an astronaut. Inner space had become my territory.

I got my PhD, then a job at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was astounded when Reagan was elected and re-elected–that hadn’t been in the plan, no it hadn’t. And I was really surprised when the Soviet Union collapsed. After all, I’d grown up during the height of the Cold War, read articles about back-yard bomb shelters, and had even picked out the spot in our back yard where a shelter should go. I figured that, whatever else happened in the world, that I’d go to my grave in the shadow of the Cold War.

Read more »

by Grace Boey

Imagine this: someone secretly laces your coffee with meth, every morning, for 28 mornings. Over the first week, you become increasingly hyperactive, and start to bubble with confidence and energy. You feel great, but by day 7, your behaviour starts to get erratic, and you’re irritated with everyone else who can’t keep up. By day 21, you’re having flashes of paranoia, and freak out from time to time because your mind keeps racing, and you’re convinced everyone’s watching you move too fast.

By day 28, you haven’t slept for a week. You feel invincible, so much so that you decide to take all the drugs you’ve got to see if it will kill you. Because that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? And if it does kill you, you’ll die feeling amazing… and dying would be such an incredible thing to do. In fact, this had damn well better be fatal. Thanks to the meth and sleep deprivation, you are so confused, irrational and psychotic, that this babbling seems entirely sensible.

Was the suicide attempt ‘your own decision’, in any meaningful sense? Of course it wasn’t. It certainly wasn’t my decision, when those very events happened to me a couple of years ago. The only difference? No one had secretly laced my coffee with drugs (though they might as well have). The terrifying effects were a product of my very first full-blown bipolar manic episode. Thankfully, I survived—although the doctors who treated me assured me I could just as easily not have. I had no clue what was happening at the time; my mania had swept me away, before I even realized anything was amiss.

Despite all this, people like Christian blogger Matt Walsh would say I had committed a “terrible, monstrous atrocity” that was entirely my decision. On August 12, one day after Robin Williams appeared to have killed himself as a result of depression, Walsh published an article with the headline “Robin Williams didn’t die from a disease, he died from his choice.” In it, he claimed that “suicide does not claim anyone against their will”. Depression—and by extension of Walsh’s arguments, all mental illness—is not responsible for suicide: you are. When a huge backlash ensued, he stuck to his guns and wrote a detailed response to his critics.

When I first came across the headline of Walsh's original post, I took a deep breath, read the article, took another deep breath… and read it again. My conclusion at the end of this exercise was the exactly same as my initial response: what a load of exploitative, uninformed rubbish. Walsh's statements reflect deep misconceptions about mental illness, competent decision-making and ‘free will’, which (unfortunately) hinge on the supernatural metaphysics that accompanies Christianity. It angers me that someone like this should feel entitled to piss on the grave of Robin Williams with a headline like that. And personally, as someone who has attempted suicide under the grips of both mania and depression, I am insulted by Walsh's backward ideas.

Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

In the course of discussing the central themes of our recent book, Why We Argue (And How We Should), with audiences of various kinds, one kind of critical response has emerged as among the most popular. It deserves a more detailed reply than we are able to provide here; nonetheless, we want to sketch our response.

Why We Argue presents a conception of proper argumentation that emphasizes its essentially cooperative and dialectical dimension. Very roughly, our view runs as follows. The central aim of cognitive life is to believe what is true and reject what is false. We pursue this by appealing to our evidence and reasons when forming and maintaining our beliefs. Yet in pursuing this aim, we quickly encounter conflicting and inadequate evidence and reasons; furthermore, we discover that we each must rely upon other people as sources of evidence and reasons. Importantly, the others upon whom we must rely do not always speak univocally; they often provide conflicting reasons and evidence. Accordingly, in the pursuit of our central cognitive aim, we confront the inevitability of disagreement. Argumentation is the process by which we attempt to resolve disagreement rationally. Consequently, argumentation is inescapable for a rational creature like us; and the aspiration to argue properly is an indispensible corollary of our central cognitive aim.

