By Namit Arora

I often think of the good life I have. By most common measures—say, type of work, income, health, leisure, and social status—I’m doing well. Despite the adage, ‘call no man happy until he is dead’, I wonder no less often: How much of my good life do I really deserve? Why me and not so many others?

The dominant narrative has it that I was a bright student, worked harder than most, and competed fairly to gain admission to an Indian Institute of Technology, where my promise was recognized with financial aid from a U.S. university. When I took a chance after graduate school and came to Silicon Valley, I was justly rewarded for my knowledge and labor with a measure of financial security and social status. While many happily accept this narrative, my problem is that I don’t buy it. I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being in the right place at the right time.

A pivotal question in market-based societies is ‘What do we deserve?’ In other words, for our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements are just? How much of what we bring home is fair or unfair, and why? To chase these questions is to be drawn into the thickets of political philosophy and theories of justice. In this short essay, inspired by American political philosopher Michael Sandel’s Justice, I have tried to synthesize a few thoughts on the matter by reviewing three major approaches to distributive economic justice: libertarian, meritocratic, and egalitarian, undermining en route the dominant narrative on my own well-being.

Read more »

by Haider Shahbaz

The first was happy to observe. The second wanted to create. The third was always mimicking. The first one, Mike, tall and thin with bushy Jewish hair was wrapped in a blanket that reminded you of your last LSD trip: colourful, torn and full of bunnies. The second, Dario, with his round face, generous smile and serious eyes was in a tweed coat. Of course, he was in a tweed coat. The third, Danyal, singing and smoking, creating rap songs from conversations, was wearing sandals and a huge shawl. He liked to show that he was ethnic. They were walking – walking on roads that led nowhere. That led from night to day and day to night.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this. I still have to finish the essay that was due last week.”

“Calm down. You’re always panicking about work. It’s your American blood. Do you still have some of Tony’s stuff left?”

“Yeah I brought it with me. We’ll smoke it when we get up there.”

Danyal, in the background, was rapping. He knew Mike too well. He always complains. He makes a resolution every morning, only to meet Tony that night, or a bottle of cheap rum. And then, ends up with ugly chicks. Just like that girl last week who he met in a party when he was horny and drunk and admittedly insecure. She was ugly; he knew it. Damn it, he knew it.

“Will you stop that?”

Dario didn’t like rapping. He only liked Rilke. And sometimes, Dadaists and Mayakovsky too, when he had to pretend he wasn’t attached to the canon and Harold Bloom as much as he was. But nothing got him more excited than talk of modernity and post-modernity and other such dangerous passions.

“Okay Okay. Chill. So what’s our plan?”

“We’re going up that small hill. It should take us about an hour. We’ll watch the sunrise and then come back and sleep.”

Read more »

By Fred Zackel

Didja hear that Senator John Ensign, the two-term Nevada Republican caught up in a sex and ethics inquiry, won’t run again?

As Carl Hulse of The New York Times reported it, “As I have learned through the mistake that I made, there are consequences to sin,” Mr. Ensign, 52, said at a news conference in Las Vegas as his wife, Darlene, stood at his side.

Hulse continued, saying:

“Once considered a future presidential contender, Mr. Ensign has seen his political fortunes plummet since he admitted in 2009 to an affair with a former campaign staffer who was also the wife of a top aide. A Senate Ethics Committee investigation, still under way, began after disclosures that Mr. Ensign’s parents paid $96,000 to the aide, Douglas Hampton, who also said the senator had helped him line up lobbying clients after Mr. Hampton left his Senate job.”

Like a lot of folks, I love reading noir. Watching interesting people make one dumb decision after another. Like watching them falling down a staircase, going faster and faster until they go splat.

Noir is Inexorable and doom is Inevitable.

