by Kelly Amis

Early in Davis Guggenheim’s education documentary “Waiting for Superman,” star Geoffrey Canada explains the title’s origin: as a child, Canada was devastated to learn that Superman didn’t exist, because who else would come save his troubled South Bronx neighborhood?

Today, Canada embodies a real-life version of the superhero he longed for, at least for several thousand families in New York City. Canada has embraced an entire community—100 blocks in Harlem—with a multifaceted effort to break the cycles of illiteracy, poverty and crime that have ravaged lives there for decades, including and especially by ensuring that every child receives a rigorous education. The results, so far, have been tremendous.

Success stories like this make me cry, but another story Canada relates in “Superman” made me laugh out loud (in a very quiet theater).

Once he became an adult, Canada explains, he decided to go study what was wrong with the public education system so he “could fix it.” After earning a master’s degree from Harvard, he figured this would take “two, maybe three years.” That was 35 years ago.

I didn’t laugh because this overreached; I laughed because I had thought the exact same thing when I first started working in education reform, in my case, about 20 years ago.

During my senior year in college, posters announcing a new program suddenly appeared everywhere on campus. Created by a twenty-two year-old named Wendy Kopp, Teach for America would send recent college grads into “under-resourced” American public schools to teach for two years, following the Peace Corps model. This struck me as the perfect way to give something back for the privileged educational opportunities I had enjoyed.

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by David Schneider

He'd disappeared. I searched and searched –– nothing but null sets. For the past four days, around the clock, he'd been beaming the news, minute by minute, from Cairo. But Tuesday morning, a vast silence on FaceBook. He'd ceased to exist. They'd just released Wael Ghonim; did they nail my friend Ahmed instead? He was a democrat, a revolutionary; a journalist, a broadcaster, an educator, a link between Arabic and English, a link between Egypt and America, someone I knew. I sent up the flares, waiting. We'd only just met, I thought, and now he's gone.

Where did they take him?

•••

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Two of the most famous suicide sites in the world are the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay and the Aokighara Forest in Japan. Both have been the topic of documentaries: The Bridge and Aokigahara – Suicide Forest.

Eric Steel, director of The Bridge sought a permit to film the Golden Gate Bridge, without divulging his real purpose which was to capture suicides. He later managed to capture 23 of the 24 suicides that happened within his yearlong watch. He went on to interview families of the victims, in an attempt to understand their lives before jumping off the bridge. In another controversial move, he didn’t disclose that the suicides had been captured on film.

Aokigahara – Suicide Forest follows geologist Azusa Hayano on a regular suicide watch. He finds an abandoned car near the forest and notes how someone could have gone in there ‘with troubled thoughts’. During his trek, he talks about the history of the place, the men and women who come to hang themselves. He finds a skeleton which he deems to be at least a year old, traces of a human life—food wrappers, crushed soda cans, flowers and food left by relatives and a man in a tent, apparently contemplating suicide.

“I was curious why people kill themselves in such a beautiful forest,” Hazano muses.

Both documentaries try to answer this question, as to why especially vulnerable people are lured to come to these places to commit suicide. The families of the victims in The Bridge speak of problems they have observed, of their loved ones feeling alienated from the world. They try to understand, and bring forth stories, anecdotes, memories. Sometimes their eyes brim with tears. In Aokigahara Forest, Hayano shifts from theorizing about the state of society which leads to annihilation to saying he doesn’t quite get it at all.

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by Sarah Firisen

“Facebook 2, Arab leaders 0”, read a sign held by an Egyptian woman on Friday as the celebrations erupted in Tahir Square. In a sharply ironic turn of events, it seems that American software companies may have done more to bring about regime change in the Middle East than all the trillions of dollars poured into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the resulting deaths and casualties. There does seem to be no doubt that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube had a significant role to play in giving a voice to the democracy-seeking citizens of Egypt & Tunisia and helping them to create a community of international supporters. If there ever is a judgement day, surely Mark Zuckerberg’s sins of inflicting Farmville and Mafia Wars on the world will be more than outweighed by the events of the last month of so.

And this makes me wonder, will people now stop saying that they don’t see the point of social media and that it’s an absurd waste of time? Of course, many of the things that people choose to spend their time doing on social media – see above comments re: Farmville and Mafia Wars – may not be the most productive things they could be doing. But, the same is true for almost everything; the fact that some people spend their time reading Harlequin romances, doesn’t negate the value of reading in general.

Whether its Second Life, Twitter, Facebook or a plethora of other offerings, there are many worthwhile, often beneficial uses of social media: disease support groups, public awareness campaigns, news feeds, educational programs, and more. Yes, there are an awful lot of videos of cats dancing on YouTube, but YouTube has also become a vital means of communication in and out of Tunisia and Egypt.

