A Review by Ahmad Saidullah

Sudipta Kaviraj. The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 299 pp. $29.50.

I. Approaching India

Written in the 1980s and 90s, Sudipta Kaviraj’s eight essays on the intellectual history of politics and culture in India, with their heavy overlay of theory, are not meant for the casual reader.

He covers various topics: the specific nature of Indian democracy; aspects of Jawaharlal Nehru's and Indira Gandhi's regimes; political culture in independent India; the construction of colonial power; the relationship between state, society, and discourse; the structure of nationalist discourse; language and identity formation in Indian contexts; the links between development and democracy; and the interactions among religion, politics, and modernity in South Asia.

In investigating the specificities of Indian history, Kaviraj who is Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia presents himself as an outsider, a social theorist wary of rushing in where “historians, the most well-informed group about colonial societies” fear to tread.

Kaviraj has been associated with marxist and subaltern approaches to studying India's social and political life. These views have challenged the historical presentation of European colonialism as the great story of the triumph of western reason, science, and modernity. This narrative of modernity influenced Indian nationalists, the writing of nationalist histories, and the developments of the postcolony itself. “The external character of modernity is inscribed on every move, every object, every proposal, every legislative act, each line of causality including the externality of the historical project,” Kaviraj notes.

Like his colleague Partha Chatterjee at Columbia, Kaviraj prefaces his essays by acknowledging the limitations of these counter-approaches. Some forms of marxist thought reduce the history of rationalism to an economistic account of extractive capitalism. Others, in their attempts to draw a picture of society, seek to bring forward “an alternative epistemology of the subaltern classes…a hard task under any circumstance but particularly difficult for intellectuals drawn from the middle class.”

He examines Indian politics through western political philosophy and the perspectives of Indian history and indigenous political thought. Kaviraj is interested in India as a cultural entity with a diverse history and culture. His work is shaped by a belief in the plasticity of Indian politics in reflecting and shaping the world in which people live. He is keen on investigating whether the concepts used by historians of all stripes are adequate for understanding the culture and politics of India.

As colonialism ruptures the self–relations of a society through time, he sets out to find fundamental histories of epistemological concepts embedded in social practices that can enable scholars of Indian society to draw legitimate interconnections between the “world, nation and self.”

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by David Schneider

I'll give one thing to the demagogues – they sure know something about basic human psychology. For those of us waterboarded by the economy, we're close to Depression desperation. It's a commonplace that depression is “anger focused inward”; and the cheap-and-easy way out, if you're too cash-strapped for the shrink or the meds, is to displace that anger outward to the nearest, easiest target.

O America, if there's anything we suck at, it's adequate self-reflection. Oh sure, we love looking at ourselves, we paragons of self-flattery on the flat screen; but thinking about ourselves (by which we mean, interrogating history) – well, that's injurious to our self-esteem. After all, we tried it a couple times: Jimmy Carter, and what the right-wing called the “politics of resentment” in the “radical left-wing” academy of the '80s and '90s. Reagan's “Morning in America,” and the Neoconservative revels after Communism's collapse, sure showed those liberal pantywaists. The power of positive thinking. Huh.

I've thought a lot about the acolytes of that cipher, George W. Bush, as the last decade broke and darkened. And I thought of my father, who, as I was growing up, could do almost anything but admit he was wrong. I thought about hard-line Communists in the Politburo, as the Soviet Union dissolved: what happens when everything you've believed in is a lie?

When the economy collapses and your phallus is your finances, you're getting kicked in the nuts. Pretty humiliating.

So you can actually feel really embarrassed, humiliated and ashamed – and pledge to reform, and actually reform – but that involves a lot of thinking, and gee, there's so much to think about already. On the other hand, you can get angry. Throw that anger away from yourself, as far as you possibly can: to the Other: socialists, terrorists, illegal immigrants, and the mythical chimaera of all three, the President of the United States of America.

In Britain, August is “the silly season”; in America, we scapegoat. It's a necessary action, according to the Old Testament – all the sins of the Israelites, placed upon a goat's head, which is then thrown off a cliff or banished to the wilderness. It's the prerequisite to Atonement, which Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck pantomimed before the giant of Lincoln, in the shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. Only then, after the scapegoat is cast out, and the ceremony of Atonement is complete, can you re-establish the Covenant, and be written into the Book of Life again, as the new Republican Pledge attempts.

Tragedy is the goat's song.

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If you have children, you have probably noticed a fascinating and common phenomenon: seemingly without instruction or reading manuals, they know more about computers and cellphones, in fact most technology, than you do. They impatiently seize controls out of your hands saying, “Let me show you how to do it.” And then, you the parent, weary and old, with too many mundane details of life clogging up your brain say, “How do you know how to do that?” Then your child, whether they’re 5 or 15, rolls their eyes and says “Duh!” Children get technology, seemingly instinctively, and they love it.

