In April of 2008 I followed the story of Pope Benedict XVI visiting the United States. I was very interested in what he had to say about clergy sex abuse of minors. He set aside his homily at Holy Mass at Washington Nationals Stadium, Thursday, April 17, in Washington ,DC to address the problem.

The Pope's homily began with a commemoration of the first Catholic diocese in the United States, created by Pope Pius VII, and established in Baltimore, MD in 1789. For the most part, I found the content to be somewhat tame with religious abstractions, scriptural quotations that were not very illuminating to a listening audience, and exhortations that I did not feel were especially inspiring.

Finally, he addressed the problem of sex abuse of minors in “the Church in America.” At this point the tameness of the Pope's homily took on a weirdness.

“It is in the context of this hope born of God’s love and fidelity that I acknowledge the pain which the Church in America [emphasis mine] has experienced as a result of the sexual abuse of minors. No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse. It is important that those who have suffered be given loving pastoral attention. Nor can I adequately describe the damage that has occurred within the community of the Church. [emphasis mine] Great efforts have already been made to deal honestly and fairly [emphasis mine] with this tragic situation, and to ensure that children – whom our Lord loves so deeply (cf. Mk 10:14), and who are our greatest treasure – can grow up in a safe environment.”

Sex abuse of minors was limited to “the Church in America.” However, damage was done to “the community of the Church,” an expression of universality. I also noticed a slight emphasis or stressing in his speech, when he pronounced the word, “fairly.” I understood this to be a reference to large damage awards to date, with more to come. If my powers of emphasis/stress detection were working, I could have concluded that he was very, very concerned that future monetary damage awards might be 'unfair,' from the Church's point of view. Or, is he talking only about “the Church in America.”

The Popes' words bothered me because he could not talk about the horror in the Church without a reference the money the Church will have to pay the victims. At least he could have put his anxiety over damage awards into a different paragraph. Here's the rest of the paragraph.

“These efforts to protect children must continue. Yesterday I spoke with your Bishops about this. Today I encourage each of you to do what you can to foster healing and reconciliation, and to assist those who have been hurt. Also, I ask you to love your priests, and to affirm them in the excellent work that they do. And above all, pray that the Holy Spirit will pour out his gifts upon the Church, the gifts that lead to conversion, forgiveness and growth in holiness.”

At this point, I was wondering if the Pope had taken the time to educate himself on the traumatic nature of child sex abuse. Did he understand how the effects of this horror are manifest in victims? Did he know what is required to treat victims, and help them to heal, recover, and integrate? Has the Pope any idea of the consequences of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) for children and minors who have been sexually abused? Did anyone on his staff arrange for the Pope, and others in the Curia, to receive instruction or briefings on the effects of child sex abuse for the victim?

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A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on London based, arts radio station, Resonance FM. It was for The Thread, a lively show that aims to use speech and discussion as a tool for research, opening up new and unexpected angles through the unravelling of conversation.

The Thread‘s host, London Consortium researcher Seph Rodney, and I were lucky enough to share the discussion with Dr. Lane DeNicola, a lecturer and researcher in Digital Anthropology from University College London. We talked about encoding and decoding, about the politics of ownership and the implications for information technologies. We talked about inscriptions in stone, and the links we saw between the open-source software movement and genome sequencing.

Here is an edited transcript of the show, but I encourage you to visit The Thread‘s website, where you will shortly find a full audio recording of the conversation. The website also contains information about upcoming shows, as well as a rich archive of past conversations.

Inside Code: Encoding and decoding appear in contemporary context as a fundamental feature of technology, in our use of language and in our social interactions, from html to language coding and literary symbolism. How, and through what means, do people encode and decode?

This transcript is shared under a Creative Commons License

Seph Rodney: I wanted to start off the conversation by asking both my guests how it is that we get the kind of literacy that we have to decode writing. It seems to me that it’s everywhere, that we take it for granted. It seems that there’s a kind of decoding that happens in reading, isn’t there?

Lane DeNicola: Yes. I would say that one of the more interesting aspects of that are the material consequences. Whereas literacy before was largely a matter of human knowledge, understanding of a language, all the actual practices involved was a surface to mark on and an instrument to do the marking, whereas today, a great deal of the cultural content that is in circulation commonly involves technologies that are considerably more complex than a simple writing instrument. Things that individuals don’t really comprehend in the same way.

Seph: What are the technologies that are more complex? What’s coming to my mind is computer code.

Lane: Exactly. Apple’s Garage Band might be one example, these tools that many of us encounter as final products on YouTube. One of the things on the new program at UCL we have tried to give a broad exposure to is exactly how much communicating people are doing through these new forms, and how they take the place in some instances of more traditional modes of communication.

