by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

All my life, I've been called a Madrasi. This is false, funny, and ironic. For those that live north of the Vindhyas in India, all four of the southern states connote a ubiquitous “Madras”, or in other words the land where people speak Madrasi (otherwise knows as four distinct languages Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, and Tamil). But Madras, or to call it by its current, official, and always locally more kosher name Chennai, was never home to me. I visited Madras, and I lived in Bombay. Madras was heat, provinciality, incoherence, and conservatism. For the longest time, it occupied the second position on a list of cities that I vowed to never inhabit. Number One is still held by New Delhi, and I hope it doesn't indulge in similarly stymieing my life plans. Hush I tell myself, lest the Gods have sharp ears. Evidence indicates otherwise, but you never know.

Madras, I am told by the many books I peruse in the hopes of gaining intellectual familiarity, is where modern India began. This old colonial outpost that had the likes of Robert Clive, Elihu Yale, and Arthur Wellesley pass through dates back to the 1640 settlement of Madraspatnam. For those seeking a primer, I highly recommend Bishwanath Ghosh's Tamarind City and of course, S.Muthiah's Madras Discovered.

Seeking this selfsame city of sepia fame, I wander off one bright Madras morning, dragging a friend and relucatant early riser to Fort St. George, one of the arteries of the colonial enterprise. Disembarking from the train at Beach station sharp at seven am, bright and caffeinated, we walk past a still sleeping old town through NSC Bose Road, and the various Chetty streets, named after differently famed members of the Chettiar community. Each street differentiates itself by the goods it sells; electrical appliances in one, upholstery in the other, plumbing equipment in yet another.

The art-deco buildings are magnificent, and often magnificently ratty. The politics of heritage preservation are apparently a nationwide phenomenon. I receive atmospheric consolation from this history that seems like so many other histories of so many other old towns. I do what any self-respecting debutante to urban studies might do, take many pictures. Fort St.George, the Armenian church with many buried Armenians and nary a community, Armenian Street, abandoned pushcarts, modernist architecture, all fodder for my newly obsessive need to know this city.

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by Michael Lopresto

Perceptual experience is a distinctly privileged way of knowing about the world. Not only is perceptual experience ultimately the bridge between mind and world, but it also trumps other ways of knowing. When another way of knowing about the world – inference, introspection, memory, and testimony – and experience disagree with one another, experience will be kept and the other will be dropped unless we have strong reason to believe that what we're experiencing contains an illusion or a hallucination. So, if you were to tell me that my sister is in Melbourne, and later that day I saw her walking across the street from where I am here in Adelaide, I would immediately drop the belief based on testimony that she is in Melbourne. However, an alternative situation may be this: I know that my sister has a doppelgänger who lives here in Adelaide. So in this situation, if I happen to believe that you're a reliable source of information, I'd probably believe instead that I'm actually seeing my sister's doppelgänger.

The moral is this: experience, privileged as it is, is still judged against what we already happen to know – as are the other sources of knowledge. When a proposition arrived at by inference or testimony disagrees with something I already know, I'm going to subject that proposition to much closer scrutiny than I otherwise would. Furthermore, experience, privileged as it is, always involves interpretation. In the first case, where I see my sister, and the second case, where I see my sister's doppelgänger, provide me with identical data. Each of the perceptual experiences are indistinguishable from my first-person perspective. The fact that interpretation is involved in perceptual experience is what explains how it's possible to come to different conclusions from identical perceptual experiences.

So, how are we to understand “interpretation” in the context of perceptual experience? It's certainly not anything like conscious deliberation, otherwise its presence would be salient to us (and it's not at all), and further, experience would be much more plastic than it actually is, in that it would be affected by interpretation in a much more thoroughgoing way. So our background knowledge influences our perceptual experiences in a way that is automatic and unconscious. Should this consideration lead to scepticism about the reliability of our perceptual faculties giving us objective knowledge of the external world? I think the answer is clearly not.

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by Mara Naselli

Minds cannot help but make meaning, even with only a suggestion of direction. When I taught manuscript editing, to put the mechanics of the work in perspective, I would write out a line of taspyograpgucal noasihfsnesnse theat qwe kcgan reasdsdo to illustrate the point. Your eye, reading the jumble above, found the letters to make the words. We make corrections and connections without thinking about them. We bend the contours of a line. We want order, not confusion, and will bring it into shape if we can.

