by Yohan J. John

“Little does my lady dream / Rumpelstiltskin is my name!” Rumplestiltskin, by Anne Anderson. Image from Wikimedia Commons

Of all the strange and wonderful fairy tales I encountered as a child, Rumpelstiltskin always struck me as the most peculiar. The story revolves around a girl who must spin straw into gold or face death at the hands of the king. A dwarf appears out of nowhere, and spins the straw into gold — for a price. On the first night he takes a necklace, and on the second a ring. On the third night the girl has nothing left to pay him with, and so the dwarf makes her promise to give him her firstborn child. The king's greed is sated after three days of gold-spinning, and he marries the girl. In due time the new queen gives birth to a child, and sure enough, the dwarf returns to receive his pounds of flesh. But the queen refuses, and tries to offer him some of her newly acquired riches instead. The dwarf agrees to give up his claim on the child, but only if the queen can guess his name within three days. Her guesses on the first two days fail. But then one of her spies returns with a strange tale. He came across a little cottage in the woods, in from of which he saw a dwarf prancing around a fire, singing a song that ended “Little does my lady dream / Rumpelstiltskin is my name!” On the third day the queen initially pretends not to know the dwarf's name. Finally she says, “Could your name be Rumpelstiltskin?” At this the dwarf flies into a rage, and stomps his foot on the ground so hard that a chasm opens up in the ground, swallowing the dwarf, who was never seen again.

As a child I found the dwarf's plunge into the subterranean void the most eerie element in the story, but in recent years I've been pondering another, perhaps deeper mystery. Why did Rumpelstiltskin's name have so much power?

Fairy tales notwithstanding, by the time I got to college I had come to think that names were mere conventions that had no intrinsic meaning or value. For all practical purposes, surely one label was as good as any other? Dismissing a debate on what to call something as “mere semantics” seemed to be an act of hard-nosed skepticism and realism.

But as I came to discover, naming involves much more than simply assigning a label to something that has already been identified. The act of naming is one of the central mysteries of human cognition — it is the visible tip of an iceberg whose depth below the surface of conscious thought we have only just begun to plumb. I cannot claim to have solved this mystery, but I'd like to present what I have cobbled together so far: a handful of puzzle pieces which I hope will entice the reader to join in the investigation. (Perhaps more puzzle pieces will turn up in future columns.) I've divided up the essay into four parts. Here's the plan:

1. We'll introduce two key motifs — the named and the nameless — with a little help from the Tao Te Ching.
2. We'll examine a research problem that crops up in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, and link it with more Taoist motifs.
3. We'll look at how naming might give us power over animals, other people, and even mathematical objects.
4. We'll explore the power of names in computer science, which will facilitate some wild cosmic speculation.

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

Scientific theories are antifragile; they thrive on anomalies.

Some things are fragile – they break. Some are robust – they can withstand harsh treatment. But the most interesting kind are antifragile, emerging strengthened and enriched from challenges. Whatever does not kill them makes them stronger. Science is as successful as it is, because science as a whole, and even individual scientific theories, are antifragile.

We owe the term “antifragile” to the financier and thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan. Taleb describes his latest book, Antifragile; Things that Gain from Disorder, as the intellectual underpinning of those earlier works, since it formalises his earlier reflections. Antifragility is the true opposite of fragility. Unlike mere robustness, it is the ability to actually profit from misadventure. A porcelain cup is fragile, and shatters if dropped. A plastic cup, being robust, will not be any the worse for such an experience, but it will not be any the better for it either. Contrast the human immune system. Being antifragile, it is improved by stresses. Having been challenged by an infection, it will be primed to respond more effectively to similar challenges in the future, because it has learned to recognise the infection as an invader. There are deep connections between randomness, uncertainty, novelty, information, and learning, and natural selection in an uncertain world favours antifragile systems because they learn from experience.

Good safety systems are antifragile. Accidents will happen, and of their nature cannot always be foreseen, but each accident can be analysed retrospectively and procedures adjusted to anticipate similar challenges in the future. Moreover, experience shows that experience is more persuasive than foresight, even when the mishap itself has actually been foreseen.

