by Jen Paton

There are, according to Randall Henderson, founding editor of Desert Magazine (1937-1985), two deserts in the American imagination. One is full of “venomous reptiles and unbearable heat…it is the desert visualized by those children of luxury to whom any environment is unbearable which does not provide all of the comforts and services of a pampering civilization.” This is “fostered by fiction writers who dramatize the tragedies of the Desert for [their own] profit.” By contrast, the real desert, as Henderson saw it, “offers rare gifts: health giving sunshine — a sky studded by diamonds — a breeze that bears no poison” to those who come “in friendliness and understanding.”

There is, of course, only one desert, equally full of comfort and danger, plenty and lack. Its gifts – that diamond sky is real – are for everyone, but its history shows all America's small scars.

Back in 1936, Henderson saw an opportunity to serve the culturally under-served citizens of the American Southwest. The people of the desert deserved a magazine of their own, he wrote in his first editor’s note – a note that reflects the cultural nervousness and occasional defensiveness that infects the Western mind:

Henderson hoped his magazine would “preserve a culture of arid…but virile…America.” An ad from the December 1964 issue describes the ways to enjoy the desert: as collector, traveller, adventurer, history buff, or nature lover.

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As dust and gas swirls around the black hole
matter compresses causing it to glow.
Scientists can only see the outline of the black
hole, also called its shadow. –Physorg.com
.

Seeing a Black Hole or Bouquet of Altroemeria

First you must know
that shadows glow

Circling the shade of nada
(the thing that can’t be seen)
the stuff of anything will gleam
incandescent as a candle
round the outline
of a vase upon a table

whose cache of blossoms tantalize
every eye that grasps:
these things of brilliant burgundy
are shades of shadows cast
which cast of blossoms tantalize
every eye that grasps:
these things of brilliant burgundy
are not the stuff that lasts
which passing blossoms tantalize
every eye that grasps:
these things of brilliant burgundy
will not be fastened fast
.

by Jim Culleny
1/17/12

by James McGirk

“The most masculine of cats,” tout defenders of the breed, and they are indeed rugged, solid creatures who look as if they ought to be de-mousing a lighthouse on the stormy coast of Maine rather than sprawling on the settee. That is, after all, what they were probably bred for. Picture a cat, a large one, with tufted ears and a lumbering gait and a cheerful disposition; a coat with an undercoat of insulation, and oversized paws fit for trampling snow or scurrying up a tree trunk. Drooping whiskers, a propensity to sprout extra toes on his feet, an unusually expressive tail, and a dour, owlish expression that is almost a pout complete the Maine Coon, a creature on the cusp of entering America’s national pantheon of icons.

The Maine Coon is fast approaching the status of charismatic megafauna like orcas and eagles and howling white wolves. No other breed of cat has starred in so many viral videos, has inspired so many airbrushed t-shirts or so many wretched – and even a few not-so-wretched – tchotchkes as the Maine Coon. A search for “Maine Coon” returns 56.4 million search results, while its longhaired cousin the Persian returns only 8.1 million and the Abyssinian returns a mere 3.4 million. The Coon’s combination of rugged looks and an undeniably goofy disposition seem thoroughly plugged into that folksy vein of Americana that generated Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox Babe. There is also an almost mystical air to the cat’s provenance.

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by Hasan Altaf

The set design of Mariano Pensotti's El pasado es un animal grotesco (“The Past is a Grotesque Animal” — the title comes, according to Pensotti, from a song by the band Of Montreal) seems at first just a conceit, one of those clever tricks that make a play experimental or avant-garde: The stage is occupied almost entirely by a large, circular platform, partitioned into four quarters, that revolves constantly throughout the performance. The scenes play out in one quarter at a time, for as long as it takes that sliver to disappear from view (the speed seemed variable). The platform works perfectly, even, once it becomes familiar, unobtrusively – the actors never seem dizzy, running from one section to the next without a pause; the sets of each room are changed, added to or subtracted from quickly, out of our sight – but, more importantly, the platform is not just a way of earning avant-garde brownie points: The audience realizes quickly that it is in fact a symbol that works on many levels to encapsulate and heighten the drama.

