by Justin E. H. Smith

“A plain historical account of some of our most fashionable duellists, gamblers, and adulterers (to name no more) would exhibit specimens of brute barbarity, and sottish infatuation, such as might vie with any that ever appeared in Kamschatka, California, or the land of the Hottentots.” —James Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism (1770)

“It is difficult to believe what one large speculative farmer has said, that the success of California agriculture requires that we create and maintain a peon class. For if this is true, then California must depart from the semblance of democratic government that remains here.” —John Steinbeck, “The Harvest Gypsies” (1936)

“In fact [this] is what I wanted to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” —Joan Didion, “Notes of a Native Daughter” (1968)

I.

Let us, in a Didionic spirit, try out a few irrefutable statements. The Northeast of North America is, for better or worse, the only part of the continent to have been properly settled by Europeans. It became a proper part of the Euro-American North Atlantic cultural sphere some centuries ago, and remains there still.

To be of European descent and from California, by contrast, is somewhat more like being from South Africa. California was simply left blank on early modern maps of the New World, and it remains one of the earth's extremities. Here, just like the Cape, is where one runs out of continent. The fact that the 'Californians' to whom Beattie refers were annihilated, while the 'Hottentots' and other Southern African groups were only subjugated, doesn't make a crucial difference. Like the Boers, most white Californians are descended from people pushed by desperation to the edge of a continent, and, once there, pitted by a white elite against the other races they came across, either as a result of autochthony or through a parallel process of migration.

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“Shu” is the single teaching of Confucius and “jen”
it’s counterpart. Shu means reciprocity; jen is love,
kindness and goodness. T’ien is heaven.
–Confucius and the Teaching of Goodness

Shu and Jen

Goodness came like two hearts
and sat beside me. My name is
Shu, said she

In the window two birds flew
The window was open when,
pointing, Shu said, Jen

The two hearts of Shu said,
What can we do for you?

The two birds of Jen crowed,
Looks like you need a friend.

The world is split in two,
and you are too, said Shu

See the birds of Jen, she said?
They feed each other and
so are free in T’ien

Think of me, said Shu
and you may be free too

by Jim Culleny, 6/18/11

By Namit Arora

[I somehow managed to write a 3,500-word essay on Trinidad without mentioning cricket, rum, or the steelpan. Can I be forgiven for that?]

In April this year, I visited the Indian Caribbean museum near the town of Chaguanas in Trinidad. Set in a large hall, the museum had no other visitors. Its curator, Saisbhan Jokhan, 69, came out to greet me. Jokhan, I soon realized, not only loved to talk but was also a trove of information. As I began taking notes, he asked if I was a journalist. Yes, I said; I wrote for a venerable publication called 3 Quarks Daily, and I intended to write about the Indo-Trinidadian experience. His eyes lit up and for the next ninety minutes, he accompanied me in the museum, explaining and answering my questions.

The museum commemorates the history of a million Indo-Caribbeans whose ancestors came as indentured laborers from India between 1838-1917. Its panels include details on immigrant ships, copies of girmits, or indenture agreements, and rare archival photos of life on sugarcane plantations. Evocative objects abound: an improvised sarangi, a pair of wood slippers, a rotary sugarcane press like the ones still used in mofussil India, even a lifesize model of an indentured worker’s hut. Other displays show milestones in the life of the community, such as a 1970 photo of the first Indo-Trini policewoman; a panel on Alice Jan, the first lady of Indo-Trini culture; Indo-Trinis winning the right to build their own schools in 1952, allowing them to replace Christian teaching with Hindu teaching.

The museum is run by the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, a conservative Hindu organization that also runs many temples. Talking to Jokhan it struck me that he lived with a clear sense of ‘his people’, what they have suffered, what challenges awaited them. His tone, and the museum’s singular focus, brought to mind a pastiche of Jewish museums I have seen over the years. This too felt like a museum designed to preserve the collective memory of a people’s suffering and struggles, and Jokhan seemed to me the right man for the job: proud of his identity, devoted to his community, slightly paranoid.

