No One in Particular

Are you looking at me? I say to the mountain
which moves as I run the tiller down the row.

But it may not be the mountain I address.

Are you talking to me? I say to the pale moon
which hangs in the blue sky like a ghost ball.

But maybe the moon is not the ghost in this conversation.

The Briggs & Stratton snorts. The Troy's deep-treaded
rubber turns. The Buddha in the engine barks. The tines
lift clumps of the secret earth buried under hard sod.

Are you censuring me? I say to the crow
who stands off like an incriminating shadow.

But the crow may not be the shade to whom I speak.

Soon spinach will be sprouting in these rows.
The prints I leave in the soil behind the tiller
will have been smoothed over by a rake.

Are you rattling my cage? I say to no one in particular
who is mute as the scent of dark humus overturned.

by Jim Culleny, 4/10/10

The news this week titillated chemists. And science aesthetes everywhere—those lovers of beauty, harmony, and order—should be just as excited that the periodic table has added its 117th element, ununseptium. But be prepared for disenchantment.

For those of us that write about the periodic table for a living, the gap at 117 was doubly galling. First, every element through 116 had already been discovered, as well as element 118. (To be accurate, the elements through 92 had been discovered, and the elements after that created, in a lab, since the days of getting your fingernails dirty looking for new elements in nature ended about 1930. The ultra-heavy elements never existed before people created them, unless in the labs of alien scientists somewhere distant.) Anyway, the gap at 117 violated a sense of order, since we like things to start at 1 and progress to N without skipping around. That for technical reasons it’s easier to create even-numbered elements like 116 and 118 couldn’t salve our aesthetic sense that something was somehow wrong with there being a gap for ununseptium.

Second, the gap was galling because the periodic table was just one box short of completing its seventh row. Because of the way electrons stack themselves inside atoms, the table always has eighteen columns; but the number of rows changes, and grows fractionally longer with each new element. And it was frustrating (at least for some of us) to be sitting on 6.96875 rows (6 and 31/32) for years, so close to 7.00000. Ununseptium fulfills the table, squares off the bottom row. It just looks better now.

We can find even more satisfaction because the beauty here isn’t arbitrary human beauty. The tidiness doesn’t depend on our senses or our accidental circumstances on Earth. For example, it’s human convention to celebrate turns of millennia or 100th wedding anniversaries because we like to see zeroes. Really, that’s just an accident of our base-ten counting system, because numbers like 200 and 2,000 look good in that system—those pleasingly geometric circles (or at least ovals) stacked at the end, and the sense they give of having turned from one era to another. But if we had seven fingers, 100 would be written as (in base-seven counting) “202”; 1,000 would be “2626”. Had we thirteen fingers, they’d respectively be “79” and (because we’d need more digits than 0 to 9 in a 13-digit system) “5BC”. So there’s nothing inherently special about those numbers, just the numerals.

The beauty of the periodic table isn’t constrained by our metatarsals. Everywhere in the universe, the basic periodic system is exactly the same. Perhaps not jotted down in the castles-with-turrets shape we humans have come to favor, but in every civilization that ever discovered the periodicity of atomic structure, the spiral or chart or hologram or whatever would naturally pause after 118 elements, would rest as a cycle completes itself. No matter how someone counts or reckons, 118 is a special number among elements, a millennial anniversary built into nature, as universal as π.

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Brian Reynolds Myers is contributing editor to the Atlantic and professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. In his new book, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters, he examines North Korean propaganda meant for both internal and external consumption and through it constructs the closed country’s view of itself, its relationship to other countries and the Kim dynasty that has controlled it for 60 years. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

It's easy for a Westerner to get the impression that everything a North Korean citizen might see or read or hear, every piece of culture they might encounter — paintings, stories, sitcoms — is, in some way, propaganda. How true is that notion?

I think it is true. Of course, the information cordon that used to isolate the country from the outside world has deteriorated steadily since the mid-1990s, when North Koreans began to leave the country to look for food. You have a lot of people who are smuggling into the country things like South Korean DVDs or Chinese TV sets — even cellphones, which can be used to call people outside the country. Average citizens now have some access to unorthodox sources of culture and information, but for the average North Korean on a daily basis, everything they encounter really is propaganda.

Is it all, in some sense, state-produced, or is it simply subject to the state's sensibilities and thus going to conform to them?

It is actually state-produced. You could contrast it, say, to South Korea under the military dictatorships, when you did have private people creating culture which was then subject to very strict censorship. In North Korea, on the other hand, everything is conceived by the party, so to speak commissioned by the party, and then it has to go through another rigorous censorship process anyway. By the time it gets into the hands of individual citizens, the regime has made very sure that there's nothing in there that contradicts the view it wants to spread.