Read more »

“You can see a lot just by looking.” –Yogi Berra

by George Wilkinson

The formation of a large body fossil is a complicated process involving rapid burial of the remains and chemical and physical interaction of the body with the forming rock bed. The final, discovered, fossil contains an amalgamation of chemical signatures of the original creature and of the bedrock in which it is embedded. Recent application of imaging methods derived from analytical chemistry has accentuated the composite nature of these fossil objects. If the fossilization process preserves the analyte in question, these methods can reveal structures that are not apparent in visible light, show the distribution of trace metals or biogenic compounds– and of course, a positive result reflects on the fossilization process itself. These palaeometric methods further allow the team to map fossils non-destructively, which means they can take a fresh look at even precious or fragile specimens.

Ultraviolet light has been used for analysis of organic compounds and microscopic fossils for some time. Fossils from some rock beds will fluoresce under UV illumination, yielding a much greater contrast with the surrounding rock compared to visible wavelengths. Improvements in the ultraviolet illumination and in fluorescence detection have allowed the use of UV light to detect otherwise hidden features of fossils, including traces of soft tissues. In the example at the link, ultraviolet light imaging of a feathered non-avian dinosaur fossil was able to show preserved attachments between flight like feathers and the legs, raising the possibility that this creature glided using all four limbs. A great profile of Helmut Tischlinger, the scientist behind many ultraviolet spectrum images, is here.

Another of my favorite recent examples used synchrotron generated X-ray imaging to confirm that the fossilized impression of Archeopteryx feathers contains chemical residue of the feathers themselves. The outlines of the feathers were previously simply conceived of as deformations of the rock matrix, but these areas in fact have residual chemical signatures consistent with known composition of modern bird feathers. The shafts of the feathers show readily detectable phosphorous and iron signatures.

Finally, infrared imaging can reveal the presence of amides and thiols, remnants of proteins, within well preserved samples. Fossilized reptilian skin, but not fossilized leaves from the same rock bed, shows characteristic infrared absorption peaks—as does skin from modern amphibians.

Read more »

by Mara Jebsen

” I deface the classroom walls and abuse french verse”

There's a shadowy black-and-white room crammed with schoolboys in Francois Truffaut's film 400 Blows. You've got to keep your eye on the boy who is not the principle character; the boy who is squinch-faced and clench-knuckled; the irrepressibly clumsy one whose inkpen just exploded. He rips out page after page of inky, sloppy copy and hides them beneath his desk. But all around, hypnotized, elbows crooked at identical angles, the other boys’ pens move in steady waves, drawn forward by the pull of the schoolmaster's voice.

At some point I'm about thirty and standing in a tweed skirt in front of a classroom in New York with a poem in my hands. “Stop all the clocks/Cut off the telephone” I say. W.H. Auden first penned these lines in England at least 40 years ago. Now, fifteen hands move in unison, following my voice and Auden's beautiful, long-dead mind.

I used to hate dictation. The first time someone tried to educate me that way it was in Lome, Togo, on the coast of West Africa, and in French, an impossible language I barely spoke. I was fourteen and I was introduced to the process not long after my American mother married a Togolese professor and we abandoned our apartment in Philadelphia to start life anew in Lome. The way I felt about French and dictation got mixed up in my mind with a conviction that something was horribly askew with all the grownups I met. Jokey, warm and tough, my new Togolese family seemed nevertheless to all have a headache. It was like they had had a headache since before I was born.

My teachers were similarly afflicted. I wish I could describe the expression of my French professor when she came upon my first page of dictation. She seemed offended right down in her gut by my panicky, phonetically interpretive loops! By the haphazard perversions of good french verse she’d so carefully delivered!

Read more »

by Kelly Amis

Twelve years ago, during the last days of a Washington, D.C. summer, I met a tiny boy who left a big impression.

I was volunteering at a day-in-the-country event for low-income D.C. kids; Malik was one of many who had climbed on a bus that morning to spend a day chasing ducks, dipping his feet in a pool and eating lunch on a vast green lawn.

Malik had just turned five. He was ridiculously cute, with a round little head and huge dark-brown eyes. We hit it off, and at the end of the day the event director asked if I would be interested in becoming Malik’s “big buddy.” A short time later, it was official. We were buddies.