Jokhan’s historical memory is alien to people like me who have joined the Indian diaspora in recent decades. We have fostered the stereotype of Indians as a model minority, led by professionals and marked by diligence and enterprise in the pursuit of opportunities around the globe. But most of the Indian journeys in the colonial era were very different. They involved harsh unskilled labor on sugarcane estates, horrible living conditions, and severe discrimination. Trinidad, which I will look at here, is one chapter of that past; others include Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and Réunion.

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by Nick Werle

The most striking aspect of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is the pacing of its narrative. The story, which tracks the fall of the Galactic Empire into what threatens to be a 30,000-year dark age, never tracks characters for more than a few chapters. The narrative unfolds at a historical pace, a timescale beyond the range of normal human experience. While several short sections might follow one another with only hours in between, gaps of 50 or 100 years are common. The result is a narrative in which characters are never more than bit players; the book’s real focus is on the historical forces responsible for the rise and fall of planets. The thread holding this tale together is the utopian science of psychohistory, which combines psychology, sociology and statistics to calculate the probability that society as a whole will follow some given path in the future. The novel’s action follows the responses to a psychohistorical prediction of the Empire’s fall made by Hari Seldon, the inventor of the science, who argued by means of equations that the dark ages could be reduced to only a single millennium with the right series of choices. In comparing the science of psychohistory and the actual events that accompany the Galactic Empire’s fall, Asimov’s time-dilated narrative weaves together disparate theories of history and science articulated around the problem of predicting the future, the historical primacy of crises, and the irreducible difference between studying an individual and analyzing a society as a whole. In Asimov’s imagined science, however, we can trace the real logic of macroeconomics and begin to understand why Keynes could never produce such dramatic predictions.

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by Haider Shahbaz

We want someone to whisper to us. But nobody does. And we get scared. There are sounds, faint sounds; they come from upstairs and downstairs, and some from the apartment next to us. And we wait for them to whisper to us. They will whisper, we know. From across the skin, across the wall, across the road, the city, the ocean, the wind and the sun they will whisper. So – we wait.

We do not like New York City. It feels, sometimes, as if it has no humans; only concrete and glass and plastic and fabric. Behind sunglasses and walls and windows and cars and clothes and books and earphones: who knows – who knows, if humans still exist. But it is that rare smile, a lingering stare, the confused question, the error so to say that gives it away. The little interactions we have: performances of our own consciousness.

There was consolation in that consciousness: to know that I can hurl myself in to these windows, blast this concrete to smithereens. I can run in to these brothels of human feelings they call shops and with every last breath in my lungs, shout. I can strip them naked and slap them and caress them and smell them. I can hold their hand, and if they want and if I want, we can go across the earth and see that the grass still grows, and flowers still bloom and dust still settles. I can walk up to someone and whisper in his ears, delicately, patiently: the messiah will not come, but I am here, and I will hold you and love you.

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by George Wilkinson

Every year, the Earth captures thousands of tons of interplanetary particles, with objects in the micron size range striking every thirty microseconds. Because of their small size, some of them waft to the surface with minimal heat damage—thus their interiors preserved traces of their interplanetary origins. Although micrometeories fall in over the earth’s entire surface(and can be collected from rainspouts), scientists try to collect them in isolated environments, away from both natural and anthropogenic contaminants. An ongoing program in Antarctica makes use of the extremely clean, dry environment to collect micrometeorites from the icepack. Scientists melt ice by the ton and sieve the meltwater to recover a fine grit very rich in micrometeorites. Because of the heterogeneity of the collected particles, they have to be analyzed individually, by electron microscopy and specialized spectroscopy.