The project of arguing well requires individuals to interact with each other in certain ways, and to avoid interacting in other ways. More specifically, in order to argue well, we must individually attempt to take the reasons, perspectives, arguments, criticisms, and objections of others seriously; we must see even those with whom we most vehemently disagree as fellow participants in the process of proper argumentation, and we must engage with them on those terms. This means, among other things, that when engaging in argument, one must seek to make the most of the reasons and considerations offered by one's opposition. Verbal tricks, insults, threats, and obfuscation are failures of argumentation, even when they prove effective at closing discussion or eliciting assent. A lot of Why We Argue (And How We Should) is devoted to cataloguing and dissecting common ways in which argumentation, especially political argumentation, fails.

So much for the nutshell version of our conception of argumentation. Let's turn now to the critical reaction it commonly invites. Critics say that our view is misguided because it cannot acknowledge the brute fact that most often we argue not to rationally resolve disagreement, but to end disagreement; and the favored way of ending disagreement is by winning an argument. Here a sports analogy is often introduced. Critics often claim that just as one plays baseball not (primarily) for the exercise, camaraderie, or the cooperative teamwork, but rather to win baseball games; so it is that when one argues, one argues to win.

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

The big news in math this week was the opening of the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Seoul. A number of prestigious awards are given at the ICM. Most famously this includes the Fields medal and the Nevanlinna prize (aka the Fields medal for computer science). Up to four winners of the Fields medal are announced along with the winner of the Nevanlinna prize. All the winners must be no older than 40.

I had the pleasure to attend the 2006 ICM in Madrid. This is the ICM famous for Grigori Perelman refusing to accept the Fields medal for his work in finishing the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. Perelman (or at least the media version of him) comes across as the stereotypical eccentric mathematician uninterested in worldly things. Fortunately for the PR folks, this year's winners all appear to be the sort you'd enjoy having over for dinner and drinks.

This year the Fields medal went to Artur Avila, Manjul Bhargava, Martin Hairer, and Maryam Mirzakhani. The Nevanlinna prize went to Subhash Khot. An excellent profile of each of the winners, including very nicely done videos, can be found on the Quanta website. The profiles are a bit short on the actual math of the winners. If you'd like a more meaty discussion of their work, former Fields medalist Terry Tao wrote blog posts here and here giving a more technical overview. Even better, former Fields medalist Timothy Gowers is blogging from the ICM itself! He's giving summaries of the main talks as well as his more general impressions while at the event. I can also recommend that you check out the excellent overviews of some of the winners' work on John Baez's Google+ page.

Rather than talk about the details of the winners' work [1], I wanted to point out a meta-mathematical common feature of their research. This is the idea of studying a collection of objects as a whole, rather than one by one.

Read more »

Tide

the way it
comes, goes,
surges, disappears,
a perfect metaphor
for shapes of time,
overused as moon
for that which vanishes
and reappears.

quiet now, the wedding past
too much so—
a house that buzzed
now hushed, silence loud
sharp, slimmer
than a midnight crescent

silence also
comes, goes
empties, spills, ebbs and fills,
evaporates and billows like a cloud
above a sugarbush still
boiling down sweet water
for its essence
.

by Jim Culleny
7/25/14

by Paul Braterman

What's wrong with this argument? More than you think!

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

It's perfectly valid, meaning that if the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true. Despite this, as Bertrand Russell explained very clearly many years ago,[1] the argument is almost totally worthless.

There is no real doubt that Socrates is mortal. Just look at the poor chap, clearly showing his 70 years. Bent, scarred from the Peloponnesian War, his brow furrowed by decades of unhappy marriage, and even more unhappy attempts[2] to persuade his fellow citizens that the best form of government is a fascist oligarchy. Besides, he is on trial for doubting the existence of the gods, and the news from the Agora is not good. Take my advice, and do not offer him life insurance.

Even if we didn't know about his circumstances, we would readily agree that he is mortal. We see decrepitude and death around us all the time, few people have been known to live beyond a hundred years, none beyond 150, and we have no reason to believe that Socrates is any different. In fact, from our experience, we are a lot more certain that Socrates is mortal than we are that all men are mortal. Ganymede, Elijah, and the Virgin Mary were all, according to various traditions, taken directly up into heaven without having to go through the tedious process of dying. However, no Zeus-worshipper or biblical literalist or devout Catholic would for such reasons doubt the mortality of Socrates. So the premise, that all men are mortal, is actually less certain than the conclusion, and if we seriously doubted Socrates's mortality, we would simply deny that premise. In other words, this classic example of deductive logic tells us nothing that we didn't already know.

