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by David Winner

After  Giselle died, I wanted to define the role that she played in my life, an uncommon relationship, a step-grandmother.

Her existence had been presented to me by my parents as a fait accompli, an addendum to my list of older relatives: Baba and Jeta, my maternal grandparents from Prague who ran a bakery together in Cleveland, my father’s mother Faie, bone thin, friendly but extravagantly self-involved, and her ex-husband, the dour, bald Grandfather Percy who married Giselle in the early 1950s.

Giselle was the only adult that I knew by first name.  Giselle’s last name was Winner like ours, but it would have been ridiculous to call her Mrs. Winner or Grandmother Giselle as no kid had three grandmothers.

Like a breath of perfumed wind, Giselle occasionally blew into Charlottesville where I grew up.  From whence she came and to whence she returned, I don’t think that I thought to ask.

Several decades after her death when I first started visiting Christopher, her son and my uncle, in Rome in what had been Giselle’s apartment, he told me the bare outlines of her story.

There were photographs of an adolescent Giselle in 1930’s Poland, blond, ethereal, standing outside a grand house in the country.  Grace Kelly comes to mind.

When the Germans invaded, Giselle’s family found themselves in their crosshairs.  My mother wondered if they were Jews, but nothing suggested that to be true.

The Germans killed her father, her uncle, her siblings.

But Giselle and her mother escaped.  Her mother went to France, but Giselle took one of the trains that ran between Nazi-friendly territories to Fascist Rome.

In Rome, an illegal alien and perhaps a Jew, Giselle did everything that she could to survive, including, Christopher’s dark speculation, sex work. Read more »

by William Benzon

That’s a highly condensed form of an idea that began with this thought: You have no business making decisions about the deployment of technology if you can’t keep people on the dance floor for three sets on a weekday night. There are a lot of assumptions packed into that statement. The crucial point, however, is the juxtaposition of keeping people dancing (the groove) with making decisions about technology (the machine).

What did I have in mind? I was specifically thinking about the decisions currently being made about the development and deployment of artificial intelligence and the hype driving those decisions. In particular I was thinking about pouring billions of dollars in developing the infrastructure to support AI. The most prominent example is the Stargate project, introduced by President Trump in the presence of executives Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son and Sam Altman:

Really? Color me skeptical.

What bothers me is that these decisions are being made by a relatively small group of billionaire technology executives, but the resulting technology commitments will affect us all. What do these people know or care about human happiness? How does that figure into their decisions? Is it really true that more wealth for the technology sector, means more wealth and happiness for all of us?

That’s where keeping people on the dance floor comes in. Speaking as a musician with considerable experience, I know that that is not easy. I also know that, when it works, it’s the best feeling in the world. This, or something like it, is a real question. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

When I first traveled to Thailand at age 23, friends warned me that should I ever encounter the police – for any reason, whether I was right or wrong – to quickly offer them 100 baht. One friend I made during my backpacking period got in trouble for smoking a joint on the beach – marijuana being VERY illegal in Thailand at that time.

“They arrested me and I knew I had no longer than the time it would take to get to the police station to bribe my way out,” my friend told a group later. “So I asked to go to the ATM and they took me! They told me 10,000 baht [roughly $230 at that time] would be good. So I gave it to them and they let me go with a warning to never make that mistake again.”

While $230 wasn’t a small sum to a 22-year-old backpacker, it was a very small price to avoid potentially a decade in a Thai jail.

During the year I lived in Thailand, I learned it was common for businesses to pay “protection fees” to the local police. When I subsequently worked in Taiwan, I learned the same basic rules applied. In China, a little money ensured government officials stamped contracts and forms. When I lived in Bali, the police sometimes setup “checkpoints” along key roads where drivers slowed, rolled down their windows and handed cash – usually 20,000 rupiah (roughly $2 USD at that time) to an officer – not a word exchanged.

Corruption has a long history across most Asian societies.

When Singapore became an independent republic in 1965, it was no different. Only its largely British educated founders – many of whom studied at Cambridge and the London School of Economics – hated corruption. Besides the inherent iniquity of it, they understood the drag corruption places on economic development. While none are free from corruption, first world countries generally eschew graft and do their best to minimize it.

“It is sad to see how in many countries, national heroes have let their country slide down the drain to filth and squalor, corruption and degradation, where the kickback and the rake-off has become a way of life, and the whole country sinks in debasement and despair,” said Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

Unfortunately, corruption is costly to extinguish. Read more »

Reflection selfie in a road mirror of me and my wife, Margit, who is also taking a reflection selfie of herself and me in another road mirror. In Neustift, South Tyrol. The photo she took is below.

