by Bill Benzon

Tracing things back to the beginning is always a bit arbitrary. There is always something that came before, and even before that. For example, just how is it that Charlie Keil, winner of the 22nd Annual Koizumi Fumio Prize for ethnomusicology, ended up playing tuba in front of the Vermont Statehouse in the Fall of 2012? I suppose it isn't much of a stretch to get from ethnomusicology to the tuba, as both have to do with music, but the Vermont Statehouse?

It's time we take a short tour through a long story. Just for sake of perspective, let's start the tour sometime in the late early 20th Century, with the band of John Philip Sousa, the March King. He was the highest paid member of that band, which had been touring America for years. His bass drummer during the 1920s was a man named August Helmecke. Helmecke was also the highest paid member of the band.

Why, you might ask, was the bass drummer the highest paid member of the band? Simple, really. He maintained the pulse. Without the pulse, the music had no life. Helmecke was the heart of the band.

And he was Charlie Keil's first percussion teacher. Helmecke gave group lessons on Saturday mornings at Darien High School in Connecticut in the late 1940s. Every Saturday morning he'd teach the kids to hold their arms high and then down stroke vigorously, getting the whole ar and trunk into the motion. And though it would be years before Charlie would know this, many of the jazz drummers he came to admire – Papa Jo Jones, Sid Catlett, Chick Webb and others – would go hear Sousa's band just so they could bear witness to Helmecke's mighty drumming.

That's the start. Charlie went on to learn the snare drum, orchestral percussion, and the traps set. And while he's played professionally from time to time, he ended up studying anthropology in graduate school at the University of Chicago. That's when he did a master's thesis that he published in 1966 as Urban Blues.

Read more »

by Eric Byrd

Actually there was only one, but his lectures contained such echoes – of Khodasevich, Nabokov, Brodsky – that in retrospect he seems the voice of, if not a “culture,” then at least a certain lineage of fierce and fastidious exiles who cut strange figures in the literary communities of Western Europe, and in the comedy of American campus manners. Alexander Dolinin's survey of Russian prose fiction was my first class at the University of Wisconsin. Outside: the crisp and glittery end of summer on an elm- and maple-wooded isthmus dividing two deep glacial lakes. Dolinin announced his standards in that first lecture; he was skeptical of group identity (“individual genius is all that counts”), and refused to teach verse in translation. For the next nine months I would be reading some Englished classic of Russian prose. We followed Dolinin from the faro tables and winter balls of Pushkin's Petersburg to the lustily scythed acres of Levin's estate; from the crowded Crimean pier where Chekhov's lady lost her lorgnette to the Arctic reveille of Denisovich and the zeks. The Oxford World and Penguin Classics provided only the silhouettes of Russian writers, and we were yawning undergrads in an early-morning elective, and Dolinin could not muse as he might have – but nonetheless he was able to model an intellectual sensuousness, an impassioned relation to tradition like nothing else I would encounter in the next four years.

Read more »

by Fausto Ribeiro

For years, amidst the cold and dirty cement, nothing had revealed itself to me, and I left so many hours, so many days go by in emptiness, without doing much about it. So when I finally felt the moist grass beneath my bare feet, a beam of pleasure climbed up my legs and landed at the back of my neck, tingling. The feeling almost subsided as I thought about the derision it would bring about were I to voice it, but it resisted in defiance when, with each slow step, I saw a bit more of the river: how could its color, in appearing among the tree leaves that separated it from me, be so beautiful? Hitherto, I understood that rivers were no more than paths for putrid waste, flanked by asphalt serpents over which gigantic metallic insects slouched creepingly, emitting their electric lights – red, yellow – and puffing ashes towards the sky; in the heart of such beasts lay anguished beings, encrusted, grabbing onto the wheel, honking, forcing themselves to ignore the imminence of cerebrovascular accidents. But not the Rhone: there I found myself, absurdly, in front of an idyllic valley where the waters ran quietly, and one could drink from them, and one could swim in them; small fallen branches were seen floating serenely, following their path towards the oneiric Mare Nostrum from the history books of my long gone childhood. And if under the sun its green glistened, by dawn the waters transubstantiated into pure methylene blue, and would then be confused in my memory with the swaying brushstrokes of a certain starry night, whose constellations shone magnificently, spreading as if by magic their light upon the river: divine images conceived by a sad soul, who had gone mad and died before anybody could be enraptured by his howls of utter beauty.