Seph: You’re calling it communication, and one of the things that occurred to me after talking to Daniel, and exchanging a few emails, was that he calls writing, at least, a system of exchange. I was thinking, wouldn’t that in other contexts be called communication, and maybe ten years ago we would have called it transmission? But why is it exchange for you?

Daniel Rourke: I just have a problem with the notion of communication because of this idea of passing on something which is mutual. I think to use the word exchange for me takes it down a notch almost, that I am passing something on, but I am not necessarily passing on what I intend to pass on. To take it back to the idea of a writing system, the history of writing wasn’t necessarily marks on a page. The technologies that emerged from say Babylonia of a little cone of clay that had markings on the outside, they said just as much about the body and about symbolic notions as they did about what it was the marks were meaning to say. So that’s why I use exchange I think. It opens up the meaning a bit.

Seph: Yeah. It doesn’t presume that there is a person transmitting and a person that’s receiving, necessarily? And it also says something about, what I thought was really fascinating, that there is so much more in the object than just the markings on a page. About how the materials tell us something about that particular age, that particular moment in history.

Lane: Yeah. Even in a contemporary context it may have been the case that the early days of the web were all about hypertext, but the great deal of what you call ‘exchange’ that is happening today, how are you going to qualify a group of people playing World of Warcraft simultaneously in this shared virtual space – calling that communication is a little bit limiting. In fact it is experienced much more as a joint space, or an exchange of things, more than simple information. It can be thought of as an exchange of experience, or of virtual artefacts for example.

Seph: That can happen certainly in simulated game play, but it also happens in the decoding of texts. Objects that come to us from antiquity. There is all this material to be decoded that’s wrapped up in the artefacts. It is also, how much we decode and what we decode has something to do with our moment in time.

Daniel: I think it might be worth picking an example out of the air, when we are talking about this.

Seph: OK

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Cinematographer Frederick Schroeder photographs Los Angeles at night. Schroeder's full series, Night Drive, can be viewed here at Flickr.

Todd Shimoda is the author of 365 Views of Mt. Fuji, The Fourth Treasure and now Oh!: A Mystery of Mono No Aware. Shimoda calls his stories “somewhat experimental, post-modernish, dealing with Asian or Asian-American themes to some degree, but also broad questions of existence,” or “philosophical mysteries.” His latest novel documents an embodies a search for the elusive Japanese literary concept of mono no aware. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

These three novels of yours form a loose trilogy. The obvious way I can tie them together is to say all of them take place, in full or in part, in Japan. But in your own mind, what holds these books together?

There's a playoff between a certain Japanese art form and a modern-day technology or science. In my first book, 365 Views of Mt. Fuji, there was the woodblock print artist and kind of a mad scientist in the world of robotics. There's a playoff between those two, arts and technology. The Fourth Treasure was about a shodo or calligraphy master in Japan. He has a stroke, so the science in this case is neuroscience, looking at the idea of what makes us a human being from a scientific point of view as well as from an artistic point of view. In Oh! the art form is mono no aware, a Japanese poetic term that deals with more the traditional Japanese-style poetry and literature. The technology, in this case, is social networking, specifically the use in Japan of suicide clubs, people that come together and discuss suicide.

This particular interaction of art and technology in your novels, is this something you think about when you look back at your books and say, “Yeah, that's what I did,” or was that what you wanted to do going into each of them?

A little bit of both. This mirrors my own life: other than in writing, my background is in engineering and educational technology, where I studied cognitive science. I've had both sides: the artistic form, as well as the science form. There's always been, in my own mind, a dichotomy or conflict going on between the two sides that want to control my life. At this point, the writing side is winning, but the other side always makes a little more money, so there's a trade-off between the two.

But the older I get, the more I'm willing to sacrifice any financial comfort for just getting the writing done. I'm moving toward that direction, but I still have one foot in technology and science. For my obsession or my passion, it's definitely my writing. I don't really write autobiographical things all, but I think that's probably the most autobiographical part of my writing: this idea of art versus science, or even modernity versus classical life.
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Seeding

Seeding in a cloud of black flies
kneeling and swatting

lettuce seeds dropping
small and humble as asterisks
noting other thoughts of legends
of a universe ripe with proteins
and photosynthesis

; of leaves enfolded on dinner plates
being lifted by forks slicked with vinegar and oil,
garnished with mystery,

sweet crisp and fresh as the day of
Let there be light

by Jim Culleny
June 11, 2010

Part One: Hosed.

By Maniza Naqvi

It’s hard to keep one crime in focus when so many others scream for attention. But every story which has the capacity to wound deeply is a hit. And because someone beloved is killed it lives on. Such a story is usually about a crime and its perpetrators.