One of the most fascinating angles you take in the book is to explore a somewhat unexplored facet of this, which is that the propaganda the North Korean state gives to its own people and the propaganda it designs for outside consumption are different, and substantially so. What is the core of that difference?

The main difference is that North Korea has always tried to convey the impression to the outside world that it is a kind of communist state which seeks integration into the world community, which is very fearful of its own security on the world stage, which wants nothing more than a peace treaty with the United States so that it can get back to its own business of improving the standard of living for its people.

Now, the impression given to the North Korean people themselves, the propaganda they get which most people in the outside world never really learn about, gives a very different impression: that North Korea is a country that will forever be hostile to the United States, which some day will wreak revenge on America — a country that is not afraid of any other country in the world. Rather, the rest of the world is terrified of North Korea. You can read books, for example, about North Korean diplomats barging in on U.N. officials, laying down the law, telling the U.N. what to do and so on. In other worlds, North Korea's depiction of itself is strikingly close to, say, the American right wing's depiction of North Korea as a rogue state.

[By the way, welcome to our new Reddit readers. We love Reddit too. Check out our About Us page, and come back to visit often. Or subscribe to our RSS Feed here.]

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By Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

Just because Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson were trail-blazing agents of progressive passion who could stir red blood with a goodly speech, people took one look at Barack Obama and thought: here comes another one.

Turns out he's a non-ideological pragmatist, and now progressives are disappointed. Madly, mightily, miserably: right down to their sternums at the innermost center where herpes viruses go to hibernate — like a Sartrean disillusioned with Heidegger because he was a Nazi, or a Catholic stricken that the Pope — God's Embodiment on Earth — could ever have enabled the hallowed priestly tradition of mass child rape.

If you're progressive, you shouldn't be disappointed in Obama. You should be disappointed in yourself.

Because you've been blinder than Oedipus. Your high hopes were built on cocoa puffs. Not ONCE in his entire political life has Obama taken any position that wasn't totally and triangulatingly Clintonesque. In fact, he's such a triangulator, he likes giving the impression he's almost sorry to be doing something his enemies don't want him to do. Look at him still coddling the Republicans, like some Big Mama nursing a bawling infant. If he were Hillary, he'd call them a bunch of lying loudmouth braindead rightwing conspirators on their way to oblivion, and be done with them.

Sure, Obama seemed to sport progressive cred because he was against the Iraq War. But remember, this is what he said: “I'm not against all wars. I'm just against dumb wars.” You didn't have to be a genius progressive to be against the Iraq war; it was a plain-to-see dumb Vietnam War Two. As the burliest bully among nations, we're dumb enough to think our patriotism is best expressed in killing foreigners. We are a naturally war-like people, like the Mongols or the Zulus. Being anti-war in America doesn't make you progressive. It just means you're not a total oaf. It means you're slightly out-of-tune with most Americans, who think our troops are heroes, when all they are is misguided, poor youngsters trained to be serial killers.

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At the City University of New York's Graduate Center, a friend of mine named Lydia Hazen is testing subjects to see whether they have greater perception of certain colors or shapes after reading poems by Wallace Stevens. She's engaged in what the New York Times recently dubbed “neuroscience lit crit,” in an article wondering whether it's “the next big thing” in literary studies. (?)

Exciting – but hardly the “new thing”; it should more accurately be called an experimental trope on the oldest traditions of modern literary criticism and philosophy in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The infamous English Romantic – opium addict, plagiarist, long-winded talker and poet of fragments – was also a metacognitive theorist far ahead of his time, who now appears to me a startlingly contemporary figure.

Today, we have blogs, text-messages, FaceBook updates, Twitter. Coleridge had his notebooks. He'd keep at least five in his pockets at all times, while walking for days through the Cumbrian mountains or Quantock foothills, or dazed in a laudanum mist, and scribbled indiscriminately into them everything that popped into his head – which was considerable. He had over 200 notebooks in all, spanning 40 years of his life from 1794 onward, and after his death, many became scattered among his admirers in the British Isles and America, seeding the American Transcendentalists, late Victorians like Gerard Manley Hopkins, and British Modernists like Virginia Woolf. Then they were re-collected, collated, edited and annotated over a period of 50 years by Kathleen Coburn at the University of Toronto.

She completed the project in 1996.

What emerged was an astounding record of a mind overwhelmed by the collision of ideologies – moral, natural-philosophical, cultural and political, during the volatile French-Revolutionary and Napoleonic years at the height of English empirical philosophy as the Enlightenment metamorphosed into the Industrial Revolution – and trying to contend with them, and reconcile them, in real time. Specifically, from around 1796 to about 1808, Coleridge was incessantly burying into four related questions: how does perception work; how does the mind think; what is the Imagination; and how does perception become thought become action?

In other words, the questions that neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists are contending with today, Coleridge was wrestling with in the early 19th century via minute observations of his own mind in the process of thinking and perceiving. The similarities are sometimes startling.

