by Mara Jebsen

The photograph on the right was taken when I was six, on a boat speeding through Lake Ontario, in Henderson Harbor, New York. It was in the village of Henderson, a good six hours north of New York City, that an ancestor of mine (one more interested in fishing than fashion) built five houses in the early 1900’s; one for each of his children.

Four of the houses are on the water, and one looms on the hill across the road. A lakefront house right in the middle got sold before I was born, and the poor souls that live there now built a high fence around it to keep my family from swarming across their property. We no longer miss that house, but we do still call it by its old name.

Everything about the remaining four is somewhat irregular—they are all in different styles, of different sizes, and each is attached to a different-sized patch of property. The one that belongs to my branch has the least land, and is the biggest and most decrepit. It is best suited to being filled by at least two nuclear families. Probably its best asset is a cobwebby porch built directly over the water.

The lake itself is sea-weedy, green. Zebra mussels cut your feet. The labour of living by it —dragging the boat in, wresting bins of garbage up the stone hill in a wheelbarrow, washing a hundred plates three times a day—is more intense than you expected when you were child. There is always someone watering and pressing the clay court, or hanging up endless clumps of wet bathing suits and towels on lines. There is a mass production of tomato and chicken sandwiches, and by the time the last child has had their lunch, the first child is thinking of his dinner. In one area are bunches of children engaged in archery, over there are some more playing chess. Several grownups are off somewhere, sailing. All activities are tinged with competition, and a little danger. The tennis is downright ferocious.

Everywhere there is evidence of grandeur and decay.

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by Jeff Strabone

The electoral college is one of those things that few people understand all that well, yet almost everyone can tell you why we’ve been unable to get rid of it: the small states have blocked efforts to amend the Constitution to abolish it because they believe that it amplifies their voting power. As we all know, holding on to power trumps principles in the real world. However, as I will show using simple arithmetic, the small states are wrong about where their true voting strength lies. In fact, the electoral college more often than not dilutes the voting power of most small states. I hope by this article to stand conventional wisdom about the electoral college on its head and, thereby, change the national conversation about it so that we can move on.

Let there be no mistake about one thing: we will never be able to abolish the electoral college by constitutional amendment unless and until it is shown to the small states that it is in their selfish interests to do so. How could it be in their selfish interests when every expert on the subject says otherwise? Read on and you’ll see. The numbers do not lie.

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Questions Philosophers Ask:
#1-Why Does the World Exist?

there might just as well be nothing
instead of the risible sun which makes me laugh
whenever it comes up coincidentally
with the punch line of a joke that also
could not have existed had some
unknown condition not brought
a comedian to a point
in the cascading events of a
million million millennia
to imagine the humorous potential of bars
and the characters who might walk into them

which

in being fictional but true to life
rings a bright bell in our brains
and wakens the funny substance of ourselves
and helps us continue our desperate undoing
of the void that would have been
in the alternative
forever unknown to anyone
making the original question

moot
.

by Jim Culleny
7/8/12

by Hasan Altaf

The title of Joe Sacco's Journalism (Metropolitan Books, 2012) ostensibly refers simply to the book's contents, the collection of the author's shorter reported pieces. Filed from the Hague, from Chechnya and Palestine, from Iraq, they have been published over the past few years in various magazines and newspapers, including Details, Harper's and the Times Magazine. It hints, though, at larger ambitions: Journalism is about not just the individual pieces, but also about journalism itself, as a practice and an art, a profession and maybe even a calling.

As one of the foremost practitioners of comics journalism, especially focused on conflict (he is most famous for his reporting from Bosnia and from Palestine), Sacco has the unique perspective of one who has had to face down the entrenched traditions and prejudices of his profession. In this volume's “introductory fusillade,” a self-described manifesto, he takes on some of the myths and sacred cows of the field. In particular, he addresses the challenge of objectivity, writing that “…there is nothing literal about a drawing. A cartoonist assembles elements deliberately and places them with intent on a page.” The cartoonist, that is, chooses everything, is responsible for everything; if the reporting involves a “river,” a writer can simply say “river” and a photographer can simply take a picture, but the cartoonist must choose precisely how he or she wants to depict that river.