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by Rafaël Newman

The National Library of Kosovo is perched above downtown Prishtina. Built in the early 1980s and now with holdings of some two million, the complex resembles a mashup of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat with a flying squadron of geodesic domes, the whole unaccountably draped in chainmail. During the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s, the building served as a command center for the Yugoslav Army, which destroyed or damaged much of its collection of Albanian-language literature; the Library’s refurbishment and maintenance today thus signals the young Republic’s will to preserve and celebrate its culture.

Reverence for that culture—Albanian culture in general, not limited to the borders of contemporary Kosovo—is on egregious display throughout Prishtina. The library looks across at the Cathedral of Saint Mother Teresa, erected in honor of the Skopje-born Albanian nun in the postwar period; her statue and a square bearing her name can also be found further north, on Bulevardi Nënë Tereza.

Mother Teresa Boulevard ends in a broad piazza in which Skanderbeg (or Skënderbeu), the nom de guerre of Gjergj Kastrioti, the 15th-century hero of Albanian resistance to Ottoman rule, faces a statue of Ibrahim Rugova, the Kosovo-Albanian man of letters who served as the Republic’s first president during the 1990s and until his death in 2006. The piazza also features an homage to Adem Jashari, a founding member of the UÇK whose martyrdom at the hands of Serbian police, along with 57 members of his family at their home in Prekaz in 1998, is commemorated with a national memorial site, while his name has been bestowed on Prishtina’s airport and other notable institutions.

Farther down, a large portrait of Hashim Thaçi, the leader of the UÇK (Kosovo Liberation Army) in the war with Serbia, adorns a building facing the boulevard. Prishtina also features public likenesses of Bob Dole and Madeleine Albright, and streets named for Wesley Clark and Tony Blair. And there is of course Bill Clinton, under whose aegis NATO bombs drove Serbian forces out of Kosovo in 1999 and led to the establishment of the Republic. The US President’s statue, positioned slightly outside the downtown core but not far from the Cathedral and the Library, features an outstretched arm à la Lenin that ends, however, with an amicably waving hand rather than an imperious index finger.

Thus, although it has avoided the idolatrous excesses of Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, which is so populated by statues that it is reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty’s petrified court, Prishtina does feel rather like an assembly of Stone Guests—although Prishtina’s tributes to Albanian folk heroes stand alongside American counterparts, rather than the Slavic heroes immortalized in Skopje. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Charles Siegel

The dishonest and cynical way in which RS 5000 was tested and marketed reflected a culture within Celotex stretching back to at least 2009.

That was a key finding of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s “Phase 2” report, released on September 4, 2024. The finding appears at the beginning of a long, meticulous examination into the acts and omissions of Celotex, Ltd., the company that manufactured the insulation used in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower in London, which burned in a catastrophic fire in 2017. The report led to outrage in the press and among victims’ groups, and to terse denials by Celotex.

It was a damning indictment.  But to anyone familiar with Celotex, it was ruefully laughable.  Celotex, Ltd. had begun its corporate life nearly a century earlier, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of an American company of the same name.  And this American Celotex had displayed precisely the same dishonest and cynical attitude toward the users of its products, and indeed toward its own workers, for many decades.  Tens of thousands of them had died as a result of that corporate culture. The horror of Grenfell was but a gruesome, if entirely foreseeable, coda to this ghastly history. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

I know teachers who imagine the tune is what they have on repeat in hell, but I myself am strongly pro-Kahoot. If (like me) you were born too early to have your own school experience center around a large screen, and (unlike me) you have one of those boring non-teaching jobs, a brief explanation is in order. Kahoot is an app that lets you ask multiple-choice questions on your class screen, and have students answer them on their own devices to earn points. With its bright colors and  some other bells and whistles, it hits a sweet spot in the teenage brain that magically makes it care about getting mathematical terminology right. It’s the best thing.

Or perhaps the best thing is actually Blooket. A self-paced quiz app, where getting questions right can give you the edge in a larger game in which you are trying to catch fish or steal crypto from your classmates. To get a genuine sense of what playing a Blooket is like, you will have to wait until Generation Alpha starts producing its own great literature. My own grasp of the different game modes is primarily inductive, based on the yelps and cries of my students rather than on first-person experience. I agree with my colleagues that ‘Café’ works well, but only if you can give enough time. Else, students complain their investments don’t pay off; they get to upgrade different breakfast ingredients to higher levels, you see, in order to make more money.

