by Tolu Ogunlesi

In its Feb 19, 2011 editorial, “A fresh chapter is opening in Africa’s history” the Guardian (London) observed:

“The African lions are finding their voice. A new generation of men and women has the ambition and imagination to reshape the continent in their own image – confident, assertive, successful, bold and proud… The story of Africa is changing. And we will be spreading the news.”

These days it seems a lot easier to pull up, from the internet, cheering news about Africa. The word “revolutionary”, when used these days regarding the continent, is less likely to be referring to a ‘revolutionary guard’ than an expression of people power, or technological innovation.

Tweeting recently from the Pivot 25 Mobile Apps & Developer Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, journalist Dayo Olopade reported: “The last panel at #pivot25 yields the best statistic: Mobile airtime beats beer as the most profitable business in East Africa.”

To hear that the business of ‘talking’ is outpacing that of drinking can only be good news – especially when we assume that at least some of that mobile phone expenditure goes towards creating connections that produce economic and political value; the kind that have helped drive the M-PESA mobile banking revolution in Kenya and altered (to varying degrees) the political landscape in Tunisia, Egypt and even Nigeria.

JM Ledgard’s article, “Digital Africa”, published in the Spring 2011 edition of The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine. Ledgard, the Economist’s Nairobi correspondent, writes very knowledgeably about how undersea broadband cables and smartphones are helping transform a shackled continent into a wired one.

Olopade herself is working on a book (due out 2012), “The Bright Continent: How African Ideas Are Changing the World”, which promises to “demonstrate how the regional tradition of resourcefulness, creativity, and “making do” – combined with the recent explosion in communications and other technologies – transforms the continent’s problems into teachable moments in health, energy, education, media, justice and more.”

Read more »

by Jeff Strabone

It used to be the case that the earth took little notice of the rise and fall of empires and republics. Fields were burned, livestock slaughtered, wells polluted, but sooner or later life returned. That is not necessarily the case anymore, as recent eco-catastrophes in the Gulf of Mexico and Japan remind us. But those were accidents, right? Roll the dice on enough high-risk energy projects around the world and eventually something will go wrong. We can at least say that no one who planned the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig or the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant counted on polluting the Gulf or irradiating northern Japan. I cannot say the same for the energy-extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking' for short.

Fracking offers us the one-two punch of both ecological and republican destruction at the same time. With its left, it poisons drinking water and appears to cause earthquakes. And with its right, it lands a knockout blow against government regulation, the disinterested rule of law, and that old chestnut from the U.S. Constitution, promoting the general welfare. In the case of fracking, both government and industry know the earth-shattering toxicity of its effects, yet both continue to act as partners in spreading the practice across the country. It is one thing to say that the republic is standing on shaky ground. It is quite another to mean it literally.

Read more »

By Kate Fincke

Over the years I have asked many children how they get to sleep at night. I collect these stories. More often than not, when the children find out about my collection, they ask me to tell them all the stories I know. Secreted in the telling is a point: all children must find a way to put themselves to sleep. While parents may put them to bed, the children alone must drift off. As adults we know that insomnia is commonplace, and we do what we can to fend it off. Children, however, often rail at the realization that despite bedtime stories, snacks, lullabies or back rubs, they are, in the end, on their own. They are frequently bewildered that we cannot make them sleep. Even if adults offer suggestions (the famous sheep counting, or prayers or reading), children must actively choose to invest themselves in the strategy. Often they rebel, refusing all suggestions, insisting they have tried them all, and they just don't work.

Their recalcitrance lies in the alone-ness of sleep, the isolation, and the self-reliance. The solution lies in turning away from whomever is tucking them in — away from the hope that they can be accompanied across the threshold of sleep—and turning toward their own creativity. I believe, in the end, that drifting off is a solitary creative act.

Toddlers, we know, cannot be given their security blankets; they create them. And for a time, the security blanket soothes and will ferry the child from sleepiness to sleep. As children mature, however, the blanket no longer suffices, and the life of the mind takes over, opening the door to both imagined fears and imagined remedies. At night children commit themselves to the power of imagination. Eight-year-olds find themselves believing in monsters that during daylight hours are ridiculed. In my profession, help often comes in the form of stories —sometimes stories that are made up on the spot by child and therapist together. So when the kids ask to hear my collection of sleep stories, it often goes something like this:

I knew a boy once who was afraid of burglars at night. He was particularly worried about his window — a natural entry point for bad guys. So when he went to bed, he had his mother tuck him in extra tight so no one could get at him. Then he had her line up his twelve polar bears all around him with the biggest one at his feet and all the rest facing in, watching over him.