The UN commission report on Benazir’s assassination says that in the absence of an “unfettered criminal investigation” in the murder of Benazir Bhutto and in the wake of the “abject failure” of the Government including the one in power now—to carry out an investigation with “vigour and integrity” there is “a proliferation of hypotheses regarding possible perpetrators. The Commission need not address each of these many theories in turn. It is sufficient to note that the proper response is an unfettered criminal investigation – a meaningful search for truth – which has thus far been frustrated.”[1]

Perpetrators. Perps and traitors. Every great box office hit and mythology is about assassins and betrayers. And every hypothesis about Benazir’s murder is about perpetrators and traitors. Every major hypothesis about her murder is about the quest for power by her family, or an international hit job or betrayal by associates. All of these are interlinked to one another –every one of them individually a story fit to play like a serial we've already seen on the screen like at the Bambino Cinema hall. And every story on the screen no matter how many times we’ve already seen it before, though fiction, rings true, is a “hit” because it continues to wound deeply.

The only way to get rid of the pain is to search for the truth.

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by Ahmad Saidullah

The Letters of Sylvia Beach. Edited by Keri Walsh. Foreword by Noel Riley Fitch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 347 pp. $29.95.

Sylvia Beach was an independent bookseller, a publisher, a literary agent and promoter. Noel Riley Fitch dubbed her “the midwife of literary modernism.” She opened Shakespeare and Company, “a little American bookshop on the Left Bank,” in a disused laundry on rue Dupuytren in 1919 on her third trip to Paris. Drawn by the cheap franc like other expats at the end of World War I, she chose the City of Lights over New York and London.

She was also drawn to Adrienne Monnier, owner of a literary bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres in the Odéon quarter. In 1921, she moved Shakespeare and Company to 12 rue de l’Odéon, a few doors down from Adrienne’s shop. They would share their personal and professional lives until Adrienne’s death from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1955.

This was a remarkable turn for the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from “a leafy, flowery park [more] than a town,” as she described Princeton, New Jersey. Sylvia had not been to college or university and had grown up in an age before women got the right to vote in the US (she was active in the suffrage movement) and when chemists still sold Pink Pills for Pale People.

Culled mostly from the Princeton and Yale collections with some additions from the British Library, Keri Walsh has buttressed Beach’s letters with short biographies of 51 correspondents and a chronology. Beach’s life spanned two world wars, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and various social upheavals—what the Russian poet Tyutchev called “the fateful ages” of the world—but her letters, cautious as they are even those to her close friends Marion Peter and Carlotta Welles in the States, rarely give away any secrets.

Her early efforts seem guileless. She sports a light, humorous touch with a few lapses into tweeisms (Sylvia used “somepin” for “something” throughout), like her quicksilver wit and turn of phrase in conversation. We learn how Sylvia and her sisters Cyprian and Holly were encouraged in the arts by their mother Eleanor who felt distant from her husband’s calling. The letters testify to their love of culture but the independence of the Beach girls shocked the parishioners. The Beaches were fond of travelling to Europe.

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by Edward B. Rackley

Once departed, many dictators are reviled and forgotten. Others are respected, even loved, long after their demise. Strange perhaps, and all the more so as their degree of popular endearment isn't always linked to their political deeds while alive, good or bad. A regular surprise in formerly autocratic states that I visit, the public estimation of departed dictators is more often arrived at through comparison with whatever political dispensation fills the void left in their wake. Few seem concerned by the human costs of a demagogue's quixotic quests or the excesses of his unreconstructed id. However Orwellian their experience, people tend to remember the good, not the bad.

In today's multi-polar world a full-blown autocrat is a rarity, although during the Cold War they multiplied like so many mushrooms. In Serbia, the jewel in the Yugoslav crown, Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980) is today neither despised nor idolized. Far greater concerns preoccupy the Serbian political imagination. With two former leaders in The Hague (Milosevic never left), a virulent nationalist movement and its stubborn denial of Kosovo independence, Serbia's ghosts are never quiet. Despite progress towards EU membership and greater economic integration of its ethnic minorities, a stable and prosperous Serbia is still very much a work in progress. While Tito cannot be blamed for Serb aggression and its ethnic cleansing campaigns in the 1990s, the breakup of the Balkans is directly related to the how and why of Tito's pursuit of a unified communist Yugoslav state.

And yet on Tito's birthday last week in Belgrade, I witnessed the malleability of national memory as public spectacle. Tito fans converged to celebrate the achievements of their former leader and to indulge their fondness for the cultish kitsch that accompanied his reign (1943-1980). In a large garden on the grounds of the former headquarters of the National Youth League, we were led to benches in the sun, and limitless beer. Trumpets blared and the Yugoslav flag was raised. No one stood as the former national anthem was sung, but all were smiling and singing along. A Tito impersonator bounded onto the stage, launching into a series of tongue-in-cheek speeches. “Everything is changing, except we who remain the same,” he declared to shouts, laughter and applause.