Over the last 10 months or so, I’ve ruminated in this blog on two major themes that seem, at first glance, only casually to have anything do with each other: educating children for 21st century success and children’s use of social media and technology. As it happens, I think that these two topics can and should be thoroughly integrated. We can debate the value of test taking and how else students’ progress might be evaluated, discuss the virtues of rote memorization and heavily invasive teaching methods, where most of the communication is a one-way transfer (or attempt to transfer) knowledge from the teacher to the students, but I would assume there can be little argument when I say that children, everyone really, learn best when the thing they are learning about interests them, or the teaching method is enjoyable. And there is no doubt that most children find technology enjoyable. Whether computers, cellphones or video games, these clearly engage children (and adults). So why don’t we utilize technology to better effect in education?

Most schools spends a lot of time trying to stuff facts into children’s heads and then repeatedly test to see how quickly and efficiently those facts can then be pulled out again. But we have ample evidence everyday that this is not the way children really learn; they’re curious, they explore, they experiment, they learn from each other. So why do we expend so much time, money and energy trying to educate them in these other, counterintuitive ways?

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Justin E. H. Smith

I am writing from a motel room somewhere in Indiana. The obese teenage girl who checked me in asked me where I stand in respect of today’s competition between the ‘Bears’ and the ‘Colts’, which, as I know without ever having sought to know, are two nearby cities’ football teams. When I gave her a Canadian postal code in lieu of a zip, she quickly apologized, red in the face, for her attempt at familiar chatter. Damn it, I thought, there I go othering myself again.

Now I’m in my room, there is a corn field out the window, and Every Which Way But Loose is on the TV. Clyde the orangutan just gave a biker gang the finger. Clint Eastwood, as I know in advance, is about to nail Sondra Locke. I hope you’ll excuse me if I get distracted and the narrative flow tapers off.

I am in the American Midwest for a little over a week. Officially, my purpose here is the usual one that takes me wherever I go: academic conferences. Behind this, however, there is a more personal reason: I wanted to return to the place I lived for two and a half years at the very beginning of the present century, and to see if I could make some sense out of it. There is another region of the world –the American West– that will always form the deepest stratum of my psychogeographical sense. Yet the Midwest, too, managed to leave a thin but hard crust over some of the other layers, one that doesn't get in the way of deeper digging, necessarily, but still requires its own equipment and instruments of analysis.

My last trip through Indiana, in early Summer, 2003, was capped off by an ugly traffic accident on the Interstate, as I was travelling south-southeast from Chicago to Cincinnati. The police report is something I occasionally pull out and study when I want, for some perverse reason, to relive the trauma of it. I even brought it with me for my most recent Indiana road trip. One of the witnesses, Tricia Yoder, reports the event as follows: “I seen the black car [mine] driving in the left lane and the blue car [Travis Butler’s] driving in the right lane. The blue car tried to make a suden turn in front of the black car in order to turn around on the hi-way divider to go back the other direction, even thouh the sign said ‘no’ u-turn. The black car did’nt have time to stop and ran into the drivers side of the blue car. I seen it from behind the black car.”

I hit Travis Butler, in other words, who, as I would later learn, was born in 1954 and was a resident of Pulaski County. As I inferred at the time –having, in the millisecond before impact, thoroughly studied and committed to memory the POW-MIA sticker in the rear window on the driver's side– Mr. Butler was a veteran of a certain bitter war. I hit the vet, and he got issued a moving violation on his way to the hospital. It still doesn't seem right. He was, I feel like saying, the legal cause of the collision, but I was the metaphysical cause. Like the ancient archer discussed by Bernard Williams in Shame and Necessity, it does not matter that he could not have known that a runner would be passing in the distance at the moment he let go the arrow. You can't hit someone who passes in front of you without shaking up the cosmos a bit. Our Christian, free-will-based legal system makes a distinction that our not yet fully de-Hellenized, fatalistic subconsciences can't quite accept. You can’t hit a guy without being tainted. You definitely can’t hit a Vietnam vet.

After the cars had come to their resting places on the grassy center divider, I slithered out, stunned, and walked like a zombie over to his car. Are you alright? I asked. ‘Yeah’, he said. Good, I said. I was sincerely relieved for a moment. Then I saw blood streaming from the crown of his head and dripping down, in big, fast drops, behind his left ear. He was not alright.

(Clint has just barged into the YWCA where Sondra is staying. The appearance of a man has put the young women, with their nightgowns and curlers and face creams, into a frenzy.)

The collision solved at least one problem for me: I had been looking for a way to free myself of my 1991 Acura Integra, for which I did not want to have to pay the exorbitant fee required to bring it with me on my impending move to Canada. I was in fact, at that very moment, in connection with the move, hauling nearly my entire library in the trunk, back seat, front seat, front passenger floor, glove compartment, and dashboard of my Acura. I have recently related how some of my most intense interaction with my books occur when I, on frequent occasions, have been obliged to lug them from one domicile to another, but never have my books had quite such an impact as they did that day, when, having rapidly decelerated upon hitting the Vietnam vet's car, my precious copy of volume III of Adam and Tannery's edition of the Oeuvres complètes of René Descartes, which had been resting atop of the pile on the backseat behind my head, quickly accelerated, by some law of mechanical physics that the great French philosopher himself probably discovered, and struck me in the back of the skull.