El pasado, which I saw at the Public Theater in New York, focuses on the lives of four young Argentinians from 1999 to 2009, as they move from their twenties into their thirties, from being very young to less so – in the playwright's words, El pasado depicts “the moment one stops being who one thinks one is to become the person one is.” The rotating platform is an obvious metaphor for time passing, both personally and globally: With each revolution, the characters move forward into the future, away from what they used to be and towards what they will become, and the world moves forward, too, away from the past and into the unknown. The partitions of the wheel also suggest a clock, the quarters of an hour, which works will with the format of the play – each scene, prefaced by the date, presents a discrete moment in the life of one of the characters. Credit for making this device work so smoothly belongs both to Pensotti, who wrote and directed the play, and particularly the actors, who seem completely at ease, as if the ground were not quite literally shifting beneath their feet.

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by Kevin Baldwin

About a year ago I began thinking about a host-parasite system that I could set up in a lab, that would be inexpensive to maintain and would provide opportunities for undergrads to get their fingernails dirty. I consider myself to be more of a field biologist, but with family obligations and the long winters and unpredictable weather in the midwest, I needed a lab system that would be available year round. After mucking about in the literature for a while, I decided to look at a group of parasites called gregarines that typically parasitize insects.

Gregarines belong to a group called the Apicomplexa that includes parasites of medical and veterinary importance like Plasmodium, the causative agent of malaria; coccidia, a cause of nasty diarrhea in vertebrates, and Toxoplasma, a mind-altering organism that can also have dire effects on fetal development. By virtue of relatedness, better understanding gregarines might give us insight into some of the greatest scourges of mankind.

Gregarines also infect worms, crustaceans (e.g., shrimp, crabs, barnacles, and krill) and molluscs. Their epidemiology could be important for aquaculture and mariculture of these organisms). Given the success of arthropods (which include insects and crustaceans) and mollusks as groups, it is probably worth understanding as much as possible about organisms that parasitize them. You could make a case for gregarines being the most successful group of organisms known. Of course this kind of success attracts attention and gregarines can in turn be hyper-parasitized by another group, the microsporidia (but that's another story,…).

As single-celled animals go, insect gregarines can be huge and are frequently visible to the naked eye. The first time I opened the gut of a roach, the gregarines spilled out like bowling pins (Strike!,… A good omen to find them on the first try. Talk about reading the entrails,..). The parasite's life stage in the host's upper gut is called the trophozoite or “troph” for short. They feed and grow here. When they mature, the trophs mate and produce an (American) football-shaped gametocyst, which is shed in the insect's feces. Additional rounds of reproduction occur inside the gametocyst and the results is that hundreds of spore-like oocysts are extruded into the environment (like beads on a string), that can in turn infect new hosts. The strands are barely visible to the naked eye, resembling very fine lint.

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by Julia Galef

You probably won’t be very surprised to hear that someone decided to reboot the classic 80’s My Little Pony cartoon based on a line of popular pony toys. After all, sequels and shout-outs to familiar brands have become the foundation of the entertainment industry. The new ‘n improved cartoon, called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, follows a nerdy intellectual pony named Twilight Sparkle, who learns about the magic of friendship through her adventures with the other ponies in Ponyville.

But you might be surprised to learn that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’s biggest accolades have come not from its target audience of little girls and their families, but from a fervent adult fanbase. I first heard of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic from one of my favorite sources of intelligent pop culture criticism, The Onion's AV Club, which gave the show an enthusiastic review last year. (I had my suspicions at first that the AV Club’s enthusiasm was meant to be ironic, but they insisted the show wore down their defenses and that it was “legitimately entertaining and lots of fun.” So either their appreciation of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is genuine, or irony has gotten way more poker-faced than I realized.)