Once settled, he began to boot-up his imaginary computer with all sorts of burglar-catching paraphernalia. It grew to be a vastly intricate computer, loaded with invisibility functions and burglar-seeking missiles. As I understand it, he would lose himself in the details of his programming and fall off to sleep.

However, once a night, he would wake up to pee. To insure his safety, he had to run to the bathroom as fast as he could while stopping to hop twice on each hall rug. If he hopped right, sleep was guaranteed. If not—worry. If worry, then the laborious computer programming began all over again.

Read more »

by James McGirk

Writers are anxious about the Internet and all things electronic, as we worry these newfangled ways of entertaining ourselves might someday obviate our own work. The solution, perhaps, lies in understanding and adapting to this new medium. Consuming enough that we can master its complexities and render appealingly intelligent confections for our readers. But who are these readers? Are they different online than they are in print? Some of them aren’t even human. There is a new form of reader browsing the Internet. For this is no longer just the age of mechanical reproduction; we now have to contend with mechanical readers as well.

William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” imagined it as a mass consensual hallucination, rendered as a cityscape, the prominence of each shape on the horizon an index of how much data was passing through a single point; a point which in 1982 a reader might have thought of as a mainframe computer, and what today, nearly thirty years later, we might identify as an html address or site. On Gibson’s Internet Google would glow the brightest, soar the highest; be an Empire State Building to the Internet’s Manhattan. Most users don’t look at the Internet by volume, however, they read it pane by pane, navigating from bookmarks or through searches, feeding keywords into an ‘engine,’ a series of algorithms, to retrieve lists of linked addresses to the information they seek. These lists are customized to the user, the results tweaked by the user’s location and previous searches. The more searches you make, the more information about yourself you reveal, the more customized the experience becomes.

From a content provider’s point of view (as opposed to a more passive content user’s point of view) an ideal Internet browser might render something close to Gibson’s landscape of crystalline data sculptures, were there a way to capture such information in real time. But commercial users would rather see traffic than the mere through-output of bits and bytes. Who consumes what information, when and why is much more important to commerce than mere bandwidth. Though online sales have grown to become big business, the Internet remains a popularity contest. The real currency of the online world is attention. Being able to read the flow of attention online would mean mastering it, and reaping the ad money that comes along with that attention. But instead of trying to follow where everyone is going all at once, content providers are instead attempting to clone their readers’ minds.

Read more »

by Hasan Altaf

If I were to describe David Lester’s The Listener (Arbeiter Ring, 2011) as “a graphic novel about the Holocaust,” the immediate correlation drawn would be with Maus, by Art Spiegelman, an urtext of both the genre and the subject. The comparison would be unfair, and a disservice to Lester’s work; the description is correct only in the most general sense. Th e shadow of Maus is irrelevant – artistically, thematically and structurally, The Listener is completely different, and stronger for it.

The Listener avoids both the historical-memoir structure found in works like Maus (or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis) and the more familiar parts of the Nazi-era narrative. Instead, it tells the story of a Canadian sculptor named Louise, who leaves for Europe after a Cambodian genocide survivor, inspired by her work, falls to his death in an attempt to hang a political banner. (She picks up her hate mail with startling regularity from various places on the continent.) On her wanderings, she encounters an old German couple, journalists and members of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) in the 1930s, whose story of mishandled elections in a small German state and a crucial vote that enabled the Nazi rise to power fill in the latter half of the book.

This strategy provides both opportunities and pitfalls. It is an unconventional and refreshing take on a difficult topic, and the connection between the two stories is real and important: They share a language, a focus on the relationship of politics to art and of both to truth, and there is throughout the book a yearning for something like absolution. When we see Rudolph and Marie find theirs – through telling their story to Louise and, through her, to us – it is as beautiful a moment as Lester shows it and Louise imagines it.

Read more »

by Jen Paton

The man disguised as Mirza Abdullah, better known as Richard Francis Burton, was overcome when he glimpsed Mecca for the first time. Burton spent years perfecting his language, his dress, his mannerisms, his very way of moving, to go undetected into a city forbidden to outsiders. And when he finally saw this city, he felt himself drawn admiringly inwards, rather than outwards: “It was as if the poetical legends of the Arab spoke truth, and that the waving wings of angels, not the sweet breeze of morning, were agitating and swelling the black covering of the shrine. But, to confess the humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of pride.”