This as much as the accident itself was a cause of my utter stupefaction, so that when I forced the door open and slithered out to go check on Travis, in my state of curiously heightened alertness I was able to examine the covers of all the great works of philosophy that were spilling out onto the grassy division. There went Jan-Baptista van Helmont's De Ortu medicinae! And there's the single-volume edition of Spinoza's collected works! Why, he barely wrote anything! Any scholar who works on Spinoza should be required to memorize him by heart, I thought. And there's Shame and Necessity! What a book! What a hammer of a book!

Within a few moments the Indiana state troopers would arrive, and I recall them scratching their heads and laughing as they went around picking up the far-flung works of philosophy. I recall seeing one of them holding Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes. “Do you understand this?,” he asked me. No, I said. Not really.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

It was sunny but cool as we drove into Budapest, and I had that kind of new city buzz that you can only get from having been in transit all night. We cut across one of the many bridges over the Danube that interconnect the Buda and Pest sides of the city, and at a traffic light something caught my eye. It was a sign for a taxi bank, bright yellow, vertical like a post and uncannily designed so as to be legible from almost all sides. There’s something about that sign, I said to Nita, that captures a lot about this culture. Later on, as we walked about the city I took multiple photographs of the thing.

In its formal inventiveness it vaguely reminded me of Bauhaus signage, of El Lessitsky’s posters and perhaps Russian constructivist and Czech avant-garde designs from the early part of the last century. But in its sculptural, volumetric, 3D-ness, there was something very particular about it. The design made the most of this set of letters, which are all bilaterally symmetrical, and therefore capable of being rendered vertically. I also saw the sign as an attempt at rendering the text legible from all directions, in a way that flat signage can never be, and it was interesting that this need or desire is intimately linked to the very idea of the sign for a taxi bank. What made this possible was the rendering the forms of the letters as cylinders, cones and discs with suitable cut-outs. The letters now seemed abstracted, as if they represented fundamental mathematical operations, or else belonged in a Chinese puzzle or a game of some kind. The configuration of the arbitrary forms of the letters of the Latin script into this elegant and meaningful three-dimensional sign haunted me as we walked around the city, and I kept looking for clues as to where and how this kind of thinking had come into being.

On the way home from dinner and we came upon a giant jagged apparition at some distance, which we wondered at, in that half-light, on the diagonal. It was really hard to tell if that was a giant ball or some kind of urban sculpture or what. It was only when we came closer, and were standing right across the building that it became clear that this was an intentional play of color and form, an invitation to indulge one’s pleasure in the visual experience of geometry. I came back later and took the photograph below.

As I learned later, this is a piece of trompe d’oeil inspired by the Hungarian modernist painter Viktor Vasarely, who had so fully captured the zeitgeist by about 1973, that you would know his work by his influence on everything from poster design to album art, even if you never knew him by name.

Vasarely was associated with many of the modernists, and part of his career was spent in Paris, yet Cubism and its aftermath does not fully explain his peculiar preoccupation with the illusionistic creation of three-dimensional optical effects using color upon simple compositions of cubes. He makes paintings that are carefully crafted grids that deform at critical junctures to break into the third dimension, or Escheresque, dissolve into unresolvable contradictions. He seems haunted by riddles of dimensionality, by the folding contradiction of the three dimensions and the pull of gravity. He makes, for instance, a composition of folding chess pieces, now straight, now flat, now folding into a cube-like chess board, whose uncertain post-Euclidean space captures the observer’s mind with force, eliciting complex emotions and wonder.

Budapest is also, of course, the home of Ernő Rubik, the father of the Rubik’s Cube and sundry similar three-dimensional puzzles. Quiet and retiring, Rubik has worked as an architect, designer, and teacher of descriptive geometry in a long and singular career loudly punctuated by his sudden global fame thanks to his Cube. He is now staging a major retrospective exhibition on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his famous Cube, which is traveling around the world. Rubik’s original Cube itself has become such a ubiquitous token among children, geeks and gamers around the world, that it is hard, after all these years, to bring it back into focus: What faculties of mind and imagination does it actually represent?

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by Michael Blim

Think back to your first class in American history. It could have been in high school or in college. The opening line was probably the same: “Half of American history occurred before the Revolution. If you want to understand American history, you need to understand the colonial period.” Or words to that effect.

I recall sitting in a big, darkened auditorium, a spiral notebook and pen in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. The class was big, perhaps as many as four hundred, but the room seated perhaps twice that many, so that there was enough room to light up, smoke, flick the ash, and crush out the butt without lighting up a fellow student. Such were the necessities of undergraduate life, once upon a time.

I can still remember my dismay at the prospect of an entire semester devoted to America before the Civil War. Images of witch-burnings, buckshot, buckskins, Hawkeye and Chingachgook competed with thoughts of powdered wigs, knee britches, the Adams family and the pockmarked, wooden-toothed father of our country for my all too limited attention span. I was never too impressed with our nation’s founders, having discovered pretty early on that many of them had countenanced Indian killing and slaveholding, and that the great document they forged counted a slave as three-fifths of a person.