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3 Quarks Daily asked a number of scholars, academics, journalists, writers and others to give us brief reactions to the recent events in Egypt. Their responses are given below in the order in which they were received:

• Akeel Bilgrami
• Mohsin Hamid
• Mark Blyth
• Frans de Waal
• Pablo Policzer
• Ejaz Haider
• Mona El-Ghobashy
• Gerald Dworkin
• Ram Manikkalingam
• Jonathan Kramnick
• Amitava Kumar
• Alexander Cooley
• Suketu Mehta
• Justin E. H. Smith

Akeel Bilgrami:

It is far too early to write with any prognostic depth about the spontaneous and ongoing democratic movement in Egypt. But two immediate observations: First, it is interesting to see American pundits on television, despite their pious support for 'democracy', uniformly expressing a subdued anxiety about what worse and chaotic things might befall Egypt now. These very same pundits expressed no such anxiety about worse and more chaotic periods to follow the regime change that came with the American bombing and slaughter in Baghdad, Fallujah…. And second, it seems at the moment that the best thing for Egypt is for this popular movement to prolong itself on the streets for a measurably long time since real political deliberation and genuinely public education occurs (whether in democracies or in dictatorships) only on the site of popular movements, not hugger-mugger in round table negotiations and conferences among leaders and advisers, not in universities, not in the widely read or viewed media, not in editorials…. Even in a democracy like the United States, people got educated into civil rights on the site of popular movements through the sixties, not by the classroom and editorial commonplaces about 'racial equality'.

Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

Mohsin Hamid:

It's still possible that the old regime will find a way to cling on in Egypt, that the army will find a new front man. But what is clear is that beneath the ossified surface of the US-backed dictatorships and monarchies that span the Middle East, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and from Jordan to Yemen, something profoundly different is waiting to be born. Turkey and Indonesia may already offer us a glimpse of that possible future: a future of modern, moderate, independent-minded democracies, pursuing their own interests, and no longer obsessively shaped by security concerns. If Egypt can do it, then maybe one day Saudi Arabia can follow, and if that happens, so much that is wrong in Muslim-majority countries today, so much that is inegalitarian, sectarian, and stifling, has the potential to be put right. Here, in Pakistan, such a possibility gives me much-needed hope.

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist and the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

The plane shudders and groans, forcing me to look up. The rumble of the cabin has passed clear through my body, rattling my stomach. I give up trying to read, or even to think, allowing myself to acknowledge the inchoate signals emanating from deep in my bowels, rising up through layers of nervous networks up into the swirling bowl of consciousness that I carry around with me wherever I go. Yes, I hear you, I tell my mind-body, I hear you. No more cognitive demands — iPad off, eyes closed — let's breath deeply, unclench, and we’ll just ride this thing out.

The aerial maneuvers finally end, and the low rise of Nagpur city’s buildings begin to take shape. The airport is likely to be quite near the rest of the city, I imagine. The conference guys will be there with a sign, I’ll grab my luggage and soon we’ll be off and away. Still, something is happening inside of me that needs my attention. Am I just queasy from the hard flying? Is this maybe a fart? Or is this something more insistent? More certain of its peristaltic beat and rhythm, due to arrive, right on time, this Saturday morning at seven-thirty, as on every other good day? A lot rides on this, and I have to listen carefully to what my mind-body is saying.

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by Vivek Menezes

Our first glimpse of Lou Majaw comes just outside the Guwahati airport – his face is building-sized, emblazoned high above the multi-lane expressway to Meghalaya, on an advertisement for Star Cement. These billboards turn out to be ubiquitous along our route. By the time we’ve wound our way up from the Brahmaputra floodplains into the cloud-wreathed Khasi hills, the legendary rocker of the North-East seems a reassuringly familiar fixture of the landscape, even the toddler in our midst chortling with glee every time his flowing silver hair looms up ahead, instantly recognizable even in the fading light that slowly obliterates the thick pine forests that line the steep, curving road to Shillong.

But when we set out to find him the very next morning, the man seems as elusive as the fast-rising mists that are a permanent fixture of life in his hometown. We knew that Lou Majaw doesn’t go on the Internet, but now we learn that he doesn’t have a permanent contact number, or even a particularly fixed address. Then we discover that you can’t buy a copy of any of his albums in any of the music stores in Shillong either.

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by Namit Arora

On English in India and the linguistic hierarchies of colonized minds

(NB: an updated version of this essay is here.)