But how faithfully does the dust collected on earth reflect its interplanetary reservoir? The STARDUST space mission collected dust from the coma of the comet Wild-2, a Jupiter family comet recently deflected nearer to earth, making use of an aerogel as a high-tech butterfly net to capture dust particles with relative velocities approaching that of a rifle bullet. STARDUST returned to Earth bringing back thousands of small (<30 μm) solid particles. The examination of Wild 2 samples made it possible to explore the connection between micrometeorites recovered on earth and cometary and asteroidal objects as they exist in the interplanetary space.

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by Meghan Rosen

15 years ago, General Motors debuted the first fully electric vehicle for lease in the United States. The EV1 was silent, fast, and as aerodynamic as an F-16 fighter jet; but most importantly, it could run between 70 and 150 miles on a single charge. (Toyota’s Prius Plug-in Hybrid, for comparison, has an all-electric range of 13 miles.) Between 1996 and 1999, more than 1000 EV1s were manufactured. 800 were leased out in Arizona and California, and, according to the brand manager at GM, inspired “maniacal loyalty” in their drivers.

Four years later, despite pleas from drivers, and a waiting list of interested customers, GM declared the electric-car program a money loser, and ordered the car’s destruction. Existing EV1s were taken from their drivers, transported to the desert (in some cases, under police protection), and crushed. (Today, a few can be found in museums, but they’ve been disabled so as to never drive again.)

The plight of the EV1 was chronicled in the 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?, but Seth Fletcher’s new book, Bottled Lightning, is not just about the the EV1. It’s about the batteries that make electric vehicles a reality, the lithium that powers them, and the players who forge global energy policies. But the long, rocky history of electric cars is where Fletcher is most compelling.

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“Fire log in cunt,”
a pious father yells
at his daughter who tells him
that an egg she swallowed
has grown a chick
inside her belly.

Sure that his only child is possessed,
he buys a perky hen
to entice the chick and purge it.
Hen flutters in his hands as he
chases his daughter barefoot
around their backyard

a day after snow.
The daughter hops like the snow hare
that lunges deep
into the throat of a glacier
to outrun the elk
and eludes the fuming father.

Three score and three years later,
she plumbs a memory,
summons all her frail strength
to yell, “Fire log in prick,”
back at her long-deceased father,
who she insists in a shrill voice

is alive at her childhood home in Kashmir.
In New Rochelle, New York,
in my usual heartless way,
I administer two pills
Ativan & Zyprexa
to chill Mother’s mind.

Rafiq Kathwari is pleased to debut “Late Retort” at 3QuarksDaily which demands original content. Remember, you read it here first.

by Frederick William Zackel

[I have always wanted to write my own commencement speech.]

Congratulations, graduates! All the hard work and sacrifice has paid off.

I think everybody here should applaud you again for all you did and had to do to get here. No, seriously, give them another round of applause.

Hey, guys, I got a pop quiz for you. Yeah, your last one.

I call you guys because until recently I had two of my own kids in college, and I see you as being the same wonderful guys as them. And I am as happy for you, I am as proud of you, as I am of them. (Mostly.)

I say “guys” because saying “guys and gals” all the time sounds awkward as hell, and I hear women all the time on campus saying “guys” as a rallying cry. “Hey, guys, it’s get it together timer, so let’s focus and do it!”

This pop quiz has only one question.

What do you call the top one percent of any population?

Are they the ruling elite? The Ruling Class?

One percent of the population of this world are college graduates.

Congratulations on joining the Ruling Elite.

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by Mara Jebsen

“Peoples bore me, literature bores me. Especially great literature”

-–John Berryman

It is Thursday and I am in the café in which the ceiling fan and rock’n’roll seem to make a gentle pact to keep rhythm. To the left of me lies one Brooklyn neighborhood, and to the right, another. Above these ceiling fans are two apartments stacked on each other, but I don’t know how they are shaped or furnished. Above them is the sky, which today is blue-mottled with clouds. The café basement, which I have never seen, hums below us, and below that, I imagine, a lot of native Brooklyn dirt, and the complicated systems of water and electricity that make the city go, go, go —and below that—I don’t know.

