by Mara Jebsen

I’m somewhere in Brooklyn when Geko hands me a card emblazoned with two highly stylized yellow roosters. They’re facing off, beaks up in each other’s beaks—their potbellied, swaybacked, braggadocious bird-bodies suggestive of a cheerful cockfight. The words “Que Bajo?” are printed under the roosters, in a phrase that functions like a bat signal. It is an injunction to a set of city-folk in the know to break out the fedoras, the red lipsticks and the get-down dancing shoes.

The music, the whole set up—is an interesting urban phenomenon. DJs Uproot Andy and Geko Jones collect folkloric vocal tracks and drum-rhythms, pull them off dusty old records that were gathered from villages in Cuba and parts of West Africa, and lay them with instinctive genius over modern dance beats. Then they throw a party that travels up and down North and South American cities and lasts for years. The effect is unifying. It is hypnotic and belly-thumping, and it gets at some core ritualistic need to move the body both as one’s ancestors may have done, and in some startlingly modern way. This music, the more I think of it, provides the correct soundtrack, or even analogy, to accompany a mass love letter I’ve been meaning to compose for years.

I met Geko through the New York Performance Poets. I don’t remember meeting him, just like I don’t remember meeting the poets. When you ‘fall in’ with people, it really is like falling—hard to remember how it happens. But I do recall arriving splat in New York with the particular flat-broke recklessness of a very young person. It’s the kind of recklessness you get when you’ve been deadened by life after college and had a brush with illness. Under these conditions, one is offered a reckless New York practically incandescent with promise, but finds its famous shimmer also laced with those first dark inklings that a life can end too soon, and be far more easily misspent.

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By Fred Zackel

In Louisiana, Chinese were “expressly counted as white” until the 1870 census.

Ideas evolve over time. What used to be de rigueur can look stoopid and wicked.

In the Symposium, the guru Socrates thought that true desire is about giving birth to ideas.

The Greek word “paideia” pops up in mid 5th century BCE. It means “education” or “instruction.” The word (pronounced “py-dee-a”) comes from the Greek word “pais, paidos”: “the upbringing of a child.”

Academia world-wide stresses a program of Gen Ed courses to make us all better citizens.

“Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess” become our global starting blocks.

The word “Encyclopedia” is a combination of the Greek terms “enkyklios” or “complete
system/circle” and “paideia” or “education/learning.”

The Greeks expected our best efforts in Literature as well as in the Olympics.

The Humanities as a concept was formulated during the Renaissance, which means “rebirth” or “born again.” The phrase “studia humanitatus” becomes a touchstone then.

We study the Human to understand more fully what Being Human means. Being Human is thus the yardstick of the cosmos. We measure ourselves against the Divine (includes the Cosmos,) against the animal kingdom (of which, yes, we are still a part,) and against the Rational.

Being Human, we think with our guts. (We have learned this through brain imaging.) Then we find a reason to justify what we already believe and decided.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

At a recent lunch with a writer from the US, discussing our common interest in rivers, I asked him what had led to his new project. He told me that he had first visited India several years ago and had toyed with several ideas, one involved travelling through the forested areas under Maoist influence, a journey that would take him from the South of India to the foothills of Himalayas, the second involved writing about the Narmada after a visit to some tribal villages on the verge of submergence. His agent in the US, he said, had told him to get real, no one would publish such books, and so now he was planning to travel down the Ganga.

It would not be the first such book, and the logic that drives it is the same logic that has led to a surfeit of books on Gandhi, Joseph Lelyveld’s recent contribution only one more in a long list. In this the world is only responding to the hold the Ganga and Gandhi have over the Indian popular imagination. The burning ghats, the loincloth, the fasts and the satyagraha, platitudes about the soul of India. In each case there is no shortage of outsiders eager to respond to our myths about ourselves.

It will be argued that there is little harm in either obsession but to do so is to forget that non-fiction in India is a genre that is constrained by the resources local publishers can offer. The possibility of devoting a couple of years to a subject and spending what is required on travel and research remains unlikely. Publishers abroad who do have the resources have limited bandwith, both in terms of money and in terms of interest in India. Give or take a few India books, this bandwith is largely exhausted by Gandhi and the Ganga. What is true of publishers and writers is as true of academics and academicians and the result is a neglect of people and places crucial to our existence as Indians.

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by Haider Shahbaz

Try listening to ‘Montezuma’ by the Fleet Foxes while reading this.

July, 2008.

Quick reply: Yes, was at the protest. No, did not get hurt. There is a certain quality about revenge. Walking and hanging on the sides of buses for more than 15 hours and than sitting in front of Parliament, watching the sun rise with half a million people and chanting for the hanging of a military dictator.