In January 2011 two modern-day Westerners in disguise sought to insinuate themselves into “the Orient”, or at least its virtual space. An American man and his wife posed as a lesbian blogger living through a heady time of revolution. They took the name of Amina Arraf, named her blog “Gay Girl in Damascus,” and began chronicling the life of a completely imaginary Syrian-American woman, returned to her father’s homeland to “be a part of the change that is coming.”

Back in January, as the Middle East shook, “Amina” wrote she had to do something “bold and visible”, and that was writing a blog as an out woman in Demascus, under her real name, with “my photo.” Her writing was compelling, and she was bold. When Amina’s cousin came online last week to post that she had been detained, her readers, some of whom felt themselves friends, sounded the alarm.

And then, masks began to come off. The publicity surrounding her detention led to Newsnight’s report last week that the photographs on Amina’s blog were actually of Londoner Jelena Lecic, who had no connection to Syria. This cued the furious investigation of Andy Carvin of NPR (whose account is here), the Electronic Intifada, other news organizations, and a fleet of increasingly furious, and betrayed, Twitterati, to track down Tom MacMaster, a graduate student in medieval studies at Edinburgh, and his wife, Britta Froelicher, an expert in Middle Eastern studies and Syrian economics. Late last night, MacMaster posted a confession on Amina’s blog, which was titled an “apology” but was anything but. MacMaster wrote that “ I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.”

Read more »

by Dave Munger

One thing you can't see on a TV news report is the sound of a flood. It's a sort of muffled silence, like a windless forest the morning after a snowstorm. When you hear a dog barking in the distance, it's muted, like some hidden force is slowing its voice before it reaches you. Listen a little closer and you might hear the floodwaters lapping up on your back porch.

Finally, look at the still-darkened curtains of your window and you'll see the rippling reflections of streetlights emanating from the lake that was once your front yard.

It's 5:30 am. Last night when you went to bed, everything seemed fine. Sure, it was raining, but Centralia, Washington gets tons of rain. Sure, there was some flooding in the area, but when you bought this house a two years ago, you were assured it wasn't on a flood plain. This land has never flooded; it's high ground nearly a mile from the river.

You struggle to your feet, limp to the front door, and open it, hoping that your car will start. One look at the water lapping over its hood tells you it won't. It's only then that you notice the smell, a combination of gasoline, raw sewage, and toxic chemicals. The foundation of your house is perhaps three feet above ground level, and the water is inching towards your doorstep.

There is stifling dampness everywhere, like being in a boathouse with water where the floor should be. In effect, you are in such a place: The water is now just inches below your feet, rising steadily in your crawlspace. Helicopters rattle by every minute or two, searching for stranded inhabitants or covering the flood for local news stations.

Read more »

I am a climate change refugee. Until recently, I, along with the other elves, inhabited the North Pole, living and working at Santa's workshop. We had seen the end of the ice cap coming for years with ever larger summmer melt-offs but were in denial until it finally disappeared. Part of the denial stemmed from the fact that we had long since outsourced all production to China and other third world countries. “How much ice would really be needed to maintain a headquarters at the North Pole?” we thought. Lists were computerized as was all design work. We no longer needed the warehouses for paper storage of current work or archives. Productivity was up, yet square-footage was down: Life was good. We managed to digitize nearly all the records going back to the beginning, and fortunately we were able to back it up to the cloud before our server farm was swallowed up by the Arctic Ocean. Children won't even noticed that we've “moved.”

Most people don't realize this, but we got our start in the seasonal gift-giving business with Hanukah. It really was a small family operation back then. There have never been all that many Jews, and let's face it, knocking out a few menorahs and dreidles is trivial compared to the diversity and quantity of what the Christian kids expect these days. Who would have suspected that when we signed-on to do Christmas, we were contributing to our own eventual demise?

So our quaint village and workshop have now slipped beneath the waves. We'll be able to keep the classic images going for a while given the state of photoshopping and CGI, but it will never be quite the same. You probably got a taste of the next-generation imagery with the Rankin/Bass-like, faux stop-motion, Mel Gibson-narrated special that came out a couple years ago. You know, the one in which the tears of the world's children soaked up all the excess carbon dioxide and saved the north pole (and of course, Christmas!). Treacly beyond belief, but nonetheless a big hit despite in reality being too little, too late (and people accuse of us of magical thinking!).

