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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by Jalees Rehman

Geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid (“Shared sorrow is half the sorrow”) is a popular German proverb which refers to the importance of sharing bad news and troubling experiences with others. The therapeutic process of sharing takes on many different forms: we may take comfort in the fact that others have experienced similar forms of sorrow, we are often reassured by the empathy and encouragement we receive from friends, and even the mere process of narrating the details of what is troubling us can be beneficial. Finding an attentive audience that is willing to listen to our troubles is not always easy. In a highly mobile, globalized world, some of our best friends may be located thousands of kilometers away, unable to meet face-to-face. The omnipresence of social media networks may provide a solution. We are now able to stay in touch with hundreds of friends and family members, and commiserate with them. But are people as receptive to sorrow shared via Facebook as they are in face-to-face contacts?

A team of researchers headed by Dr. Andrew High at the University of Iowa recently investigated this question and published their findings in the article “Misery rarely gets company: The influence of emotional bandwidth on supportive communication on Facebook“. The researchers created three distinct Facebook profiles of a fictitious person named Sara Thomas who had just experienced a break-up. The three profiles were identical in all respects except for how much information was conveyed about the recent (fictitious) break-up. In their article, High and colleagues use the expression “emotional bandwidth” to describe the extent of emotions conveyed in the Facebook profile.

In the low bandwidth scenario, the profile contained the following status update:

“sad and depressed:(“

The medium bandwidth profile included a change in relationship status to “single” in the timeline, in addition to the low bandwidth profile update “sad and depressed:(“.

Finally, the high emotional bandwidth profile not only contained the updates of the low and medium bandwidth profiles, but also included a picture of a crying woman (the other two profiles had no photo, just the standard Facebook shadow image).

The researchers then surveyed 84 undergraduate students (enrolled in communications courses, average age 20, 53% female) and presented them with screenshots of one of the three profiles.

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Who's Urizen

In William’s crisp mandala
Urizen asymmetrically stoops

Laying duality on the world,
cleaving philosophers’ minds,
inspiring theologians to settle scores,
he undoes the unity of chaos
splitting it to bits like chips
to feed the dogs of wars

Reaching down, this buff, man-like self
curiously in his prime
with old head coiffed white
raked by wind gusting furiously
through heaven’s open door,
Urizen bends to scribe a zero with his compass,
leaving nothing out, including all

From his plush but sanguinary perch
He loads the dark with That and This
There and Here, Was and Is, tendering to Man
the dubious consciousness of Bliss,
propping all its characters to fall

by Jim Culleny
3/30/14

Graphic: Ancient of Days, by William Blake

“I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire.” —Daniel 7:9

By Namit Arora

On Arundhati Roy’s introduction to Dr. BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste.

A few weeks ago, the Indian publishing house Navayana released an annotated, “critical edition” of Dr. BR Ambedkar’s classic, Annihilation of Caste (AoC). Written in 1936, AoC was meant to be the keynote address at a conference but was never delivered. Unsettled by the scathing text of the speech and faced by Ambedkar’s refusal to water it down, the caste Hindu organizers of the conference had withdrawn their invitation to speak. Ambedkar, an “untouchable”, later self-published AoC and two expanded editions, which included MK Gandhi’s response to it and his own rejoinder.

AoC, as S. Anand points out in his editor’s note, happens to be “one of the most obscure as well as one of the most widely read books in India.” The Navayana edition of AoC carries a 164-page introduction by Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint (read an excerpt). The publisher’s apparent strategy was to harness Roy to raise AoC’s readership among savarna (or caste Hindu) elites to whom it was in fact addressed, but who have largely ignored it for over seven decades, even as countless editions of it in many languages have deeply inspired and empowered generations of Dalits.

However, this new edition has drawn a mixed response. Expressions of praise coexist alongside howls of disapproval and allegations of an ugly politics of power and privilege, co-option and misrepresentation. To many Dalit and a few savarna writers and activists, this Roy-Navayana project—Navayana is a small independent publishing house run by Anand, a Brahmin by birth—is a bitter reminder that no Dalit-led edition of AoC can get such attention in the national media, that gimmicks are still needed in this benighted land to “introduce” AoC and Ambedkar to the savarnas, that once again, caste elites like Roy, with little history of scholarly or other serious engagement with caste (as Anand himself suggested about Roy three years ago), are appropriating AoC and admitting the beloved leader of Dalits into their pantheon on their own terms—all while promoting themselves en route: socially, professionally, and financially (see this open letter to Roy and her reply).

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by Madhu Kaza

It’s cold outside. New York City is probably exciting as ever out there, but I’m staying in with my soup and my soup spoon and all of the spoons, with books listing this way and that on the shelves, socks and sweaters stuffed into drawers, stray paperclips on the loose, dust storms gathering behind the sofa and an African stone egg that's warming either under my pillow or somewhere under my bed. It would all be uneventful, except that I’ve been rereading Michal Ajvaz’s novel, The Other City.