I am back in Islamabad. Exciting times here, but I am getting bored. Big Important things have stopped interesting me and seem impersonal. You know, apostrophes and spellings are tricky things: yesterday, my friend had to correct my spellings of “tommorrow”. I will never learn English.

P.S. The stars shine really brightly today, and another suicide bombing. Also, odd purposeless walks between Welsh fields all the way to a lighthouse are addictive.

July, 2009.

I was reading: Dadaism by Tristan Tzara.

One sentence reminded me of you, took me back, held me by the hand.

“Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create.”

To those stories, words and images; brushes, paints and whispers; flights. You must be still at it – weaving, moulding, negating, and creating. I hope you are still at it.

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by Dave Maier

As everybody knows, with the proper encouragement computers can make bleeps and bloops, and so: computer music! That's been true for many years, and there are plenty of histories of computer music which will tell you all about the Telharmonium, the Synket, and the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer (pictured here). This thing, which was once the state of the art, is the size of several refrigerators and was decidedly not a real-time sound production device. Nowadays, on the other hand, everyone who has a laptop, or even an iPad (or iPhone!), and access to the Internet, can download, often for free, sound generation and manipulation programs which make even the most powerful tools of the previous century look like TinkerToys. Yet our understanding of the significance and meaning of “computer music” remains mired in the compositional and ontological assumptions of the distant past.

This is unfortunate but entirely understandable. As plenty of wise guys have pointed out over the years, we rarely understand change as it happens and only get it, if at all, in retrospect. Still, we should try to keep up; so let's see what we can do. What is “computer music”, and why should we care?

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by Jen Paton

“Everyone’s uniting again. It’s a good scene,” says a young man in this clip, on the day the world found out about Osama Bin Ladin’s death.

One way to understand the news value of objectivity, that grail of modern news media, is that it has the goal of establishing the greatest distance between observer and observed. Sometimes, that distance is closed not by those behind the camera, but by those in front of it. Perhaps as we become more hypermediated as individuals, we collectively become more comfortable in front of a camera. When we are so comfortable, we become like performers, and objectivity becomes more elusive.

Many images radiate out from September 2001, the media event, but the celebrating young people of a few weeks ago form a symmetry with one series of images in particular: people celebrating for a TV camera, chanting for a TV camera, jubilating at death for a TV camera. It might have felt so ugly, so hurtful to see people celebrating death on that scale, but that is what we saw, the performance of joy.

The same performance happened three weeks ago, when one man died, and some Americans came out on the streets to celebrate, or to see how others were celebrating, or reacting. Not everyone was jubilant, or rowdy, but some were. Clayton McKlesky of the Dallas Morning News wrote, describing the scene in DC:

Folks were lighting cigars and holding signs declaring “Ding, dong! Osama's dead!” and “America, F%!& yeah!” I saw couples making out. Since when is the death of a terrorist a turn on?

McKlesky added that “the crowd seemed dominated by those hoping to grab the attention of news cameras.” The images of young people look so familiar – in that eerie glow of a TV camera’s light, jubilation and chanting would erupt, just like they did on the MTV program Total Request Live, which these kids must have seen on television in the late 1990s when they were just children, or on one of the same channels’ myriad Spring Breaks, when the camera pans the crowd and everyone yells and undulates and gestures back in victory.

It’s not about our emotions: whether we feel happy or sad or ambivalent about Bin Ladin’s death: it is how we express those emotions or ideas in that most public of spaces, that cold medium of television. And plenty of Americans expressed themselves as if they were on MTV in 1999. How comfortable we are now, in performance.

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by Ryan Sayre

I’d really like to have a peek at Osama Bin Laden's dental records. Not because I need proof of his death. It's simply that I am obsessed with the teeth of world historical figures. I'm fascinated with Hitler’s halitosis, Mao’s festering gumboils, Napoleon’s rotten maw. I like to think of this all in terms of a kind of orthodonto-politics, a historical approach by which the subject of dentition brings the loose chiclet teeth of historical processes into a smooth arch. The under bite of Saddam’s double allegedly who was allegedly hanged in his stead, the gap between Churchill's dentures made to preserve his signature lisp: these things are grist for the molars of a political history of teeth. So when I say I am interested in seeing Bin Laden's dental records for purposes of closure, you can rest assured that I am referring to the kind of closure that dentistry professionals call 'occlusion,' that is, how the teeth make contact with and lock against one another. I am interested not in questions of validation, but in whether there are trace-marks in the enamel of the words that left from this figure's mouth.