Read more »

I’m an ENTP, preferring extroversion over introversion, intuition over sensing, thinking over feeling and perceiving over judging. In case you didn’t know, this is my MBTI^® score, or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^®. When I first took on my new role in a leadership development group, I heard everyone throwing around these letters “I’m a J, so I’m going to need to get into the details here”, “I’m going to need some time to process this alone because I’m an I”, etc. I had no clue what these people were talking about, but it all seemed to mean something to them and they would talk for hours on end about their interactions with their teams, their families, and with each other using this jargon.

According to the Myers-Briggs organization, “the essence of the theory is that much seemingly random variation in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, being due to basic differences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment.” By taking a test, rating preferences of various situations and activities on a sliding scale, the claim is that your underlying personality type and preference can be mapped. “The theory of psychological type was introduced in the 1920s by Carl G. Jung. The MBTI tool was developed in the 1940s by Isabel Briggs Myers.”

I was a total sceptic. As far as I was concerned, the idea that by answering a few questions, my personality type could be reduced to 4 letters (with some granularity of preference under that) was pure mumbo jumbo. Moreover, I was sure that there must be a degree of self-selection; at some level I would guess what the question was trying to measure and would select an answer based on how I wanted to be rated.

And then I took the test and had the results explained to me by a certified MBTI^® practitioner. I have to say, I’ve been totally converted. I did the MBTI^® II level, which gives the greater granularity and the results were so spot on, and not necessarily what I would have “chosen” to be represented as, thereby undercutting my self-selection theory. As I scanned through my report, I realized that this test had totally nailed who I am and what my preferences are. It was explained to me that it is certainly possible, and often necessary, for someone to act out of preference, for someone who’s a P like me, preferring to plunge into tasks, to force themselves to be more methodical, but that such “out of preference” activity will never be easy or pleasant for me, often putting me “in the grip”, MBTI^® terminology for experiencing extreme stress. And it’s so true; I can be methodical and organized, it’s just never natural or pleasant. Similarly with so many of the other preferences.

Read more »

A Sprawl of Cemeteries

Blood for blood is in our bones
the bass line of a perpetual requiem

Justice says carpe diem
to sooth the killed. As expected
the living hoot and gloat, or wail
asking Why did it have to be him?

Why other arrangements
have not been made
in the leaves of good books
so that blood and honor are not wound
as they are in the syntax and squalls
of scripture and the cyclones
of our double helix is anybody’s guess

Why is left to be mulled
by simple folk who think that
death for death yields no more
than a sprawl of cemeteries

by Jim Culleny, 5/2/11

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

I

My first psychoanalyst was an old German woman, who lived in a faded flat overlooking a small lake in Calcutta and who spent our time making me lie on a couch and free-associate. Later, she’d point out things that I seemed to be avoiding – the putative hidden centers around which my thought moved. I was fifteen and alternately charmed and troubled by the inscrutability of this all. Of course I censored myself and said what I thought she wanted to hear. And, of course, it didn’t really do anything to help me, at least not in the short term.

For many years later I’d intermittently free-associate on paper, scrutinizing the traces of the workings of my mind for clues to its substrate. Of course I censored myself and created what I thought I wanted to hear, and of course I was aware of this. I puzzled over how to cut this knot. I think Freud says that psychoanalysis doesn’t begin with free-association; it ends when one is able to free-associate. I’m not sure whether this was supposed to mean a Zen-like state where the productions of the unconscious can flow out unhindered by conscious monitoring, or one where the unconscious has no more conflicts to reveal and so can be purely random.

But to free-associate with yourself is to simultaneously experience the thrill of the detective and that of the criminal, creating the signs of a crime and then trying to decipher them. It is a replay of cops and robbers, even if the roles are often muddled, and, since the act of interpreting the unconscious events often serves to create them, the criminal is sometimes framed.

Read more »

If it were fictional, the Raymond Davis saga would have had a shot for best original screenplay. This one had it all — shootouts, car chases, duplicitous allies and one humdinger of a courtroom climax.

The bare bones of the Davis episode are well known. On January 27, 2011, a man subsequently identifying himself as Raymond Davis shot and killed two men at a busy intersection in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city. After shooting the two men, Davis emerged from his car and filmed their bodies with his cell phone. He then got back into his car and tried to drive away. However, in an unusual display of efficiency, he was chased and arrested by two traffic wardens. A separate vehicle then tried to assist Davis but in the process ran over and killed a motorcyclist.