And you might be even more taken aback to learn that many, if not most, of those adult My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fans are men and that they've even coined a name for themselves: “Bronies.” At least, I was taken aback. In fact, my curiosity was sufficiently piqued that I contacted Purple Tinker, the person in charge of organizing the bronies’ seasonal convention in New York City. Purple Tinker was friendly and helpful, saying that he had read about my work in the skeptic/rationalist communities, and commended me as only a brony could: “Bravo – that’s very Twilight Sparkle of you!”

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by Akim Reinhardt

When is role playing an innocent expression of playfulness, and when does it cross over into a form of unconscious catharsis that is born of and reinforces either personal psychological trauma or problematic social norms?

Role playing is something we do from a very early age. Pretending to be someone else, particularly an archetypal grown-up, is a staple of childhood play. Two common examples of childhood role playing show how it can be both innocent and highly loaded, even (or perhaps especially) among children too young to really understand what they are doing.

The first example is the classic kids’ game of Cops and Robbers. To me, this seems an obvious case of innocent role play. Has a parent ever worried that by playing the role of a criminal, their small child is prepping for a future as a career felon? There is an obvious social subtext to the game, ostensibly teaching children that crime is wrong, but only the squarest of nosey sticklers would become alarmed if the extemporaneous script developing in the backyard occasionally ends with the bandits getting away with it once in a while? After all, it’s just play.

But then there is the other classic role play game of American children: Cowboys and Indians. This one is much more problematic. Well, not for the kids, of course. To them this is no different than Cops and Robbers. It’s just two groups, one them highly favored, the other one an underdog and a bit of a scoundrel, and off they go to horse around in the summer sun. But the subtext of this game is far more insidious. It serves to reinforce the imperial mythologies that have dominated American culture since its inception. Regardless of which team wins one improvised fracas or another, this role play is reinforcing ideals just as much as Cops and Robbers. But instead of the innocuous lesson of “criminals are the bad guys,” Cowboys and Indians teaches children too young to really understand that America’s Indigenous peoples were supposed to “lose” to Europeans and their descendants.

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So we're two GOP primaries down
But don't worry, don't pout, snarl or frown
The fun won't end soon
Still so much to lampoon
South Carolina, the circus' in town!

Mitt, Newt, Ron, Rick one and Rick two
For today we bid Huntsman adieu
Who does God love more?
Well clearly no one who's poor
At least that's the creed of this crew

If God's summoned each one to this calling
Did he just want to laugh at their brawling?
I may doubt that he's real
But this atheist can feel
That if not, he'd find these guys appalling

Which one is the worst hypocrite?
Is it wetback-hiring Mitt?
Or thrice married Newt
Who really should have stayed mute
When Bill Clinton's infidelity hit

I confess that I do miss Herman Cain
That was sure just a wacky campaign
But I don't need to fret
Now it's Mitt's turn to sweat
As he tries to back pedal from Bain

So South Carolina as you go into vote
And decide on which of these fools to dote
Just remember this thought
Your vote's really for naught
“Big Money”, that's all she wrote!

by Sarah Firisen

by Joy Icayan

“You have the advantage of youth, use it to win.”

An old remembered advice from an old job. That was years back, just post college and unsure of what we were doing, trying to sell products whose own reasons for existing eluded us. Someone was always trying to do something else—trying to rekindle a band or the armed revolution. I was trying to write stories and poetry. But one writes what one knows, so in one of my stories a man is trying to save his brand image. I tried to make sci-fi, George Saunders like, but I’m no George Saunders. In my stories the characters are always speaking in corporate jargon—your rebranding is not working, our consumers relate our fast food label to pictures of dead cows! Or resorting to suicide or murder, which was often the easiest thing to do in case of non-functional characters. In the mornings, my boss gently told me I didn’t understand how desire led to action and to revise the slides.