I too could be comrade for a day at this annual reminiscence, an indulgence my Serbian colleagues called “Yugo-nostalgia.” For revelers, the commemoration was more an expression of disappointment with Serbia's inability to meet popular expectations than a wish to resurrect the former Yugoslavia. For everyone there, some of whom were too young to have known Yugoslavia at all, it was a chance to toast the idealization of a warm, fuzzy, and less complicated era. But if life in contemporary Serbia was 'the morning after', life under Tito had been a prolonged honeymoon of state excess and exalted cult of personality–a powerful opiate of the masses in its own right. Given the bloody ordeal of Serbia's recent turbulence under Milosevic, the rosy afterglow of Tito's stewardship was an analgesic for a nation's wounded psyche.

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by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

Let's start with a smattering of metaphors. The world needs the US like a fish needs a bicycle. Or rather: like a virgin needs a rapist.

There was a time, a century ago, when Turkey was known as the sick man of Europe. Today America might be called the psychopath of the planet.

Or a beehive collapse disorder in the ecology of politics.

Let's try an extended metaphor. America is like Heidegger being a Nazi: how could the begetter of Sein und Zeit, a man of supernatural intelligence, his head full of great ideas … how could he have fallen for all that Germanic-destiny-embodied-in-Der-Fuhrer claptrap? How can we Americans, our heads full of ideas of greatness, our hallowed constitution enshrining the freedom of the individual … how can we go forth and kill foreign individuals by the thousands on a pretty regular basis?

How could Heidegger have thought that ancient Greek and his German were the only languages worth thinking in? How can we think our country is the only indispensable nation worth emulating?

We happen to be the dark id of nations, yet we imagine we're the shiny superego.

We happen to drop more bombs on people than anyone, yet we believe we're crop-spraying the manna of freedom.

We happen to be Darth Vader, but we think we're Luke Skywalker.

Heck, while we're at it, let's carry our metaphors to a vulgar extreme: for the US to have a foreign policy is like putting a vagina on a rock. It seems like an interesting idea, and it softens the idea of a rock, but in the end, a rock is a rock, and who wants to sex it up with a rock?

President Obama is the vagina on our rock. He talks pretty, and looks pretty, even to the hard cases out there, but in the end, America is still a hard rock, whose foreign policy consists of nothing less than killing foreign civilians by the thousands via bombs, drones and guns, or devastating the world economy via Wall Street. Plus we've got over 800 military bases all over the world — staging places to make it easier for us to kill foreigners.

I'm just trying to stick to the facts here. I'm trying to avoid reification — creating a thing out of an abstraction. I'm throwing out metaphors to head-butt our language into the Ding-an-Sich of what we do. We talk about America being all for promoting human rights and freedom — abstractions, abstractions, metaphors, metaphors — but the actual scientifically verifiable real-life strictly-data facticity of our foreign adventures, the realpolitik behind the screen of metaphors, the concrete here-and-now specificity of our being-in-the-world, comes down to this and this alone:

Thousands of dead bodies laid out in the morgues and graves of foreign lands, put there by our soldiers and their weapons.

Our foreign policy is to kill foreigners.

That's it.

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During the last year or so of the seemingly endless health care debate, there has been a lot of hand wringing and yelling about what’s needed to fix the health care system in the US. The funny thing is, if you read anybody who really knows anything about these things, who has thought deeply about these issues, there is a pretty simple, general consensus about the main thing that is wrong with health care in the US, and most of the world over – it isn’t based on outcomes. It’s a fee-for-service system that doesn’t reward anyone, doctors or patients, for better health outcomes. If that system were changed to some kind of pay-for-performance system with more accountability all round for the actual value derived out of the health system – cost relative to quality – this would be a really great first step in curing what ails us. Part of this paradigm shift is to put the patient at the center of their own health care, utilizing technology innovations to move towards “care anywhere” networks where the patient gets the care they need, where and when they need it.

Thinking and reading about this subject recently made me think about education and whether any of these concepts could be applied to this other broken US system. I’m particularly thinking about it this month as a lot of my local school boards vote whether or not to approve their budgets, budgets that have already been stripped down to the bare bones as services are canceled and any class or activity extraneous to the state testing regimen is threatened.

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Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the premiere journal of the eponymous genre of writing that combines the literary techniques of fiction with the reality of life itself. With its spring 2010 issue, it’s undergone a radical revision in look, feel and sensibility, shifting from academic journal to wider-interest magazine. He’s also the author of many books that fall under the creative nonfiction heading, exploring subjects like baseball, transplant surgeries and robotics. In Vanity Fair, James Wolcott dubbed Gutkind the “godfather” of creative nonfiction. His latest, the father-son memoir Truckin’ with Sam: A Father and Son, The Mick and The Dyl, Rockin’ and Rollin’, On the Road, comes out this summer. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I'm looking, right in front of me, at these two issues: one of the journal Creative Nonfiction and one of the new Creative Nonfiction magazine. These two could not look more different; for the same publication, the difference is striking in every dimension. What could've brought out such a radical change?