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by Colin Marshall

1. The most immediately notable quality of Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, and what that quality hints to us that we're missing

A movie under 60 minutes is “a short.” A movie under 90 minutes is just “short.” A movie over 150 minutes is “long.” A movie over about 200 minutes is, often, “epic.” Maybe you have quibbles with my specific points of demarcation, but surely you agree that, popularly speaking, that's how it tends to break down. By this set of labels, La Belle Noiseuse is, at 237 minutes — breathing distance from the four-hour mark, nearly 45 minutes longer than, say, Schindler's List — an epic and then some. Despite giving off a whiff of self-indulgence, its length turns out to be necessary in all sorts of different ways, and ultimately raises a torturous question for any cinephile: what other works of cinematic art require such an unconventional length, and how many have been denied their very existence because of it?

And I'm not just talking about “very long” films, or even the super-“epics” in La Belle Noiseuse's film-feet league. (And those aren't even the upper limit; we probably need another category for movies like Rivette's own Out 1, whose canonical cut clocks in at a staggering 773 minutes.) Just about exactly one hour is a famously awkward film length, since it doesn't meet the common 80-minute festival floor for feature length but breaks most commonly accepted ceilings for shorts. The business of film distribution and exhibition, in perhaps in an ad hoc manner but one now deeply entrenched, has established these categories, and it's easy not to grasp their restrictiveness unless a creator deliberately steps outside them and shows you.

I submit to you that, while some stories are indeed best told in 90- to 120-ish-minutes, most others, by pure logic of probability — are not. I submit that some material is only cinematically realizable in 61 minutes, or in 773 minutes, or, indeed, in 237 minutes. La Belle Noiseuse — also available in a 125-minute cut called La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento which is by all accounts nothing more than a two-hour trailer for The Real Deal — wouldn't have worked if substantially shorter, nor would it have worked if substantially longer.

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Speaker, writer, blogger and entrepreneur Seth Godin, having already built a large body of published work on the nature of ideas, how they’re conceived, how they’re spread and how they’re executed, has expanded his intellectual purview with his new book Linchpin. Extending the thoughts and observations he applied to marketing in books like Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars, his latest work examines how individual human beings, not corporations or organizations, can most fruitfully practice their art in the transforming information economy. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I read Linchpin in kind of a strange way: I spread it out so whenever I was reading it, I was also reading another Seth Godin book. What I noticed doing that is that Linchpin just feels different, in a visceral way, than your other books. I heard in another interview with Merlin Mann, a former guest on this show, that you said Linchpin was the hardest book you've ever had to write. Are these two things related?

For sure. Most of the books that I've written, other than probably The Dip, have been written to organizations, written to people who are doing strategy, written to people who are working at the bloodless act of spreading an idea. This book is personal. It's not personal in that it's about me; it's personal in that it's about you. That's a pretty different responsibility for the author. The argument I'm pushing forward is frightening to people, so I had to handle it in a way where I was pushing hard enough to make an impact, but I was treating your fears and skepticism with respect. Otherwise it becomes a jeremiad and isn't very helpful.

How much of the difficulty comes purely from having to switch the whole way you think about your audience? You said you write to organizations, to idea-spreaders — now it's to living, breathing humans, in a sense. Was a lot of the difficulty simply changing your own mindset?

Not really. For me, there is a revolution going on, and I've been lucky that I've been able to carve out a niche by chronicling that revolution and talking about some of the elements of it. The death of the industrial age is the most important historical shift of our time. A lot of people don't see it happening, even though it is changing their lives every day. For me, then, the purpose of this book is to bring home what that death is going to mean to everyone, and what the opportunity it creates means to everyone.

But when I'm writing, I'm not visualizing what the reader looks like. Judging from my inbound e-mail, there is no way to characterize anything about my readers: where they live, how old they are, what their gender is, what their race is, what they do for a living. They don't have anything in common other than the fact that they don't have anything in common.

You have a bit of an angle in the book — I don't know how deliberate it was — it seems like you're somewhat angry that the death of the industrial age, as you've called it, has resulted in a bit of a bill of false goods being sold to a lot of people. Have I characterized that right?

Well, there is no angle. I'm a big fan of gimmicks, but this book doesn't have one. Yeah, I'm angry, and what I'm angry about is that the bill of goods was sold to us ten, twenty, thirty years ago, and it is that if we do what we're told and are compliant, we will be rewarded. It bothers me when I see a bank, which has more power and insight, take advantage of someone, and the person loses their house. It bothers me when I see someone work somewhere for twenty years, doing what they think they're supposed to do, and then lose their job when it's not their fault. It bothers me when we organize schools to create ever more compliant workers for ever more mediocre factories.

I think we need to stop burying our potential and instead start embracing the fact that there's this huge opportunity here, even thought it makes people uncomfortable to tell them the truth.