In all forms of journalism, of course, objective reality is subjectively interpreted: Photographers choose what to shoot and how to shoot it; writers can flip an entire story on its head by shading their adjectives. It's easy to forget this, though; it's easier to read a reported piece as objective truth than to try to remain aware of all the assumptions behind that objectivity. As Sacco says, “journalists are not flies on the wall”: The presence of a journalist changes the story automatically, and the particular character and background and attitudes of that reporter change it further. Comics journalism of this kind – it's self-conscious, deliberately; Sacco usually draws himself within his stories, interacting with his sources or as another actor in the scene – serves to highlight that fact, making it clear just how much the reporter is in charge of our understanding.

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by James McGirk

Hot, smoke-fouled air is a powerful mnemonic. As the sun set over New York City on the 4^th of July, my fiancée, Amy, and I took a break from comforting our shell-shocked cats, to stroll through our neighborhood. We live in a decaying industrial area perched on a scarp between the neighborhoods of Bushwick, Brooklyn and Ridgewood, Queens. By peering down one of the avenues we could just make out the puffs of incandescent orange exploding over the East River. We climbed the hill into Ridgewood. It was dark. New York had had one of its wettest summers yet, and a dank hot fug lingered beneath the foliage. All around us explosions rocked the city as families fired bootleg fireworks off their balconies, and the air reeked of sulfur and smoke.

Amy and I had met ten years before, almost to the day, and spent our first night together sitting side by side on a bench beside a power plant in Astoria, Queens, bathing in the ozone-saturated air, swapping stories about our adolescent pyromania, as fire trucks raced past us, to douse the flames from a blown transformer. She grew up as a pale redhead in Florida; so sensitive to sunlight she was forced to live most of her existence at night. She ran with a wild bunch, fled her home at fourteen and stopped going to school. They fired guns in the Florida Everglades and scorched colonies of sea oats and in retaliation for the pastel-hued scorn of their elders – who truly believed they belonged to an adolescent death cult – pelted churches with paint-dipped sanitary napkins and smashed stained glass windows.

My own pyro-maniacal peak came by accident. I grew up in India, and between the ages of ten and fifteen, belonged to an American Boy Scout troop stationed out of New Delhi. We would take short trips out of the city on weekends, go white-water rafting on the banks of the Ganges River (near Rishikesh, above the corpses) or trekking in the Himalayas or, in this case, rappelling down a cliff face near an artificial lake in Haryana. The trip had been a disaster from the get-go, word had gotten out that Americans were in the area, and we became a spectacle and were constantly chased by amused villagers, and were forced to bivouac on the grounds of a government rest house with high walls. Morale was suffering too. There were two patrols in our troop and one patrol had provisions from the American commissary and the other did not and this caused enormous resentment and a lackadaisical ugly attitude unbecoming of Boy Scouts and the sons of diplomats and the agents of multinational corporations.

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by Maniza Naqvi

I. Mass and Matter

II. Drywall

I. Mass and Matter

There is never, nothing. Nothingness is everything. What does it matter? Matter and meaning? Hurtling through life and hoping that it will amount to something—that it will take on mass.

This Higgs boson question of what gives matter mass? In this moment—two points in the collective ether: the Higgs boson and debt. The world is concerned about how matter—particles, become mass—how particles travel through the treacle of energy called Higgs boson. And the world is concerned about debt the one thing that has become the “be all” of human meaning—amassing—meaningless matter.

To travel, at a velocity, so great, and so often, as to stop mattering and to stop, having any meaning. To, keep on, leaving before accumulating enough meaning, enough evidence of existing. But if you can travel so far, and still keep going isn’t that evidence of something? Or does it mean that the further you go and keep on going, this can only happen without gaining substance or without gaining enough of it to stop the velocity—and then does that mean you don’t matter—you are incapable of gathering mass—becoming something? And then do those, who stay those who find it hard to leave, to part, those who remain to resist, those that accumulate, do they—matter? But to depart, to part is an article of inevitability isn’t it for a particle -it is the way a particle accumulates mass—As it travels through space that treacle offering resistance to the particle’s velocity sticking to it and assisting it in gaining mass. That treacle is existence—it is society offering resistance, termed responsibilities, saying stop. It is mass that stops velocity. Mass is when something offers resistance.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