What brought about the change is the fact that the entire genre of creative nonfiction has changed over the past fifteen or sixteen years, and in fact the publishing industry and the writing community has changed as well. Everything is different. When I started Creative Nonfiction as a journal, the whole phrase “creative nonfiction,” hardly anybody'd ever heard of it, and when they heard of it, they made fun of it like James Wolcott did. It was something new.

It was especially of interest, but also of great resistance, in the academic world: writing programs, creative writing teachers or writers who worked in creative writing programs. People were interested, but they didn't quite know what it was, and didn't quite know if they wanted to buy into it. There were many literary journals that published scholarly essays, good fiction and terrific poetry. Some of our best fiction writers and poets started their careers by being published in literary journals. I thought, “Okay, why don't I start a literary journal featuring only narrative nonfiction — or 'creative nonfiction' — and that will give it some distinction and great deal of credibility.”

That's what I did fifteen or sixteen years ago: I started the journal, and in fact it helped a great deal, giving the genre credibility in the entire academic world. The thing about the academic world is, it is growing like crazy. The creative writing programs are, in many respects, the cash cows of English departments these days. As it turns out, the nonfiction programs are the leading producers in most writing programs and English departments. It was the right thing to do. The timing was right at that moment. Now, almost every literary journal publishes creative nonfiction. There are about 70 MFA programs giving degrees in creative nonfiction in the United States. Creative nonfiction is increasing in popularity throughout the world. I thought, “Now's the time to continue to publish really terrific essays, but also to start a magazine that can discuss the genre.”

Half of the new magazine is essays, and half is a collection of ideas and columns by terrific writers about what we're doing in this whole creative nonfiction world. Secondly, if I can go one step further, I wanted to take the journal idea and push it beyond just writers and editors and academic reading creative nonfiction. I want the world to read creative nonfiction. A magazine to readers who aren't necessarily writers is much more accessible. That was the the plan, and that's what we're trying to do.
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We imagine that there are areas of life beyond critical engagement. Stepping across boundaries of sanctity elicits outcries ‘in defence of custom’, as Tom Paine said. Drawing these lines, we imagine that no one would dare step across them to poke or prod with crude, manmade rationality at these things we view with sickly admiration. And it is sickly because often these things do not deserve admiration at all. The only explanation for this continuing admiration, I would venture, rests in our irrational adherence to tradition – that horrid notion that deserves to go the way of smallpox. Within the well-oiled machine of tradition, we find the family unit; each member a cog that is slotted in as soon as it exists; the machine rolls on, puffing and sprouting the smoke of diffusive uncritical activity. Many issues of current contention raging on the borderlands of sanctity, such as euthanasia and abortion, all find their irrational and dogmatic views birthed from this machine. I do not wish to sing the old, tired Orwellian yarn of breaking free from the tyranny of ‘the System’; but I do wish that we view our spheres of sanctity, maintained by mere assertion, with objective criticism. Not only do I see no axiomatic reason to adhere to ‘traditional family-values’ – marriage, monogamy, children, love – but once we do away with labelling these things ‘sacred’, we can progress in our discussions on them. At the moment we go in circles because many of us – including those who consider themselves liberal – refuse to see them as anything other than sacred and, therefore, good. Everything is sacred within the family: marriage is (a) sacred (duty), monogamy is sacred, children are sacred, love is sacred. When people say these things, they are not using ‘sacred’ as a synonym for ‘valuable’ or ‘admirable’; they appear to be taking the idea much further. And this, unfortunately, is not restricted to discussions on the family. The most hampering discussions are those working from the belief that life is sacred: not only do I think life is not sacred, according to what sacred actually means (as will be shown) but, once again, labelling it sacred causes numerous moral quandaries which increases suffering (for example, in viable cases of people wanting euthanasia, where their lives are unbearable). However the case for ‘unsanctifying’ life will not be the topic of this piece.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Climate change, pollution, and dwindling natural resources are growing concerns. “Green” products are widely popular and discussion of environmental issues is constant in the media. Increasingly, people are recycling and reusing, and thinking twice when they reach for plastic bags.

Despite increased public awareness of environmental problems, the role of livestock is generally underestimated. A comprehensive 2006 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN indicated that livestock are a major factor in water use, depletion, and pollution, and also in loss of biodiversity. The report estimates that, in the United States, livestock account for more than half of all soil erosion, 37% of pesticide use, and half of the volume of antibiotics used. Their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change is described as enormous.