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By Namit Arora

A review of a memoir by an ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s in rural Uttar Pradesh, India.

(This review won the top award in the 3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Contest. Read more about it here.)

I grew up in the central Indian city of Gwalior until I left home for college. This was the 70s and 80s. My father worked as a textile engineer in a company town owned by the Birla Group, where we lived in a middle class residential quarter for the professional staff and their families. Our 3-BR house had a small front lawn and a vegetable patch behind. Domestic helpers, such as a washerwoman and a dishwashing woman, entered our house via the front door—all except one, who came in via the rear door. This was the latrine cleaning woman, or her husband at times. As in most traditional homes, our squat toilet was near the rear door, across an open courtyard. She also brought along a couple of scrawny kids, who waited by the vegetable patch while their mother worked.

My mother often gave them dinner leftovers, and sometimes tea. But unlike other domestic helpers, they were not served in our utensils, nor did the latrine cleaners expect to be. They brought their own utensils and placed them on the floor; my mother served them while they stood apart. When my mother turned away, they quietly picked up the food and left. To my young eyes this seemed like the natural order of things. These were the mehtars, among the lowest of the so-called ‘untouchables’. They worked all around us, yet were ‘invisible’ to me, as if part of the stage props. I neither gave them much thought during my school years, nor recognized my prejudices as such. I, and the kids in my circle, even used ‘untouchable’ caste names as playful epithets, calling each other chamaar and bhangi.

It’s possible that I first reflected on the idea of untouchability only in college, through art house cinema. Even so, upper-caste Indian liberals made these films and it was their viewpoint I saw. It is hardly a stretch to say that the way even the most sensitive white liberals in the United States knew and described the experience of black Americans is partly why one had to read Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and other black authors. A similar parallel holds for Native Americans, immigrants, and women, as well as the ‘untouchables,’ now called Dalits (‘the oppressed’), numbering one out of six Indians. For some years now, they have been telling their own stories, bearing witness to their slice of life in India. Theirs is not only a powerful new current of Indian literature, it is also a major site of resistance and revolt.

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Gerald Dworkin and Justin E. H. Smith

Jerry and I began this dialogue after he, in the process of preparing an ethics course on the topic of capital punishment, happened upon some pieces I wrote a few years ago at various activist venues (they are archived here, here, here, here, and here). The articles are polemical rather than scholarly, and I never expected the issue of capital punishment would someday get any attention from me qua philosopher (as opposed to qua polemicist). But Jerry found some of the issues I raised in them worthy of attention, and in turn has raised for me a number of issues that I never really worked through before in my very visceral opposition to the death penalty. I'm grateful for this, and I think what has resulted is a discussion that should be of interest to reformers and philosophers alike (as well as to those who belong in both of these camps.) –JEHS.

*

Gerald Dworkin: Justin and I agree that capital punishment as currently administered in the United States, and in the absence of convincing evidence that it deters more than a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole (LIWP) for any crime, should be abolished. Where we may disagree –I put it this way because I am not sure what view I will emerge with at the end of this discussion– is whether there is an argument for abolition that does not depend on contingent facts, such as that it does not deter, or that as currently administered the selection of who gets executed is both arbitrary (chance and luck play an enormous role) and unjust (the poor and racial minorities are executed at higher rates that those with money and those blacks who kill whites). For, as Justin points out elsewhere, believing that the facts are as they are is compatible with believing that in a world where deterrence is established and fairness reigns CP is justifiable. This position could be true even if one believed that as a matter of contingent fact our system will never be sufficiently just, and the evidence for deterrence will never be sufficiently strong so as to warrant CP. The first thing I want to do is see if Justin and I agree on a more rigorous definition of the issue. For it is, as I shall argue later, very important exactly how the problem is framed.

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By Tolu Ogunlesi

Every time I find myself at Lagos’ Murtala Mohammed International Airport, a glance at the foreigners’ queue makes me wonder how many of those sweating Caucasians are there on a mission to spill ink on Africa’s endless fires.

It is of course an open secret that the continent teems with ‘anonymous’ white men and women destined to build enviable reputations from material from the ruins of what the Economist Magazine once proudly termed “The Hopeless Continent”. In recent months I have become deeply fascinated by the possibilities of assembling images of Africa as painted by outsiders – the Gospel of Africa according to Saints Blixen, Kapuściński, Forsyth, Dowden, Maier, Wrong; to mention just a few.

“For the last 20 years the news from Africa has been unremittingly bad,” the second line of Anthony Daniels’ essay Not as black as it’s painted, (originally published in The Spectator) declares.

Daniels is to a significant extent correct. This was 1987. Twenty years before then would have been 1967, the year that the Nigerian Civil War kicked off. In those two decades Nigeria, self-acclaimed Giant of Africa, saw 30 months of civil war, four coup d’états, and one horribly mismanaged oil boom.