When I first moved to a small town in the midwest in the summer of 1999, I walked downtown to check out and support the local businesses. I honestly cannot remember what I bought, but I do remember that the change the cashier made for that first purchase included a very worn 1907 Liberty Head nickel. I had never seen one before! It was one of those “Twilight Zone” moments: I could almost hear the repetitive four note musical theme, and half-expected Rod Serling to step out from behind an architectural column, cigarette smoke swirling towards the ceiling, to deliver a pithy introduction: “He thought he was moving to a new place but it was really another time.”

My thoughts alternated between delight and horror. What were the odds of this coin showing up during the very first purchase in my new hometown? If rare, was this some kind of auspicious sign? If common, where had I moved to? Did women have the vote? Had news of the repeal of prohibition made it here yet? (I later found out it isn't possible to buy alcohol before 1pm on Sundays). I haven't noticed any coins of similar vintage since, so I guess maybe somebody found it in their attic and put it back into circulation. I tucked it away as a memento and forgot about it.

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by Sarah Firisen

I look up to the heavens in prayer
Let Obamacare die now I swear
There's no words to berate
That evil mandate
And keep your hands right off my Medicare

Stop the death panels right now I cry
The government wants me to die
It's the private insurers
Who should be healthcare jurors
Only corporations won't send this awry

Jesus cured the sick and the lame
But today it's Democrats that he'd blame
And say each man for himself
I've a right to my wealth
If you're poor, well I guess that's a shame

Pre-existing conditions aren't nice
But we all take our roll of the dice
Some get sick, some are well
That I'm healthy is swell
Just try harder, that's my advice

You clearly have not done your part
Yes I know that you have a bad heart
The free market knows best
Some are lucky and blessed
Some our Lord has just set apart

So I'll make sure that I do my share
Vote for repeal of Obamacare
I have not one doubt
Of the private health route
And keep your hands right off my Medicare

Key and Gate

Heading out the door
I forgot my key
and time is short

it’s late
but I’m going nowhere
in this keyless state

Last night the moon
phasing out again
with its back to utter reaches
seemed for a second
like a key or switch
needing a turn or flick
to open or start
some thought
I don’t know what but
imminent nonetheless
behind the moon’s back
through its silver hatch
that will, not too late,
open itself with itself
being at once its own
key and gate
.

by Jim Culleny
6/21/12

By Liam Heneghan

A unicorn is described as having the legs of a deer, the tail of a lion, the head and body of a horse. It possesses a single horn which is white at the base, black in the middle and red at the tip. Its body is white, its head red, and its eyes are blue. Clearly, the only thing unreal about a unicorn is in the combination of its parts. That is, a unicorn is less than the sum of its parts, assuming, that is (with a prayerful nod to Anselm of Canterbury), that existing in reality trumps existing in the mind, or in this case existing in the mind as in a series of disarticulated parts that are themselves very real.

When an ecosystem is described as greater than the sum of its parts, as it was in Eugene Odum’s holistic conception of it, what is meant is that when the biotic components of ecological communities interact with the abiotic realm (that is, the formerly living and the never-alive), certain properties of the whole emerge that cannot be readily predicted from an analysis of the component parts. This claim, made on behalf of the larger units of nature, was persuasive to generations of ecologists influenced by Odum’s textbook, first published in 1953 and now in its posthumously published 5^th edition (2005).[1] However, in as much as Odum’s notion of the ecosystem manifests a Balance of Nature perspective it has almost universally fallen out of favor in ecology and, like the unicorn, is emphatically relegated to myth and fancy.