The question I’d like to play around with below involves stories told about teeth and the ways in which truth and truth telling is inscribed into and tugged out from mouths. Washington’s dentures contained no wood, but you could fill a medieval bestiary with all the animals used in his dentures. His mouth was a veritable zoo, stabling at different times donkey, mule, humans, horse, elephants and hippopotami. I think there is something regal in the fact that whenever Washington passed words from his throat, he spoke not only for himself but also out from the animal republic in his mouth.

What does it mean to speak out over the far side of one's teeth? Who is one speaking for when one speaks through one’s teeth? What is it to put words into one’s mouth?

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by Meghan Rosen

Dear 3QD Readers:

I had originally intended to post a review of Carl Zimmer’s latest contribution to the world of science writing, A Planet of Viruses, an excellent little book (just 94 pages from introduction to epilogue) that explores the vast realm and long history of some of Earth’s most fascinating life forms. Throughout the book, Zimmer’s knack for imagery helps provide an easy sense of scale (he tries in a variety of different ways, for example, to help readers grasp the enormous number of marine viruses compared to other ocean dwellers: “Viruses outnumber all other residents of the ocean by about 15 to one. If you put all of the viruses of the ocean on a scale, they would equal the weight of seventy-five million blue whales.”), and his focus on scientific research places each chapter comfortably in the space between popular science non-fiction and science textbook. In fact, I’d recommend it not only to those who like microbiology, but also to science educators looking to introduce students to our fascinating ‘planet of viruses’.

My detailed review, however, will have to wait until next month, because I was happily surprised with the early arrival of the newest addition to our family: a baby girl, born on the morning of May 13th. In honor of her birth (who said Friday the 13th was an unlucky day?), I’ve decided to post a review of a wonderful book I read this summer: Origins: How The Nine Months Before Birth Shape The Rest Of Our Lives. It seemed appropriate.

Origins:

I’m 131 pages into Origins, but was hooked after the first chapter. Annie Murphy Paul has written a book that every woman (expectant or not), father-to-be, scientist, science buff, and lover of babies will want to read. (As a female scientist who adores babies, you can see why it appealed to me.) Paul compiles and distills much of what is known about the environment’s effect on the embryo and relates it to her own experience navigating the murky, ever-changing waters of prenatal care. We follow her, month by month, as she explores the science behind each stage of fetal development.

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by Hasan Altaf

When we talk about Pakistan, generally what we talk about is change. Most conversations will involve headshaking and sighs and riffs on the idea that things – take your pick: security, economy, culture, education, health – are “getting worse”; most conversations also will have one person to point out all the things that are “getting better.” But whichever position one takes, progress or regress, growth or decay, what’s behind it is change.

This is of course true for most countries; we compare how they are now to how they were then. At an individual level too we tend to believe firmly in the possibility and even the inevitability of some kind of change, at some point, somehow: Today is not yesterday, and tomorrow will not be today; something will be different, because something has to be different. Politics, advertising, media, self-improvement; they’re all based on this belief.

It would be foolish to deny that Pakistan has changed over the years. It’s changed right in front of us. Everyone, I imagine, has their own metric for this, their own yardstick (for a lot of people it’s cell phones) but I think most of us see it. Sometimes, though, it seems that this might not be as true as we think, and in many ways, Pakistan is stuck in the past.

For a project recently I had to dig through several years worth of editorials in two Urdu newspapers, Jang and Nawa-i-Waqt, starting with 1995. The experience was actually eerie. Almost everything that was written fifteen years ago could have been written yesterday. Low literacy rates, insufficient power generation, strikes, ethnic violence, terrorism, Bhuttos, Sharifs, trips-to-America, foreign hands, poverty, misery, elegies, eulogies, laments, hope. When the subject was Pakistan, it wasn’t at all hard to imagine that they were talking about today’s Pakistan. It’s not time travel or even time-lapsed; it’s just as if time didn’t exist, and in some ways for Pakistan the past nearly two decades had never happened.

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by Nick Werle

In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing on May 2, veterans of the Bush Administration have hit the airwaves in an effort to reserve for their policies a portion of the credit for the success of SEAL Team Six’s covert lethal mission in Abbottabad. Chief among the many Bush policies they credit with enabling President Obama’s team to kill bin Laden are those permitting the torture and “rendition” of foreign combatants. According to John Yoo, Karl Rove, and their cohort, so-called “enhanced interrogations” led directly to bin Laden’s suburban compound in Pakistan. However, none of the details of the four year-long intelligence trail leading to the SEAL operation released by the current administration suggests that the C.I.A. gained any useful information from detainees subjected to waterboarding or other controversial techniques. Indeed, two detainees tortured at Guantánamo Bay – including the “9/11 mastermind,” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times – intentionally misled interrogators about the identity, whereabouts, and operational role of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, bin Laden’s personal courier and the thread that led American spies to the $1 million compound in Abbottabad.

