by Misha Lepetic

“The whole arrangement is as cozy and comfortable as the
front basement dining room of a first-class city residence.”
~ Scientific American, 1870

Is there anything that is not deserving of disruption by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs? Last week the world came to understand that in addition to pretty much everything else, high-speed rail is heading for a makeover. The irrepressible Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, unveiled, in a somewhat anticlimactic press conference, what is essentially a giant pneumatic tube for people. Also known as the Hyperloop, it intends to shoot people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in something like 35 minutes, at a top speed of nearly 800 miles per hour. Remarkably, Musk declared that he has no intention to build the thing; as John Oliver said on the Daily Show, “That's like saying ‘Hey, you know what we should do? Find a vaccine for cancer…Someone get on that! I'm just the ideas man.'” I suppose this is the flipside of what Musk generously termed the “open source” nature of the project. However, the proposal is worth examining both for its implicit attitudes towards what is being designed, and what the real purpose of the Hyperloop might be.

Once Musk had finally opened the kimono, the critics naturally pounced. It's easy to dish on a multi-billion-dollar design proposal that is all of 57 pages, and contains such breezy gems as: “short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where things get tricky” (p3). Tricky, indeed.

But it's not so much the technology, or Musk's indifference to building it, that is at issue here. Most of this has been developed and is fairly uncontroversial. In fact, the idea of using some combination of air or vacuum to propel people through tubes was successfully prototyped back in the 1870s. Of course, the issue of scale will certainly produce its own set of challenges, but this will arrive in due time. Nor is the cost “where things get tricky,” either: even though critics have called out the $6bn price tag as laughably low, since when has an infrastructure project ever been priced realistically?

What is more interesting to me is the way people themselves are considered in the design proposal.

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by Maniza Naqvi

A woman, her cart of belongings next to her, sits on a park bench, feeding the pigeons, squirrels and ducks. She throws bread crumbs to them, and calls out in a voice, cured by cigarettes and gin: “Have a nice day working for the war! You know we all work for the war! Even these pigeons are eating off the war!” She must be seventy, she wears a string of pearls, a checkered white and blue gingham dress, her eyes are bright blue, her hair silver and long, her skin tanned and weathered. I stare at her, for a moment I think I know her and then I move on.

In front of the White House, another diaspora pleads and protests against a repressive regime, as if the White House were a temple, for such things. Helmeted curious tourists whoosh by on their Segways. A few days earlier, it was the Egyptian diaspora, here, demanding that the White House recognize the ouster of Morsi's government by the military as a coup d'etat. But this prime temple, the White House, has maintained a monumental Sphinx like silence on this term, surrounded as it is, perhaps, by so many edifices to Generals. Now over one thousand Egyptian protesters are dead at the hands of their military. Who manufactured the bullets, guns and gas? But there are balls and chains that stop the White House from breaking with its tradition of supporting the military in Egypt—weapons sales from US companies based on vouchers considered as aid to Egypt. This is the way the world is organized, trapped like insects in honey, unable to resist the viscosity of an elaborate system of commerce, war and aid: vouchers as aid to militaries overseas to purchase from the weapons industry —and subsidies to the food industry for surplus maize as aid to the impoverished citizenry of those places overseas.

I look at the sculpture of General Lafayette at the Southeast corner of the park, at whose base a statue of a woman, half crawling half naked, reaches up to him to hand him a sword: Lady Liberty, I presume.

Even so, there is another protest—a monumental piece de resistance —in fact, an act of supreme resistance installed, quite literally, in its own back yard.