Read more »

by Omar Ali

I have written before about the historical background of the Shia-Sunni conflict, and in particular about its manifestations in Pakistan. Since then, unfortunately but predictably, the phenomenon of Shia-killing in Pakistan has moved a little closer to my personal circle. First it was the universally loved Dr Ali Haider, famous retina surgeon, son of the great Professor Zafar Haider and Professor Tahira Bokhari, killed in broad daylight in Lahore along with his young son.

This week it was Dr Babar Ali, our friend and senior from King Edward Medical College; He was the assistant DHO (district health officer) and head of the anti-Polio campaign in Hasanabdal, who was shot dead by “unknown assailants” as he drove out of his hospital at night. Shia killing portals reported his death but it is worth noting that no TV channel or major news outlet reported on this murder. Such deaths are now so utterly routine that they do not even make the news.

This should scare everyone.

In 2012 I had predicted that:

“The state will make a genuine effort to stop this madness. Shias are still not seen as outsiders by most educated Pakistani Sunnis. When middle class Pakistanis say “this cannot be the work of a Muslim” they are being sincere, even if they are not being accurate.

But as the state makes a greater effort to rein in the most hardcore Sunni militants, it will be forced to confront the “good jihadis” who are frequently linked to the same networks. This confrontation will eventually happen, but between now and “eventually” lies much confusion and bloodshed.

The Jihadist community will feel the pressure and the division between those who are willing to suspend domestic operations and those who no longer feel ISI has the cause of Jihadist Islam at heart will sharpen. The second group will be targeted by the state and will respond with more indiscriminate anti-Shia attacks. Just as in Iraq, jihadist gangs will blow up random innocent Shias whenever they want to make a point of any kind. Things (purely in terms of numbers killed) will get much worse before they get better. As the state opts out of Jihad (a difficult process in itself, but one that is almost inevitable, the alternatives being extremely unpleasant) the killings will greatly accelerate and will continue for many years before order is re-established. The worst is definitely yet to come. This will naturally mean an accelerating Shia brain drain, but given the numbers that are there, total emigration is not an option. Many will remain and some will undoubtedly become very prominent in the anti-terrorist effort (and some will, unfortunately, become special targets for that reason).

IF the state is unable to opt out of Jihadist policies (no more “good jihadis” in Kashmir and Afghanistan and “bad jihadis” within Pakistan) then what? I don’t think even the strategists who want this outcome have thought it through. The economic and political consequences will be horrendous and as conditions deteriorate the weak, corrupt, semi-democratic state will have to give way to a Sunni “purity coup”. Though this may briefly stabilize matters it will eventually end with terrible regional war and the likely breakup of Pakistan. . Since that is a choice that almost no one wants (not India, not the US, not China, though perhaps Afghanistan wouldn’t mind) there will surely be a great deal of multinational effort to prevent such an eventuality.”

Unfortunately, it seems that the state, far from nipping this evil in the bud, remains unable to make up its mind about it.

Read more »

by Holly A. Case

Demonstration in Budapest in support of CEU, April 9, 2017

On Tuesday of last week, the Hungarian parliament passed a law that seeks to drive the Central European University, founded in 1991, out of the Hungary. Many articles and op-eds have been written condemning the law, and declarations of support have come from Hungarian universities and student unions, scores of universities and scholarly organizations in Europe and the US, and from CEU students and alumni. Demonstrations and solidarity events have taken place in Budapest, New York, London, Lisbon, Friedrichshafen, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Saarbrücken, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris, Bucharest, Mainz, Vienna, Berlin, Cluj, Stockholm, Heidelberg, Zagreb, and Prague. Members of the European Parliament, as well as US and European diplomats and statesmen have criticized the law, all to no avail. The governing party in Hungary, Fidesz, with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at its head, remains unmoved.

Somewhere in between all the domestic and international support and the Hungarian government's attacks on CEU is the actual place and the people who have studied or worked there. What follows is a series of anecdotes about an educational institution in the heart of Europe like no other, one that has no obvious forerunners or successors. The child of a euphoric moment in the region's history (1989), CEU has since grown and changed, but has also transformed the many people who have passed through it.