This hunger for order applies to memory as much as it applies to reading. We know memory is plastic—it can even be invented. What interests me are the choices that occur someplace between consciousness and unconsciousness—our grasping letters that make sense and eliding the others so that the coherence of our interpretations and blindnesses are preserved. But what would a more careful reading look like? How do we allow a memory or fact to break into our consciousness and disrupt our domestic intellectual and emotional order?

On April 18, 1939, Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa urged her to write her memoirs, before her memory might fail her. Woolf was ready for a diversion—she had been working on a biography of the painter Robert Fry, puzzling out the difficulties of writing about another human being outside of the events of his or her life. Who was I then? she asks, turning the question onto herself. For the next year and a half, she wrote her recollections, conjuring the dead and their vanished Victorian world. “A Sketch of the Past” was edited by Jeanne Schulkind and published posthumously in 1976.

Which is to say these writings are, for all intents and purposes, works in progress, and to read them is a bit like editing them, interpreting and weighting the content, discerning a shape that might give contours to the genius they contain. To read Woolf’s draft of a memoir is to sit with her at her writing desk, after she has gone for a walk, read Chaucer, made notes on Robert Fry, written instructions to the housekeeper, or heard the drone of German planes overhead. She settles in, and we watch her wade into the past. Woolf’s writing is not simply recollection, rather her encounter makes the convergence of past and present an altogether new thing—waters not yet crossed.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

Parenthood is coming under increasing criticism as a selfish lifestyle choice. Parents' private choices to procreate impose expensive obligations on the rest of us to ensure those children have a decent quality of life and come out as successful adults and citizens, and that means massive tax-subsidies for their health, education, and so forth. We also pay to support parents' self-conception of parenthood, such as by providing lengthy paid paternal leave to allow them to ‘bond' with their children.

In addition there are environmental costs relating to the consumption of the children themselves. The choice to become a parent massively increases one's environmental footprint because it adds consumers who otherwise wouldn't have existed, and who may then go on to have children of their own. The environmental impact of a population is a function of population size multiplied by consumption per capita. Therefore, adding consumers must either lead to a greater environmental impact, or else to a politically directed reduction in per capita consumption to avoid that impact. With regard to carbon emissions, for example, it has been estimated that an American woman who has a child increases the carbon emissions she would have been responsible for by a multiple of 5.7 (source). If lots of people have children, the planet will be in even greater danger of cooking, unless all of us make very severe cuts to our consumption practices to keep humanity within the bounds of sustainability.

One might argue that children don't only impose costs on the rest of us. For example, because they may be expected to become productive workers as well as consumers, they will repay their ‘debt' to us by supporting the economic sustainability of our pension system (and thus allow us to continue to afford our habits of affluent consumption). But even if that were true to some extent, it does not affect the core criticism of the selfishness of parenthood, which is that parents do not stop to consider how their procreative decisions may affect others, including other would be parents. Since parents aren't motivated to have children by their commitment to supporting the social welfare system or otherwise contribute to society, they can claim no credit if that is how things happen to work out.

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by Carl Pierer

In the book “Existentialism – A Reconstruction” David E. Cooper devotes an entire chapter to inquiring the relation between philosophy and alienation. Cooper's interest is to make the point that “the issues of alienation are pivotal in existentialist thought” ([1], p.31). To do so, he includes a brief sketch of Hegel's and Marx' ideas concerning alienation. In line with these two thinkers, Cooper gives a rough outline for an argument that alienation is at the heart of the philosophical adventure. Since he is right in claiming that this take on philosophy amounts to a drastic shift in perspective for the (analytic) philosophy student, the idea deserves to be argued for.

The term “alienation” is strongly associated with the allegedly impenetrable, obscurantist writings of thinkers such as Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre. Sentences like “(…) the terminology in which I have so far discussed alienation – ‘at home with', ‘separated from', etc. – is both vague and figurative. It may be that the sense of alienation is resistant to literal, analytical definition” ([1], p. 25) hardly make the concept more palatable. Yet, in spite of many different thinkers stretching the concept of alienation to fit their needs, it seems that there is a core which can be distilled. The aim is not to find a one size fits all, but to establish a tentative runway from which the various writers can take off. In this context, such a proposed fundament must be general and abstract enough so as to account for various pulls into different directions. However, a rigorous stress test would go beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, testing the proposed definition with Marx and Heidegger, two writers in whose thinking alienation plays a crucial role, will have to suffice. With a sketched definition of alienation an argument for understanding philosophy as an attempt to overcome alienation, rather than acquiring knowledge, can be proposed.