In fact, I did not consider during those late days of the sixties the Constitution to be such a great document at all. The Warren Court was finally fixing its inequities, and despite Justice Black’s quaint habit of carrying around a copy of the Constitution in his pocket like a legal baby-blanket, was actually making new law so sorely missing from the old. I wasn’t so keen on the constitutional set-up of government either, as Cold War presidents had become unaccountable emperors, and the two-house Congress had all but put the legislature in the hands of Southern reactionaries. Lyndon Johnson was showing how broken American government had become by subjecting the Congress for good at home and the populace for bad with war abroad. Even if you thought America’s rulers were well intentioned, Richard Hofstadter, the premier American historian in those days, was awfully persuasive in describing the national political tradition as one of cynical opportunism.

Forty years have passed since I was told to pay attention to early American history, and I finally understand why, petticoats and Pilgrims aside, it was such good advice. For it was their great concern about who should rule America that should now become ours.

Who should rule America, the revolutionary and Constitution-writing generations of American leaders asked? Should it be an aristocratic elite bred to rule by the best families of the land? Or should it be direct representatives of the people whose knowledge of statecraft might be slight but who were reflective of the popular will?

Though America’s revolutionary leaders and the constitution-writing generation comprised a highly self-conscious and well-born elite, and as Anglophile as it might have been, the fight against imperial privilege and rule has soured them on replacing a remote absolutism with one homegrown. The spurts of raw democratic radicalism inspired by the revolution motivated this elite to write what Gordon Wood in Creation of the American Republic (1969: 513) has called “an intrinsically aristocratic document.” Republican rather than democratic with state power divided among agencies to prevent direct popular rule, the elite strived in as much as possible to reserve government for itself.

But this same elite, its roots in immigration and hardscrabble made all the more obvious after the properly English-related well-born had fled the colonies with British defeat, feared the creation of a new “England” in their midst even as they attributed their own social mobility to the fact that society’s best, like cream, always rose to the top. America needed an aristocracy, they reasoned, but let it be a natural one drawn from the ranks of people like them, those whom in their conceit they decided were the best and the brightest.

And so the concept of a “natural aristocracy” was born.

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Top, And the vacuum cleaner swallows its bag. Oil on canvas, 72″ x 84″, 2010

Bottom, Shotgun Accident. Oil on canvas, 62″ x 50″, 2009

All images courtesy of Kate Vrijmoet

Elatia Harris

Kate Vrijmoet, the Seattle-based painter and conceptual artist, is having a year that Carlos Castaneda might recognize as a slice of that famous non-ordinary reality he and various sorcerers, actual and imagined, mapped in the 1960s. Nothing to do with mushrooms – Vrijmoet is the mother of three – but if non-ordinary reality is that intensely present zone only a slight shift away from one's usual life, then Vrijmoet, in her career trajectory, has been over there since about last winter.

How did the transition happen? When an artist comes into her own, it may have an aura of inevitability, but getting internationally recognized for remarkable work is, as every artist understands, not inevitable. 3QD readers know that I Iike to interview people at pivotal points in their professional lives — a writer with an acclaimed new book out, an instrument maker mastering the secrets of the great violins, a chef launching a line of fantastically authoritative blended spices. But addressing this year of Kate Vrijmoet's life in art is like trying to anatomize a whirlwind. Better to start with the supercell thunderstorns that fed into it. And thereby hangs a tale.

50 Paintings in 50 Days

In search of a school system hospitable to their highly gifted daughters, Kate and her husband John moved, in 2009, to Seattle from a farmhouse in the mid-Hudson Valley. It was the latest of many moves for the family. Perhaps moving often teaches you to be the one in charge, for there's no such thing as settling in and waiting to be found. Kate has curated opportunities for her art wherever she has gone, including tiny semi-rural communities where there is no arts scene. In a 200-year old barn near Pawling, NY, she mounted an exhibition of 50 enormous portraits of local people, painted in 50 days, with Benjamin Moore house paint on paper. It was her way of entering the community, and of creating dialogue there about art, and about being a part of its creation — a new experience for most of her sitters. She initiated them into it not only as portrait subjects, but as participants in a community-wide performance piece. The works that resulted are nothing if not painterly paintings, but they are also the record of a conceptual process — a familiar template for the artist, who always operates at several levels, using media that best expresses any given concept. As a watcher of Kate Vrijmoet (disclosure: I was her teacher), I saw these spectacularly drippy paintings, each allowed to take not more than 2.5 hours to complete, as the beginning of something big.

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By Namit Arora

Shortly before the appalling ‘Shock and Awe’ attack on Iraq, and for years after, public support for the war was high in the U.S.[1] It was evident in the high approval ratings for Bush, who had hoped that the war would turn him into a great president and American hero. As if taking a cue from the Senate, the mainstream media mostly stood united. Few even from the universities came out to protest. A great many Americans silently relished their mounting excitement.

The opening night’s attack, coolly dubbed a ‘campaign’, was broadcast live into American homes and even looked like a massively coordinated fireworks show. It would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, create millions of refugees, and cost the U.S. taxpayer over two trillion dollars. Many American politicians and commentators who had supported Bush that night, later criticized him on the grounds that they didn’t support this kind of war, one so badly executed. Bush should have sent in more troops and supplies, and planned ‘to win the peace’. In other words, they had supported an operationally smarter war.