Read more »

by Grace Boey

Last month, I wrote about moral uncertainty and moral hedging. The discussion was fairly abstract and ultimately rather inconclusive; it’s time to examine how real people might put some sort of moral hedging into practice now if they wanted to.

First, here’s a recap (readers already acquainted with moral hedging can skip the next two paragraphs). What should you do if, despite knowing all the relevant facts about animal physiology and consciousness, you are still uncertain as to whether killing animals for food is permissible, or whether it is murder? This is moral uncertainty, as opposed to factual uncertainty. The strategy of moral hedging aims to maximize the ‘expected moral value’ of our actions under moral uncertainty. This expected moral value is the probability of an action’s being right, multiplied by the moral value of its being right if it is indeed right. This means that we shouldn’t just choose to do what we think is most probably right – we should also take the value of consequences into account.

While the idea of moral hedging seems promising, I noted that it suffers from some weaknesses. For one, there is the ‘problem of inter-theoretic value comparisons’ (PIC) – how do we compare values across theories that value things differently? Also, the theory still lacks clear guidelines that the average person can realistically apply in practice.

In this second piece, I’ll give reasons for believing that we should press on with moral hedging. I’ll also recommend a realistic guideline for acting under moral uncertainty that I believe captures the idea of moral hedging: For any choice of action that you’re morally uncertain about, consider this question: if you eventually find out that this choice is, in fact, morally wrong, what attitude would you have towards your actions? If you foresee that you’d hold yourself culpable or blameworthy for the potential wrong, then you shouldn’t perform the action now. Although this may seem obvious on first glance, this suggestion may impact more of our actions than we realize.

Why press on with moral hedging?

As previously discussed, hedging isn’t the only way we might go about coping with moral uncertainty. Moreover, PIC might appear to be a big enough theoretical challenge for some to give up on the strategy of moral hedging. In spite of this, however, I believe hedging is still the correct thing to do under moral uncertainty, and that we should apply it where we can. Here I hope to persuade my readers of the same. (Readers who already support moral hedging may want to skip to the next section).

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

There is a delightful episode of Radiolab entitled “Emergence''. In it they look at the remarkably complicated structures which can emerge from large groups of remarkably dumb individuals each doing their own thing. You see this in ant colonies, flocks of birds, human cities, capitalist marketplaces, and the human brain. Remarkably, we find the same phenomenon in the (seemingly) inert world of mathematics.

You have a problem. You're planning your annual post-New Year's party and as the consummate host you know that parties are deadly dull unless you have just the right mix of friends and strangers. A core group of witty friends or interesting strangers to keep things lively is just the thing. For the moment let's say you would be equally happy to have three people at your party who are all friends or all strangers. Unfortunately, your co-host believes parties are best when well mixed. At all costs they would like to avoid a group of three friends or three strangers.

You make a bold offer to your co-host: If you get to pick the number of guests, the co-host can decide who is invited.

Does your gambit work? Can you now successfully outmaneuver your co-host by making the invitation list sufficiently long as to ensure a group of three friends or three strangers no matter who ends up on the list? And, if so, how many? Or have you made a horrible mistake in this strange high strategy battle over the most minor of stakes?

Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

“Planes have always been a theme in my life,” my father says and asks me how the essay is going. I tell him fine. It has some problems, but fine. Still trying to work out the structure. I hear him smile to fill the distance between us.

The last decade was bad for airplanes.

Hudson. Turkey. Buffalo. Tokyo.

And Air France. Twice.