Nevertheless, the demand for meat products continues to grow. The FAO report predicts a doubling of global meat production by 2050. This will have devastating effects on the environment. Livestock represent a slowly progressive, man made environmental disaster.

If the environmental consequences of our meat consumption aren’t enough, there are the implications for our health. High intake of animal fats and red meat contributes to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain types of cancer. Livestock products are also highly susceptible to pathogens. The consumption of animal products can transmit tuberculosis, brucellosis, and parasitic diseases caused by tapeworm and threadworm.

These problems, and concern for the welfare of the animals, have led some to adopt vegetarian and vegan diets. More recently, the possibility of in vitro meat has been proposed. But petri dish carnivory won’t be an option any time soon. Other alternatives are worth considering. What about insects?

The practice of eating insects is known as entomophagy. Though the very thought is disgusting to some of us, in many parts of the world insects are a normal part of people’s diets. Over 1400 species are consumed – not out of desperation, but as a dietary preference. And they’re not just delicious – they’re nutritious. Insects range in nutritional composition, but generally serve as an excellent source of protein and other important nutrients, like fatty acids, iron and zinc.

Europeans and North Americans, unfortunately, have a somewhat irrational aversion to eating insects. We spray our crops with toxic chemicals to kill pests that are more nutritious than the grain they eat. Yet we’ll readily eat the pests’ arthropod cousins, like lobster and shrimp. Shrimp look quite a lot like insects. Locusts, which are considered a delicacy in some places, are even referred to as “sky prawn”.

When we think of eating insects, images of Fear Factor contestants stuffing live critters into their mouths might come to mind. Others might recall the last creepy crawler that turned up in their homes and imagine popping it into their mouths. Certainly these images are revolting, but not more revolting than taking a bite out of a live chicken or a live cow. Most of the animals that we eat are killed, prepared, and cooked in a manner that renders them difficult to identify as animals. The slaughter and gutting of animals is unappetizing to say the least, but we tend not to think about these things when we’re eating hamburgers. Similarly, insects must be well prepared for consumption. Crickets, for example, are cleaned first and their heads and legs may be removed prior to seasoning and roasting.

To get around strong aversions to entomophagy, pulverization might be useful. Insect flours could be used in baking or as a protein powder in shakes. The source of the products wouldn’t be readily identifiable.

It’s worth noting that we already consume insects. Extracts from cochineal beetles are commonly used as food coloring agents. Grain beetles and weevils are milled along with grain, and some of the fruits and vegetables that we eat contain small insects. Most varieties of figs are pollinated by wasps and typically contain some insect parts. The FDA allows up to 13 insect heads per 100g of fig paste. Yum.
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By Maniza Naqvi

A time arrives when circumstances dictate that there is no choice.

“Of course the choice is yours”— said the nonchalant and gentle voice—typically urbane, typically sophisticated— of a seasoned diplomat in the Embassy of Pakistan. His thinning hair jet black and a sliver of mustache equally gleaming above his lips curled into a smile. His eyes shone as he leaned back in his chair behind his desk—amused. A shrug of his shoulders as he contemplated me—his finger tips delicately brought together as his index fingers touched his lips and his thumbs held up his chin. As though, he were contemplating an experiment, or a work in progress. He had dealt with me before, at an embassy reception when we had gotten into an argument about Bhutto and Benazir— Bhutto had been hanged by then and she was in jail. General Zia-ul-Haq’s era was at its zenith. I had exchanged heated words with the embassy man. Now here I was sitting before him in his office at the Pakistan embassy, there to have my passport renewed. And here I was refusing to sign a clause in the application form.

“I won’t sign this” I repeated.

“Fine,” he said, “It is entirely up to you. Then I guess we are done here.”

I sat facing him in silence. He fingered the edge of the application form that I had tossed in his direction. Then without needing to push it back towards me—there was no need, he must have known, he must have done this before—he waited for the moment when I rose from my chair, as I did and watched as I leaned over his desk and retrieved the form. I signed. I needed the passport.

He grinned. “Good girl. Your hero had the Ahmedis declared as non-Muslim through an amendment in 1974 in his newly minted 1973 constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Remember?”

“He had no choice! He was forced to!”——“Like I was today.”

“Forced, really? Who forced you? Said the embassy man, his eyebrows raised in mock surprise “No one forced anyone. You weren’t forced—the choice is always yours”.

The section I signed demands that I declare, attest to the fact that I am Muslim. Muslim in a manner that the Pakistan State defines as being Muslim. This section is called: Declaration In Case of Muslim.