The modern era of European colonialism began in the Americas with bands of adventurers seeking El Dorado. Their early intrusions evolved into predatory monopolies like the East India Company and European states exerting direct control over the economic and political life of the colonies. The natives tended to not welcome and cooperate with the intruders, so alongside came great developments in the art of subjugating the natives, through military, political, and cultural means. In this essay, I’ll look at some cultural means of controlling the natives, particularly through language, and its effect on the psyche of the colonized, using examples from Africa and India.

When it comes to colonial quests, military might is what breaches the metaphorical Gates of Damascus. Regime change follows. Thereafter, the most efficient and durable means of colonial control happens via culture. Culture holds the keys to how a group sees itself and knows its place in the world. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o—Kenyan novelist, professor, and author of Decolonizing the Mind—has pointed out, ‘Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.’ [1]

When done right, the native comes to elevate and mimic his master’s ways, to see his own culture as inferior, and to look down on his past as ‘a wasteland of non-achievement’. He begins to defer to the colonizer’s ideas on fundamental things like beauty, art, and politics. In time, writes Ngugi, he begins to understand himself and his culture through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments. Before too long, he turns into a proxy for his master: colonialism with a native face.

How does the colonizer gain such control? The easiest method, explains Ngugi, is to actively spread his language among the natives, and to simultaneously denigrate the language of the natives as crude and unfit for proper education. It is amazing how much mileage this delivers. Simply make the colonizer’s language the lingua franca of imperial administration, accord prestige and upward mobility to those who learn it in colonial schools, and before too long, there is a feeding frenzy among a native minority. This has been the way of the great colonialists of history, such as the Arabs in the 7-8th centuries, the British and the French in the 19th, and the Russians with the Baltic States in the 20th. Ngugi writes,

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by Michael Blim

With each stone thrown, each Molotov cocktail hurled from one side of Cairo’s Liberation Square to another, an Egyptian revolution appears being thrown further away. The Square is a symbolic space, first occupied by people envisioning revolutionary change, and now made a marker in a game of competition among elites for governance. The state is secure. No one has yet set upon storming Cairo’s Winter Palace. No one in the popular movements against the state has set upon taking the state.

It is puzzling. What are the immediate reasons? Perhaps all of the candidate revolutionary state-takers are dead or among the 17,000 political prisoners of the regime. Not to be under-estimated is the 59-year military rule and two generations of stop and go mixes of cooptation and repression. The figure of Omar Suleiman, the torturer, the renditioner, the Israel interlocutor, says much about the center of things in Egypt today. The sheer corruption of Egyptian state power scars his face. He is no Kerensky; he is evil incarnate.

Perhaps Egypt is better off without a Lenin. In any event, it does not have one. Must it forego revolution as well?

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by Rishidev Chaudhury

Five years ago I spent six months working on a farm about an hour outside Bangalore. To get to it I took a city bus thirty miles along the highway to a dusty crossing where it turned onto dirt roads and bounced along them for about twenty minutes before ending in the centre of a small village called Mukodlu. As we left the city behind, the occupants of the bus changed from office staff to farm workers, and eventually included goats and chickens. I once witnessed a heated altercation between the bus conductor and the owner of a goat that was soiling the bus floor. It was eventually resolved when the owner held the goat’s bottom out of the window for the rest of the journey.

The farm was only a few miles off the highway but was also only a few miles away from a game sanctuary. Twenty years ago, when Bangalore was just starting to grow, the area was entirely rural. Now it was an odd hybrid of small villages, smaller farms, urban overflow, the game sanctuary and numerous granite quarries (many of them illegal). Perhaps it was once good for farming, but now the soil was thin, stony and eroded. We grew rice, vegetables and herbs, and had a small shed for breeding silkworms. The farm also hosted an NGO that ran workshops on governance for women from village-level self-governance bodies (Panchayats) and workshops on low-cost herbal medicine for midwives and other community healers.

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by Steven Poole

Please tear your eyes away from this elegant and curiously seductive prose for a few seconds and look at what surrounds this webpage on your display. Unless you are browsing in full-screen “kiosk” mode or kicking it old-school with Lynx, chances are your browser program is designed to look like some sort of machine. It will have been crafted to resemble aluminium or translucent plastic of varying textures, with square or round or rhomboid buttons and widgets in delicate pseudo-3D gradients, so they look solid, and animate with a shadowed depth illusion when you click them. Me, I hate this stuff. I think it's not only useless but pernicious and sometimes actively misleading. Won't you please join me in declaring a War on Chrome?

By “chrome” I don't mean Google's browser of that name, but all the pseudo-solid, pseudo-3D visual cruft that infests user interfaces in modern computing. For an example of Chrome Gone Wild I need only turn to Apple, who have somehow acquired a reputation for elegant and minimalist user-interface design while perpetrating monstrosities like this:

Can you tell what that does, and how to work it? Me neither, and I've been using it for years. (It is the Ultrabeat drum machine in Logic.)