MAN was killed instantly when a Boeing (INSERT MODEL HERE) Jet lost control and crashed into his house. He was asleep at the time, a hand positioned under his pillow, unfinished Sunday crossword on the nightstand. WIFE AND DAUGHTER managed to escape seconds before the plane hit. They would have to start their lives over now, start from scratch.

SEASONED PILOT, male, lands Boeing (INSERT MODEL HERE) Jet safely into the Hudson River after a BIRD STRIKE on BOTH ENGINES. All CREW and PASSENGERS were evacuated from the plane safely. No major INJURIES were reported.

In 1950 a CESSNA two-seater nose-dived in to the Pacific Ocean, just outside of San Francisco. The plane held TWO MEN; one of them was MY GRANDFATHER.

Is it possible to miss someone I've never met?

_____

Would you call my father a liar if he told you the perfect story? If he told you that at exactly 1 p.m. he fell into a fence, blinded by a white light so strong and pure it knocked his feet from under him, a math book open in the gutter, seedless grapes hanging in clusters from a vine above his head?

At exactly 1 p.m. my grandfather's plane crashed into the ocean. The velocity with which he hit the water was enough to tear the clothes from his body. Shoes too.

You always remember the grapes. They looked like tiny Christmas bulbs.

After the funeral, you paced around the back yard, the one that would become a basketball court but wasn't yet. You stepped on weeds, pressed their bodies to the ground. Tossed pebbles into the grass to watch them sink.

What words did you choose when you told your little brother about the accident? Your mind was someplace else by then. Left the body to fend for itself.

_____

2012: Discovery Channel filmmakers purposefully crash a 727 Jet into the Mexican desert in the name of passenger safety research. It was concluded that following the guidelines on the seat-back safety cards might actually increase your chances of survival.

It was also noted that real people were replaced by crash test dummies.

The Coast Guard found my grandfather's wallet at the scene of the accident. Two pictures were still tucked neatly inside; one of his children standing in front of a lopsided Christmas tree and the other of his wife in a bikini.

My father fell into the cracks of his own life but clawed back out, “tooth and nail” his mother would say. “Tooth and nail, that Johnny.” I imagine him scaling trees with his bare hands.

You were fifteen and didn't want to lose your father but you did. That's the way it worked. He was there and then he wasn't. Just like that.

Read more »

Tiny Megalomaniacs
.
being good
you take responsibility for everything
and credit for nothing,
otherwise you’re sliding down
the slippery slope at an accelerating clip
until you’re taking credit for everything
and responsibility for zip

just a short slip down that slope
you’ve already sloughed goodness
many times like snake skin
for the sake of some small gain
some little leverage, some edge, some in
elbowing out some less able
contestant in Darwin’s world
to gain what turns out to be
a plot of worthless sand
by means of tiny sins

it’s tough, discernment’s not easy
in the muddle of desire
everything you think you require is righteous
so you turn to gods that fan that fire
you whisper prayers into corners first
then, picking up a head of steam,
you’re bellowing your righteousness from peaks
as your minions mutter lies up and down mean streets
and many bubbles burst

but more often than not you don’t get that far
you settle for a provincial fiefdom
running a big firm or corner bar,
equally worthy jobs
if your heart’s in the right place
and you understand the limits of all
and know you’re in this universe
under an umbrella of chance,
lucky to be small
and know you have just a tiny part
in the making of this
curious dance
.

by Jim Culleny
12/28/2013

by Alexander Bastidas Fry

Imagine that reality is as strange as string theory predicts. String theory calls for ten perhaps eleven space-time dimensions where strings and membranes vibrate to generate the particles and ultimately all emergent phenomena of the natural world. The dynamics of such a universe quickly escapes our ability to describe it with ordinary language or to conceive of it at all. A theory that successfully predicts the behavior of the universe is good, but a theory that precisely describes nature while it simultaneously inspires our imaginations would be best. String theory wallows in that cross roads of imagination and science such that if you don't know what string theory is yet you aren't just missing science you are missing critical modern culture.