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by James McGirk

I was born beside Sigmund Freud’s London townhome, and spent the next eighteen years ferried between Europe and Asia. Nominally American, it was not until I was seventeen-years-old that I could actually call the U.S. home, and even then I was so jangled from the shock of moving from India to a mountainous midwestern state, that I felt as if I had arrived from another planet. This was more than mere discomfort, I was so confused and unsure of who I was and what my role was meant to be I lost the ability to speak for months. Many years later – as a freshly minted Master of the Fine Art of fiction writing – one of my deepest anxieties stems from this dislocation and lack of authority. I lack a homeland to plunder for deep, meaningful memories from. Flannery O’Connor had Savannah, Georgia and generations of roots feeding her creations, Saul Bellow had Chicago, and Alice Munro has Southwestern Ontario. My own memories seem too fragmented and distant for the deep aesthetic dives they take, unless there is such a thing as expatriate literature. Could there be such a thing?

Immigrant fiction has a long, rich tradition that is not quite the same as expatriate fiction. Perhaps the difference has to do with authority. Migration has always been part of the human experience. For millennia we have been herded about and forcibly relocated. Immigration is active. To uproot your home and set it down elsewhere is a story. There is conflict and action built into this experience, so it lends itself to fictionalization. But being an expatriate is a completely different level of engagement than being immigrant. You either arrive as an agent or you arrive as a tourist. Either way you remain aloof; tethered elsewhere, staying at the whim of a foreign government, in a role where any intervention on your part is an imposition of some sort. Expatriate action either lacks agency, or is pure adventure and thus politically moot. What authority can an expatriate writer possibly have when compared to a national or an immigrant’s perspective? Outside of nationalist chauvinism, their only claim to some sort of special authority would be data based, such as technical expertise – the expatriate as consultant or mercenary; or as a gleaner of information – the expatriate as a journalist or spy.

Marco Polo, the great 13^th Century Venetian traveler, was all of the above. He was a representative in the court of Kublai Khan and an agent of his family business concern.

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by Jonathan Halvorson

Most people regard health care reform in America as thoroughly bungled. The proverbial train left the station weak and wheezing, was pushed off the rails by hooligans and is about to crumple in an inglorious heap in the ditch. Only about 20% say the reform hits the sweet spot, with the rest convinced it went too far or didn’t go far enough.

To review the most recent pilings-on: in a time of huge Federal deficits, we get depressing predictions that the PPACA will do little or nothing to slow the growth of health care costs. Only a year after passage of what was supposed to be comprehensive reform, Democrats acknowledge that Medicare and Medicaid spending remain out of control and propose new cuts in the hundreds of billions. In the span of four months, Republicans switched from posing as aggrieved defenders of Medicare spending, to proposing to slash it and leave seniors to absorb the spillover. Medicaid funding is probably even more precarious, since fewer Medicaid recipients vote.

To add injury to injury, the Supreme court may rule to invalidate the entire law, or perhaps just the mandate to purchase insurance, thereby removing the most hated part of the law, but eliminating the “universal” part of universal coverage and inviting an actuarial death spiral. Oh, and the few reforms that look like they might bring costs down, like the IPAB board in Medicare and the minimum medical expense ratio for insurers, are under threat of being watered down. A year after legislation has been passed that will transform nearly a fifth of the American economy, to the casual observer it looks like nothing much has happened and nothing in the future is secure, especially anything that the big industry players don’t like.

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by Julia Galef

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein gets credit for pointing out that many classic philosophical conundrums are unsolvable not because they are so profound, but because they are incoherent. Instead of trying to solve such questions, he argued, we should try to dissolve them, by demonstrating how they misuse words and investigating the confusion that motivated the question in the first place.

But with all due respect to Wittgenstein, my favorite example of the “dissolving questions” strategy comes from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which contains a cheeky and unforgettable dissolution of which I’m sure Wittgenstein himself would have been proud: A race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings builds a supercomputer named Deep Thought, so that they can ask it the question that has preoccupied philosophers for millions of years: “What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?”