Upon encountering the world, there is – at the very least – a perceived dichotomy. On the one hand, there is something that belongs to me, and there is something external to me. There is an I and a not-I. To realise this is to experience alienation. To take up Bertrand Russell's example in his Problems of Philosophy: “(…) let us concentrate our attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives a wooden sound.” ([2], p. 11) For the sake of argument, let us grant Russell the concept of table, of sense data, etc. Even if we strip ourselves of scepticism about these, there is an object presupposed. A something we can concentrate our attention on. This subject-object distinction is inherent in the grammatical structure of transitive verbs. To see means to see something. Without leaving the surface level, it appears that – intuitively, in our way of living – we distinguish between two entities: the I and the not-I. Alienation, then, denotes the partition of our existence into these two subsets.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

In January this year, I visited Hospitalito Atitlán, a health care center for the Tz'utujil Maya in the town of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. There were two reasons for this visit. First, much of my healthcare work has been limited to the US system; I wanted to get a sense of what was going on in other places. Second, for many years I've been trying to learn about the indigenous cultures of the Americas; this had led me in the past to Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. I welcomed, now, this chance to spend a few days in a Mayan town in Guatemala.

Santiago Atitlán, a town of 30-40,000, is a 3-hour drive from Guatemala City, at the southwestern edge of Lake Atitlán. The lake fills a caldera formed in an eruption 84,000 years ago, and is surrounded by lush-green volcanoes, rising to over 8,000 feet. The majority of the people who live in the surrounding towns belong to one of two Mayan groups: the Tz'utujil and Kaqchikel. Santiago Atitlán is almost entirely Tz'utujil, while San Lucas Toliman is mostly Kaqchikel. Tz'utujil and Kaqchikuel also refer to two of the twenty odd Mayan languages in Guatemala (there are a few others in Mexico). All of them are still spoken, in sharp contrast to the fate of indigenous languages elsewhere in the Americas.

I arrived in Santiago Atitlán on a Sunday morning. The town is set along a slope that eases into the lake; Volcan San Pedro rises dramatically across a narrow section of the water, dominating the view. For a small town, the streets were a maze, and I lost my way each time. Many of the homes were make-shift; the farther I ascended away from the town center, the poorer the homes were. Almost all the Tz'utujil women wore brightly colored yarn based textiles with intricate patterns. On the main road along the lake's circumference, Toyota pick-up trucks – a common mode of shared local transportation – carried passengers who stood in the open rear. Then there were the brightly colored tuk-tuks, exactly like the three wheeler autos I knew in India – every one of them that I saw in Atitlán was made by Bajaj.

The pick-up trucks, the tuk-tuks, and even many of the paved roads were all new, I was told – part of the economic growth here after decades of conflict. In the last half of the 20th century, Guatemala, like other nations of Central America – El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras – went through a violent upheaval. The Guatemalan Civil War lasted from 1960-1996. A brutal right wing government fought against insurgents in the largely indigenous countryside. The Lake Atitlán region did not go unscathed; hundreds of people from Santiago were killed or disappeared; “everyone you talk to lost someone in his or her family” [link]. Since 1996, there's been a return to normalcy. While the region still remains relatively poor, its coffee plantations have done well, and the beautiful lake setting draws plenty of tourists.

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by Tom Jacobs

– Do you know the expression, “Let sleeping dogs lie?” You are better off not knowing…

– I have to know…

– Very well…

~ from Polanski’s Chinatown

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

~ Dante

So there is a dark tunnel that stretches out into indefiniteness. There is the faint light of the lobby behind but really there is no direction to go but forward into the darkness. To do otherwise, to go back towards the light would be weak, cowardly—a failure of curiosity. After it is all over, the directions that are meant to explain what to expect and how to go about navigating the otherworldly blackness will become apparent; these directions and explanations would have clarified and demystified the whole thing and were right there for the seeing but somehow they went unobserved. But that comes later. Perhaps it is better to have passed them by, to not have seen them. So, again, nowhere to go but in.