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by Mara Jebsen

First day of May, and the roses on my block
all boiled into bloom, as if following a summons–
water-logged and lewd they nodded as I passed
and I wanted to touch them, but didn't have time–
Then I watched a rat pull an entire poppy-seed bagel
along subway tracks. He kept falling. I'd never seen
a rat so happy. Give us this day
our daily bread, I thought. But then came the next part:
something about forgiveness and daily
trespasses. When I was a kid, I found it silly. Only once
I'd trespassed on the way to school-drawn onto private
property– by roses, in fact–it was a rich person's garden
In Philadelphia. My mother had warned me
not to take the back-paths, but that's where I'd found
a secret city–whole shadow-alleys crammed with azaeleas
crocuses, roses, one actual
No Trespassing sign. It did not strike me
as bad to be there. It seemed a strange thing for God
to fuss about. Once, in a period after my college years,
I could not find a job and it made me weep. When I came home
I thought to myself: I am lost. I'm lost. In a big fat
onion. No one can find me
here. It is a wonderful thing to be in
the right place; to trust the arrival of daily
bread, tossed by some invisible
hand. After work, I saw a man
with his pants around his thighs
rest his bare bottom
on the warm concrete. His flesh was loose
and wasting; his head lolled forward like a rose.
I could not see his face. He was dreaming on the steps
of the the public library. I have been lately feeling
very grateful, as if all were falling
into place. May is the month of the possible,
of roses and bread.
Forgive me my daily trespasses.

by Omar Ali

The first thing that strikes you on landing in Pakistan after a few years is how much more “modern” it is and how dramatically (and frequently, painfully) it is changing with every passing day. One is reminded that Pakistan is as much a part of “rising Asia” as India, Bangladesh or Thailand and is not all about terrorists, conspiracy theories, Salafist nutjobs or the clash of civilizations. But since more qualified people are writing about the economics of rising Asia, the destruction of the environment, the breakdown of traditional society, the future of the planet, and the meaning of life, I will try not to step too much on their turf. And since there are countless articles (and more than one famous book) detailing the Westernized elite’s view of how the underclass lives and dies in rising Asia, I will not intrude too far on that well-trodden terrain either. Instead, without further ado, here are my personal and entirely anecdotal observations from 3 weeks in Pakistan.

1. The uncertainty is real and deep. Not only are people unsure about what may happen next, they are unsure about how uncertain they are! Someone can start off by saying life will go on, it will probably be more of the same, things will slowly get better but there will be no big sudden transformation. Then, as the conversation proceeds, report that he (or she) is afraid it’s all going to fall apart next year in one big apocalyptic disaster. A few minutes later, the same person confidently assures you that we are about to turn the corner and Pakistan will be the next China (or at least, the next Chinese colony, which is pretty much the same thing). If asked which of these three theories (more of the same, impending disaster or turning the Chinese corner) he thinks is more likely, he seems genuinely surprised to learn that he has just confidently predicted three different outcomes. This seemed like a new trend. Different people used to have different theories about what may come next but now the same person has many different theories and seems equally unsure about all of them. It did cross my mind that maybe this happens everywhere but is just more noticeable here. But the fact remains, it was more noticeable this time than it has ever been in the past.

2. “Real life” economic calculations so consistently trump ideology that one can be excused for starting to believe in the crudest forms of Marxism. Of course, no one I met actually believes in crude Marxism because the people I met were anything but crude. A number of them claimed to be Marxist, but mostly in the latest postcolonial postmodern post-industrial sort of way. Anyway, coming back to “real life” in Pakistan: Islamists and anti-Islamists seem to run very similar (and similarly profitable) schools and colleges all over Pakistan. Friends who were in the Islamic student parties and friends who led their leftist opponents and battled on the streets with club and guns, now run the same private clinics and hospitals and take the same pharmaceutical junkets. Their children go to the same colleges and take the same Cambridge and SAT examinations to go to the same elite institutions of higher education in the developed world (of course, a world that now includes Shanghai and Singapore in addition to New York and London). They start businesses, launch careers and file patents the same way, though the Islamists all say Allah Hafiz and the leftists still resist by saying Khuda Hafiz. In short, capitalism is thriving. But the environment and social harmony are not. The water is literally undrinkable all across Pakistan. No one can drink tap water and avoid typhoid or hepatitis, but even if you only drink genuine Nestle bottled water, your dishes are still washed in tap water, your veggies are grown in raw sewage and your milk may be mixed with it. This probably sounds like typical expat griping, but this was the universal opinion of every doctor I met. Public health is a nightmare and since an unhealthy proportion of public intellectuals is either waiting for Mao or dreaming about the caliphate (see below), no one seems to be able to fix mundane things like water and sewage.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Cigarette smoking is an insidious and on-going public health disaster. If a new virus were killing as many people – more than 400, 000 Americans each year – there'd be widespread panic. Yet smoking-related deaths and disease garner little of the public's attention.