Issues of interpretation are not uncommon in science. “People slowly accustomed themselves to the idea that that the physical states of space itself were the final reality” Einstein said. He was commenting on the fundamental principle of his theory of general relativity wherein the distribution of energy and matter determines the geometry of space time. Einstein spoke to the public with precise words. Here he is stating that the reality we experience is given by space-time itself. He is also suggesting a larger kind of scientific realism where there is an objective world independent of our capacity to know it. In this view reality is a purely physical manifestation of the natural laws of physics. Yet, the underlying dynamics of nature are not directly accessible to human perception, as Einstein said it, “imagination is everything.”

“Should overwhelming evidence gathered using a diversity of methods confirm the existence of a phenomenon in the world, it ought to be taken to be objectively real; for example, that the universe consists of three spatial dimensions: length, height, and breadth” states Sean Miller in his 2013 book Strung Together. The existence of extra dimensions is prescribed by the formalism of string theory (in M-theory there are ten dimensions of space and one of time). This claim contradicts current theories. String theory will attain the status of scientific knowledge only if predictions like this can be validated. String theory makes such sweeping claims about our universe that it is a so called theory of everything. Though regardless of whether or not string theory is strictly correct our imaginative understanding of what it means may continue to progress.

Read more »

by Madhu Kaza

I began to read the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle last year after I heard a conversation between two writers who were puzzling over the book. They both agreed that the absence of plot in the novel was not compensated for by a strong prose style. One writer even called the writing “bad.” Yet they both found the book utterly compelling. What they were trying to figure out was why this should be so. Intrigued by this puzzlement of theirs, I began to read the book to look for an answer myself. Shortly after, I went to an event at 192 Books in New York, where Knausgaard discussed the book with Paris Review editor Lorin Stein.

I admit my interest in Knausgaard was also related to a longstanding preoccupation with Scandinavia and the North (from the age of seven I've owed a particular debt of allegiance to Denmark, proof in my mind that one doesn't exactly choose one's imaginary homeland). But even if the nets of affiliation pull in strange catch, they are not cast randomly: Knausgaard noted that My Struggle was originally titled Argentina, which he later explained was the country of his dreams. “I can't believe Argentina exists,” he said. “It's like literature.” He spoke of Borges and also of Witold Gombrowicz, who spent much of his life in exile in Argentina. It makes sense that a Norseman would find himself drawn to Borges (who was obsessed with Old Norse and the Icelandic Sagas), and through Borges imagine that the realm of literature itself was a land called Argentina.

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

It was in a small, black, hardbound volume of Iqbal’s Urdu verse, that I saw the name Goethe for the first time. Iqbal’s Baang e Dara had belonged to me since before I could read and it became an object of mystery, likely due to the manner in which it entered my psyche: in candlelight, and in my mother’s voice. Prone to studying shadows, I was terrified of power outages at night, so my mother lit me a candle and read Iqbals’ poems for children in Baang e Dara: the dialogue between a spider and a fly, a mountain and a squirrel and other adaptations of English poems, in her lucid yet slightly elfin voice. The pages were turned right to left but a non-reader sees a text of poetry much in the cubist’s way— shapes centered on the page, squares or long rectangles, with tightly woven letters inside and wide margins to roam free in.

Over the years, the binding slackened from wear only under the section of children’s poems. When I was older I perused the rest of the book and found the poems complex but I was drawn to the miraculous harmonies formed of Urdu’s polygenetic beauty; its Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Turkish diction fitting as if synaptically, only in this poet-philosopher’s hands, to create a unique musical-intellectual whole.