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

“Do not put your work off till tomorrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.” Hesiod in “The Works and Days“

Paying bills, filling out forms, completing class assignments or submitting grant proposals – we all have the tendency to procrastinate. We may engage in trivial activities such as watching TV shows, playing video games or chatting for an hour and risk missing important deadlines by putting off tasks that are essential for our financial and professional security. Not all humans are equally prone to procrastination, and a recent study suggests that this may in part be due to the fact thatthe tendency to procrastinate has a genetic underpinning. Yet even an individual with a given genetic make-up can exhibit a significant variability in the extent of procrastination. A person may sometimes delay initiating and completing tasks, whereas at other times that same person will immediately tackle the same type of tasks even under the same constraints of time and resources.

A fully rational approach to task completion would involve creating a priority list of tasks based on a composite score of task importance and the remaining time until the deadline. The most important task with the most proximate deadline would have to be tackled first, and the lowest priority task with the furthest deadline last. This sounds great in theory, but it is quite difficult to implement. A substantial amount of research has been conducted to understand how our moods, distractability and impulsivity can undermine the best laid plans for timely task initiation and completion. The recent research article “The Categorization of Time and Its Impact on Task Initiation” by the researchers Yanping Tu (University of Chicago) and Dilip Soman (University of Toronto) investigates a rather different and novel angle in the psychology of procrastination: our perception of the future.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“If you explain to a musician he'll tell that
he knows it but he just can't do it”
~ Bob Marley

It's hard to imagine that the Beastie Boys released “Paul's Boutique” around this time, 25 years ago. Even more astonishing is the fact that I recently had two separate conversations with members of the so-called Millennial Generation, which resulted in the extraordinary discovery that neither person had even heard of “Paul's Boutique.” Now this may make me sound like an ornery codger complaining about how the young folk of today are illiterate because they have never heard of (insert name of your own pet artist). But taken together, these two events require me to submit a modest contribution to keeping the general awareness of “Paul's Boutique” alive and well.

What makes “Paul's Boutique” so extraordinary and enduring? The sophomoric effort by the brash NYC trio debuted in 1989, and was the much-anticipated follow-up to “License To Ill.” But instead of a new set of frat party anthems along the lines of “Fight For Your Right (To Party),” listeners were treated to a continuous magic carpet woven out of a kaleidoscope of samples. Romping over this dense, schizophrenic bricolage, MCA, Ad-Rock and Mike D traded lightning-quick call-and-response rhymes that embraced the usual MC braggadocio but at the same time drew on a vast range of sources and styles. The effect, to this day, is a delirious sort of aural whiplash.

No one is clear on how many songs were actually sampled, although the number is certainly well over a hundred. The exegesis of both samples and lyrical references is a time-honored tradition, too. Around 1995, one of the first sites that ever made me think the World Wide Web might be a good idea was (and continues to be) the Paul's Boutique Samples and References List. When studied, Torah-like, alongside the Beastie Boys Annotated Lyrics and the record itself, one begins to appreciate the catholic taste of both the rappers and their producers, the inimitable Dust Brothers, who would go on to provide much of the genius behind Beck's seminal “Odelay” album a few years later.

Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

I don't like writing about depression. Because it's hard to get right in words. Because I sound like an asshole when I try. Because I am too close to it still. Because my memory of what happened feels faulty at best.

I remember light streaming through the blinds, big fat rays of sun, hitting me in the face. I remember a phone next to me, maybe in the palm of my hand, maybe wedged between the mattress and my thigh. Cold coffee on the nightstand. Cigarette ash on the sheets. I remember the sounds of kids playing on the street below, throwing rocks at a metal shop gate.

Friends told me to buck up. Pull it together. Muscle through. They said things like fake it till you make it and everything happens for a reason. They blamed it on global warming. Growing pains. Venus is in retrograde, after all.

They wanted me to will myself better and all I wanted was to write my will. I thought I was dying. I believed with every fiber left of my being that I was dying. Case closed. The party is over.

The more I needed people the more I retreated from them. How could I tell them that I couldn't feel my body? That it was completely disconnected from my mind? I was a person in parts, each part trying to function in its dysfunction. Pieces that no longer fit together in a way that made any sense.