It reads thus:

The above heading announces a section on page two of the Pakistan Passport Application. I ______s/d/w/of—–aged——–adult Muslim, resident of__________________ hereby solemnly declare that:

a. I am Muslim and believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of the Prophethood of Muhammad (peace be upon him) the last of the prophets.

b. I do not recognize any persons who claim to be a prophet in any sense of the word or any description whatsoever after Muhummad (peace be upon him) or recognize such a claimant as prophet or a religious reformer as a Muslim.

c. I consider Mirza Ghulam Qadiani to be an imposter nabi and also consider his followers whether belonging to the Lahore or Qadiani group to be Non-Muslim.

The section demands that you sign your name, the date and attest with your thumb print agreement with the three statements above. This section demands that you sign on to State sponsored cessation of thought and rationality. It demands that you consider Islam as only being something defined by the State of Pakistan—and as being only predicated on the negation of all others. Ordinance XX of the Government of Pakistan promulgated under General Zia ul Haq and still on the books forbids Ahmedis to call themselves Muslim or refer to their mosques as mosques or to recite the Kalima or greet using the Muslim salutation. The law of the land forbids Ahmedis to protest or take to court any injustice done to them in the name of religion including the destruction of their mosques.

The same type of clause is present in the National Identification Card's form.

There is silence about taking any real meaningful action against the violence and injustice wreaked upon the Ahmedi community. Witness the murderous events that unfolded at two mosques in Lahore, Pakistan on Friday May 28, 2010.

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Muhheakantuck

The river that flows both ways
flows through my house

Sometimes called paradox
—called Muhheakantuck by the Lenape
who knew that reversals in time
are not unusual,
just often misunderstood by we-
who-walk-away-from-understanding

The river that flows both ways
has two sources
…………….
one in front and one behind. It flows from
two horizons and meets here
in the middle turbulently sometimes
but not always —only when I speak with
forked tongue. At all other times it
comes together silently as one

The river that flows both ways
is like the god with two faces

—antipodal from beginning to end,
Janus, like Vishnu, drifts upon his raft
into the past and future at once
remembering and hoping

The river that flows both ways
has the properties of a mirror

whose face is a nexus as Alice knew
by walking through— call it Paradox,
a town, a place I lived once
in a time before this

The river that flows both ways
has nothing to do with imagination
or poetic conceits

The river that flows both ways
really falls from mountains

is caught by tides
and carried into estuaries

The river that flows both ways
flows through my house

like the Lenape
I'll just call it

Muhheakantuck

by Jim Culleny, May 27, 2010

Thanks to Frances Madeson for her comment on another poem
that lead me to this one.

Andrew Bujalski is the young director of the films Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax, which is newly available on DVD. Though Bujalski's funny, realistic movies are often considered by critics to be of a similar genius to other independently-produced pictures of the 2000s focusing on the personal relationships of twentysomethings, they possess an intellect and an aesthetic all their own. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

Watching your three films, I feel like Beeswax is starkly distinct from the two that precede it, but I can't put my finger on exactly why. What would you say to that?

I would probably agree, for starters. Are you asking me to put my finger on it?

Yeah, obviously you're the closest person to that film in existence. I can't quite articulate why. It feels different. I can't exactly point to reasons why it's so different, but why do you think it's so different from Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation?

I could get into a million reasons, which are mostly minutia. One of the things about being so close to a film is, I do sort of see the forest for the trees and the trees for the leaves. I could start with technical things: we shot widescreen format, which we hadn't done on the earlier films. I could go into the fact there are twins at the center of it, which is very different, too, from the other films. All of them have been written for the people who ultimately played the leads, none of whom were professional actors but all of whom had a particular kind of charisma that I thought would translate onscreen.

Of course, those are very different kinds of charismas. That's another thing that's different about this film. What the Hathcher sisters, Tilly and Maggie, who play the twins in the film, brought to it is… there's something about their energy which is a little more inward, not quite like anything I was used to seeing on screen myself and was really interested to try to put at the center of a movie and see what happened. The audience has to lean forward a little bit to see what they're doing. I think — of course, I'm very attached to the film — I think they're miraculous in it. The rhythm of it is a little different. It's more plot-heavy, more exposition-heavy. Certainly, that was another challenge. I could go on and on.

This procedure of creating a film, of conceiving a film starting with the fact that you know somebody and wanted to see if they could carry a film, it's something you've talked about in othe r interviews and have done with the previous two films as well. What sort of things bring these people to your attention as possible leads, whether the Hatcher Sisters or the stars of Funny Ha Ha or Mutual Appreciation?

Maybe it comes from having spent too much time at the movies as a kid. It might not be healthy to look around the world and say, “How would this translate in the movies? What would this be like if I were asking it to hold together the center of a narrative?” I think everybody knows somebody who they think, “Oh, that guy could be a movie star.” Not that I've asked these people to be “movie stars” with everything that entails today.