I also found, to my astonishment, Iqbal’s poems addressing the greats belonging to a variety of cultures: Rumi, Shakespeare, Ghalib, Goethe, Hafiz, Ghazali, Blake, Emerson and other influential thinkers and poets. Iqbal’s century was changing the map fast, making his reflections on the learning of the East and West ever urgent. While rejecting the title “Sir” from the Raj, he continued to honor philosophers such as his own mentor (at Government College, Lahore) Dr. Thomas Arnold in his poems. Among great western thinkers, Goethe held a special place for Iqbal: Our soul discovers itself when we come into contact with a great mind. It was not until I had realized the infinitude of Goethe's imagination that I discovered the narrow breadth of my own.

Time and again, Goethe’s name stood out when I approached Iqbal’s poetry— there were many reasons for this, but the most memorable one was a typewritten response from the celebrated German scholar Annemarie Schimmel to my letter about my interest in Sufi poetry. She had read my poems closely and her brief letter was full of light and love. I heard the cosmic yes whispered in it, deep enough to give me a measure of patience, knee-deep as I was in raising my children while struggling to find time to read.

Read more »

by Quinn O'Neill

An alarm clock radio wakes me up each morning. For a while, it was set to a radio station that featured mostly pop music and mindless celebrity gossip, mainly because of its clear reception. It also frequently played an advertisement for an insurance company serving military members who have “honorably served” and their families. The ad cast military service in an unquestionably postive light and was played often enough that I could pretty well recite it. One morning, having heard it one time too many, I pushed the button on my alarm over to the buzzer option. “I'll decide for myself what I think of the military,” I naively thought.

At the gym later that day, I found myself on a treadmill before a TV screen playing music videos interspersed with military recruitment advertisements. After my workout, on my way to the locker room, I passed a military recruitment stand with an array of brochures for the taking. I stopped for a few minutes and perused its offerings. As I saw it, the stand was wanting for alternative views, but it was clear that only one viewpoint was to be served to the gym goers, and it wasn't for me to decide.

In 1928, Edward Bernays, a pioneer of propaganda and public relations published his seminal book titled Propaganda.¹ In this important, but little known book, he defines propaganda as “a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.” (p.52) Though the term has acquired a negative connotation, owing to its association with German use in WWI, the practice continues today, euphemized as “public relations”.

This exerpt from the 1928 book could equally apply to our current state of affairs:

“We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. […] Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons – a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million – who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” (p.37)

Whether we like it or not, we are being manipulated by an unseen, unelected minority. Society may have grown and evolved over the years, but the changes have served only to intensify the power that these invisible leaders have over us. Control over the media is concentrated today to an extreme degree. As of 2011, just 6 corporations controlled 90% of our media. In 1983, this power was shared among 50 companies.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use,
which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”
~ Arthur C. Clarke

Artificial intelligence has been a discomforting presence in popular consciousness since at least HAL 9000, the menacing, homicidal and eventually pathetic computer in Kubrick's adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL initiated our own odyssey of fascination and revulsion with the idea that machines, to put it ambiguously, could become sentient. Of course, within the AI community, there is no real agreement of what intelligence actually means, whether artificial or not. Without being able to define it, we have scant chance at (re-)producing it, and the promise of AI has been consistently deferred into the near future for over half a century.

Nevertheless, this has not dissuaded the cultural production of AI, so two recent treatments of AI in film and television provide a good opportunity to reflect on how “thinking machines” may become a part of our quotidian lives. As is almost always the case, the way art holds up a mirror to society allows us to ask if we are prepared for this coming reality, or at least one not too different from it. I'll first consider Spike Jonze's latest film, “Her,” followed by an episode of the Channel 4 series “Black Mirror” (sorry, spoilers below).