But he soon strays into dubious territory, adopting that deadly attitude (a potent mix of condescension and incontrovertibility) that the colonial adventure seemed to implant deep into the European DNA. A few sentences later, after a litany of peculiarly African woes – desertification, population explosion, AIDS – Daniels jokes: “Perhaps most depressing of all, one is now grateful for a President who, however dictatorial, does not actually eat his opponents.”

And then the guns emerge, blazing. Four examples:

“As I remarked, no doubt cruelly, to several young African radicals, even if Africa were to unite economically, it would still scarcely amount to Switzerland.”

“Africa is so technically backward that it would be cheaper to ship things from Mars than to produce them on the continent. An arms embargo on South Africa has produced an arms industry; an arms embargo on the rest of Africa would produce bows and arrows.”

“There is little in traditional African culture that is compatible with a modern economy, and much that is inimical to it.”

“Very few Africans have – can have – the faintest notion of the depth of the cultural and scientific tradition necessary to produce a Mercedes, or even a simple light bulb.”

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Chris Bohn is the editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire. Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and the generally non-mainstream since 1982, featuring a span of artists from Ornette Coleman to Björk to David Sylvian to Jim O’Rourke to field recordists like Lee Patterson to emerging Chinese sounds artists like Yun Jun. The magazine is also well known as a rarity in its industry for both its profitability and its loyal, growing readership. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I was reading a slightly older profile of the magazine in the Telegraph. It had a quote from you saying that The Wire is best thought of as a magazine that does not cover certain types of music rather than a magazine that does cover certain types. So I'll put the question to you: what does The Wire not cover?

The stuff you could consider heavily featured in the mainstream media. Obviously there's some crossover with the mainstream media and the underground, noncommercial media, but generally we have no interest in covering stuff you just see on — if you go to a newsstand any see a range of magazines, be it music, culture, fashion, whatever, you see certain names cropping up over and over again. We just have absolutely no interest in being part of that interchangeability of faces, names, et cetera, et cetera. We'd rather focus on the music that interests us, and that most frequently is “non-mainstream” music, “underground” music, whatever that means.

That's kind of a very slippery word, you might say, because “underground” in a political sense is a whole lot different from “underground” in a Western sense. In London or, I should imagine, where you come from, almost anything goes. You can do anything without consequences. But last November I was in Leipzig for a festival of underground culture from the German Democratic Republic period, the communist period in East Germany that obtained between '48 and 1989 before the wall came down. Then, underground culture had a totally different meaning. It's a salutary reminder to know that sometimes music is as serious as your life, and you can end up in jail for playing it. That's not often he case here. Every so often I have to take one step back from the word “underground” and remind myself that it can be a far different thing to what perceive.
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My Life As A Crime Fighter: Absolute Prosecutorial Discretion – Part 1

Norman Costa

Note: This narrative was created from three true stories. Each character is a combination of more than one real person. I changed names and story elements to preserve the privacy of individuals.

Call in your troubles

My nephew, Samuel, called me from his home in Huntsville, Alabama at eight o'clock in the morning, an unusual hour for him to phone. I stayed quiet and waited. After a moment or two he spoke. He was hesitant and uncomfortable, asking if he could borrow $550. I gave an immediate assurance that I would lend him the money, and then waited.

“Uncle Norman, I got arrested for domestic violence.”

“WHAT!”

It made no sense, at all. In a more subdued voice, I asked him to tell me what happened. He said that he had pushed his wife, Kara, and she had fallen over a chair. He said it was an accident; he didn't mean to do it; but, it was his fault since he pushed her. Samuel was going to plead guilty to a criminal offense, agree to probation and anger management counseling, and pay a fine of $550. After twelve months his record would be wiped clean, if there were no more incidents.

And then Samuel started to cry. Inside a few seconds he was sobbing.

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Your correspondent has wrangled a place in the first elevated row, just behind the backless futons reserved for buyers. The Three Quarks Daily seat is adjacent to the New Indian Express (Calcutta) and The Man (monthly). Black bleachers cascade all along on either side of the runway. There are bells suspended above one end, just above the backboard with Payal Jain's name on it. On the other end, the jostling mosh-pit of camera men in five, no six layers, like the green toy soldiers that you may remember from childhood: sniper flat on the ground, aiming and firing on one knee, mortar loader, aiming while standing, platoon leader yelling.

The lights go brighter for a moment before dimming, the music starts thumping, a thrill ripples through us all, and four models appear on the far end of the catwalk. Your correspondent has never been so aware of the dramatic tension between camera, focal length, object and field. The contemporary, globalizing fashion show, of course, is a media practice, which requires the collaboration and participation of so many players to create this sense of the new, the now, the it, which one can either be with, or else clueless about.