It is not enough to argue that Americans were lied to about Saddam’s nukes and links to al-Qaeda. With the same ‘evidence’, why did most Americans support the war—even reelecting Bush in 2004—when much of the world strongly opposed it?[2] Why is it that, as the historian Tony Judt put it, ‘the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military’, where politicians ‘surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess’? War is always spoken of as an option; to be averse to it is taken as a sign of weakness. Indeed, why are the Americans so much more jingoistic today than, say, the Europeans?

I offer three reasons that I believe, taken together, provide an answer: (a) The demographics of the American military (b) Historical inexperience of war and the world, and (c) The impetus from corporate capitalism. These are not original lines of investigation by any means. My modest goal in this short essay is to develop them into my own synthesis, and hopefully provide food for further thought.

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Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor are the creators of the new men’s style web series and blog Put This On, which explores all facets of the art of “dressing like a grown-up.” Thorn is also the host of Public Radio International’s The Sound of Young America as well as the comedy podcast Jordan Jesse Go; Lisagor is also a co-host and producer of the comedy podcast You Look Nice Today. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

Jesse, you've been on the program before talking about The Sound of Young America, your public radio show, and you're also known from Jordan, Jesse, Go!, your comedy podcast. A lot of your efforts are in the center of a Venn diagram of public radio, comedy, and the internet. Would I be correct in assuming that's kind of a perfect storm of people who don't care much about style and thus are fertile ground to inspire you to create something like Put This On?

Jesse:To be fair, many of those people give careful consideration to what band t-shirt to wear each and every day.

They spend the time, but they're not spending it necessarily in the place you would prefer it?

Jesse: Yeah, they've got three Yo La Tengo shirts, and they're trying to decide between them.

Adam: There are Venn diagrams within that Venn diagram where people are coming out of the woodwork and seem to unexpectedly be concerned with style and actually know how to dress in things other than band t-shirts. To be fair. To come to their defense.

I want to get an idea of whether the inspiration came from seeing a lot of anti-style or non-style around you, or was it more like being inspired by the style you did happen to come across — if that makes any sense?

Jesse: My inspiration for creating this was very much the latter; it was very much my own interest in style. Over the past few years, there's been a community of style enthusiasts that's grown on the internet, that's made me feel there's an audience for this. When we started making these videos, one of our goals was to make something an enthusiast would love but was also welcoming to someone who was just learning. Adam, to his credit, has done a really amazing job of maintaining that tone. Not only do people who like to argue about which tie know to use like it, it's also something valuable and interesting, even to — we get a lot of e-mails from women, for example, who literally do not wear men's clothes and have no practical use for our videos. We've really found a tone that's open to everyone.

I want to figure out how you, Jesse, managed to develop your own interest in style. Take the average person born in 1980, living in Los Angeles: they're not typically all that interested in style. What factors in life brought you to this unusual interest for your context?

Jesse: I'm from San Francisco, the style capital of the West Coast of the United States, as modest a distinction as that may be. I grew up splitting my time between my parents, and my mom is very style-conscious, very much an aesthete. It's always been something I enjoyed. When I was little, when I started doing this kind of stuff, my dad was making fun of me because he remembered be being a little kid. My favorite game was “costume game,” where I would make up costumes from the weird stuff I had laying around the house. I would be a dog-knight combination. It's always been a sincere interest of mine.

The stumbling block was always finding a way to do it that did justice to the aesthetics of clothing, which is such an important part. I didn't think I could do that through what I knew how to do, audio, but I was excited to learn more and do more. When I became friends with Adam and saw how amazingly gifted he was, aesthetically, particularly in the medium of video, I was like, “Oh, I can put these two things together. I can follow this interest I have and combine it with this interest I have in making media independently.”

The way this was made independently, the way it was funded, the way it looks — this is not a low-resolution show — the way people watch it whenever they want for free — it seems to be so much a product of right now. I'll direct this to you, Adam: how long has the technological window been open? How long have these elements converged on the net to the point where something like Put This On could be possible?

Adam: That's an interesting question. I know that the short form is relatively new. The internet itself is relatively new. I would say as early as reasonably streaming video has been around, there's been demand for your five- to ten-minute video. Technologically speaking, that all converged with the available tools: computers being fast enough to edit video, cameras being cheap enough to shoot something and have it not look like complete garbage with tracking lines going through it. That all converged together about the time I was getting out of college.

It was an exciting time, revolutionary, about the same time people started shooting full feature-length movies on digital video. This is pre You-Tube, of course, but that was about the first time it made sense to make content for the web and have it be viewed in the proverbial postage stamp-sized window. We started rethinking what content for the web means, in a way. I was young enough at the time where I hadn't fully developed my set of paradigms as to what content should look like, but being a child of the eighties and nineties, most of my aesthetic is informed by commercials as much as it is by film and TV. The short form lends itself to that really well.

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by David Stark

Lights dimmed, spotlights, stroboscopic effects, and loud rock music. The camera on a large boom arm swings toward the audience who can now see themselves, clapping and cheering, displayed on one of the enormous screens above the stage. The warmup act is over and the headline performer bounds onto the set amidst frenzied applause. We are at VictoryChurch.tv, one of several megachurches that I have been studying in Oklahoma City.

In 1904, German sociologist Max Weber traveled to Oklahoma where he conducted field research, leading to an article, “Church and Sect in North America,” and his most influential book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. A century later, the megachurches of Oklahoma City seemed an appropriate setting to witness recent developments in the relationship between religious experience and contemporary capitalism.