My neighbor at the time, a well-meaning philosophy professor that only left his apartment long enough each day to teach and buy wine, told me that depression comes in waves. But that made it sound too beautiful. There was nothing good about the bad. He suffered from melancholy, a sort of condition that he became addicted to, enamored of. A powerful, deep sadness that became life-affirming for him. People broke his heart but in a pretty, poetic way. And this somehow gave him buoyancy in this world.

But my depression felt different.

Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

The world of food and wine thrives on a heavy dose of nostalgia. Culinarians (“foodies'” in the vernacular) chase down heritage tomatoes, ferment their own vinegar, and learn to butcher hogs in the name of “how things used to be” before the industrial food business created TV dinners and Twinkies. As we scour the Internet for authentic recipes, we imagine simpler times of family farms supporting family feasts consisting of real food, prepared in homey, immaculate kitchens with fruit pies on the windowsill, and the kids shelling beans at the table. Similarly, the wine industry continues to thrive on the romantic myth of the noble winemaker diligently tilling a small vineyard year after year to hand-produce glorious wines that taste of the local soil and climate.

Of course, in reality the winemaking of days past was not so romantic. Bad weather would have ruined some vintages and difficulties in controlling fermentation temperatures and unsanitary conditions in the winery rendered many wines barely drinkable. As to the way we ate in the not-to-distant past, for most people, food was scarce, expensive, of poor quality and often unsafe. Kitchens, if they existed, were poorly equipped and their operation depended on difficult, relentless work by women. Only the wealthy could eat in the manner approaching the quality of contemporary nostalgic yearnings, but that quality usually depended on the work of underpaid kitchen staff after slavery was abolished.

Nostalgia is a form of selective memory, history without the bad parts, enabling us to enjoy the past without guilt.

Does this dependency on myth render our contemporary fascination with the foods of the past a kind of kitsch—a sentimental, clichéd, easily marketed longing that offers “emotional gratification without intellectual effort” in Walter Benjamin's formulation, an aesthetic and moral failure? Worse, is this longing for the past a conservative resistance to the modern world. The word “nostalgia” has Greek roots—from nostos and algia meaning “longing to return home”. Are contemporary culinarians and wine enthusiasts longing for a return to the “good” old days?

Read more »

by Kathleen Goodwin

Few students of colonial history can deny the power of spoken and written language to subject and subdue a population. Zia Haider Rahman's “dazzling debut” of a novel, “In the Light of What We Know”, contrasts two South Asian characters who attended Oxford together as undergrads—a privileged Pakistani narrator who becomes an investment banker in London and his friend Zafar, an impoverished refugee of the 1971 Bangladeshi Liberation War turned Harvard educated international human rights lawyer. One of the central themes of the novel is the way language can exert power over individuals and groups, as well as entire nations. Spoken language is an obvious manifestation of the tension created by modern day neo-colonialism or the 1971 splintering of Bengali-speaking East Pakistan from Urdu-speaking West Pakistan. But Rahman also explores a parallelism in the way language—in the form of industry jargon, acronyms and other forms of coded phrasing— can create power structures with remarkable potency.

“In The Light of What We Know” skips around temporally but the narrative is centered around London in 2008, in the midst of the unfurling financial crisis. The nameless narrator is revealed to not only be a banker, but the head of the mortgage-backed securities unit of his (also unnamed) global investment bank and thus on the verge of losing his job as the public condemns him and his counterparts for the calamity that is taking place. Tellingly, Rahman's résumé includes a stint as a Wall Street investment banker prior to becoming a novelist. His purpose does not appear to be to crucify the financial sector, rather his novel explores the great irony of the financial crisis—the securities derived from residential mortgages, which when the American housing market collapsed became essentially worthless and set off the chain of events that have changed history forever, were vetted and encouraged by the entities that should have understood and prevented the systemic risk to global markets these securities posed. Rahman's narrator explains this as being a function of the incestuous and hierarchical relationship between the big banks and the ratings agencies and regulators. The narrator describes a financial club of sorts, headed by chummy Oxford classmates who maintain a revolving door hiring policy and most importantly—speak a financial language incomprehensible to the ignorant public. The critical point is the way these hidden power structures allowed the conditions preceding the financial crisis to occur. The ratings agencies and regulators were compliant with the investment banks while the rest of society was unaware of the huge gambles being sanctioned, which eventually proved to be detrimental to the stability of the global economy.

Read more »