Payal's models are wearing hoodies and head-scarves of many designs, and occasionally smocks that look also like Iranian chadors. Her literature says that the collection is inspired by the monastaries of Laos, which God love her, is surely exotic territory for all of us. The music is vaguely Enigma, perhaps remixed by Laotian monks.

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by John Edwards

I was in Cote d'Ivoire, working for a financial mag covering the African Development Bank in West Africa, when some co-workers and I set off on a trip to nowhere in particular: specifically, somewhere in Ghana. At the Ghanaian embassy, they informed us: “No journalists allowed!” When we told them we were editors, not journalists, they lightened up a little. “If you say you are computer programmers, maybe we can let you in to Ghana.”

So newly christened as “computer programmers” (even though I thought “microchips” were ingredients in miniature toll house cookies), we prepared to travel around like knuckleheads in the country of Kofi Annan. To go gonzo in Ghana. A black American woman, who was also procuring a visa at the embassy, said with a faraway smile, “I just love Africa. You can really get into the rhythm of the people!”

The only rhythm I noticed so far, however, was the knocking and swaying of the crowded bush taxi–crammed with Christian iconography and blasting Highlife music–as we took off into the hair-raising hinterlands. We decided to bypass Accra and head to the beach, a place called Dixcove, which had an old fort that was a site in the past for the infamous Gold Coast slave trade.

When we finally arrived, a small boy led us past groups of sweaty shouting men waving maniacally at us to stay in their makeshift “hotels” (which featured no beds). We were wading through some sludgy water from a slow-moving stream on the beach, obviously drainage from toilet facilities, hoping that it didn't contain the dreaded “guinea worm,” which can wrap and coil itself in your body for reputedly miles and miles.

“There is a place on the beach where you can also get something to eat,” the boy quothed in the Queen's English. He led us to what looked like a large concrete bunker right on the beach, with a bar filled with tattered Guinness posters. An old man wearing clothing stitched from burlap sacks, who looked a little like Geoffrey Holder with a hangover, gladly accepted our business.

That night he asked us what we wanted for dinner, and one of the more imaginative of our group (jokingly) said, “lobsters.” And lo and behold, the old man did indeed barter with fishermen and cook us lobsters with a creole tomato sauce, and we began to wonder what was up with this so-called rudimentary hotel in paradise, where we were savaged by insects in our sleep and where huge waves broke on the shores of the end of the world.

What would a postcard home from here sound like? “News from Nowhere: Wish you were here…”

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by Daniel Rourke

A face to face encounter, devoid of the warm appeal of flesh. The eyes are glass, a cold blue crystal reflects the light in a way real eyes never would. A muzzle of hair, perhaps taken from a barbershop floor or the hind quarters of an animal. The painted scalp peeks through the sparse strands: there is nothing here one might caress with fumbling fingers, or, a millennia ago, pick between to lovingly tease out a louse or mite. The figure balances uneasily on stumps for legs. Its waxen surface bears no resemblance to skin. It is a shade saturated of living colour. In another shortened limb the figure holds a wooden spear, with a plastic point designed to take the place of the authentic stone tip. Under its beaten brow this creature forever stands. He is a spectacle, a museum attraction. He is not human, he is 'other'. He is not man, he is Neanderthal.

Encounters like this, hashed together from memories that span my childhood and adult years, represent the closest many of us will come to meeting a Neanderthal. Encounters built upon out-dated science and the desire of museums to authenticate experiences which, in reality, are as far away from 'true' anthropology as those glass eyes are from windows on the soul. In a recent Archaeology.org article a question was put forward that made me think again about these encounters:

Should we Clone Neanderthals? : I could not help but probe the proposition further.

In my own lifetime our understanding of these absolute 'others' has gone through several revolutions. What once were lumbering apes, incapable of rational thought, speech or the rituals of religious reverence, have become our long lost evolutionary cousins. Research from various quarters has shown that not only were Neanderthals quite capable of vocal expression, but in all likelihood they lived a rich, symbolic life. They had bigger brains than we did, or do, and were probably burying their dead with appeal to an afterlife 50,000 years before our ancestors left Africa. They cared for their young, lived in well established social groups and apart from their prominent brow and less mobile, stocky build, resembled humans in most other aspects. More recent evidence seems to show that far from being a completely separate species, it is quite possible that ancient humans interbred with Neanderthals. This astounding revelation, if it were ever verified, would mean that many of us – if not every one of us – carry within our genetic make-up a living memory of Neanderthal heritage.