The truth is, we were massively bored, bored in the manner of the ill fit young, middle class in a developing country—educated, earning enough for rent and expensive coffee and independence—when our idea of revolt was attacking the human resources office for imposing stupid regulations like Skirt Mondays. We revolted against Skirt Mondays, and we revolted when they prohibited miniskirts. We were always finding something to fight for or against. It felt good to be fighting against something.

There’s a game children play when they’re bored in traffic—make words out of license plates. At some point you do enough of these and you develop a talent for finding words where there are none. So the man who comes on Wednesday nights in a motel near my apartment, the man who drives an SUV is RAFT (Plate Number RFT). I’ve become his personal documentor; no one has documented his comings and goings as I have and I feel we’ve formed some sort of connection, as one way as it is. When he doesn’t come, or I’ve missed him, I feel a bit unaccomplished.

In my head, he has a wife somewhere who has a conventional name like Sara or Lisa. This isn’t the same woman who rides in the passenger seat, window always open, arm perched on the door. I’ve caught sight of her more than the man; she looks bored all the time.

I don’t know what their deal is or what it is with Wednesdays. I imagine the mirrors, wall and ceiling of the rooms they’ve gone in. They touch the rooms where a hundred others have come in, and leave traces others would soon erase.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Monsters lurk in the artificial paradises that mathematicians construct for themselves, swimming, slouching and fluttering into view from the corners of the imagination. These strange beasts – odd constructions or unexpected consequences of axioms – trouble the mathematical mind and threaten to expel the mathematician into chaos. By embodying the limits and the peculiarities of the concepts we use they force us to clarify, to draw distinctions where none had been drawn before, and to interrogate which objects we may meaningfully speak of and which properties we can assume. They also serve as a fascinating and wondrous gallery of the oddities of the mathematical universe, reflecting elegant and treacherous subtleties in their construction. Many mathematicians collect menageries of counterexamples and unusual cases, much as a naturalist might display upon returning from some distant continent.

A number of these emerge from the delicate structure of the number line, and the ideas of infinity and continuity that follow. One of the first and best-known is the square root of 2, along with the (probably apocryphal) story of the trouble it caused the Pythagoreans. Unlike most of the numbers we normally encounter, the square root of 2 cannot be written as a fraction (the ratio of two integers – what a mathematician would call a rational number)¹. Allegedly the Pythagoreans, driven by their number mysticism and belief in a cosmos governed by whole numbers and their ratios, tried to keep this discovery a secret, going so far as to execute a member for revealing it to the outside world.

In fact, the situation is much worse. Not just most, but effectively all of the real numbers (the numbers on the number line; the numbers that can be written with possibly infinite decimal expansions) cannot be written as fractions. The numbers that we deal with everyday, numbers like ½, ¼, 5 and so on, are an infinitely small proportion of the total, lost in a host of numbers that we never dream of. This realization is the entry into the strangeness that is the real number line, and is a glimpse at the long attempt to grapple with and understand infinity and continuity.

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Expect nothing and nothing
will come bearing something
—sure thing

Sure Thing

This is how the world began:
expecting nothing

but see how something
(a blazing ball
caroming off the tip of Kepler’s cue)
breaks the horizon
trailing a passionate veil of crimson light
which sets the sea afire with fierce luminescence
and me with fierce delight

this is how it is:
the earth, without expectation,
became a seething knot of azurite,
its nourishing greens and blues
spun from the cornucopia of nada
as if nothing’s empty store
were a well of even more

this is how it was:
I sat upon a diner stool
elbows on the countertop
forearms straddling my book
like the legs of that Colossus
astride the harbor door of Rhodes
scanning the sea for future ghosts
and you came with carafe and side of toast

and nothing—
nothing expected could compare
with your unanticipated eyes
and chestnut hair

by Jim Culleny,
12/31/11

by Liam Heneghan

A short note in which I conjecture on a potentially vast local extinction event of Midwestern soil organisms especially of those inhabiting the leaf litter of woodlands.