1996: The Conference (by yours truly, no affiliation with CEU)

I first visited CEU in the spring of 1996. A friend of mine and I had come up from the town of Szeged for a conference. We met the other participants in a cafeteria-like setting at the brand new Kerepesi dormitory on the outskirts of Budapest. The conditions for language surfing were ideal. Everyone had a few, it seemed: all the former Soviets knew Russian, all the former Yugoslavs knew…well, that language that they all spoke (the name of which was a plaything in that cafeteria, but a minefield outside it; the war in Bosnia had barely ended). Plus there were the displacement stories, like Leonid, a Russian-speaking Jew from Moldova, who also happened to speak Bulgarian as well as that language, thanks to friendships and a love interest from Serbia.

I gave my conference presentation on absurdism in Polish and Hungarian literature. While the cafeteria conversations had unfolded in numerous languages, the conference proceedings were all in English, which was rough for many of the participants who had only been learning the language for a short time. After my panel, a group of us—myself, a Croat, a Latvian, a Hungarian, and Leonid—were standing in the lobby when someone commented on how good my English was. "How did you learn it so good?" he wondered. Before I could tell him it was my native language, the Latvian spoke for me, waving a hand dismissively: "You know how it was, the borders were changing so quickly."

We burst out laughing. The collapse of multi-national states, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the bipolar world order: the borders had indeed changed very quickly.

Read more »

ASSIGNMENT

Only Muslim in the workshop,
I went on about the President’s
Shocking and Awful on Iraq,
civilization’s cradle,
bombed back to the Stone Age
for non-existent nukes
sold by capitalist gunrunners.

I am a witness, I said,
I must howl: In every well
in Baghdad a rafiq is weeping
while long black coats
(with gas masks)
huddle at the Wailing Wall,
as if prayers could halt smart bombs.

“Rhetoric, not lyric,” my peers echoed
Yeats. “Argue with yourself not others,”
the adjunct professor said, “A warhead
rising from its silo was over the top.
Nike stockpiling kneepads was sick.
Not ars poetica.”

By Rafiq Kathwari, winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2013.

by Ahmed Humayun

Saudi King Abdullah

Earlier this month Saudi Arabia decreed that the Muslim Brotherhood, the Middle East's dominant Islamist party, was a terrorist organization. This is the latest move in a series that demonstrates Riyadh's profound fears about the challenge posed by the Arab uprisings to the Sunni ruling status quo, and especially to its self-appointed role as the arbiter of Sunni Islam. The Saudi designation says less about the character of the Muslim Brotherhood and more about its own embrace of an all-out eradication strategy meant to vanquish, rather than accommodate, the aspirations of populist Islamist activism across the region.

Contemporary states tend to apply the ‘terrorism' label selectively. Pakistan distinguishes the good Taliban, who are perceived to protect the state's interests in Afghanistan, from the bad Taliban, who attack the Pakistani state and are therefore described as terrorists. Saudi Arabia too condemns groups that target it, such as Al Qaeda and its offshoots, while remaining a critical sponsor of a dizzying array of militant factions around the world.

In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, the charge of terrorism is particularly inapplicable. The Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence decades ago. Unlike violent extremist groups like Al Qaeda it does not preach that Arab rulers are apostates whose un-Islamic rule must be toppled through war and subversion. It denounces terrorist attacks, supports electoral democracy, and preaches political engagement—rather than terrorism and insurgency—as the method of advancing change.

Saudi antipathy towards the Muslim Brotherhood is not therefore due to any genuine fear of terrorism. The real threat is the political and ideological challenge posed by the Brotherhood's potent mix of Islam and politics. The Saudi model of governance uses religion to command absolute submission to rulers, disdains meaningful elections or transfer of power, and promotes a depoliticized citizenry. Through its enormous petro power it propagates the same Islamic order abroad, funding reactionary clerics, organizations and institutions across the Muslim world. An alternative way of construing Islam and politics is a deep internal threat to the legitimacy of the regime and a provocation to its monopolization of global Islam.