In one of a number of strenuous critiques of Odum’s holistic conception of the ecosystem, ecologist Dan Simberloff claimed that it resurrected one of ecology’s earliest and now discredited paradigms, the notion of the biotic community as a superorganism.[2] The superorganismic quality of the ecological community was a tenet of one of the first comprehensive theories in ecology where vegetation scientist Frederic Clements likened changes in the plant community over time to the developmental processes of organisms. The appeal of holistic ecosystem ecology with its Clementsian flavor was not, Simberloff argued, because it improved the science, but because it drew upon a myth of enduring appeal, one that derived from the metaphysical conceptions of the ancient Greeks. Less technically, one can say that holistic conceptions of ecology tap into a notion of the Balance of Nature – something, as we’ve seen contemporary ecologists choose not to defend.

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by Misha Lepetic

“Look – you're my best friend, so don't take this the wrong way.
In twenty years, if you're still livin' here, comin' over to my house
to watch the Patriots games, still workin' construction, I'll fuckin' kill you.
That's not a threat; now, that's a fact.”
~Good Will Hunting

Culture warriors from the 1990s may remember Charles Murray, who rather stirred the pot with The Bell Curve, a highly contentious book co-written with Richard Herrnstein. The authors hypothesized, among other things, that not only intelligence but also its alleged heritability could be measured and used to explain differences in the success of social (or, perhaps, economic and ethnic) groups.* At any rate, Murray, who seems to be a refreshingly damn-the-torpedoes type of fellow, is back with another doozy, this time concerning inequality in America. But where is this America of which he speaks?

The inequality narrative is nothing new, of course. The Economist has been harping on the threat that income inequality poses for years now (I believe that this is due, in no small part, to that publication’s consistent undercurrent of Burkean anxiety). In 2009, Emmanuel Saez won the John Bates Clarke medal for illuminating how income inequality is not just increasing but is increasing at faster velocities for the more rarefied strata. And the Russell Sage Foundation recently released a pretty authoritative report on the matter, although I’m sure they won’t be the last to do so. And regardless of your opinion of it, the Occupy movement has brought the inequality narrative into the forefront of the “national conversation”, if such a thing actually exists.

But Murray is here to tell us that income inequality is just the tip of the iceberg: what we are really faced with is, as he puts it, “cultural inequality.” As he writes in a Wall Street Journal essay in support of his book, Coming Apart:

And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.**

This isn’t really all that earth-shattering, but Murray introduces a few new angles. The first is his exclusive focus on the white demographic. I will return to the consequences of this choice in a moment, but let’s accept that, as seconded by his soft-ball fellow-WSJ reviewer, this was done “to avoid conflating race with class”.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

The first lecture I got on summer drinking was accompanied by my first real job offer and my first real marriage proposal. All three were delivered by an elderly Sikh man, sitting next to me on a London-Delhi flight. His fondness for me emerged early, when I agreed to ask the air hostess for extra whiskies and pass them onto him; he'd already swallowed three and was cautious about attracting attention. He began by telling me that while he lived in London, he still spent part of the year in Riga, where he used to arrange prostitutes for East Asian businessmen, and he was looking for someone to take his place. Later, after a few more drinks, he asked how old I was (I was 18) and then told me that his daughter needed to get married to a reliable man, and asked me to consider her. Having taken care of these social pleasantries, he spent the next hour or two explaining to me the trouble with drinking in hot weather (makes you feel hotter¹), and his theory about the appropriate balances necessary for drinking in the summer. His approach was simple: he drank only whisky and beer in the summer, and he drank only rum and brandy in the winter. He never quite explained to me where this particular seasonal partitioning came from, or whether it was primarily physiological (to balance the humors?) or aesthetic (in case inventing drinking conventions is the only thing that separates us from the beasts)². But I was left deeply moved, at the very least by his consistency, and I think of him towards the beginning of every summer, especially if I'm transgressing his rules and drinking rum or brandy.

Every curated summer drink list should include some manner of gin and bitters combination, to clarify the senses and lighten the flesh. At the simplest, you could roll bitters around a glass (pop it into the microwave for a few seconds to open up the flavors, if you like), drop in a measure of gin (always make it a generous measure) and top it with ice (crushed, if you're feeling fancy). That suffices, but you could add tonic water and lime or, if you're lucky enough to live in a place where coconut water is readily available, gin and bitters and coconut water is a classical tropical summer drink and the coconut water will keep you suitably hydrated.