The Other City begins with the narrator taking refuge from a snowstorm in a bookstore in Prague. Through a series of magical encounters that follow, the novel leads us into “the other city,” which exists as a shadow city just beyond the Prague that is known. The Other City is a labyrinthine and fantastical place where books turn into jungles, the alphabet becomes a virus, oysters attack cities, and fish battle inside glass statues. Through the layering and pile up of surreal imagery Ajvaz conjures a world that is wonderful and terrible, a place of awe.

Though it’s a strange place the Other City is not inaccessible or distant. Ajvaz insists that if we truly learned how to look and pay attention we’d find that we are right at the edge of otherness: “The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it.” He notes that we overlook the nooks and crannies, the closets and the dusty spaces of our homes or between our homes where things are happening:

Even inside the space we regard as our property there are places that lie beyond our power, lairs inhabited by creatures whose home is over the border. We are familiar with the strange queasiness we feel when we encounter the reverse side of things, and their inner cavities which refuse to take part in our game: when we shove aside a cabinet during spring-cleaning and we suddenly find ourselves looking at the ironically impassive face of its reverse side, which stares into dark chambers that are mirrored on its surface, when we unscrew the back of the television set and run our fingers over the tangle of wires, when we crawl under the bed for a pencil that rolled away and we suddenly find ourselves in a mysterious cavern, whose walls are covered with magical, trembling wisps of dust, a cavern in which something evil is slowly maturing until one quiet day it will emerge into the light.

Ajvaz tells us not only that is there a world unfolding from the perspective of the spoons in a drawer, the backside of the cabinet, or the space between walls in an apartment, but also that encounters with this world can be frightening. “Every genuine encounter destroys our existing world,” says the narrator. What counts as a genuine encounter must be terrifying because it puts us in contact with the unknown; it makes the familiar strange.

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by Misha Lepetic

“Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses,
or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle?”
~Baudrillard

I usually buy my cigarettes at a corner store, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, that, not unusually for such establishments, also does a brisk trade in lottery tickets. Now, buyers of both cigarettes and lottery tickets are placing bets on outcomes with dismally known chances of winning. My fellow consumers are betting that they will win something, and I am betting that I won't (I also console myself with the sentiment that I am having more fun in the process). But in both cases, the terms of exchange are clear – we give our cash to the vendor, and buy the option on the pleasure of suspense, waiting to see if we have won. Beyond the potential payout, there really isn't that much more to discuss: the transactions are discrete and anonymous. And in the end, someone always wins the lottery, and someone always lives to a hundred.

I was reminded of the perceived satisfactions of participating in games of chance with hopeless odds after hearing a recent piece on NPR discussing quite the prize: a cool $1 billion dollars for anyone who nailed a 'perfect bracket.' In other words, the accurate identification of the outcomes of all 63 games of the NCAA men's basketball playoffs. Sponsored by a seemingly oddball trinity of Warren Buffett, Quicken Loans and Yahoo!, the prize is, on the face of it, an exercise in absurdity. But its construction is superb, and worth examining further, for reasons that have little to do with basketball, or probability, but rather for the questions it provokes around the value of information.

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by Kathleen Goodwin

There are many bitter and hopeless thoughts that have plagued me since the night that Wendy Chang took her own life in her Harvard dorm room in April 2012, just 34 days before she would have graduated. However, it wasn't until this past January, when Madison Holleran, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, committed suicide in Philadelphia, that I have felt compelled to organize these thoughts to understand what may have prevented these horrifically tragic deaths. Madison was a varsity track runner at Penn and was reported to have a loving family and many friends. She was also so remarkably beautiful that no news source reporting on her death could help but comment on it. Wendy and I were both part of a close-knit student organization and having known and worked with her, I can attest that she was among the most gregarious, creatively talented, and vibrant human beings I have ever encountered. The hundreds of Harvard students who attended Wendy's filled-to-capacity memorial service all voiced similar sentiments describing her uniquely magnetic nature.

In the immediate aftermath of Wendy's suicide, I blamed the environment at Harvard that seemed to value our accomplishments over our happiness. However, when I had my own episodes of anxiety and depression in the year following her death, it was the presence of my roommates, friends, and a few exceptionally helpful university administrators who prevented these issues from spiraling out of control. While I may criticize American colleges for not doing enough to support the mental health of students, I realize that colleges, including Harvard, offer an invaluable opportunity for development within what can be a supportive community. However, many colleges today are failing their students who grapple with mental health issues. Numerous require or compel students who admit to suicidal thoughts or serious mental illness to take a leave of absence, or even to formally withdraw. Most colleges claim that they are not adequately equipped to help students with mental illness and implicitly suggest that it is not their responsibility to provide resources to mentally ill students, especially when these may be diverting resources from students who are “well”. I argue that, on the contrary, it is the direct responsibility of these institutions to create a campus environment where students struggling with mental illness can be supported.

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