Read more »

by Debra Morris

In this part of the essay I'll draw out some possible consequences for the contemporary Democratic Party of a distinctive brand of partisanship exemplified, as I suggested in Part 1, by my grandmother, the woman known all my life as “Morris.” She is a true Texas type: the Yellow Dog Democrat. To be sure, she has always been more Lady Bird than Ann Richards in demeanor—proper, clean-living, quietly capable; disarmingly witty, though I've long suspected she keeps most of her jokes to herself. Now, the fact that Morris harkens to one of these ladies, rather than the other, is part of the reason I wonder about the value of the Yellow Dog sensibility; certainly no one writing or talking about Democratic Party strategy in Texas shows any nostalgia for my grandmother's kind of partisanship. And maybe, by now, it is a relic: irrelevant to the political landscape of Texas (not to mention the nation); more endangered by the day (literally so; my grandmother turned 100 last year, and it may well be her passing that distresses me, not the loss of a Democratic golden age in Texas); and, in any case, not the unambiguously positive thing that I might like to think, or that I dare suggest we preserve or try to resurrect. As I was reminded recently, when I characterized Morris as a “Yellow Dog Democrat” and a friend retorted “By which you mean Republican, of course,” the term and the phenomenon are loaded. What do I achieve by attempting to describe it, much less by lamenting its loss?

Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

At the beginning of book three of his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume argues that justice is something we invent. In a word, justice is unnatural. It isn't something we just see in the world, since we only ever see what is, and nothing in what we see tells us how things ought to be. Neither does justice come from some inner, natural feeling, if by “natural” we mean the hard-wired, immediate pleasures and pains that we can't help but have. No; to have any sense of justice, we have to be taught to have it. We have to be trained by others to feel a particular kind of pleasure in seeing fair treatment being done. Our parents have to show us how to be fair, and encourage us in whatever ways they can to get us to want fairness, until it starts to seem natural to us.

Parents train their children in this way because, somewhere along the way, our ancestors figured out – probably the hard way – that respecting and honoring fairness eventually leads to the kind of life where we can live safely, raise families, and keep property. Justice works. And so these ancestors taught their children to be fair, and they taught their children, and so today do we. “In a little time, custom and habit operating on the tender minds of children, makes them sensible of the advantages, which they may reap from society, as well as fashions them by degrees for it, by rubbing off those rough corners and untoward affections, which prevent their coalition”. We become shaped by our early experiences to take some pleasure in a sense of justice – and a good thing, that.

Hume argues that this early and artificial shaping has to be in place well before promises can have any hold over us. Promises come about because, at some point, the affairs of daily life present us with circumstances where an exchange of this for that can't happen right away. “Your corn is ripe to-day; mine will be so to-morrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I shou'd labour with you to-day, and that you shou'd aid me tomorrow”. At this point, a promise would come in handy. So we invent special words and signs that constitute a promise. But there is no reality to this human invention, apart from all of us agreeing to treat it as a real thing, out of the interest in justice we have been shaped to have.

Read more »

Posterity:

………… all that
follows

every generation since Oldowan man chipped obsidian and flint
to make a stone ax to lay open the skull of an adversary
for food or turf, honing technique until

at this end
he’s chipped them
into ICBMs

the inner stuff of blind surge
the inclination of instinct
down a slippery slope

…………the popped buds
…………of hope

…………or

whatever’s survived
the gauntlet of a willful Demiurge
in which rank and ecstatic
blossoms collide

what morphs into the next thing
which unfolds from a chrysalis
and mounts the sky

a lime Luna moth the color of bliss
a bird that whistles, a bird that sings
desire that will not desist
the leading edge of everything

the fruit it brings

my daughters now in the outer world
pushing on, pioneers

………..a bird that whistles
……………a bird that suffers
…………………a bird that sings
.

by Jim Culleny
3/12/14

by Brooks Riley

We didn’t want a second cat. That said, we got a second cat, succumbing to the desperate pleas of a friend with two litters to give away. By the time we capitulated, she was the only kitten left.

If there were an antonym for ‘runt’, it would have applied to Sperl, as we finally named her (see T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Naming of Cats’). She was the biggest kitten of the two litters, a black-and-white, gangly thing with a strange face. Like a mother who loves one child more than another, I did my best to hide my antipathy. Our other cat, after initial outrage, lapsed into a state of chronic resentment behind a mask of indifference.