After seven and a half million years of computation, Deep Thought finally announces the answer: Forty-two. In response to the programmers’ howls of disappointment and confusion, Deep Thought rather patiently points out that the reason his answer doesn’t make any sense is because their original question didn’t make any sense either. As I’ve written before, questions like this one, or the very similar “What is the meaning of life?” question, seem to be committing a basic category error: life isn’t the kind of thing to which the word “meaning” or “answer” applies.

But in this article I want to take my analysis a little further than that.

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by Dave Munger

It's 10:00 on a beautiful Sunday morning in California. To my left is some of the most spectacular coastline America has to offer. I'm walking along a road on Point Lobos that is ordinarily packed with cars on days like this, but today, thanks in part to my $135 entry fee, the road has been closed to traffic.

There's only one problem: I should be running, not walking. Over the past year, I've spent hundreds of dollars on running gear and race entry fees. I've logged more than 1,600 miles training for this event, including nearly 1,000 miles in the past four months alone. I've lost over 35 pounds and steadily improved my speed and stamina. Why can't I make my body do what I've trained it to do?

Dozens of runners pass me on either side, each of them experiencing varying degrees of misery similar to my own. Most of them, like me, have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to get here, spending $500, $1,000 or more to participate in this event, the Big Sur International Marathon. Like Boston, New York, Paris, and Berlin, Big Sur is a “destination marathon,” a once-in-a-lifetime experience that is so beloved, many runners return year after year.

The race was run on May 1 this year, but Big Sur's 4,500 spots for marathoners had already sold out last October. Other races sell out even faster. This year's Boston Marathon, despite strict qualification standards, sold out in 8 hours. The 2011 Marine Corps Marathon, which tours the monuments of Washington, DC, sold out its 30,000 spots in 28 hours.

While I'm a better-than-average runner, I'm by no means a competitive athlete. My best finish ever was fourth place, in a 5-kilometer race that only had 74 participants, many of whom were walking the entire course. I'm certain that there are several hundred runners faster than me who live within 50 miles: When I do well in a race, it's either because those guys aren't racing, or they're racing elsewhere.

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by Akim Reinhardt

There is pervasive form of Americana that is a pubescent rite of passage for so many: car culture. But having been born and raised in the Bronx, I never acclimated it.

I walked to P.S. 24. I walked to J.H.S. 141. I walked or took a city bus to John F. Kennedy High School. I rode the subway to Manhattan. When it came time for my first big trip, off to college in Michigan at age seventeen, I boarded an airplane. And when I arrived there, I discovered a dormitory hall-full of young men who loved to talk about cars: their cars, their parents’ cars, cars they’d worked on, cars they pined for, cars they’d stared at longingly in the glossy pages of magazines, and cars that whizzed by on the street as they stood there, talking about cars.

It was mysterious babel to me. Baseball and football I could talk about. Music? Sure. I could even gab about history a little bit if you pressed me. But the infatuation with cars was completely foreign. And it is a language I would never learn with any real fluency. To this day, when I enter that world, all I can manage to do is smile, order the first thing on the menu, and ask where the bathroom is. And even at that, half the time I end up pissing in the alley.

It’s not that we were a carless NYC family. In fact, my father had always owned a car. But that did not spring out of any desire. It was a necessity. He was a general contractor, so he needed something to haul his tools, materials, and workers in; something he could sling a 40-foot ladder onto. I grew up riding in work vehicles that stunk of cigarettes and were oft grumbled about.

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[Satellite photo of Manhattan on 9/11. The red circle is my own location at the time.]

by S. Abbas Raza

I hated Osama Bin Laden, and I suppose I probably had more personal reasons to hate him than most.

When I was just beginning grad school in the philosophy department at Columbia University, I met a remarkably self-assured young man who was an undergrad there at the time. We were both originally from Pakistan and I became a sort of mentor to him, despite the fact that most of the time he argued with me endlessly about almost everything. He was bright and vivacious, if headstrong, and a born leader. He was also very funny and made me laugh a lot. He took me to meet his parents and five-year-old brother at their hotel in midtown Manhattan when they came from Pakistan for his graduation. They seemed extremely proud of their oldest of two children. After graduating from Columbia, he got an MBA from Emory University, and then joined a bank.

Unsurprisingly, he rose through the ranks at almost unbelievable speed and was a senior executive by the time he turned 29. Still having the boyish enthusiasms of a young man, he bought a BMW 740 iL, his pride and joy, which we cruised around in on many an evening, with me at the wheel as often as not. He talked about getting married to his girlfriend, a lovely American girl he had met a year or so earlier. Soon after, on the bright and crisp morning of September 11, 2001, he awoke early to get to a business meeting at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. His last phone call was to his girlfriend. He said he'd call again once he got out.

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