Perhaps we reason that smokers deserve the consequences of their actions because their habit is a choice. But according to the American Cancer Society, almost 90% of adult smokers take up the habit before the age of 18. Adolescents aren't known for their level headedness and a lifetime of addiction seems a harsh penalty for a bad teenage decision.

Tobacco advertising is an important influence on teens' smoking-related decisions. We like to believe that we make free choices as consumers, but the tobacco industry, which better appreciates how impressionable we really are, spends 8 to 10 billion dollars per year on marketing in the US alone. And it works. The CDC acknowledges that there is evidence of a causal relationship between advertising and tobacco use by young people. Studies confirm that teens are exposed to cigarette advertising and that these ads do increase their desire to smoke.

We would never allow ads to feature cartoon characters encouraging kids to drink toxic household cleaners; but for some reason, when it comes to smoking, we do tolerate the marketing of toxic substances to young people. Tobacco advertising will predictably influence teens' behaviors and many of the new smokers it creates will develop serious or fatal disease. The marketing of cigarettes is essentially criminal and it isn't those who succumb to its influence who deserve to be punished. Today's youngsters need protection from the sinister tactics of the tobacco industry. A complete ban on advertising would be ideal, but doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. The CDC offers suggestions on how to reduce the influence of these ads on teens, which may be especially useful to parents.

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by Brooks Riley

For years I lived in the Kunstareal, an area of Munich surrounded by museums, great museums, the kind that people travel thousands of miles to visit—the Lenbachgalerie with its Blue Rider painters, the Alte Pinakothek with its Dürers, Brueghels, Rubens, the Neue Pinakothek with its 19^th century European painters—to name just a few. I lived less than 5 minutes away from 10 museums and could explore the history of art from Greek and Roman times to the present day, as easily as I could pop around to the corner store.

When I first moved to the neighborhood I thought, ‘ How convenient, I can go anytime.’ ‘Anytime’ came to mean ‘almost never’. I suffered from the museum variation of the Parkinson principle: If work fills the amount of time allotted to it, then exploring the riches at my doorstep would take more than a decade.

It’s not that I had never been to any of these museums: On visits to Munich in my teens and twenties, I had gone to the Alte Pinakothek several times, long before I lived around the corner. I knew my favorite painter could be found there. I knew how emotional I could get, standing in front of the self-portrait from 1500, convinced that Dürer had painted it for me and me alone. He was looking at me, wasn’t he? Such narcissism thrives in the solitary contemplation of a painting, but the fear that I might be wrong wasn’t what kept me away. And my avoidance was never a case of ‘been there, done that’ but more of ‘want to, will do. . . whenever’.

It turns out that during all those years I stayed away, one of my favorite Dürer works, the Paumgartner Alterpiece triptych, was also absent, the victim of a sulfuric acid attack in 1988 by a deranged pensioner. Restoring the painting took 21 years. Had I known, how I would have missed the antithetical Paumgartner brothers who frame the central panel: the older, frumpy Stephan as an ineffectual St. George (the dragon at his feet looks still alive), the younger cocky Lukas as St. Eustace, upstaging his brother in both regalia and attitude. This gentle dose of Cain and Abel exposes an intriguing aspect of Dürer’s work, which is full of asides and painterly winks, among them, surely, the perspective oddities of the triptych’s central panel.

Dürer, Kandinsky, Friedrich, Schinkel and Co. were my neighbors all those years, waiting for me to drop by on my way to buy milk. They cried out to me in the night, “When are you coming to visit us?” The more they nagged, the more I resisted and the guiltier I felt, as though they were parents awaiting a long overdue visit from an only child.

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by Rafiq Kathwari

Srinagar, Kashmir, 14 August 1947 Thursday

At Midnight two dominions of Pakistan and Hindustan will take birth: Whole day busy with tomorrow's celebrations. Pakistan Government has instructed Superintendent Post Office Srinagar to fly the Pakistan flag tomorrow on all the post office buildings. The Kashmir government does not want this to happen. They are extremely perturbed over it — feverish political activity in this connection.