Evangelical, non-denominational “megachurches” (defined as congregations with more than 2,000 members) are the fastest growing segment of religious affiliation in the United States. VictoryChurch.tv and LifeChurch.tv are two such Oklahoma City megachurches. Indeed, these are their official names, inscribed on large signs (complete with logos resembling the Nike swoosh or dot.com startups) reaching high above gargantuan parking lots. Each began in the mid-1990s with a handful of members. VictoryChurch, for example, first worshipped in the cafeteria of a public high school. Within a decade, weekly attendance had grown to over 6,000 (at VictoryChurch) and over 13,000 on five “campuses” (LifeChurch). They achieved such growth through an innovative recombination of the cultures of church and commerce.

The architecture of these churches is the first signal of such recombination. There are no steeples, in fact, from the street one sees no crosses or other religious symbols. After outgrowing the high school cafeteria, VictoryChurch leased space in a declining shopping center, one of the familiar “strip malls” that line the thoroughfares of most American cities. From these still modest operations (the suburban equivalent of an urban “storefront” mission church), it quickly expanded to acquire the entire retail property (80,000 square feet) just two blocks from old Route 66. From the parking lot, one sees the signage of its various facilities: a bookstore (at which one can purchase CDs, DVDs, and other materials produced by the church’s audio-visual department), a coffee shop (serving Starbuck’s registered coffee), an arts and crafts studio, and its own religiously themed “Toys ‘R Us” (with a logo that must come just short of trademark infringement). Unlike some of the other, even larger, Oklahoma City megachurch campuses, VictoryChurch does not have a gym or fitness center.

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by Michael Blim

The Democrats are running scared and triaging their Congressional majorities for salvageable seats, according to the Sunday New York Times lead story. The President may be confined to quarters, but they are going to impress Michele Obama, last seen by photo yesterday with two really nice heads of fennel fresh from the White House garden, into campaign work.

Let’s hope that the Democrats don’t send her out to talk about victory gardens. Combined with her husband’s “be patient” counsel after the bad unemployment news last week, I’d almost feel obliged to start building a Hooverville by the Washington Monument, or at least toss around a medicine ball by the White House in remembrance of one of America’s greatest humanitarians and technocrats who saved Europe from starving after the First World War, but couldn’t bring himself to save his own people from the ravages of the Great Depression.

The present occupant of the White House is no Hoover, I guess, though I do reserve the right to second-guess myself another time. After all, the President has avoided telling us that prosperity is just around the corner, which nobody believed in 1932 and no one believes now. Yet his approach to our grave economic situation seems almost as passive and bloodless as was Hoover’s.

Patience is no answer to the problem of 25 million unemployed. There is nothing on the horizon from factories to banks, workplaces and federal programs that has the remotest chance of putting 25 million Americans back to work within the next five years. The unemployed are suffering terrible damage with the promise of more. Whole chunks of people’s lives are being written off for which there is no recompense, no recovery. Some years back a sociologist compared the annual wages of people from identical backgrounds and work histories. The only difference among them is that one group had spent a year in the Armed Forces during the Vietnam War. Decades later, the one year gap in their job records had left the Vietnam veterans earning less than those who were identical to them, save for the fact that they did not spend a year of their lives fighting the Vietnam War.

Imagine the impact of this recession as it rips through people’s work lives, makes short work of people’s careers, prevents other people from starting, and diminishes their livelihoods. Imagine their lives as a series of little Vietnams. Where does patience fit in, exactly?

This Administration is running backwards. Its response grows more pallid and miniscule by the day.

Perhaps like Hoover, there are just some things it cannot bring itself to do.

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by Randolyn Zinn

“This week we are remembering things too terrible…”

Note: In the first week of September of 2001, I enrolled in the MFA graduate program in Creative Writing at the New School in New York City, excited to finish a collection of short stories set in the world of dance. A few days later, the city was thrown into chaos by the attacks on the World Trade Center, and I, like many other writers and artists, struggled to find what, if anything, was relevant in my work. Who cares, I wondered, about the vicissitudes of dancing when the world can so easily shift towards catastrophe? After much soul searching, and nearly abandoning the project altogether, I formulated a question that would sustain me through the writing of this story: Has world history and dancing ever converged? “Mera,” set a few days after 9/11, imagines a Cambodian-American teenager living in Brooklyn who learns the deeper truth of her mother’s ordeal at the hands of the Khmer Rouge nearly thirty years earlier. Sometimes, when living through unbearable circumstances, only the imagination can be trusted.

MERA

Tran is crying again. Her hands are shaking. There are things she hasn’t told her daughter.

“Turn it off,” she says, and Srey rolls the TV stand into the corner, steadying the plastic Buddha that sits on top. Channel Two is the only station left with a local signal and for the last four days has shown the same shaky video over and over: a tilting plane crashes the outline of its shape into the north tower and a fiery wound of orange flame and black smoke erupts from the gash. The next clip shows the south tower burning down. “Like a cone of incense,” Srey’s grandmother keeps saying, “but with a thousand souls inside.” Srey wants to tell Grandma that it wasn’t like that at all, but Cambodian teenagers do not disagree with their elders — at least not openly.