In his initial interrogation, Davis stated first that he had acted in self-defence and second that he was a contractor employed by the U.S. Consulate in Lahore. The subsequent statement was particularly important because applicable diplomatic conventions distinguish between the limited immunity of consular officials as opposed to the absolute immunity enjoyed by embassy officials on duty. This statement was then corroborated by Assistant Secretary of State Philip J. Crowley who also added the mysterious rider that “reports identifying the employee’s name are false.”

Read more »

Since it first came out in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” has widened the eyes of multiple generations of nerdy kids, and I was certainly no exception. The book draws all sorts of parallels between music, art, math, and computer science, ultimately shaping them into a bold thesis about how consciousness arises from self-reference and recursion. It’s also a very playful book, full of puzzles, puns, and imagined dialogues between Achilles and a tortoise which weave in and out of the main chapters, illustrating the concepts therein.

One of those dialogues, titled “Crab Canon,” seems puzzling when you begin reading it – sprinkled with seeming non-sequitors, the word choice a bit awkward and off-kilter. Then shortly after the halfway point, when you start to see recent lines repeated, in reverse order, you realize: the whole dialogue is a line-level palindrome. The first line is the same as the last, the second line is the same as the second-to-last, and so on. But because Hofstadter chooses his sentences carefully, they often have different meanings when they reoccur in the reverse order. So, for example, the following bit of dialogue in the first half…

Tortoise: Tell me, what's it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all?
Achilles: To be precise, one has no frets.
Tortoise: Oh, well, it's all the same to me.
Achilles: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know.
Tortoise: Say, don't you play the guitar?

… becomes this bit of dialogue in the second half:

Achilles: Say, don't you play the guitar?
Tortoise: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know.
Achilles: Oh, well, it's all the same to me.
Tortoise: To be precise, one has no frets.
Achilles: Tell me, what's it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all?

Hofstadter does “cheat” a bit, by allowing himself to vary punctuation (for example, “He often plays, the fool” reoccurs later in a new context as “He often plays the fool”). Nevertheless, it’s an impressive execution of a clever conceit.

Read more »

By Aditya Dev Sood

One day the Sultan was looking from a turret window onto the city of Delhi and he no longer liked what he saw. These people were spoiled and unimaginative. Like the residents of every other large and imperial city, they reeked with the parochialism of the metropolis. Even before he became Muhammand bin Tughluq, the Sultan of Hindustan, he had ridden across the burning plateaus of Mahratta, Warangal and Kampili, down deep into Ma’bar, the Tamilian tip of the subcontinent. He knew what they didn’t — the rest of Hindustan lay to the south — all the unconquered petty kingships, all the riches, all the lands yet to be assimilated into his Sultanate. This city of Delhi was just too far north.

With the precise and strategic thinking that had marked all his successful military campaigns, Tughluq began looking for a place that would be more accessible to the furthest reaches of the Sultanate. It had to be equidistant, more or less, from Gujarat and the Sindh, from Delhi and the Gangetic plains, from Bengal, and from the new territories in the South, which he had himself conquered. In this way, he arrived at Devagiri, a small military encampment, from which he planned more efficiently to administer his empire. In 1327, he ordered his subordinate officers of the court, their families and servants, the artisans and traders who supported and served them, to move to Devagiri.

At first, nothing happened. No one would agree to move. He renamed the city Daulatabad, or Money-Ville. He built a wide and safe road to the new city to encourage his courtiers and the rest of the general public of Delhi to relocate. Frustrated in his several inducements, proclamations, commandments, he force-marched the population of Delhi to Daulatabad in 1330. Miserable in their new surroundings, his people were struggling to come to terms to their new conditions when water ran out at the fort. The Sultan himself never remained in Devagiri, being compelled to ride out repeatedly to whichever distant realm of the empire was in crisis or in danger of being lost to local revolt. It was only years later that Tughluq finally relented, allowing those who still survived in Daulatabad to trickle back to Delhi. About this time the Moroccan travel writer Ibn Batutta arrived in the city to record the anger of the surviving local populace of Delhi. What had once been a large and great city, on the order of Cairo or Baghdad, was now empty, abandoned, deserted.

What was Tughluq thinking?

Read more »