There is nothing but darkness and no light, no wind, not even the faintest draft. Seemingly nothing ahead and, once the lobby light fades, nothing behind. Just a meaningless blankness that begins to seem weirdly seductive. Nowhere to go but in.

The air is filled with fear and ignorance and it is all ridiculously thrilling. To not know. To not know but to go on anyway, just to see.

Eventually the end of the tunnel presents itself, as do two chairs. After five minutes or so of sitting in the soundless nothingness the magic of proprioception becomes a kind of revelation. There is really nothing to observe but the rhythms of breath and blood.

After ten minutes the dark adapted eye begins to see, or at least to discern. An amorphous gray blob begins to shimmer and pulsate in the distance. This gray blob fascinates until eventually it doesn’t anymore and it’s time to leave.

Groping through the darkness of blackness, a vaguely irritating question emerges. What is actually out there in the darkness? What is that faint pulsating gray blob? Nothing? Something? An illusion? And where does the inner eye stop and the world of things out there begin? There is the certain knowledge that a trick of some sort is being played. The senses are being manipulated and played and the confusion of inner and outer is offered as a kind of weird gift. Enjoy it and don’t ask questions; float and luxuriate in the strange equilibrium of Turrell’s dark solution. But then, just then, the cell phone presents itself as something that might cut through Turrell’s riddle. A flash of digital light might cut through the murk.

The consequences of wrecking the mystery are considered and dispensed with, completely supplanted by the desire to know what’s really out there in the darkness.

The cell phone’s light flashes and a very mundane, delicately curved white space appears for the time of the flashing and then is gone again.

So that’s what it was. An empty space, a bannister, and two spare chairs. That’s all it was and nothing more. Maddened by the absence of anything, the dark-adapted eye seizes upon whatever light finds its way in to bounce off the blank walls and a confused and hungry retina. That’s it. It’s hard to say whether the plainness of the thing makes it more or less intriguing. More, probably.

Finally the lobby presents itself again, a far duller place than it seemed just ten minutes before, even if the inner ear and the inner eye take the rest of the day to realign and find concordance again. A certain regret begins to gnaw, an unformed inkling that perhaps it would have been better not to know. To just let the mystery ripen and be. It is funny that the pleasures of pursuing resolution and clarity and coherence almost always destroy the deeper pleasures of the enigma, the cryptic, the befuddling.

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“Faith is a fine invention…”
…. ……… —Emily Dickinson, 56

Different Choice

faith is a fine invention,
a spade to shovel doubt away
and bury apprehension,
keeping disbelief at bay
it sidelines skepticism,
confining incredulity to a box
it becomes a soothing salve
or cell with locks

faith may boost the probability
of inattention and final answers
discounting anything that challenges its ends
so that, faithfully, no mind will bend
to newer sets of circumstances

faith’s the up and the under side of willing
—it has a mothering voice,
but it’s also not averse to killing
anyone who’s made a different choice

by Jim Culleny
4/5/14

by Eric Byrd

[the heroic] outlook which regarded action as the main end of life and attached to it an ideal which demanded that a man must make the utmost of his body and his mind.

C.M. Bowra, The Greek Experience

Incomplete and unfinished at Fermor's death in 2011, ending mid-sentence hundreds of miles from
Istanbul (Constantinople he always called it), destination of the famous walk the eighteen year old began in Rotterdam in 1933, the manuscript of The Broken Road was knit together by his biographer Artemis Cooper and the writer Colin Thubron. The draft title of this review was “Patrick Leigh Fermor at Journey's End” – but I realized that was pat, a cheap nod to the posthumous publication, and what is more, false to the story the book tells – the story of a beginning. This last volume of the trilogy has all the freshness and exuberance of the two previous books. It shows Fermor at the end of his peculiar education – the history of Europe studied in huts and in castles, in folk example and in manor archives – and poised on a long life of further adventure. In The Broken Road he enters the Balkans, and the Greater Greek world that would become the focus of his linguistic and ethnopoetic passions, the stage of his military heroism, and his permanent home.