On Tuesday, just after it happened, large ashes like dry snow blew across the channel and settled on their Brooklyn sidewalk. Lots of papers blew over too, scraps of shredded computer printouts and numbered columns, nothing really personal except for a few torn memos with hand-written signatures, but Srey didn’t feel right about throwing them away, so she stashed them under her bed in an old shoebox.

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Novelist Joshua Cohen is the author of Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and now Witz. The new book follows the cross-country (and international, and possibly even interplanetary) journey of Benjamin Israelien, born with a beard and glasses, already nearly a grown man. After a Biblical plague on Christmas Even 1999, Benjamin becomes the last Jew on Earth. He’s first celebrated, then marketed, then turned upon. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I want to — oh god, where do I even start with this book — talk a little bit about the experience I had when I was looking up the reactions to it. Gaving read it, an experience I would characterize as being enjoyably lost in it, I found a lot of people saying things like Dan Friedman said in the Forward: “It's a shame no one will read this book.” That's what you might call damning with faint praise. Is this the reaction you've seen? I can almost not believe that's what people are writing about it.

No, that's not what I've seen. Just like the book itself is a provocation, there have been a few reviews that have sought to provoke as well. I think that was intended more as a provocation than a true statement of Mr. Friedman's beliefs, but you'd have to ask him. I've expected a lot of the responses. Some of the responses have been fear or this begrudged respect, and then, of course, there have been the good reviews that have been heartening. Book reviewing in America today is such a fraught profession where you're paid a few hundred dollars to read a book of many hundreds of pages and then reduce it to 300 words that will go through three editors and eventually find its way in a newspaper or onto a web site. To expect, three months after a book this large, a book ten years in the making, the reactions to be comprehensive or in any have intellectual depth or clarity is a little more than I would expect, and I've worked as a reviewer for years.

Indeed, and the first reaction you mentioned was fear. What is this fear rooted in?

Well, I think it's gigantism. I think people don't want to read things this long. I think people don't want to read things this verbally dense. But also, politically, the subject matter tends to frighten. People feel compromised. When you tell them you wrote a book about the last Jew in the world, they don't know how to take it. They don't know whether it's a piece of propaganda or a satire.

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By Maniza Naqvi

A woman folds her copy of the paper, looks around at all of us and exclaims: “What an evil opportunist! He was virtuous for her when she took the diamonds from him, and now he’s evil because he’s on trial at The Hague?” Then she pauses—“Well, I suppose really—what is good and what is evil are definitions simply determined by survival. It is the story of survival. No?” She shrugs, “The ones who triumph are good, the ones who don’t are evil. Our model picks the Alpha males.”

Several complementary copies of the newspaper lie untouched on the table. The front page carries the story of the war crimes trial in The Hague for Charles Taylor. The accompanying photograph shows—Jemima Goldsmith, Imran Khan, Charles Taylor, Nelson Mandela, Naomi Campbell and Mia Farrow after a dinner party thrown for a charity by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Everyone smiling congenially posing together, as though boy toys for the actress, the super model and the heiress. The super model and the actress have made appearances at the War Crimes trial in The Hague for Charles Taylor giving the proceedings glamour and an air of scandal that catches our attention more than war and crimes. And scandal sells papers. It is clear that it has been inconvenient for them to be here. They have provided conflicting testimonies about the size of the dirty diamonds and the terms under which they were gifted by Charles Taylor that evening to Naomi Campbell.

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A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson

(read Part I here)

A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South, militant ants, and the coupled fate of humans and nature—will help spark a conservation revolution.

Wilson met me at his Harvard office—a three-roomed cavern at the university’s natural history museum. “Harvard treats emeritus professors very well,” he observed. He showed me part of the world’s largest collection of ant papers, and a copy of his portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. He wore a blue/black checked shirt and slouched when he sat. His sentences were criss-crossed with asides and qualifications, and he squeezed in a few startlingly good impressions. Throughout our talk he sipped iced tea—or as Wilson, a native Alabaman, might say, sweet tea. When he spilled some on the table, he swept it onto the floor with his hand. “The difference between a book review and an interview,” he mused right before we started, “is like the difference between a handshake and a shot in the back.”

SK: In the book, was the “Anthill Chronicles” section the easiest one for you to write? [It describes a war between ant colonies from the p.o.v. of the ants.]

EW: Actually it was. I had just finished with Bert Hölldobler the book The Superorganism. And earlier I’d done many, many—well over 300 scientific papers—on ants. And with Bert Hölldobler, the two of us are about to bring out another book called The Leaf-Cutters, on these ultimate superorganisms. And now they’re one of the best-known group of species in the world in biology because they’ve become a model group to work on, at all levels, from genetics up.

Of course, that was all in my head, so I just rolled it out. And it’s authentic: how they talk to each other, what responses they have, what their cycles are, their constant wars with each other. They’re the most war-like of all creatures we know. Even more than people.

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Review of Rhonda Byrne, The Power (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010) ISBN: 978-085-720-1706.

1. The Law of Attraction

Rhonda Byrne, author of 2006 best-seller The Secret, has released its sequel. Entitled The Power, it claims further depth into the insights gleaned from The Secret. As she humbly states: ‘You don’t need to have read The Secret for The Power to change your life, because everything you need to know is contained in The Power.’