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

Two scientific papers that were published in the journal Nature in the year 2000 marked the beginning of engineering biological circuits in cells. The paper “Construction of a genetic toggle switch in Escherichia coli” by Timothy Gardner, Charles Cantor and James Collins created a genetic toggle switch by simultaneously introducing an artificial DNA plasmid into a bacterial cell. This DNA plasmid contained two promoters (DNA sequences which regulate the expression of genes) and two repressors (genes that encode for proteins which suppress the expression of genes) as well as a gene encoding for green fluorescent protein that served as a read-out for the system. The repressors used were sensitive to either selected chemicals or temperature. In one of the experiments, the system was turned ON by adding the chemical IPTG (a modified sugar) and nearly all the cells became green fluorescent within five to six hours. Upon raising the temperature to activate the temperature-sensitive repressor, the cells began losing their green fluorescence within an hour and returned to the OFF state. Many labs had used chemical or temperature switches to turn gene expression on in the past, but this paper was the first to assemble multiple genes together and construct a switch which allowed switching cells back and forth between stable ON and OFF states.

The same issue of Nature contained a second land-mark paper which also described the engineering of gene circuits. The researchers Michael Elowitz and Stanislas Leibler describe the generation of an engineered gene oscillator in their article “A synthetic oscillatory network of transcriptional regulators“. By introducing three repressor genes which constituted a negative feedback loop and a green fluorescent protein as a marker of the oscillation, the researchers created a molecular clock in bacteria with an oscillation period of roughly 150 minutes. The genes and proteins encoded by the genes were not part of any natural biological clock and none of them would have oscillated if they had been introduced into the bacteria on their own. The beauty of the design lay in the combination of three serially repressing genes and the periodicity of this engineered clock reflected the half-life of the protein encoded by each gene as well as the time it took for the protein to act on the subsequent member of the gene loop.

Read more »

by Lisa Lieberman

In the memoir he was writing at the time he died, my friend Avresh described returning to the Czechoslovakian town of Sevlush, his birthplace, in the winter of 1946. He'd left some fifteen years earlier to attend a Jewish gymnasium in a larger city, stayed on to study engineering at the university and never looked back. This was his mother's wish for him: that he enter the great, free, secular world, liberate himself from the narrowness of his tradition. Escape.

When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, Avresh joined the Communist resistance. Captured and tortured by the Gestapo but inexplicably released, he made his way to the Soviet Union, expecting to be welcomed with open arms, a comrade in the fight against Nazism. Instead he was arrested at the border and charged with espionage—the fate of most Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. Avresh spent two and a half years in the Gulag, shuffled from one prison camp to the next, but ended up an artillery officer in a Czech unit of the Russian army;
by the time he was discharged, he'd earned four medals for his service on the Eastern front. His favorite featured a picture of Stalin.

So it was as a decorated officer in a Russian army uniform that he returned to his town after the war. All the Jews were gone, rounded up and deported to Auschwitz. A Slovak family was living in his childhood home and not a trace of Avresh's own family remained. Looking for answers, he went to the neighborhood synagogue and peered in the door. The sanctuary, the balcony, the corridors and stairways were cluttered with belongings: furniture, pots and pans, bedding, books, knickknacks and photographs. A policeman stood watch over the household goods of the departed Jews of Sevlush. Town officials had collected the Jews' possessions and stored them in the synagogue to prevent looting. No Jews had returned to claim their things. Was there something he wanted from the collection, the policeman asked, some memento?

Avresh said he took nothing when he left Sevlush, but this is not strictly true. He carried no objects away from the synagogue, no material belongings, pointedly refusing the money the officials offered as “rent” on his family's house. What he took, along with the burden of guilt he carried—”I share the usual remorse of most Holocaust survivors lamenting why they are alive and why they did not try harder to save their perished family,” he wrote in his memoir—what he took, I would say, was a sense of spiritual belonging, the token that remained of his Jewish inheritance.

Read more »

by Ahmed Humayun

(This is the first post in a series on Pakistan's struggle against militancy).

Almost a decade in, the rebellion by the Pakistani Taliban against Islamabad shows no signs of flagging. Tough, savvy, and agile, the insurgents have expanded their campaign from the isolated northwestern tribal regions all the way to urban centers in the south such as the port city of Karachi. Their declared agenda has grown with each success: they first demanded acceptance of their control over large swathes of the tribal areas; they then denied the authority of Islamabad across Pakistan altogether; today, influenced by Al Qaeda's rhetoric, they boast of sending fighters to wars in Arab lands and attacking the United States.