Sperl was huge, a gentle giant with muscles, not fat. Anthropomorphically speaking, she could have been a Valkyrie (with an operatic voice to match), or a female wrestler. When she was nearly grown, it dawned on me that she had become a great beauty. But something else made me sit up and take notice: It was that presence, so much greater than her body mass. I fell in love.

When she died eight years later (was it gigantism?), it was one of the saddest days of my life. She had brought us so much pleasure, and more: She had taught me a thing or two. In memory of Sperl I have written down the Sperl Commandments, as I learned them from her.

The Sperl Commandments

1. If they don’t like it, don’t do it.

There was almost nothing Sperl did that I didn’t like. She was a considerate cat, unlike others I’ve known. She never used her claws, even when she was kneading my stomach in a show of affection. She knew instinctively what I liked and what I didn’t. If I reprimanded her for something just once, she never did it again.

2. Don’t be forced to do something you don’t want.

Sperl didn’t like to be held. She might curl up on my lap, but if I picked her up, she would struggle to get down, using her muscles to get free, not her claws, not her teeth. Because I was so besotted, I sometimes picked her up anyway, just to hold that great bulk in my arms (I had yet to learn Commandment number 1). Over time, to please me, she would remain still in my arms a bit longer—one second, then four, in the end ten whole seconds–before she began to squirm.

Read more »

by Hari Balasubramanian

In my first piece for 3QD, I discussed some aspects of the science of queueing. In this essay, I'd like to ground that discussion in the context of delays that patients routinely experience in American hospitals. In 2010, there were around 130 million visits to the emergency departments (EDs) of hospitals around the country. Nearly 23% of these patients waited an hour or more to see a care provider [link]. Many urban hospitals and individual patients do much worse.

The documentary The Waiting Room foregrounds the human stories that underlie these statistical estimates, and lets patients, their families, nurses, doctors and social workers speak for themselves. The film is shot during a 24-hour period at the emergency department of a safety-net hospital: Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. 241 patients come to seek care during this one day. Most of the time the camera is in the waiting room, where patients reconcile themselves to a long wait; this applies even to a man with a gunshot wound, whose body is turning numb – hard to believe but true.

The problem faced by Highland Hospital is by no means unique. I've heard it many times from hospital administrators and clinicians. My own research on reducing delays in healthcare led me to work with a large hospital which sees nearly 300 patients daily — more than Highland — in its emergency department. I was quite familiar with what I saw in the documentary: the look and feel of the waiting area; the small rooms inside the main care section with beds and equipment, curtained off to provide patients and their families some privacy; the additional hallway beds with no privacy, but nevertheless necessary due to the sheer volume of patients in acute condition; the constant buzz of pagers, movement of personnel, calls for lab analyses and diagnostic scans; the flicker of computer screens with way too much information; the difficulties in deciding whether the patient should be admitted to an inpatient unit or discharged; and if discharged where the patient should go, for some psychiatric or substance abuse patients have no home to return to.

Read more »

by Michael Lopresto

What, if anything, makes life worth living? What matters to us most as human beings, and hence enables us to live the good life? Could it be knowledge, or worthwhile achievement, or love? Philosophers have produced various answers to this question. Aristotle argued that the good life is one lived according to reason, where we as rational beings exercise our rationality and virtue. Accordingly, we'd be in a state of flourishing. (Philosophers would apparently be living the ultimate form of life, on this view.) Alternatively, philosophers have come up with two main competing theories to Aristotles's: hedonism and objective-list theory. These two views contrast with each other really well. Hedonism says all that matters for a life to go well only has to do with having good experiences, namely, pleasure and happiness. Objective-list theory, on the other hand, moves right away from hedonism's first-person perspective, and says that all that matters is what can be “seen from the outside”, and from here we try to construct an open-ended list of all the things that are objectively valuable that can be plausibly said to make a life go well. Presumably, we'd include things on this list like knowledge, achievement of worthwhile ends, wisdom, friendship, and so on.