A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) are famous for the digressions in which Fermor, if, say, recollecting a visit to a gallery, climbs into the portals of pictures and stalks around the sitters and figures, drawing elaborate reveries from costume and mien; or if on the march, he drops back, lets the rucksacked youth recede a little down the road, and conjuring from an adult erudition fills the foreground with phantom processions: the migrations of tribes and tongues, nomad cavalcades, royal progresses, coronations and beheadings, triumphs and massacres, the lugging of siege trains toward Vienna.

The best digressions of The Broken Road unfurl in Bulgaria – over a mosque, and over a complex of ruined Slavo-Byzantine churches. Karlovo's Muslims call up the pageant of Ottoman conquest – “Anatolian infantry, wild Asian troops of horse, Bedouin cavalry, mounted archers from eastern deserts, contingents of Albanians, Tartars and Tcherkesses, Negroes from Africa and, under their strange emblems and their fan-plumed helmets, the Janissaries” – which winds down to quiet scenes observed around the mosque. His host the hodja sits “cross-legged and absorbed in prayer,” raises his hands, “his palms uppermost, on either side of his body for a few seconds, as though he were offering a light and invisible gift.” Fermor naps and wakes at sunset to the hodja calling from the minaret: “The last hoop of the prayer had expanded to infinity. The famous words faded from the air and from these infidel mountains. The parapet…was empty; the invisible muezzin was already halfway down his dark spiral.”

Word of the murals of Tarnovo, capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire, the dominant Balkan kingdom of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, its Czars “rivals and imitators of the Byzantines,” caused Fermor to break his easy southward track to Istanbul and turn north, up and over the Balkan Mountains. In Tarnovo he made friends with a grocer's son, a fiery nationalist student, and together they climbed to a windy ridge planted with the monastic mementos of the Bulgar Czars. Loitering in the churches, they craned their necks “to peer into the pictorial vaults and cupolas and domes” at the haloed ranks of “prophets and paladins and anchorites and holy men and headsmen” who stared down with “a thousand unblinking eyes.” Suddenly “the dim light of this vaulted world of interlocking haloes grew dinner still” – a storm arrives, rages, and passes. Fermor and his companion stepped out from the shelter of a twelfth century porch to see the Tarnovo's “amphitheater of hills” rinsed of late summer's haze and dust. The stones gleamed like mineral nuggets, the dun ploughlands were a “deep chocolate,” and the bushes and flowers and herbs, having shaken off their “long trance,” released “a confusion of scents” which roved the air.

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by Matt McKenna

As the wicked, soon-to-be-drowned warriors surround Noah and his famous ark in Darren Aronofsky's rendition of the well known, but well modified Bible story, one gets the sense that the ornery mob isn't just ornery because they're about to get super damp and dead in the biggest do-over the planet has ever experienced. These men would prefer to survive, of course, but what really sticks in their craw is how smug Noah is about the whole ordeal. As he stands before the mass of doomed humans, Noah (Russell Crowe) passionlessly explains how God has had it up to here with them and has decided to fill the planet with water until everyone is sufficiently dead. As you can imagine, these violence-prone, weapon-wielding gentlemen are quite displeased by Noah's dismissive indifference to their imminent demise and react the way any panic-stricken group of amoral marauders would react–by attempting to kill Noah and his family so they themselves may utilize the boat for their own seafaring, end-of-the-world adventure.

How appropriate it is then that in the very same month that Aronofsky released Noah, Nate Silver relaunched FiveThirtyEight, his data journalism blog and digital ark designed to survive the deluge of data raining upon the news world and threatening to submerge the partisan blogs, the cable news programs, and the opinion columns that have heretofore blighted journalism. Like Noah, Silver has come under fire from those who don't have a seat on the ark. These incensed media personalities and politicians, these rabble-rousing kerfuffle-mongers don't appreciate being judged by Mr. Silver and have attacked him for being too sensitive, untimely, and otherwise missing the point of journalism.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Ending her dance naked at his feet, the king tells her she can have anything her heart desires.

Salome doesn't even need to think about it–for she already knows what she wants.

King Herod, mad with love for her, asks if she wouldn't prefer jewels and half his kingdom instead. But Salome stands firm. And so the king has no choice but to deliver the head of John the Baptist on a silver tray.