Tonight is Shab-e Qadar, what an auspicious night, and tomorrow is Jumatul-wida, when legally the two dominions will start to work. In fact, Pakistan Constituent Assembly met today and was addressed by Lord Mountbatten who, as the Governor General of Pakistan, read the Kings message. Then, our most beloved leader, Qaid–e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah was sworn in, and then, the First Premier of Pakistan, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan.

At midnight, my father (and a group of friends) sat attentively near the radio tuning to Lahore. The clock struck 12. The announcer approached the mike, and announced, “Pakistan Broadcasting Service.”

Pakistan has come into existence. Long Live Pakistan! Long Live Qaid-e-Azam, its architect and founder!

The proceeding started with recitation from the holy Quran, followed by Naat's. We all could not resist our tears for so much was the emotion and so piercing was every word spoken on the radio that we all of us actually went into a sort of trance. At 1 A.M. the Special Broadcast ended. After that, we talked till about 3 A.M.

Srinagar, Kashmir, 15 August 1947 Friday

Got up early at 6 A.M. From the early hour people were excited. We put on Pakistan flags, green with Crescent and a Star and a white strip representing the minorities. We also put up buntings. The Nationalist Musulmaans also decorating with red flags. Lots of excitement, some trouble, not much.

Went at about 11 a.m. to Amira Kadal — today everyone observed holiday. The whole city had a bride's appearance with green, red, and tricolor flags. Pakistan flags were hoisted on all the post offices, and that proved very great excitement to Musalmaans. Hundreds went to the post offices and saluted the flags.

At 1:30 p.m went to Jamia Masjid. Huge congregation there, a public meeting also held. We went in a procession of cars — all cars had Pakistan flags.

Returned from Jamia Masjid: I was now exhausted due to sleeplessness, hungry and thirsty. Went home. Had a rest until 7 p.m. [Two friends] came to pick me up from my home. We went to Lake View Hotel to attend the Pakistan Dinner Party. About 150 gentlemen responded. The dinner commenced with recitation from the Holy Quran, and ended successfully with more recitations under life size statues of Qaid-e-Azam.

My father, Khawja Gulam Mohammed Kathwari, kept a daily dairy from the day he entered Aligarh Muslim University in 1932 to the day he died in 1999. There will be many opportunities to share other pages.

Amethyst
—Puerto Rico, 1960

San Juan past the stone north walls of Morro
shanty roofs slide to the sea
white below beyond breakers
the sea spreads bluegreen north to New York

…… strewn across my bed the moon
…… through a window
…… lies across the sheets like a lover

the ship on rippleless lavenderglass swells
at dusk, the sky’s hue too
I am indistinct in this boundless
lifting/falling amethyst
.

by Jim Culleny, 8/9/13

by Usha Alexander

Two days in south Rajasthan with AMRIT Health Services, a not-for-profit initiative

“The demand to sacrifice a goat was not something we had expected as a precondition for setting up the clinic,” Dr. Pavitra Mohan explained. A pediatrician and public health professional, he was telling me about the initial days of setting up the first AMRIT Clinic in Bedawal, a Meena village in south Rajasthan that otherwise had no healthcare facility. The problem was that the building he had identified as adequate for his purpose was directly across from the village temple to their god, Hemliya Bavji, but it required major renovations, including the construction of a toilet, apparently the first in the village. Though the panchayat welcomed the clinic, several villagers refused to allow a toilet so near the temple, on religious grounds. To make matters worse, they also refused to allow trimming the sacred tree overhanging the building in order to build rooms on the roof for the healthcare workers to sleep at night. But after further talks and negotiations, they finally granted permission to build the clinic and trim the tree as well.

And so, in early 2013, AMRIT Clinic opened in Bedawal with a small team of qualified nurses and healthcare workers, who constitute the core of AMRIT Health Services (AHS) in the villages. They are supported by a doctor who visits once a week and is also available for telephone consultations on other days. Hoping for a view into the work of this organization—its context, its challenges, its benefits to the local population—my partner and I went for a visit in early August; our plan was to produce an introductory video about their work.