In no case have I written films I thought were biographical of these people, per se. Beeswax is not the true story of the Hatchers any more than Funny Ha Ha is the story of Kate Dollenmayer and Mutual Appreciation is the story of Justin Rice. I took what I could imagine them projecting onscreen, how I imagined what they do in their ordinary lives, and translated that into the realm of the performer. I've noticed that, when you ask people to act — and this is probably true of professional actors as well — most people pick out something about themselves to exaggerate. People tend to want to do caricatures of themselves. You start from there, and then you can craft it in one direction or another. What is this essence of you that we can translate into a performance? Is there a story to be built around that?

Was the essence these actors would pick out from themselves and exaggerate the same thing you saw in them that you wanted to use? I can imagine that being ideal — they pick out the same thing you see — or they pick out something completely different, and you've got to make a different movie. Has that happened?

Certainly, yeah. There are surprises throughout the production process. Anything you try to boil down in concrete terms — there are always swerves and surprises. If somebody ate something weird for breakfast, they might come in in a different mood than you expected.

With Beeswax, I had a vague notion of the story, but I hadn't begun to write it. I went to the girls and asked them if they would… first of all, it's a huge commitment. You're asking somebody who is not a professional actor to take quite a bit of time and quite a bit of emotional energy to give to a project like this. As we all get older, it becomes harder for people to find the time to do these. First, I asked if they would even be interested. They both seemed game for it. We did a little screen test, and at first I had a notion of what these two roles would be. We switched it.

We did one run-through of a scene with Maggie playing the small business owner and Tilly playing her sister, and then we did it again and switched the roles. My initial instinct had been to cast the opposite of the way I ended up actually doing the film. I thought I would have Maggie play Jeannie the small business owner, and it became clear from that screen test that what they were going to bring of themselves to the roles instinctually — it was much more interesting the opposite way. Tilly was bringing a certain reservation. There was an inwardness and even maybe a defensiveness that I thought could be really, really interesting, if we used it right, in the Jeannie role.

This was a situation where, early on in the process, before I'd written the script, where something made me think very differently about how I was going to approach this. That's at the macro level. On the micro level, when you're on set, you always have to be paying attention to what the actors are bringing, and looking for ways to make that make the film more interesting.
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Tetris and its Connection to Confucianism

By Angus McCullough

Tetris is a video game about clearing away what is unnecessary in the best possible way, accessible on almost every gaming console imaginable, on cellular phones and for free on the Internet. Perhaps you played it once on an ancient game system in your youth or maybe you play it whenever you're sitting at your desk at work. Alexei Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, calls it the first “casual game”, meaning that it is timeless in just such a way: it is the same every time you play, without plot or characters to follow. The first time you played it in middle school is the same game that is probably programmed into your phone today. To compare Tetris to any other game is somehow wrong – it is a masterful test of how our brains function while trying to balance instinctual and intellectual challenges in real time. The major difference between Tetris and other games is the simplicity of its construction and complexity of play. Most importantly, it is a game that does not have a goal or end. There is no castle to storm or high score to achieve – the only way to end your game is to lose. The result of this simple and mildly daunting setup is that Tetris affords the user a repetitive task every time he or she picks it up: to play better than the last time. It has also been shown to have beneficial effects outside the game itself, making it a powerful tool for personal development, mirroring certain aspects of Confucian ritual.

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By Tolu Ogunlesi

A few weeks ago Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie wrote a piece for Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper, titled: A new Nigerian-ness is infusing the nation. In it she tells of Nigeria’s recent past, during which “[t]he future was a vision of impossibilities” and “the only thing to aspire to was a foreign visa.”

Adichie then goes on to comment on the remarkable changes that have taken place in the Nigerian psyche in recent years. “There is a growing collective confidence in our future, a new restorative sense of self…” she writes, in reference to the fast-rising Nigerian pop music industry.

Interestingly, another arena that has seen significant change, and provides evidence of an impressive cultural renaissance in Nigeria, is the one in which Adichie herself occupies a vantage spot: the literary arts. On a recent Saturday afternoon, the Silverbird Lifestyle Store in Victoria Island, was cramped with guests attending the 4^th edition of the monthly BookJam reading series; featuring Adichie, Kenyan’s Binyavanga Wainaina, and UK-based Nigerians Chuma Nwokolo and Sade Adeniran.

Lagos is suddenly a hot new destination for writers from all over the world – courtesy of the exploits and efforts of writers like Adichie. Her four-year-old annual Creative Writing workshop, sponsored by Nigeria’s oldest and biggest beer company (which before now appeared to be more at home with sponsoring music festivals and talent hunts) has brought Jason Cowley, Nathan Englander, Binyavanga Wainaina, Jackie Kay, Doreen Baingana and Dave Eggers to Lagos, to facilitate writing sessions. This year Ama Ata Aidoo, Niq Mhlongo and Chika Unigwe are the guest writers.

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