In our evolutionary progression humans scrambled from the leafy treetops about half way down the length of the trunk. We now live perched between treetop and root ball on that convenient platform we call the soil. If physicists can give themselves vertiginous shivers by imagining those empty atomic spaces that constitute the seeming sturdiness of ordinary things then it is surprising that soil ecologists ever leave their homes knowing as they do how vastly crenulated, fissured, fractured and porous is the soil.

Ours is the exceptional ecological enterprise since more organisms live in the soil in those porous and interstitial lodgings than on the soil. We are not directly equipped for flight, we rarely burrow, we are condemned to walk upon the dirt until at last we may complete our descent into the ground, toppling into that large furrow excavated for our remains. A soil pore will have us after all.

If we had been just a little smaller and had migrated just a little further down the length of that primordial tree we’d be living in one of the most biologically diverse and ecologically active compartments of the biosphere. The upper ten centimeters or so of soil teems with living things. The organisms living in Earth’s thin and hyperactive rind are phylogenetically diverse, trophically heterogeneous, functionally assorted, highly variable in size, dissimilar in longevity, variegated in morphology, behaviorally divergent, adapted to different soil horizons, disparately pigmented, but are united in their reliance on death. Specifically, soil organisms are all similar in that they feed on detritus (i.e., dead organic matter). As I discussed in a recent column, collectively the action of these organisms within detrital-based food webs results in the breakdown of dead organic matter and the mineralization of organic compounds that makes key nutrient available to the living.

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by Misha Lepetic

There are only two kinds of freedom:
your freedom to do what you like, and
our freedom to determine what kind of a society we want to live in.
~Gerald Frug

One phenomenon that the Occupy Wall Street movement has crystallized in remarkable fashion is the unapologetic negotiation of the physical occupation of urban space. But before considering the context within which OWS has been operating, and what its successes and challenges may be, it is instructive to look into the deeper history of public space in New York. While some observers have examined how the spatial reality of the city, as presently constituted, influences the ability of its citizens to assemble and, implicitly, protest, I would submit that said spatial reality is really a symptom of not just physical geography, but also the landscape of legal precedents, political negotiations and accretions. This is an enormous – and enormously interesting – topic, so I will attempt to limit my remarks to the history of New York as seen through its street grid, its negotiation of what appear to be rights, and the intersection of political and commercial reality.

Thus it is a timely coincidence that 2011 marks the anniversary of the original “grid” plan, as conceived by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. Prior to its adoption by New York, street-grid planning had already had a long history – consider, among others, Francisco Pizarro’s original plan for Lima, Peru, conceived in the mid-16^th century. The grid was seen by planners as an attractive alternative to the messy results of “organic” growth, that is, growth that lead to narrow alleys, winding streets and tortuous property claims. Such bottom-up density also made the broader provision of services difficult, and seemed to encourage the spread of disease and crime. Thus an authoritative master plan was the perfect means to sweep away the accumulated social and economic flotsam and jetsam that came with the decades of thousands of citizens scrapping and scraping for economic survival/prosperity over decades. (This tendency to overly treasure the act of tabula rasa continues to manifest itself today, most frequently as usually disastrous slum clearances in the cities of the developing world).

However, these same planners were confronted with a dilemma: by creating cleaner city layouts, the same designs that encourage mobility, commerce and interaction may, at the same time, encourage unwanted assembly, whereby citizens congregate in order to air grievances, hold strikes and generally foment the kind of unrest that might bring down a government. It is one thing to be all in favour of freedom of assembly or expression, but quite another to embody those rights within the built environment itself, no matter (or especially) what UNESCO might hold dear.

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by Colin Marshall

Pedro Almodóvar’s overarching project, spanning three decades and counting, makes the most sense to me as the redemption of the soap-operatic. I see it in his films’ bright colors; in their plots driven by the sturm und drang of love, death, and betrayal; and in their besieged women who balance a certain noble endurance with a hint of trashiness. (Over time, the noble endurance has taken the edge over the trashiness.) Watching the entire Almodóvar canon, my brain files each movie as one episode of a single, melodramatic story, albeit a complicated, ever-shifting one which begins in extremity and will surely end in relative mildness. While the filmmaker doesn’t encourage this way of thinking — characters from one film don’t seem acquainted with characters from the others, though my, what notes they’d have to compare — neither does he discourage it. Formal, thematic, visual, and even verbal echoes resonate across his pictures, and in The Flower of My Secret, a few of them crash right up against each other.