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by Tom Jacobs

How many stories are born of images? All of them? Most of them? Without some founding image (of a person, of a family, of a moment) is it even possible to conceive of a story? The relation between an image and its story—all of the resistances and exchanges between these two very different forms of expression and representation—is both important and incredibly slippery. In a Paris Review interview, Faulkner was asked “How did The Sound and the Fury Begin?” His answer is struck with the force of a small revelation, in part I guess because it is so simple. It began with a mental picture.

I didn't realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl's drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother's funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless girl climbing down the drainpipe to escape from the only home she had, where she had never been offered love or affection or understanding.

He notes that he tried to tell the story through the eyes of several characters, and even to “gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman,” and ends up admitting that he “never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.”

Kundera, too, in his excellently-titled, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, explains that his characters came into being by virtue of a haunting image. I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. […] I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking out across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do.” He is trying to figure out if what he feels for Tereza is hysteria or love.

This puts me in the mind of (as most things that I find incredibly engaging interesting do), Walter Benjamin. He has a castoff comment in his Arcades Project where he is thinking about why criticism and analytical thinking are so much less successful than advertising. And he says this: Not what the moving red neon sign says—but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt. That, to be sure, is the kind of declaration that will, if you are so inclined and share a similar sensibility, make you stop and think really hard.

There’s something there, but what does it mean? Why does the reflection of something affect us in such a different manner than the thing itself, unmediated? We have all seen an advertisement or a sign or whatever via its reflection and been kind of startled by it. It’s hard to know why our sensuous assimilation of things is so hard to talk about or describe or explain.

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by Namit Arora

Some years ago in a Montana slaughterhouse, a Black Angus cow awaiting execution suddenly went berserk, jumped a five-foot fence, and escaped. She ran through the streets for hours, dodging cops, animal control officers, cars, trucks, and a train. Cornered near the Missouri river, the frightened animal jumped into its icy waters and made it across, where a tranquilizer gun brought her down. Her “daring escape” stole the hearts of the locals, some of whom had even cheered her on. The story got international media coverage. Telephone polls were held, calls demanding her freedom poured into local TV stations. Sensing the public mood, the slaughterhouse manager made a show of “granting clemency” to what he dubbed “the brave cow.” Given a name, Molly, the cow was sent to a nearby farm to live out her days grazing under open skies—which warmed the cockles of many a heart.

Cattle trying to escape slaughterhouses are not uncommon. Few of their stories end happily though. Some years ago in Omaha, six cows escaped at once. Five were quickly recaptured; one kept running until Omaha police cornered her in an alley and pumped her with bullets. The cow, bellowing miserably and hobbling like a drunk for several seconds before collapsing, died on the street in a pool of blood. This brought howls of protest, some from folks who had witnessed the killing. They called the police’s handling inhumane and needlessly cruel.

It’s tempting to see these commiserating folks as animal lovers—and that's how they likely see themselves—until one remembers what they eat for dinner. A typical slaughterhouse in the United States kills over a thousand Mollys a day—lined up, shot in the head, and often cut-open and bled while still conscious, an end no less cruel and full of bellowing—all because Americans keep buying neatly-packaged slices of their corpses in supermarkets. Raised unnaturally and inhumanely, over a million protesting birds and mammals are violently killed in the U.S. every hour (that's 300 per second!). Is it then unreasonable to say that nearly all meat-eaters in America participate quite directly in a cycle of suffering and cruelty of staggering scale?

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Speed and Trouble

Sunday
……………… —my head spins
suddenly it’s Saturday again

wind whistles through hours
days are bullet trains

yet in this garden
long as the space of a light year
crows drop in to listen for the bristle
of worms making way below
through a sea dark as biker leathers
black as predator feathers

I love these crows
……………………… —being so
we-are-masters-of-this-row

they strut with natural equanimity
unlike cocksure CEOs who strut
but with a limp of sociopathy

meanwhile, two blood red cardinals
perch upon a limb outside our room
much nearer god then those of
the red-habit class

our fat cat’s
laser gaze nails them, though she looms
impotent behind the slider glass

—in this leisure garden bubble
these crows and I know zip
of speed and trouble
.

by Jim Culleny
6/14/12