How are we to decide between these three views? One way may be to subject each view to criticism, and see which one fares best. So the objective-list theorist may say to the hedonist that hedonism can't be true because someone could conceivably get happiness counting blades of grass or from watching Nicolas Cage films. The hedonist may in turn say to the Aristotelian or the objective-lister that exercising one's rationality, or pursuing worthwhile ends, actually makes one miserable, and this is by no means a good life. Constantly exercising one's rationality may lead one to be constantly vigilant about one's moral obligations to humanity, and to be constantly weighed down by the knowledge of having done morally wrong things in the past, like dismissing the desperate needs of a friend.

Read more »

by Dave Maier

I don't usually watch the opening or closing ceremonies of the Olympics – I like to think of the Super Bowl halfime show as an aesthetic catastrophe uniquely American in nature – but I did see the Sochi closing ceremony, which celebrated Russian achievement in the arts. Or some of them, anyway. We saw dancers and poets and painters and composers, but sadly missing (with a partial exception to be noted below) was a form to which Russian artists have contributed spectacularly since its very beginnings up through the present day.

Russian cinema ranges in tone from the bleak to the mordant to the ecstatic, in subject from the quotidian to the mystical and visionary. If you appreciate the characteristically Russian sensibility in music or literature or painting, you will surely recognize it here as well.

Some of the following films are well-known classics, others possibly mere curiosities. Time will tell; but in any case this is not a best-of list – I have omitted many famous names (Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Eisenstein) – but simply a selection for your enjoyment (much like my similar list of Japanese films a while back). I'm not a film critic, so I might not have any great insights to share with you. Go watch the films, they speak for themselves.

Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi

She is startled awake by the sound of her own snore—a sense of falling—a sudden panic— the sensation of drool down the side of her mouth—the cold point on her forehead against the window– the plane seems to be dropping—she looks out of the window—where are they? Above the Congo — no must be just out of Lilongwe—she must've nodded off—The long road trips to several villages—starting out at six am and returning late in the evening and all the attendant turmoil of thoughts— The guilt of having three meals a day—and clean water– The Agenbite of Inwit—Coetzee—had it right——-last night on a narrow path—between fields on fire—stubs of maize, stalks set ablaze—and in the other blaze of headlights: children, fleeting sights—-Children catching fleeing mice, trapping them for food—-a special favorite treat. The SUV, rushing through the rising smoke, with its large aid logos, stamped on its sides. In it, peering through the haze outside, Coetzee, Mapanje in her head, one sentence after the next.——– she is caught there—suspended—repeating words—the Agenbite of Inwit—And tomorrow is another long day and then another long ride– back in the night—Confused she looks out into the darkness— — a large patch of lights below—are they approaching Addis already? That would mean she's slept the entire three hours — But the cramped seat—the shabby state of the seats does not fit what she is accustomed to on Ethiopian. But then the surly announcement just then—instructions about the seat belts meant to allay the fear of the abruptness of turbulence—brings her back—She is suspended ten thousand feet above the frozen space between Minneapolis and Washington DC—on United—-another two hours to go—they must have just flown over Chicago—-she can just make out that it's all frozen below.

The fear sets in for a moment just as it does over the Congo— the sight of the frozen lakes conjure up the same sensation as do dense green forests —what happens if she were to fall—into that wilderness—if the plane were to crash—This possibility she wills herself to banish from her thoughts—she must get her feet on the ground fast— she tries to lure herself back to sleep—wills a calmness to flow through every fiber and nerve—-she is afraid of flying—and yet it seems she is forever doing this.

Read more »

by Carl Pierer

Dear Mr F.