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ISRAELI PATROLS KILL 90 DOGS IN ARAB TOWN
—The New York Times, April 14, 1995

Mother, I’m living in sin with an Egyptian
Jew raised in Paris. We stroll in Central Park
Gaulois, her mutt, off the leash. Lucky he’s
not in Hebron, where gods kill dogs for sport.

by Rafiq Kathwari

by Maniza Naqvi

Opposite the White House, and across from the park, an entire block holds the flat and faceless, building of the Export and Import Bank of the United States (here), it is the color of khaki or a dead tree stump. It evokes a sense of a black and white film from the cold war about Eastern Europe– I almost expect subtitles to run beneath my gaze. It is responsible for providing financing for the foreign purchases of American goods and services. And across from it on the same street, hunkered down for the long haul, equally hued but embellished with Greek columns—I think ionic– is the Department of Veterans Affairs. It is responsible for taking care of the consequences of some of these purchases.

On the corner of that block, on some days at the entrance to the McPherson Square metro a street musician plays jazz on a horn— while on most days now, on the sidewalk in front of the building responsible for their welfare, a few stray left over “Occupiers”, veterans of these ongoing wars and past, still protest, looking like a heap of rags or lumps of dumped bodies—or body bags—as they take shelter from rain or cold, covered head to toe in their sleeping bags in the early mornings at the entrance to the Department's building. Nearby, large shiny bullet proof black sports utility vehicles, in the employees reserved parking slots on the street, provide a a sharp contrast to them and symbolize wealth, power and the capability to roll over bodies and crush them. On a large brass plate on the outside wall of the Department of Veterans Affairs the inscription quotes Abraham Lincoln: “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” I wonder if war was Lincoln's definition of battle or was his idea more profound than that—This man who himself was felled by an assassin's bullet and who left behind a widow and orphans. Was the notion of battle for Lincoln, the struggle to care for all on the basis of need and the un-decorated act that these stragglers, these society's lost souls, on the sidewalk were now engaged in?

One day as I walked by the Department of Veterans Affairs, on my way towards Lafayette Park and past the White House, my path was crossed by a trolley cart wheeled out from the building by janitors. The trolley was loaded with about three feet high painted wooden soldiers as though props for a pageant or the Nutcracker ballet. The wooden soldiers, some with broken parts, were being loaded into a truck, perhaps now useless, they were homeless and bound for a Park or perhaps for repair and storage until needed for another occasion. I turned to look back at several people, amputees, in wheel chairs who had come out, for a smoke and the warriors in their sleeping bags, as if discarded and broken props themselves, waiting to be picked up and loaded into a garbage truck.

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by Dave Maier

It's very difficult to write a good introduction to philosophy. Put in too much technical detail and it reads like a textbook, irrelevant to all but sophomores; but leave too much out and it's just a self-help book. Luc Ferry is a French philosopher whose recent essay in this genre, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, is our subject today.

Ferry's book is generally successful in walking that fine line. He keeps the details to a minimum, leaving room for plenty of argument, much of it eloquent and forceful. He leaves no doubt about where he thinks his explorations lead, and what their consequences are for contemporary life. As he himself argues, philosophy must address its readers in this direct and personal way if it is not to devolve into pointless academic speculation, a fate shared, he thinks, by too much contemporary philosophy. Even if that subtitle promises more than it can deliver (more accurate, if more unwieldy, might be A Philosophical Guide to Philosophical Guides to Living), Ferry's book provides an excellent background for further investigation and debate.

Ferry's explanatory scheme is necessarily compact, but for his purposes it works very well. The philosophy of each major era in the history of Western thought addresses three related questions: in Kant's famous formulation, they are 1) What can I know? 2) What must I do? 3) What may I hope? Kant's own system is built around his answer to the first question, which inaugurates the “critical philosophy” that brought us irrevocably into the modern period. In contrast, Ferry centers on the third question as the one driving the whole endeavor.

A human being […] is the only creature who is aware of his limits. He knows that he will die, and that his near ones, those he loves, will also die. Consequently he cannot prevent himself from thinking about this state of affairs, which is disturbing and absurd, almost unimaginable. And, naturally enough, he is inclined to turn first of all to those religions which promise 'salvation'.