For the next few years, I spent two or three Sundays a month taking Malik, and usually his two sisters, all over the city, to parks, movies, the occasional heavily-negotiated museum. I had been a teacher and tutor before becoming Malik’s “big buddy,” but this program was less about academics and more about getting kids out of their neighborhood to have some fun and new experiences.

I had never thought to visit Malik’s school or meet his teachers, and was angry with myself for not doing so when I learned that he was in a special education class at school. I only discovered this because he happened to show me his class photo: there were only five or six children in it (a regular class would have had 24 or more) and one of them had Down’s Syndrome.

I tried to hide my dismay from Malik. I knew the Washington, DC school district was notorious for over-identifying students—especially black boys—as “special ed” but it had never occurred to me that Malik might be one of them. Why was this perfectly intelligent and capable little boy in what appeared to be a special-education-only class?

Malik’s mother (who assumed the school was doing what was best for him) gave me permission to investigate and helped me set up a meeting with his teacher.

Read more »

by Jen Paton

One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years–roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright–the good folks in charge of America's intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.

—Roger Rosenblatt, then-Editor in Chief of Time Magazine, 16 September 2001.

Rosenblatt’s partial definition of irony is telling: he misses the most dangerous part. The most insidious irony is not the swaggering and droll Alanis Morisette sense of the word. Rather, the most dangerous irony is the irony of distance. In 1979, Dahlgren and Chakrapani argued that the way foreign countries and foreign people are portrayed in Western news is ironic in the sense that the audience is “situated in a position of superior knowledge to the protagonist.” We think we know something that the people on the news – the flood victims, the terrorists, the freedom fighters – don’t know. The West is ordered, stable, developed, and modern. “The Rest” are disordered, underdeveloped, and primitive.

You find this distance playing out in surprising places. My oldest friend attends medical school in one of our most “liberal” cities. Recently, one of the “standardized patients” (actually actors who interact with the students for training) arrived wearing hijab. “She’s wearing a burka!” whispered a classmate to my friend. She corrected him and he was incredulous: how do you know this stuff?

Thirty five percent of Americans know a Muslim person – at the same time, “events and controversies related to Islam dominated U.S. press coverage of religion in 2010 -” beating out Catholic church scandal for the first time this decade. This makes how Islam is portrayed in the American media more important than ever. Unfortunately, the ironic detachment Dahlgren and Chakrapani described over three decades ago seems to persist in coverage even of in-country Islam. When forty percent of Americans say Islam is more likely than other religions “to encourage violence among its believers.”, one wonders where those ideas come from. Especially since, in 2002, only twenty-five percent of us thought so.

Read more »

by James McGirk

The “gallery” still exists on paper and hosts an occasional salon – these being one-night-only performances choked with marijuana fumes and haunted by octogenarian Warhol hangers-on and younger artists whose parents are presumed to have money – but lost its physical space five years ago. Today the gallery is a husk, but for a couple of years this gallery, which shall remain nameless, maintained a convincing façade and provided our heroine A— with her first glimpse at the art world’s mottled backside.

Art remains a mostly visual medium. Without a gallery to display his or her wares in, a dealer is little more than a middleman. Without shows, a critic has nowhere to direct his or her audience and thus has nothing newsworthy to write about, and without an overlay of critical gravitas, a painting is just paint on canvas, a sculpture is just papier-mâché wadded over wire, etc. And from a buyer’s perspective there is no quantifiable reason to pay a premium for artwork. Without space to display, an art dealer is essentially worthless to an emerging artist.

Our nameless gallery was run by J—, a friendly if somewhat frenetic American, balding and goateed, but quite handsome in spite of it, about forty years old at the time, given to fugues of untruth whose force corresponded directly to his bank balance. Not a bad man. He was vague about how he came into the art business. He inherited money from his parents, who were apparently doctors. He was money-driven and a bit of swindler but not a malevolent one. As teenager he fancied himself a sort of European aesthete and claimed to have bluffed his way into Oxford University – or almost did, he was caught registering for classes. Later he claimed to have tried the same stunt at Dartmouth, only to be found out a half semester in and discretely removed.