Almodóvar builds the film around Leocadia Macias, known to her public — and to her public, only — as romance novelist Amanda Gris. Frustrated by a emerging dissatisfaction with her literarily unchallenging racket, a military-strategist husband who’s grown both emotionally and geographically distant, and the unquenchable aphrodisiac side-effects of one of her medications, Leo lets Amanda Gris’ novels go bleak. Bleak in a way, in fact, that meets the standards of Pedro Almodóvar pictures, although Leo’s sensibility, as reflected in an article she anonymously publishes against Amanda Gris’ latest opus, may have permanently taken this turn toward the Almodóvarian. Her life then takes its own swerve in the same direction.

Man thievery, drug addiction, crime, attempted suicide, family squabbles, a retreat to the village, difficulties with the maid, sudden revelations of artistic potential: Almodóvar’s followers, among whom I count myself, have come to expect all these developments from him and more. This film delivers them without doubt or hesitation, but some smell in it a whiff of the bitterness of an auteur chafing against his reputation. “We have the materials here for a comedy, but not the willingness,” Roger Ebert writes, “and gradually the awful suspicion dawns that Almodóvar himself, like Leo, is tired of his success and despairs that his producers will ever let him do something ‘serious.’”

I would hesitate to declare any Almodóvar movie “serious,” just as I would hesitate to declare any Almodóvar movie “not serious.” Like soap operas, they first allow you to approach them as inconsequential fluff, and then they plunge their characters into an exaggerated drama whose stakes quickly become everything. A genuine soap still allows the discerning viewer the opportunity to write the thing off for its cheap, hazy look and the profusion of artifacts of its rushed production. Cutting crisply, designing with deliberate solidity, and cultivating a host of the classical cinematic qualities, Almodóvar offers no such escape hatch. If you can’t accept the story’s grave oscillations at the same time as the storyteller’s brazenness, aestheticism, and brazen aestheticism, you’ll have to reject his entire enterprise.

Hence my suspicions about whether Almodóvar truly feels pangs of regret over squandering his creative will in a league of ambition alongside soap operas and romance novels. Over and above breathing weight and body into the flimsy materials he shares with those forms, he introduces a kind of complexity they’ve rarely known. Extending almost involuntarily over decades and decades, the long-term continuity of soap operas and romance novels inevitably grows Byzantine: characters appear, locations shift, characters fall away, extended dream sequences reveal themselves, characters undergo resurrection. Almodóvar operates on a higher level. He can manipulate person, background, and layer of reality with the hardiest daily scriptwriter, but he performs an altogether more impressive craft with less tangible elements of narrative.

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by Justin E. H. Smith

One of the most controversial scenes in Shohei Imamura's 1966 film, The Pornographers, depicts three veteran directors from the Japanese porn industry in conversation, casually questioning the legitimacy of the prohibition on sex between fathers and daughters. To be willing to ask this question at all is meant to signal ultimate rottenness. Yet it is an important question, perhaps the most important question about the structure and nature of human society. It may be answered succinctly: a family is defined, even sustained in existence, by the rules governing who may have sex with whom in a household (or in a yurt, or tent, or cave); and families, in turn, are the building-blocks of society. The incest taboo is the fons et origo of social reality.

But this answer to the pornographers' question, an answer already familiar at the time of publication of Edward Westermarck's History of Human Marriage in 1891, has in turn spawned generations of new questions, some the plain product of academic inbreeding, some showing hopeful new mutations that promise to help along the project –a laudable one, in this author's view– of tracing the social world back to its ground in nature.

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