That promise, though, is worthless if we don't believe it. Where religion demands faith, philosophers – arrogantly so, from the religious perspective – accept only what can be shown by reason. Philosophical “salvation” is thus intimately connected to what Ferry calls theoria, an investigation into not only how things are in the world, but also the means by which we know this (or what Ferry is careful not to call “metaphysics” and “epistemology” respectively). More practically, we also want to know how to deal with other people, and what our mutual obligations are (which includes the question of what “obligations” are in the first place). The key to understanding each era, in Ferry's view, is to see how it deals with these three questions.
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by James McGirk

My wife and I live in Oklahoma. But for the past few months it's felt like we haven't really been living here. That's because you need a car to live in Oklahoma, and until recently we didn't have one.

Actually, what you really need to live here is a truck. Maybe not in the cities, but out here, in the foothills of the Ozarks, where the roads flood when the creek overflows its banks, and even traversing a parking lot means tumbling into tooth shattering ruts and axle scraping bumps: you do. Given that my 'job' is being a freelance writer, and my credit is shot to pieces and my income is totally erratic, buying or leasing a new one was out of the question. So that left buying a used truck. And buying a used truck in Oklahoma—especially when you don’t know the first thing about them—is downright scary.

That's because people out here use their trucks. Take my neighbors as an example. There is a family of fishermen (and –women and –children) who live across the street from me, and they have at least a half-dozen trucks and truck-like sport utility vehicles parked in their lawn, and they drive the hell out of them. At the crack of dawn each morning I watch them hook huge boats to the their trailer hitches, and pile huge people inside of their huge trucks, and form a convoy and go wheeling off toward the Illinois River. They return around noon, caked with mud, with a dozen of the neighborhood cats in tow. My neighbor is a nice man, but there was no way I wanted to buy a truck that was used the way he used his.

I wanted a mall crawler. An off-road vehicle that had never been off-road. So I started looking at the auto listings in California, where my folks live. My thesis was this: that a California car would be more gently used and have much lower mileage than its Oklahoma-equivalent (enough to justify flying out there and driving the thing back).

I found one that met our requirements: a 2004 Grand Cherokee Laredo. The seller was selling it on behalf of his son’s fiancée, who was moving to Europe to become a champion cyclist. This was her beloved “Daisy”, according to the ad; Daisy was painted a glossy, sparkly black, had 4×4-wheel drive, and the famously reliable six-cylinder Jeep 4.0 engine, was big enough to fit my wife’s paintings inside of it (or her stretcher bars), had under 100,000 miles on the odometer, had an automatic transmission, and best of all fit, comfortably in our meager budget (which was about $6,000, generously loaned to us by my folks). A comparable car in Oklahoma, according to my hourly scans of Craigslist, was going for about a $1,000 more and had at least another fifty thousand miles on it.

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by Maniza Naqvi

As I stepped into the park I saw that two large trees had been felled. The sight saddened me. I was unable to identify what kind of trees they were—I don't know much about the species of trees — now they were a pile of chopped wood marked off by yellow tape—as if a crime scene. I felt such indignation, such sadness as if I had walked into my garden and found that someone had vandalized it. I looked around me, for an explanation. How could this have been done without notice, without—well–without my permission! Ridiculous this, my reaction but there it was. There was no one to ask and I was too afraid to walk up to the security guys guarding a checkpoint near the park to inquire. So I thought up of reasons: It may have been the storm the other night that had brought them down or a fungus or some other molestation that had killed them. There would have to be a good reason, a very solid rational explanation. Knowledgeable custodians of the park—expert gardeners would have had the authority to do this, I was sure. And they would know better than mere walkers through a park, like me about such things. The deed was done, the trees were cut. That was that. In fact I had only noticed these two particular trees once they were a pile of wood. Now, their stumps were as though monuments to themselves or to amputations caused by closed processes, or to the kind of instant culling that can take place in Washington of what are seemingly solid and rooted.

A few days earlier, I had passed by an old man seated on a bench his protest placard placed next to him which read “At least the war on the environment is going well.”