We need not accept all their grandiose declarations at face value. When it comes to global terrorism, in particular, there is a chasm between their rhetoric and their capacity. The only terrorist plot on American soil they can claim is of the failed Times Square Bomber in 2010. The evidence of Taliban involvement in Middle Eastern battlefields is ambiguous at best. And their operations are constrained by an overall pool of fighters that is small: estimates vary because data is hard to collect and the definition of an active fighter is murky but at any given time there may only be between ten and twenty thousand rebel fighters.

But the insurgents have substantially expanded their campaign within Pakistan itself. They have strategic clarity where Islamabad does not and their aspirations have been whetted by the confusion of the state. In recent years the rebels have complemented their fight against Pakistani armed forces in the tribal areas with a systematic campaign of terrorism in towns and cities across the country. To this end the insurgents have leveraged and expanded a vast ‘infrastructure of extremism', which originates in decades of state sponsorship of non-state militant groups.* The network includes combat trainers, militant recruiters, funders, suicide jacket makers, indoctrinators and foot soldiers who have access to training camps, safe houses, telephone getaway exchanges, madrassahs (some, not all) and highly sophisticated media communications facilities across the length and breadth of Pakistan. The insurgents are not cave dwellers: they are adept organization builders who have institutionalized the production of terrorism as one weapon in their broader war against the state.

Read more »

by Alon Levy

There's a genre of shows, above the level of House or Friends and below that of The Wire, that exude high quality even if the actual level of characterization and plot isn't deep. Julian Fellowes' Downton Abbey is one of the prime examples of this genre. It's beautifully done and acted, has enough characters and plots to keep anyone's interest, and is full of references that seem smart.

It just so happens that none of these references is particularly intellectual or obscure. Instead, they're the sort of history that everyone knows. The first episode discusses the Titanic; we do not live in an alt history in which James Cameron chose to make more Terminator sequels in the 90s. Every time Lord Grantham's American wife's mother comes, we're treated to the usual tropes of differences between British and American culture. In the season that just concluded with its Christmas special, two additional common references are added: a rich English expat goes to Munich in 1922 and is killed by the early Nazi party because he vocally disagreed with them; and there's a subplot regarding Edward VIII's playboy philandering. This is about as smart as an American mid-18th century period drama inserting a reference to Washington not being able to tell a lie.

The problem is that even the stronger points of symbolism on the show are like this. The biggest is the analogy between the upstairs and the downstairs. The servants form a tight group (except Thomas and O'Brien) in which Carson is the father, Hughes is the mother, and the rest of the servants have a hierarchy in which valets and lady's maids are above the rest. Bates/Anna is of course parallel to Matthew/Mary, and the stronger parts of the show are the ones that showcase the differences between their relationships, with Matthew/Mary having more resources and more clout than Bates/Anna so that they face more rich-people problems rather than a possible execution.

The only problem is, the show didn't really invent this view of the butler as the father, the housekeeper as the mother, and the other servants as lesser members of the house. It was common in that era. I don't think it's as well-known a reference, but that symbolism is still a trope, and the servants' order of precedence within the great houses reflected it. It works well enough as a reference, but as symbolism, it's trite.

Everywhere else, Fellowes' Tory baron biases show. The show can't write women well, and descends to a virgin/whore/mother trichotomy. The only man who is as conniving as the median woman is gay. The treatment of race is facile. Lord Grantham is self-consciously written as an upper-class twit, but he doesn't suffer any consequences for it and is always saved by more competent family members, nor does he have interesting moral dilemmas. The characters are never shown to engage in any effort – they do some work and succeed, without any of the failures that are associated with actual effort. The show wants to be about the aristocracy's struggles with its decline after WW1, but it's instead about an aristocratic family that weathered all the troubles, which is about as interesting as any riches-to-riches story could be.

Read more »