These apps embrace an important fact about school life, namely that students and teachers don’t want the same things at the same time. Though in the end we are all interested in demonstrating that learning has happened, some teenagers apply a steeper discount function to that outcome than I do. Gamifying ‘kahootable’ skills is one way of harmonizing our short-term aims. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Crystals in Monochrome. Harlem, February, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Note: This is Part 2 of my Umrah Travelogue. Link to Part 1: “Here I Am, Labbayk”: A Travelogue

Everywhere you turn there is the face of God (Surah al-Baqarah, 2:115)

At the Ka’ba, you spiral the great Oneness, now drifting closer, now farther, keeping your gaze centered, raising your hands to your lips and sending a kiss in the direction of “Hajar-e-Aswad” or the “black stone” when you turn its corner. You understand that this stone or any other stone is as much in service of the One as every single being in creation— from an atom to a galaxy-cluster, that the Ka’ba’s alignment with the sacred throne (“bayt al mamoor”), and your alignment with it when you offer prayers far away, is but a mercy that aids your faith, for God’s face is everywhere. You are asked to witness Oneness here as a Oneness of faithful hearts. In the millions. Yes, here you are sublimely inseparable, and sublimely solitary, much as you were in the womb. This is the land of spiritual gestation and birth; it teaches you the meaning of faith via the exiled heart, first in the tradition of Hajar/Hagar (AS), then, Muhammad (PBUH). Your teachers— men and women among them—gather insights into these Prophetic bearers of Divine “Rahma” (Merciful Love), a corollary of “Rahm” (womb), and you learn to discern the imprint of the sacred feminine in all beings.

Makkah feels every bit the desert you imagined, despite modern conveniences such as air-conditioning, shuttles and cold water. Not much vegetation as far as the eye can see, only some hodge-podge Western-style buildings that rim the holy sanctuary, bringing to focus your own exiled heart, exhausted body, and a mind that fails to compute the brutality of the times. Everywhere you turn: a Quranic verse that holds you in its embrace. What embrace could be wider, more majestic or comforting than the Divine mirror that is reflected in all creation, even in its harshest, most confounding, painful aspects. The ayat points to the Cosmic Qur’an; everything in time, space and dimensions beyond perception, is an “ayat,” a “verse”, a “sign.” Read more »

The writer died while mixing with the rebels, these are
natural accidents of war . . . —Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco

The country has to toughen up … part of the problem is nobody
wants to hurt each other anymore, right? —US president, Donald Trump

The Last Days of Federíco García Lorca

Federico in pajamas and blazer died at night
wearing the sudden-death clothes of a poet killed
because there’s nothing more dangerous to despots
than an artist who tells the day’s truth simply
because some force within insists.

Accepting death for being one’s self
is life’s condition of being one’s self
because to speak is to be.

This condition applies to all in all times
because nothing ever changes the insistence of love
& witness under any sky or sun.

Although the atmosphere of eras & place swings from
heaven to hell on a dime before the head-count has time
to blink, and because the intractable who paint “Guernica”
or write “Canto Libre” or “Satanic Verses”
(artists who dare) could well end with bullet-through-skull
because, to a despot, silence is golden (long-lived or brief)
because despots know that painters and poets,
sculptors and dancers will always speak
from momentary possession
because they’ve found the straightway
to the brainsoul of human-kind,
the place despots only enter
by means of fear & blood
which always mocks
the divine

Jim Culleny, 3/7/19 rev-2/22/2025

“head-count” meaning, “the people”,
during the period of the Roman Empire.

Federíco García Lorca

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by Nils Peterson

A Memorable Fancy I

On the last day of the year, I think about the very first day.

One early morning a Minnesota friend turned his iPhone towards his Minnesota window and we saw snow and a grove of slim, bare trees. He’d been singing, so music was in the air and looking at the beautiful scene I remembered the song, “Morning has broken like the first morning” and I found myself wondering if this is what the first morning looked like.

We think of Eden as summer, everything in bloom, everything perfect and perpetual. A naked Adam and Eve parading around comfortably in their skin suits with navel or without depending on the artist, but suppose the first morning was like this one in Minnesota though the trees, unlike the ones outside my friend’s window, would not have lost their leaves – they would not yet have gotten them. Our hibernating friends, bears and moles say, would be created asleep in their caves or little hollows beneath the new trees. They’d soon awaken for the first time – and the seeds and tubers would begin to stir to their unfolding, to the finding out their size, their shapes, their colors – what they’ll be when they grow up – fruit, flower, vegetable – the creation a child of time, not a creature of eternity.

Adam and Eve came wholly finished later. They entered time without growing into it. Maybe that was their trouble, our trouble, that separation. Also, God told them it’s better not knowing, indeed, ordered them not to know. Perhaps He/She was thinking ahead to Thomas Gray’s line, “Where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be wise.” but we chose knowing, we chose folly, marvelous folly, and have learned much, but we have not yet chosen wisdom. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I’ve most recently read, including upcoming titles.