Often I map myself. I've got an ignorant, sensual GPS system. I track what I can and can’t sense. Maybe it’s common amongst those of us who traveled a lot as children—this desire to physically locate oneself in time and space. Then, I was there. Now, I am here. Here smells like oranges. But my mapping habit is getting compromised because lately, I usually have the laptop in front of me. There’s google maps, and all kinds of information that I could use to extend my senses. The sheer reach of it freaks me out.

Once, I was blindfolded for a week. It was in Cambridge in 1998, the summer I was 19, the one I now remember as the summer of jazz and the playboy bunny. I was a waitress at the time in a music club, and sometimes I modeled a little for a photography class (I have a distinct memory of clambering around a cemetery during a heatwave in a wedding dress. Polyester lace climbing up my neck) but the money from that wasn’t adding up to rent. The blindfold was part of a medical study that I knew through various channels was safe and aboveboard. They paid me 1,000 dollars to stay in the hospital, to do funny little exercises, and to get six MRIs so they could study the effect of the blindfold on my brain activity.

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by Tolu Ogunlesi

In its Feb 19, 2011 editorial, “A fresh chapter is opening in Africa’s history” the Guardian (London) observed:

“The African lions are finding their voice. A new generation of men and women has the ambition and imagination to reshape the continent in their own image – confident, assertive, successful, bold and proud… The story of Africa is changing. And we will be spreading the news.”

These days it seems a lot easier to pull up, from the internet, cheering news about Africa. The word “revolutionary”, when used these days regarding the continent, is less likely to be referring to a ‘revolutionary guard’ than an expression of people power, or technological innovation.

Tweeting recently from the Pivot 25 Mobile Apps & Developer Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, journalist Dayo Olopade reported: “The last panel at #pivot25 yields the best statistic: Mobile airtime beats beer as the most profitable business in East Africa.”

To hear that the business of ‘talking’ is outpacing that of drinking can only be good news – especially when we assume that at least some of that mobile phone expenditure goes towards creating connections that produce economic and political value; the kind that have helped drive the M-PESA mobile banking revolution in Kenya and altered (to varying degrees) the political landscape in Tunisia, Egypt and even Nigeria.

JM Ledgard’s article, “Digital Africa”, published in the Spring 2011 edition of The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine. Ledgard, the Economist’s Nairobi correspondent, writes very knowledgeably about how undersea broadband cables and smartphones are helping transform a shackled continent into a wired one.

Olopade herself is working on a book (due out 2012), “The Bright Continent: How African Ideas Are Changing the World”, which promises to “demonstrate how the regional tradition of resourcefulness, creativity, and “making do” – combined with the recent explosion in communications and other technologies – transforms the continent’s problems into teachable moments in health, energy, education, media, justice and more.”

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by Jeff Strabone

It used to be the case that the earth took little notice of the rise and fall of empires and republics. Fields were burned, livestock slaughtered, wells polluted, but sooner or later life returned. That is not necessarily the case anymore, as recent eco-catastrophes in the Gulf of Mexico and Japan remind us. But those were accidents, right? Roll the dice on enough high-risk energy projects around the world and eventually something will go wrong. We can at least say that no one who planned the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig or the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant counted on polluting the Gulf or irradiating northern Japan. I cannot say the same for the energy-extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking' for short.

Fracking offers us the one-two punch of both ecological and republican destruction at the same time. With its left, it poisons drinking water and appears to cause earthquakes. And with its right, it lands a knockout blow against government regulation, the disinterested rule of law, and that old chestnut from the U.S. Constitution, promoting the general welfare. In the case of fracking, both government and industry know the earth-shattering toxicity of its effects, yet both continue to act as partners in spreading the practice across the country. It is one thing to say that the republic is standing on shaky ground. It is quite another to mean it literally.