This garden reminds me of other places- —I realized something—everyday this walk—-the way it is—the brick pathway—the sunlight coming through the canopy of trees— reminds of going to school in the mornings in Lahore—-here now the pathway is not lined by hundred year old mango trees but shaded by equally majestic Gingkos, Oaks, Frangipani, Magnolias, and a Bald Cyprus labeled as such at the Southwest corner— I found out in my search for the names of these trees—that this Park used to be an apple orchard in the 18^thcentury—–The trees, the dappled sunlight on the bricks—the whole sense of it—the morning light—my reaction to it so visceral so deep, such longing and nostalgia of something so beautiful and innocent and perfect. And just as I was thinking of this perfection I came to the realization– that there is no such place—it is a delusion—for that perfect place was in a place where a military dictator was in power and was in the process of jailing, trying and hanging an elected civilian Prime Minister. My attention was drawn to the protesters in front of the White House, today they are Ethiopian. And in this perfect peaceful garden, in this lovely morning light, the context unchangingly was of war, and today there were more revelations military courts, secret courts and surveillance—only now fugitives are seeking asylum, not here but rather from here. I felt I was walking on a path right back to home—

In front of the White House the marchers protest human rights violations in their country. They chant slogans asking President Obama to stop support to the military and the Government there, as two fellow countrymen, perhaps from the embassy, took pictures and video-taped them.

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by Ruchira Paul

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks … Anything can happen.” —Red Wind, Raymond Chandler

It is not just the Santa Ana that inflames a fevered mind; the sirocco that raises a dust storm, the arctic wind which howls over frozen fjords and the gentle Mediterranean breeze that rocks tethered boats too can fan murderous intentions. From slums to manicured suburbs the world over, sudden ill winds blow in the depths of the human heart when it comes to crime and crime fiction.

My devotion to mystery / detective stories began early -around age nine or ten – and as was common among English speaking Indian children of my generation, it followed the usual trajectory of Enid Blyton, Conan Doyle and the formidable Agatha Christie. British mysteries dominated the shelves of Indian book stores and libraries at the time. The first encounter with American crime fiction took place in my teen years when I began rooting through Ellery Queen's mystery magazines and the Perry Mason books in my uncle's paperback collection. The hardboiled American gumshoe caught my attention in college – the down-at-the-heel, smoking, drinking, quietly desperate philosopher-avenger was a far cry from the polished and well mannered British crime busters. The first such charming prototype appeared in the form of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer and I was hooked. Macdonald provided the gateway into the vast world of American crime fiction. His hypnotic story telling led me to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Cain of the pulp fiction era and later to dozens of newer writers, some of whom continue to write to this day. Thus began a life-long habit. No matter what else I read – high, low or middle brow – after a while I go back to a good mystery book for a dose of adrenaline induced relaxation.

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by Colin Eatock

What's up with my friends on Facebook these days? Let's have a look.

One of my friends recently starred in a TedX video. Another friend was just interviewed by the BBC. Another just got tenure at the college where she teaches. Yet another is directing a theatrical piece that's about to open. And a friend of a friend published a short story about a cat in Paris.

These and other similar announcements pop up in my newsfeed on a daily basis. Thanks to Facebook, I know that I have friends who wear only the most fashionable clothes, friends who make scrumptious pies and cakes, friends with perfect marriages, and friends who go on splendid vacations – with the photos to prove it.

All of these informative (if not exactly helpful) nuggets of knowledge can be described with one simple word: boasting. Moreover, there's nothing sly, discreet or tangential about this kind of boasting – it's unfettered, undisguised and unapologetic. It's a kind of boasting doesn't ask permission to speak, and doesn't wonder if anyone is interested in what it has to say. It's so pervasive that Facebook should be renamed “Boastbook.”

Yet not so long ago in North America (and especially in Canada, where I live) boasting was considered a very bad thing. Boasting used to be vain and egotistical. Boasting was tedious and insufferable to others. Boasting was pathetic, because it was rooted in some kind of deep-seated insecurity complex. Boasting was also a stupid thing to do because it so often achieved the opposite of its goal: damaging, rather than enhancing, the boaster's social stature.

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by Gerald Dworkin

There is a story about the philosopher Nuel Belnap who collapsed in his classroom. After a period of time, having recovered, he returned to the classroom and began “As I was saying…” It has been several years since my last blog. My absence is partly due to my having had heart surgery and partly due to trying to finish several philosophical projects. Since both were successful, I return to the fold.

Readers with a long memory will remember two pieces Short Takes and More (and longer) Short Takes. They were excerpts from a commonplace book on philosophical humor– and lots of short, serious stuff– that I had been collecting for many years. One of my projects was to finish (or rather just stop collecting) this book. It now has been published as an e-book on Amazon and other sites. It is called Philosophy: A Commonplace Book.