I’m a sucker for a certain type of European novel, or if not actually European, something that trades in all of those connotations of that continent, of that word. Specifically central European and eastern European settings, perhaps because of some deep ancestral affinity for that borderland between the occident and orient, a place of beets, carraway seeds, and sour-cream, of gnarled primeval forests and grey rivers, of craggy ominous mountains or lonely sunflower covered steppes, massive brutalist apartment blocks and picturesque little Medieval hamlets of onion domed churches and red-tiled roofed homes. For that reason, this past year I’ve continually drifted towards either novels from folks originally from the Balkans, Poland, Russia, or I’ve read American imaginings of that broad inchoate land bordered by the Adriatic and the Bosphorus, the Black Sea and the Baltic, along the banks of the Danube or the Volga.

Daniel Mason’s 2018 The Winter Soldier was a particular type of eastern European story, an epic war account from the perspective of introverted Austro-Hungarian medical student Lucius, a scion of Viennese society from noble Polish stock who is unfortunately sent as a medic to the homeland of his forefathers on the eve of the Brusilov Offensive. My introduction to Mason was this past summer, when I read Northwoods, his brilliant, polyvocal, magical realist, slightly gothic, maximalist account of American history from the colonial era through to the near future all as focalized through a single western Massachusetts house in the woods, a character its own right. The Winter Soldier, in an envious display of Mason’s tremendous talent, is a profoundly different book.

Effectively a realist novel in the vein of a Boris Pasternak more than the Thomas Pynchon on display in Northwoods, Mason’s earlier attempt is a novel of the Great War, with accounts of charging Cossacks and rationing in Vienna, of railroad stations filled with fleeing refugees and of cruel Hussar officers. There is, of course, a love story (and a mystery) as well, Lucius inevitably falling for the nun who works alongside him as a nurse, but it is heartbreakingly depicted, with sentimentality but no schmaltz. Beyond that, however, Mason has written an indelibly effecting account of medicine, as Lucius is forced to develop from a shaky student in the distant cosmopolitan capital into a frontline emergency physician treating soldiers whose minds and bodies have been blown apart. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

Comic horror’s fundamental lesson is that the world is not what it looks like. This thought is given particularly sharp expression in John Langan’s The Fisherman:

‘When I look at things – when I look at people – I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid…All a mask…and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask? If I could break through the mask, if I could make a fist and punch a hole in it…what would I find? Just flesh? Or would there be something more…Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us.

The speaker here is in grief after his entire family was killed in a traffic accident, and there is a sense that only such large dislocations can jar us out of a sense of the reality of the world around us. There is another sense, however, in which this dislocation is a fundamental condition of modernity. A person in the Middle Ages could stand on a still, firm platform and watch the universe revolve around her. It was obvious the platform was solid and still – she wasn’t moving, was she? – and from that fact many other conclusions could proceed. (This is, of course, a vast over-simplification of the medieval worldview, which, for one thing, very much did believe in non-terrestrial realities. But it remains the case that for a large part of human history the route from perception to conclusion was reasonably short.) Now, not only must we accept that we are, in fact, travelling at tremendous speeds in various directions relative to other objects, but we also do so through space that is curved, though time that slows down the faster we go, and, thanks to quantum mechanics, upon a platform where “solidity” does not mean what we expect. The winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022 won “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” The actual meaning of this is beyond most people – it certainly is beyond me – but the net result is that now one may approach the oracle Google, ask whether the universe is “locally real,” and receive the answer, “No.”

When Kamala Harris, in August of 2024, began calling Trump and his base “weird,” it resonated first and foremost through the intricate codes of behaviour MAGA has indulged itself in. “Let’s go Brandon,” wearing diapers and massive ear-bandages, and the bizarre religious fetishism for a man who is in no way Christ-like, all contributed to the idea that Trump’s supporters had become, as was and is commonly said, “disconnected from reality.” Much of this may, in fact, be derived from the online world where a good deal of Trump’s support originates; to be strange is the simplest method by which to weed out the normies. This sort of political coherence is hard to come by; even so, Trump’s response was, as is common with him, reflective in the sense that he merely threw the insult back: “They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.” “I think we’re the opposite of weird, they’re weird.” And, an increasingly long time ago, at the moment of the Sixties counterculture that gave rise to the modern Democratic party, they were weird.

So MAGA is weird, and their cultural and political opponents are weird. Are they weird in the same way? Read more »