According to Byrne and her publishers, Byrne’s oeuvre (The Secret movie, released prior to the book; and various cards, sayings and other fashionable accessories) focuses on readers’ abilities to get what they ‘deserve’, using what is known as ‘the law of attraction’. According to The Secret’s synopsis by her publishers: ‘fragments of The Secret have been found in oral traditions, religions, literature and philosophies throughout the centuries … By unifying leading-edge scientific thought with ancient wisdom and spirituality, this riveting, practical knowledge will lead readers to a greater understanding of how they can be masters of their own lives.’ We become ‘masters’ of our lives by invoking the ‘law of attraction’.

To understand the law of attraction would require either a casual or a long glance at the current trend in the self-help industry. This is the factory-produced, standardised answers to questions of human betterment, which elicits a solipsistic attitude as the touchstone for all problems in the world; a tethered link between religious guilt and nihilistic dismissal, self-help gurus claim to walk this fine line over the precipice of our banal existence.

This is how they do it. The three rules of the Law of Attraction – let us capitalise the letters now – according to Byrne are the following: Ask. Believe. Receive. As Byrne says, in The Secret, it means that: ‘like attracts like. What that means in simple terms for your life is: what you give out, you receive back. Whatever you give out in life is what you receive back in life. Whatever you give, by the law of attraction, is exactly what you attract back to yourself.’ If you want good things to happen, be a good person, think positive thoughts. By doing so, you can have many things granted: if one wants a parking-space, simply ask the universe to provide it for you; if you want that career, simply ask for it, believe in it and you will receive it. By this logic, Byrne then went on to state one of the worst sentences any literate, twenty-first century individual can make. She says, in The Secret: ‘The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.’

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In my last essay “A Rational Approach to Irrationality,” I argued that not all forms of religious criticism are equally effective. Judging from the comments and blog articles posted in response, I seem to have hit a nerve. The respected evolutionary biologist and blogger Jerry Coyne took me to task in his article, “Should religion get a pass?” because he interpreted my position as going soft on religion.

In all fairness to Coyne, I wasn’t clear as to where I stood on the issue of criticism of religion. So let me set the record straight here: my answer to Coyne’s question, “Should religion get a pass?”, is an emphatic no.

I suggested that attacks on religion may not be the most effective approach to protecting secular education. And I argued that verbal abuse may do more harm than good. That I oppose all criticism of religion is an easy, but incorrect, inference. I think critical discourse is a vitally important part of a healthy society; religion merits no exemption.

I’m not surprised that my article precipitated such a passionate response from atheists, since to many it seemed to support the widespread public attitude that religion is sacred territory, and criticism of any kind is akin to a personal attack.

Which raises the question, why is it that the general public seems to think that religion should get a pass, that any kind of criticism of religious beliefs is offensive? Maybe it's because religious people feel that their beliefs are as much a part of who they are as their race or their eye color; something they were born with and can’t change. This feeling probably isn't too far off- to some extent, religious faith is not a choice. Children are born into the religious world of their parents and after years of indoctrination, religious beliefs are not easily changed or abandoned.

The importance of early childhood education is recognized by both sides of the religious debate. This is evident in the Jesuit motto “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man”. The secular movement should adopt a similar motto.

The systematic indoctrination of children is unethical and must be stopped. Strictly speaking, religious freedom is a state protected right. But I think we can agree that freedom to choose a religion can be restricted in a more practical sense. For students at a religious school, the choice is free in a legal sense. It’s not a free choice in any practical sense, since all but one of the options have been obscured. If you are only exposed to one option, you don’t have a choice.

Criticism of religion is respectful of people’s freedom to choose. Presenting facts and arguments that people can use to draw their own conclusions doesn’t in any way restrict their freedom to do so. It informs the decision. It’s a good thing.

I think Richard Dawkins sets a great example. He doesn’t stoop to personal attacks. He isn’t gratuitously offensive in speech or in writing. His recent documentary “Faith School Menace?” draws attention to the rise of faith schools in the UK. It raises important questions, like what’s best for children and what rights should children have in determining their beliefs. I suggest we follow his lead, in both the way we treat people and what we focus on.

Jerry Coyne also sets a great example. In a review of Coyne’s book, Why Evolution is True, Publisher’s Weekly said this: “Additionally, although fully respectful of those who promote intelligent design and creationism, he uses the data at his disposal to demolish any thought that creationism is supported by the evidence while also explaining why those ideas fall outside the bounds of science.

Generally speaking, I think we should pay greater attention to strategy and tactics. More specifically, I think secular education should be our top priority. To this end, non-threatening persuasion tactics may be especially useful. It will be a long battle and we should identify of our most effective weapons.

Coyne closed his response to my essay with this statement: “In the end, the arguments to go easy on religion all boil down to this claim: it’s the most common form of superstition. It’s useless to attack it because it’s ubiquitous and entrenched, and we’ll only alienate people if we try. But I need hardly point out one lesson of history: the ubiquity of bad beliefs does not make them immune to change.” I agree wholeheartedly, and real change may begin when we are able to grant every child their right to an education free from religious indoctrination.