A few weeks after the book came out, and with no causal relation, a post on the website Reddit called “What’s the most intellectual joke you know?” went viral. Since intellectual does not equate to philosophical, the majority of the jokes are of the “a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer” type. But there are some good philosophical ones as well.

“Is it getting solipsistic in here, or is it just me?”

“I’m a linguist. So I like ambiguity more than most people.”

“According to Freud, what comes between fear and sex? Fünf.”

“This sentence contains exactly threee erors.”

“Every word in this sentence is a gross misspelling of the word “tomato.” –Doug Hofstadter”

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by Leanne Ogasawara

From Xia to Shang
And from Shang to Zhou….

You know the story: Nine bronze tripods– cast back in the mists of great antiquity– were treasured by ancient Chinese Kings as a symbol of their right to rule.

Passed down from dynasty to dynasty– for nearly 2,000 years (or so the story goes) until the time when the First Emperor, Shihuangdi, finally toppled the last Zhou King– and rather than see their transfer to Shihuangdi’s new dynasty– the last Chu King flung the nine bronzes forever into the River Si

(English wikipedia suggests it was the Qin king; Japanese wikipedia has it as the Qin king who did the flinging).

Given their symbolic significance, Shihuangdi actively attempted to dredge up the sacred bronzes from the river, but it was to no avail; and scholars of later dynasties saw this as further evidence of the lack of moral virtue of the First Emperor.

There is a well known story about these matters, which supposedly took place at the start of the Eastern Zhou Period (770-256 BC). Severely weakened by external and internal threats, the Zhou kings came to rule in name only. Although the Zhou dynasty was the acknowledged recipient of the Mandate of Heaven and therefore possessor of the Nine Tripods, the real political power was held by the kings and generals of various surrounding kingdoms, chiefly those of the Qin, Qi, Chu, Wei and Yan.

The Chu were especially troublesome, and after some showy military displays near the Zhou capital of Luoyang, the worried Zhou king dispatched his trusty Minister, Wáng-sūn Mǎn (王孫満), to negotiate for peaceful relations with their southern Chu neighbors.

Arriving at the military camp outside the capital, the belligerent Lord of Chu immediately asked Minister Wang about the size and weight of the Nine Tripods (問鼎之輕重)– thereby implying that with their transfer to the House of Chu, the Mandate of Heaven would also be transferred to Chu.

Minister Wang–always quick of wit– sharply responded that unless it could be shown that the Will of Heaven had in fact changed, then it was forbidden to inquire after the weight of the tripods. He then went on to explain that the actual weight of the tripods was beside the point–for in fact, their weight corresponded directly to the virtue of the king who had them in his possession; that is, if the ruler truly held the Mandate of Heaven then the tripods would be immovably heavy. However, should a ruler lack virtue, the tripods would become weightless and therefore meaningless as a political and psychological symbol.

He then drove in his point: The tripods do not matter, virtue does.

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That's It

I’d mowed and cut and weeded
tips of fingers inked with earth

I’d heard our cardinal calling
I’d heard our engines down the valley groaning
coming up, distant, moaning

hands between dry stems of garlic moving,
like my mother kneeling, devout, but not in church

I’d yanked contentious weeds, insisting,
grabbing, pulling —this was how I worked:
so much sweat I wore a perspiration shirt

I’d quit and picked my tools up:
shovel rake— and shut the hose off
at the door I took my boots off
smacked them sole to sole to knock the mud off
and turned to see your garden blazing
with inner light in daylight failing
I cracked a beer and sat— amazing!

I watched your garden’s still fires burning
it’s orange lilies burning
its incandescent red & purple gladiolus burning
its spiky flush of bee balm burning
rose campion bursting in the burning
sparking coral bell and yellow lupine burning
moonbeam coreopsis burning

all in all on still all, all lit
until the mountain’s shadow eased the fire’s edge off
as petal embers in its dying spit
as if some hand had turned a dimmer of the sun
to gently cauterized the done
to douse the blaze
to ease the day off
to say, that's it

by Jim Culleny
7/25/13
from Blink