But Neanderthals are more than scientific curiosities. They are the embodiment of the 'other', a reflective surface via which the human race may peer upon themselves. Human myth is filled with lumbering creatures, not quite human but every bit an echo of our deepest fears, our vanities, our failings, our memories prone to fade in time. With Shakespeare's Caliban, the feral beast of Prospero's burden, and William Blake's depiction of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who myth says was reduced to animal madness, being only two in a long list of sub-human characters. Along with these mythic creatures the Neanderthal has achieved the status of a linguistic archetype, carrying the weight of our inhumanity when admitting our limitations is too much to bear. For a very long time after their discovery Neanderthals were named as the very embodiment of our ineptitudes. To be violent, or brutally instinctive was to be Neanderthal Neanderthals stood as a fiendish remnant of the days before language, fire or social grace, before the borders between man and nature had been breached by the gift of free-will – a gift bequeathed to us, and not to them.

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Jonathan Dee is the author of four previous novels, most recently Palladio. He is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, a frequent contributor to Harper’s, and a former senior editor of The Paris Review. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the New School.

Provocative and Prescient

The Privileges grants readers a swift and deep plunge into the private life of a fictional Wall Street couple from their wedding day through middle age. Cynthia and Adam are likeable for their witty repartee and ardent love for one another. Adam plugs away at Morgan Stanley for four years while Cynthia elects to stays home with their two young children, but neither of them discovers the deeper satisfactions they had expected from life. Adam moves on to a smaller firm run by an independent maverick investor who loves Adam like a son from the first day. Cynthia’s spirit, however, flags as their good fortune rises. “…she had fallen into the underworld of women with nothing special to do…”, which provokes Adam’s fateful decision to step across the moral boundaries of financial commerce.

It wasn’t enough to trust in your future, you had to seize your future, lift it up out of the stream of time, and in doing so you separated yourself from the legions of pathetic sullen yes-men who had faith in the world as a patrimony. That kind of meek belief in the ultimate justice of things was not in Adam’s makeup. He’d give their children everything too, risk anything for them. He knew what he was risking. But it was all a test of your fitness anyway. The noblest risks were the secret ones. Fortuna favet fortibus.

One Hour, Two Cappuccinos

Randolyn Zinn: When Lehman Brothers folded, where were you in the process of writing The Privileges?

Jonathan Dee: I was nearly finished. The timing of the book’s release was absolutely accidental. It’s kind of been a double-edged sword. I’m conscious of the fact that it helps me out, in that readers have an interest in these figures that they might not have been a few years earlier. But the reason that they have an interest in those figures is that they want to see them vicariously punished. Punished for their greed and punished for their presumed moral inferiority.

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By Maniza Naqvi

Ringed in by swirls of rope, I train for that golden fight. Without power, now, yes, yet, the night is lit up by a winking star within my reach. I stretch, I practice and I meditate. This, till Fajr’s first light. The sea breeze washes over Lyari at this time and as it comes into the Ali Mohammad Qambrani Stadium, it caresses my wet skin, the sweat cools and evaporates and my muscles ache as the heat inside me subsides. My lungs clear of the day’s petrol fumes that still burn my throat and eyes. Here in Lyari the name Qambrani means something: pride. The breeze, weightless as a fly, as soft as a feather, whispers and places a burden on me: be unique, be the one, be unparalleled, be unrivaled, be superlative. Be. That’s the cheer in every street in every alley here. Be unique! Be unique! Be without comparison! Be incomparable! Be! And I know what that means. Its meaning belongs to the poor. Be unique belongs to the poor.

A head injury may be the price to be golden to belong, to be, that way.

That’s the price for being caught in the web, the ropes of family ties, carrying on the family name, the family tradition, the family honor and pride. That’s the price of being a hero. That’s the price of limelight and being on the ropes.

Saima is afraid. She says that this will destroy my pretty face—I’ll get bruised and battered and get scars and a busted nose, lose teeth. She says if I get ugly she might not want to marry me. I know that she’s only joking.

Boxing belongs to the poor. Yes it does. Look at the conditions in which we still become champions. What would happen if we had resources? Just look at the RCD club run by the Olympian and National Coach Jan Mohammed Baloch. He also started boxing at the Muslim Azad Boxing Club back in 1959 under the coaching of the late Ustad Ali Mohammad Qambrani and became junior champion at the age of fourteen. Ustad Jan Mohammad spends his time coaching the young at RCD coaching club near Ranchore lane. Here for so many years he has produced Olympians, and national and international level boxers. He served as national boxing coach and achieved hundreds of International medals for Pakistan. He qualified for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich and represented Pakistan in the boxing tournament. Of those games in Munich he recalls the tragic event on September 5, 1972 and the gunning down of Israeli athletes. A terrible moment for everyone. And he talks about how Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was very fond of him. “Bhutto sahib often visited me and he visited our coaching camp in Hasanabdal.” Under his coaching boxers qualified for 4 Bronze medals in Bangkok and 4 Bronze in Atlanta and 5 bronze in Athens. Even now his club produces players of international standard.