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By Kate Fincke

Over the years I have asked many children how they get to sleep at night. I collect these stories. More often than not, when the children find out about my collection, they ask me to tell them all the stories I know. Secreted in the telling is a point: all children must find a way to put themselves to sleep. While parents may put them to bed, the children alone must drift off. As adults we know that insomnia is commonplace, and we do what we can to fend it off. Children, however, often rail at the realization that despite bedtime stories, snacks, lullabies or back rubs, they are, in the end, on their own. They are frequently bewildered that we cannot make them sleep. Even if adults offer suggestions (the famous sheep counting, or prayers or reading), children must actively choose to invest themselves in the strategy. Often they rebel, refusing all suggestions, insisting they have tried them all, and they just don't work.

Their recalcitrance lies in the alone-ness of sleep, the isolation, and the self-reliance. The solution lies in turning away from whomever is tucking them in — away from the hope that they can be accompanied across the threshold of sleep—and turning toward their own creativity. I believe, in the end, that drifting off is a solitary creative act.

Toddlers, we know, cannot be given their security blankets; they create them. And for a time, the security blanket soothes and will ferry the child from sleepiness to sleep. As children mature, however, the blanket no longer suffices, and the life of the mind takes over, opening the door to both imagined fears and imagined remedies. At night children commit themselves to the power of imagination. Eight-year-olds find themselves believing in monsters that during daylight hours are ridiculed. In my profession, help often comes in the form of stories —sometimes stories that are made up on the spot by child and therapist together. So when the kids ask to hear my collection of sleep stories, it often goes something like this:

I knew a boy once who was afraid of burglars at night. He was particularly worried about his window — a natural entry point for bad guys. So when he went to bed, he had his mother tuck him in extra tight so no one could get at him. Then he had her line up his twelve polar bears all around him with the biggest one at his feet and all the rest facing in, watching over him.

Once settled, he began to boot-up his imaginary computer with all sorts of burglar-catching paraphernalia. It grew to be a vastly intricate computer, loaded with invisibility functions and burglar-seeking missiles. As I understand it, he would lose himself in the details of his programming and fall off to sleep.

However, once a night, he would wake up to pee. To insure his safety, he had to run to the bathroom as fast as he could while stopping to hop twice on each hall rug. If he hopped right, sleep was guaranteed. If not—worry. If worry, then the laborious computer programming began all over again.

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by James McGirk

Writers are anxious about the Internet and all things electronic, as we worry these newfangled ways of entertaining ourselves might someday obviate our own work. The solution, perhaps, lies in understanding and adapting to this new medium. Consuming enough that we can master its complexities and render appealingly intelligent confections for our readers. But who are these readers? Are they different online than they are in print? Some of them aren’t even human. There is a new form of reader browsing the Internet. For this is no longer just the age of mechanical reproduction; we now have to contend with mechanical readers as well.

William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” imagined it as a mass consensual hallucination, rendered as a cityscape, the prominence of each shape on the horizon an index of how much data was passing through a single point; a point which in 1982 a reader might have thought of as a mainframe computer, and what today, nearly thirty years later, we might identify as an html address or site. On Gibson’s Internet Google would glow the brightest, soar the highest; be an Empire State Building to the Internet’s Manhattan. Most users don’t look at the Internet by volume, however, they read it pane by pane, navigating from bookmarks or through searches, feeding keywords into an ‘engine,’ a series of algorithms, to retrieve lists of linked addresses to the information they seek. These lists are customized to the user, the results tweaked by the user’s location and previous searches. The more searches you make, the more information about yourself you reveal, the more customized the experience becomes.

From a content provider’s point of view (as opposed to a more passive content user’s point of view) an ideal Internet browser might render something close to Gibson’s landscape of crystalline data sculptures, were there a way to capture such information in real time. But commercial users would rather see traffic than the mere through-output of bits and bytes. Who consumes what information, when and why is much more important to commerce than mere bandwidth. Though online sales have grown to become big business, the Internet remains a popularity contest. The real currency of the online world is attention. Being able to read the flow of attention online would mean mastering it, and reaping the ad money that comes along with that attention. But instead of trying to follow where everyone is going all at once, content providers are instead attempting to clone their readers’ minds.

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