Read more »

Now I Know What He Meant
—I’ll have that done in no time, my father would say.
…………………
I’m in the midst of a moon
(as the Lenape called them)
dead center. It’s Thursday
dead center, too, of the week
I’m at the pinpoint of noon poised
precisely at the day’s fulcrum
just thirty seconds into the minute
at point five Oh! of that second

and a breeze blows
across my cheek
which the sun warms
in no time

by Jim Culleny
March 2011

by Jonathan Halvorson

There has been a minor resurgence of interest in whether the social sciences live up to their billing as sciences. Economics in particular is going through well-deserved scrutiny from its ongoing failures of prediction and its inability to build consensus.

Read more »

by Hasan Altaf

Lately it seems we have revolution on the brain, so in that sense, Icíar Bollaín’s new film, También la lluvia (Even the Rain), came out in the US at the perfect moment. The context is different, the struggle and the outcomes are different, the actors and powers are different, but those differences only serve to bring into relief the similarities: It was impossible to watch the movie, set during the water riots in Cochabamba in 2000, and not think of the revolutions blooming today across other parts of the world.

The luck of timing was, I imagine, a surprise for the filmmakers, but the movie wears this accidental topicality lightly, perhaps because it has its own built-in reference point, a central conceit that is already strong. The water riots are not, at first, the central subject of Bollaín’s film – También la lluvia begins by being about a crew of Spaniards, led by an earnest, idealistic director named Sebastián (Gael García Bernal), making a movie about the first arrival of Columbus in the Americas, and Cochabamba is a cheap, convenient backdrop, full of Quechuas who will, for two dollars a day, play Taínos, much to the delight of Sebastián’s cost-cutting producer, Costa (Luis Tosar). The reality intrudes on Bollaín’s movie as it does on the movie within – Cochabamba becomes, suddenly, a city instead of a backdrop, and the “native extras” turn into stars of a very different drama.

If someone had described the movie to me beforehand, I would have avoided it. The juxtaposition of Columbus and the water riots seems, academically, too pat and perfect, too easy, almost simple-minded. Rapacious conquistadores, rapacious conglomerates; the same people suffering then and now; the obvious dichotomy of Davids and Goliaths – it’s a familiar paradigm, and one that tends to suffocate movies. (Although it did get used to good effect in Eduardo Galeano's Las venas abiertas de América latina, but that was a completely different project.) The great success of También la lluvia, in my view, is that it manages to use this conceit and rise above it – and so although I have described the movie in this way, I recommend highly that you go see it.

Read more »

by Julia Galef

If you wanted to teach people about science, you probably wouldn’t set out to write a fantasy novel. But the exceptional Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality – an ongoing series of online “fan fiction” by Eliezer Yudkowsky – borrows J.K. Rowling’s world and uses it as a vessel for a sophisticated guide to scientific thinking, while simultaneously crafting a far cleverer and more imaginative story than the original.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality isn’t primarily interested in teaching readers the “what” of science, even though it is liberally sprinkled with interesting facts about genetics, game theory, quantum mechanics, and psychology, among other things. Instead, as the title suggests, it’s about the “how” of science, conceived of not in the narrow sense of research in a laboratory, but in the broader sense of the process of figuring out how anything in the world works.

Like his counterpart in the original series, this Harry Potter is a seemingly ordinary British boy who is thrust into the magic world at the age of eleven. But unlike the mistreated waif of the original series, this Harry has grown up with caring, intellectual parents who bought him all the books he wanted and encouraged his analytic instincts. So when he finds himself plunged into a new, magical world, he immediately starts using that training to find the answers to a host of new questions that confront him: Who can I trust? Why are some people able to do magic and others not? Is there an afterlife? What are ghosts? And how does magic actually work?

Magic may not operate by the logic we’re used to in our world, Harry reasons, but it must operate by some logic. His attempts to methodically figure out what that is are some of the most intellectually enjoyable parts of the series. For example, it appears that you can cause a target to levitate by uttering the magic phrase “Wingardium Leviosa.” But what’s doing the actual work: the sounds made by the spellcaster’s mouth, or the concept in the spellcaster’s head?

Read more »