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Merlin Mann is a writer, speaker, blogger, podcaster and student of the creative mind. He's the creator of 43Folders, a popular web site devoted to time, attention and creative work, as well as the man behind such varied projects as The Merlin Show, Kung Fu Grippe, 5ives, the 43Folders podcast, one-third of the crazy-successful comedy podcast You Look Nice Today, and lord knows what else. He's also currently working on his first book, Inbox Zero. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

There has rarely been a man to whom the title “productivity guru” has been applied so often who has less wanted to be called a productivity guru. What's your relationship to that label these days?

Oh, man. The thing is, if you're like me and you hear the word “guru,” you expect it to be in a headline with either “swindle” or “ponzi.” It's a tremendous compliment when people say that. I think people say that because the 43Folders web site became fairly well known for trying to help people with the same kinds of problems that I have historically suffered from. It becomes a little bit of an albatross at a point, because — I'm not sandbagging — I honestly don't consider myself anywhere near the level of expertise that would qualify me as a guru. I think the reason people like what I do — I hope — is because I'm not saying, “Here's how to be great like me.” It's like, “Here's how to hopefully suck less, like me, some days.” For the kind of stuff I'm talking about, that's pretty different than a lot of the “gurus.” I just don't want to give people the wrong idea.

How much was that the need that 43Folders tapped into when it first became really successful? How much was that honesty part of it — or what need were you tapping into with the site?

There's a couple parts. One is definitely is the timing. It's funny; there's these certain things that come along where, after it's been around a while, you start to think, “Oh gosh, that's probably been around forever.” You hear Nirvana and you go, “Oh my gosh, how have we not had Nirvana forever? It seems so obvious now.” At the time, it seemed pretty crazy to have a web site about Mac software and life hacks and personal productivity and these goofy programs like Quicksilver that I like a lot. At the time I thought, “This has got to be the most insane idea in the world.”

Different people liked the site for very different reasons. I think I really hit a zeitgeist; I was standing in the right line at the right time. The topics of attention management and wanting to deal with this feeling of being overwhelmed by information and calls on our attention became a hot topic around the time I started doing it. I think I helped contribute to the popularity of those ideas, but I think it was good timing. The voice was part of it. I think that's true for blogs; I think that's true for podcasts; it's definitely true in radio. A lot of people don't care about a topic as much as they care about the voice of the person talking about it, for better or for worse. I hope that's why people enjoy it.

When I first became a reader of your site and when a lot of my friends did, we came to it because these topics have a very broad appeal. Who doesn't want to be more productive? But I found myself virtually among your fans, and what I saw around me was a lot of guys with chunky glasses. They love Apple products and they like to write in their Italian notebooks and they care a lot about the kerning of the font Helvetica. Could you enrich this mental image I have? Who are these people?

That's interesting. So you're doing some audience segmentation? You'd say that's part of my demo?
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by Frans de Waal

Yesterday in a restaurant in Tokyo, someone at the table next to us lit up a cigarette. I asked my Japanese host if no one ever asked smokers to go outside. His answer took me by surprise: one is not allowed to smoke on the street. Inside is fine, outside is wrong. It’s the opposite of what we are used to in the West.

The point is not so much the reason for the Japanese rule (which is that a walking smoker often holds his or her cigarette at children’s eye level, hence may accidently blind a child – apparently, this has happened!), but the fact that cultural differences often baffle us. This is because we assume our own perspective to be the only one that matters or makes sense. The same applies very much to my field of primatology, which owes much to Japanese pioneers.

Today I met in Kyoto with my old friend Toshisada Nishida, who is a student of the late Jun’ichiro Itani, who in turn was the most prominent student of Kinji Imanishi, the founder of Japanese primatology. Imanishi was interested in the connection between primate behavior and human evolution well before Louis Leakey and others in the West, and had fewer inhibitions to speculate about it. In 1952, when European ethologists still worked on instinct theories and American behaviorists still trained rats to press levers, Imanishi wrote a little book that criticized the view of animals as mindless automatons. He inserted an imaginary debate between a wasp, a monkey, an evolutionist and a layman, in which the possibility was raised that animals other than ourselves might have culture. The proposed definition of culture was simple: if individuals learn from one another, their behavior may, over time, become different from that in other groups, thus creating a characteristic culture. Soon thereafter, his students demonstrated that the potato washing started by a juvenile female monkey on Koshima Island spread to other members of her troop. The troop had developed a potato washing culture. [Photo, taken by the author, shows Japanese macaques on Koshima Island are still washing potatoes half a century later.]

Imanishi was also the first to insist that observers give their animals names and follow them for years so that they understand their kinship relations. His concepts are now all around us: every self-respecting field worker conducts long-term studies based on individual identification, and the idea of cultural transmission in animals is one of the hottest topics of today. But that is now: at the time, all Imanishi got was ridicule.

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