Oscar Wilde's version of the story, while at first banned in England, was immediately popular in Japan in the late Meiji and early Taisho periods. One of Japan's most famous modern poets, Takamura Kotaro, even included the Wilde version of the story in one of his early poems, Awakening on Winter Mornings (冬の朝のめざめ):

On winter mornings
Even the River Jordan must be covered in a thin layer of ice
Wrapped up in my white blanket there in my bedroom
I imagine how John the Baptist felt a
As he baptized Christ
I imagine how Salome felt
As she held John’s severed head

Wilde was not the first—nor the last— artist to be fascinated by this idea of a woman gone so mad in love with John that she prefers to see him dead than to live with the thought that he did not love her. Strauss' opera ends with her passionately kissing the lips of his disembodied head in what must be one of the most badass moments in opera history.

And what then became of his beautiful head?

Entwined with the history of Jerusalem, some have claimed that his head was interred in Herod's palace- a city whose history is itself so gruesome and grisly that the story of Salome is but a mere blip.

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by Bill Benzon

The other day I was reading an old post an eBuddy of mine, Michael Cobb Bowen, had written about the possibly of a female viagra-type drug. Michael ended the post by observing:

Sex is dirty, complicated and embarrassing. You have to get naked and vulnerable. In fully formed human beings, that takes some doing and some mutual obligation. More than we think we know, and more than most are willing to say.

In thinking about it – how, say, vulnerability “takes some doing” in “fully formed human beings” – my mind wandered to bundling, an old courtship practice I'd learned about in my teens and, in the worldly wisdom of youth, thought rather prudish and quaint.

Of bundling the Wikipedia tells us:

Traditionally, participants were adolescents, with a boy staying at the residence of a girl. They were given separate blankets by the girl's parents and expected to talk to one another through the night. The practice was limited to the winter and sometimes the use of a bundling board, placed between the boy and girl, ensured that no sexual conduct would take place.

I am no longer an adolescent. I have learned that sexuality is not, in reality, so simple as it was in my pristine adolescent fantasy.

Perhaps there is wisdom in bundling.

The fact that precautions were taken against sexual activity indicates that people both were fully aware of sexuality, and that they wanted to prevent the practice thereof. That I can understand, but then why incur the risk by having the courting couple sleeps together in the first place? If the object is to have them talk, why not let them talk in the swing on the front porch, or sitting in the front parlor? Why have them talk at night, and in bed?

There is a possible answer. When we are sleeping we are, in the crudest possible way, most vulnerable. We are open to surprise physical attack. Thus we take great precautions to ensure that our sleeping places are safe. Moreover, no longer tethered to the here and now, the mind is free to wander.

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by Josh Yarden

Photo:

The sound of money talking is echoing ever louder throughout the land. The recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court unfettered the ability of the wealthiest Americans to buy free speech in the form of deregulating contributions to political campaigns. In the words of Justice Stephen Breyer (writing for the minority in McCutcheon v. The Federal Elections Commission) “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.” We the people now have to raise our voices even louder if we are to have influence in our political system. It is all too easy to become discouraged, but we can begin to gather inspiration for social engagement by returning to explore first principles.

An old symbol for a new struggle

On any given day you might see a group of school children crowding around the Liberty Bell for a lesson on the history and the mythology of the United States of America. The Pennsylvania State House bell was commissioned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of William Penn's 1701 Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges. It later came to be known as the Independence Bell, associated with the founding of the nation, and eventually as the Liberty Bell, when it was adopted by the movement for the abolition of slavery.

The renaming of the bell by the abolitionists was inspired by the inscription, “Proclaim Liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” quoted from the Book of Leviticus, chapter 25, verse 10. The part of the verse immediately preceding the quote speaks of hallowing the fiftieth year, known in biblical times as the jubilee year, and so it was fitting to choose this quote for a golden anniversary, but the rest of the text may surprise you. Leviticus 25 goes on to detail the requirements of the jubilee year. After seven periods of seven years, it is time to press the proverbial restart button on the nation's economy. “And you will return, each to his possession, each to his family will you return.” And it goes on from there to set forth what the inhabitants of the land are not allowed to do with the harvest that year.