Your recent book was read with much appreciation and was very well received. It is truly impressive that you manage to translate a foreign author's essays with such accuracy and close attention to his many plays on words. Yet, as a native Austrian, your annotations and commentaries are the more valuable. Indeed, their meandering and digressing nature breathes life into those articles. Witty explanations mixed with your own experiences and brief autobiographical sketches help to understand a complex writer and to see his relevance. But praise has been manifold and you are probably very well aware what great contribution you have made with this book. This letter is addressed to you because your book prompted many questions. Most of them are very closely linked to the topic of the book, but a substantial minority is as digressing as your own commentaries. Certainly, the idea you put forward that a writer cannot possibly desire a completely egalitarian society due to its lack of linguistic differences is fascinating and harbours an explosive potential for controversy. Your other arguments to the quality of writing and your drawing of parallels between turn of the century feuilletonists and modern bloggers stimulate reflection. Still, none of these kept your devoted reader wide awake at night. More troubling than these are your implicit characterisations of what makes a good novelist. This should rather read: implicit mentioning of which characteristics a good novelist displays. Your own biography and those of many other writers seem to suggest that the youthful author should struggle with his fate, they should be submerged in the search for their self and isolation. Yet, even if we accepted this, it is far from evident that the other direction of implication should work as well. If a young person begins to ask the first questions about themselves and about their identity, it does not immediately follow that these questions put to paper will make for readable literature. Instead, they might commit the error of abusing art to assert a self they want to be.

This line of reasoning seems to have a strong pull. To write is to be cool. And what is cooler than to depict (and live) a solitary man's struggle with the world around him? Isolation and prophetic cynicism are perceived as cool. Simultaneously a sort of nihilism and defiance can be adopted. Akin to the Eastwoodian anti-hero, the self they aim at is a more refined and less moral protagonist. While eating their fire-roasted beans, they polish their “designed in California”-weapon. Its smooth aluminium enclosure equips the lonesome soldier with just the right cutting-edge fashion in their Mexican standoff with evil and society. In one of your early footnotes, you analyse precisely this feature of the cultivated Apple: “Isn't the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn't even matter what you're creating on your MacBook Air. Simply using a MacBook Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris.”

The temptation to slip into back patting self-affirmation of the young author's existential hermitism is well depicted in Male Novelist Jokes. The fact that these jokes take the form of low-brow amusements (How many x does it take to do y) stands in stark contrast with their smart but scorching sarcasm. However, their formal kinship with all too familiar misogynistic, racist or otherwise discriminating jokes, parallels the young male author's laddism. For instance, the following makes use of all of these elements:

Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: “The cocaine isn't the point. The cocaine is a metaphor,” he explained wearily over the pile of cocaine. She folded her arms. She didn't understand his cocaine. “Didn't you read my manifesto?” The prostitute had read his manifesto. Why couldn't she?

Read more »

by Thomas Rodham Wells

Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history

History too important to be left to national politicians and their ideological visions of national identity and social engineering projects.

First, the principle. History should be truthful, relevant, and just. As an intellectual enterprise history is a matter of fact not opinion, the discovery and painstaking corroboration of contingent events by rigorous peer-reviewed methods. People have a right to an official story that is also true, even if that is upsetting or inconvenient for some politicians or dominant ethnic groups. Children have the right to study the truth rather than propaganda, to be respected as future citizens rather than being used as pawns in a game of social engineering. It is as ridiculous to have national politicians imposing their opinions and calling it history as it would be for them to choose what kind of evolutionary theory gets taught. The idea of ‘national histories' should be replaced with the idea of international history, in which a basic requirement is that every historical account should be compatible with each other. There should be no more of the competitive victimhood in which every country teaches its children that they were the ones attacked without provocation.

Of course it is reasonable for national governments to decide to some extent which areas of the country's history should be the main focus in schools. But national curriculums should not only meet the bare truth requirement. They should also pay adequate attention to the dark side of a nation's past – the oppression of empire, the moral quagmire of occupation, the crimes of autocrats and their accomplices, and so on. The victims of national crimes, and their descendants inside and outside the country, have a particular right to have the crimes against them acknowledged, as in the case of Turkey's Armenian genocide or Japan's war-time atrocities across Asia.

Second, there should be a grievance mechanism that reflects the fact that the way history is taught is a matter not only for national governments, but of human rights below and international relations above. I like the model of the European Court of Human Rights, to which both individuals and other member states can bring cases of rule-breaking by national governments. But instead of legal judges we would have a panel of internationally respected academic historians. False, substantially misleading, or unjust history curriculums would lead to legally binding rulings against propagandist governments including fines and reform requirements.

Read more »