The ancient Israelites were instructed that the process of amassing wealth comes to a halt every fifty years, when all property is returned to the original owners. (The books of Numbers and Joshua describe in detail the apportioning of the land to the families.) There can be no landed class lording over a peasant class. Come what may over the course of a lifetime, the system does not allow for the emergence of a sustained economic gap with a dispossessed impoverished population existing across the social divide from an institutionalized wealthy class.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

Yakov Sinai

On March 26th it was announced that Yakov Sinai, a mathematician at Princeton University and the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, had won the 2014 Abel Prize. The Abel prize was established in 2001 by the government of Norway and was first given 2003. Unlike the more famous Fields Medal, which (in)famously can only be granted to those under the age of forty, the Abel prize recognizes an individual for the breadth and depth of their entire career. It has quickly become the highest award one can earn in mathematics. Indeed, the list of prizewinners over the past ten years reads like a who's who of influential mathematicians.

Dr. Sinai won the prize “for his fundamental contributions to dynamical systems, ergodic theory, and mathematical physics”. Fortunately, I'm completely unqualified to tell you about Dr. Sinai's work. I say fortunately because Jordan Ellenberg already does an excellent job explaining Dr. Sinai's work in layman's terms as part of the announcement of the winner. You can watch the video here. Dr. Ellenberg gives a very nice twenty-minute overview of Dr. Sinai's work starting at the nine minute mark. Highly recommended!

I also say fortunately because it gives me the excuse to tell you about some cool math. A big part of Dr. Sinai's work is in the area of “Dynamical Systems.” This is a rare case where the name of a mathematical discipline actually tells you what the field is all about. Simply put, researchers in dynamical systems are interested in studying how a given system changes over time. The artist Tristan Perich explores the same territory by examining the upredictable dynamics of using computer code to draw in an unsheltered environment.

Tristan Perich's drawing machine in action [0].

This is the sort of math you would be interested in if you want to model and predict the weather, the climate, the stock market, the reaction in the combustion chamber of an engine or in a nuclear explosion, etc. Of course these are all wildly difficult problems. Even with all our modern computing power it's hard to make progress. So here we'll instead think about much, much simpler examples which still exhibit some of the same interesting phenomena.

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by Quinn O'Neill

It is a widely held view that women are more emotional than men, and some argue that this makes them unsuitable for positions that demand important, cool-headed decision making. The argument often rears its head in discussions about women in politics – particularly as prospective presidents – and I've heard it asserted by both males and females.

The claim that women are more emotional should immediately raise the question of what we mean by emotional. Perhaps we're referring to the intensity at which one experiences an emotion. It's quite possible that women do feel emotion more intensely but this would be difficult to establish with certainty. Emotions are subjective in nature, as are individuals' ratings of the their intensity. Would two people experiencing the same emotion at the same intensity necessarily rate it similarly? It's hard to say.

Alternatively, we might equate emotionality with emotional demonstrativeness. In this sense, a person crying at a sad movie would be deemed more emotional than his or her dry-eyed companion, even if both are feeling equally sad. In this context, one might guess that women are indeed more emotional than men. It seems to me, at least, that they are more likely to cry when watching a sad movie, and more likely to cry in public for other reasons as well. It's important to consider, however, that social norms and expectations differ for men and women when it comes to crying, with it generally being more acceptable for females. If crying were equally acceptable for both sexes, would women still cry more often? Maybe. Maybe not.

It may also be the case that media portrayals of men and women distort our views on gender and crying. In the political domain, Hillary Clinton's tears seemed to garner a lot more media attention – particularly of the negative variety – than those of George Bush junior or senior, Barack Obama, or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnE6HHH_50E” target=”_self” title=”Joe Biden”>Joe Biden. Jessica Wakeman, writing for FAIR, detailed the sexist media portrayal of Clinton's emotional display.

Whether we equate emotionality with the intensity of the experience or with demonstrativeness, there's a wide array of emotions to consider aside from sadness. What about anger? When angry, which sex is more likely to punch walls or other people? The vast majority of violent crime is committed by men, and while all incidents may not result from emotions getting the upper hand, I'd guess that a large proportion does. Violent crime certainly isn't the result of the kind of rational, level-headed decision-making we expect of good leaders.

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