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Ben Walters (BW) and J. M. Tyree (JMT) write about movies. Together, they wrote a critical appreciation of The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute’s Film Classics series, and they also have co-written reviews of No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading for Sight & Sound. They discussed this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated films on a transatlantic chat between Rotterdam and Lake Erie, and they agreed on a film to recommend: Exit Through the Gift Shop. Also discussed: Inception, Winter’s Bone, The Fighter, Somewhere, The King’s Speech, Shutter Island, True Grit, Catfish, and The Social Network.

JMT: Have you noticed how many of this year’s Oscar-nominated films are about family businesses of one kind or another?
10:08 AM It’s odd…
10:09 AM From Inception and Winter’s Bone to Black Swan, The Fighter, and The King’s Speech. “We’re not a family, we’re a firm,” Colin Firth says in The King’s Speech. And several of these films feature rotten families trying to push the kids into their firms…
10:10 AM BW: interesting. true grit and the kids are all right are about a determination toward family loyalty too
but the business side is something else, i guess
10:11 AM JMT: Yeah, on the other end of the spectrum, True Grit, like The Social Network, deliberately presents a total absence of family life. In another sense maybe True Grit presents a business venture that winds up becoming a sort of ad hoc American family. In The Social Network the business relationship is really more of a romance.
10:13 AM But for me it’s still the year of The Bad Family.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

Over the past month there have been two separate reasons to return to the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan. The first was the result of an astounding piece of mathematics by Ken Ono and his colleagues on the theory of partitions, bringing to a conclusion some of Ramanujan’s most interesting work in number theory. The second was thanks to Patrick French’s recent book – India, a portrait – which ends with a short two page biography of Ramanujan. The first Ramanujan is of course the Ramanujan who should matter, the mathematician, the second is unfortunately the Ramanujan who has come to occupy public memory, the metaphor.

It is not clear what French’s Ramanujan stands for in a chapter that seeks to explain the specifics of individual, social and organizational behavior on the basis of particular Indian traits such as religion or caste, but given the title of the chapter – Only in India – it does seem that French believes there was something particularly Indian about Ramanujan’s story.

This belief is not unique to French and has only been compounded by Ramanujan’s own description of the Goddess of Namagiri as the source of his inspiration. The result is that Ramanujan has come to embody certain romantic notion of eastern or more specifically Indian thought. Even those who want to allude to Ramanujan the mathematician do so in such terms. Paul Hoffman, in an otherwise entertaining book on the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos – The Man who Loved Only Numbers – writes, “While Hardy and Ramanujan’s partnership lasted, the two men stood the world of pure mathematics on its head. It was East meets West, mysticism meets formality, and the combination was unstoppable.”

Ramanujan’s otherwise excellent biographer Robert Kanigel devotes the entire first chapter of the book – The Man who Knew Infinity – to Ramanujan’s religious and social upbringing. However important this may have been to Ramanujan the man, the claim that it is central to Ramanujan the mathematician does not stand up to scrutiny. Ramanujan did not learn his mathematics in a temple. By the time he went to school only a few of the traditional Vedic schools still functioned. They had been largely replaced by schools teaching a curriculum based on European science.

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Justin E. H. Smith

O Isaac? Isaac! Come forthwith! The clamp 'round my gouty ankle must needs be tighten'd. That's right, Isaac. The left ankle. Yes, my loyal Clampsman. Just like that.

Do you know what I've been doing, Isaac? I've been reading about comic sections. Do you know what those are? They are the Curves produced by the Intersection of a Conus by a Plane. Now look here, Isaac. There are not only Circles and Ellipses so form'd, but e'en edifying Parabolae and whimsical Hyperbolae. Some are most comical indeed!

What's that, Isaac? You say it's 'conic' sections about which the immortal Euclid held forth, and not 'comic' sections?

Now, Isaac, did you see a Signe hanging o'er the Door of my den, warning “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of Mathematics?” You didn't? Well that's why you're allowed in, you Orang-Outang! You are here to tighten my ankle-Clamp, not to out-do the great Roberval.

Now, to our Quaeries.

Firstly, for some period, o'er a decade of Years ago now, we repeatedly heard that jubilant Declaration: Whoomp, there it is! What was discover'd at that time, precisely? A great Treasure of Portuguese Bullion? El Dorado? Verulam's Fountain of Youth? In what barbaric Tongue, furthermore, does whoomp translate the wise Archimede's elegant exclamation, εὕρηκα? Wherefore, finally, did the Jubilation cease so suddenly? Was this Discovery at length only a Fata Morgana?

Whence, moreover, all this talk of 'Wikileaks'? Wiki, we suppose, is of the same Lingua Hottentotica as whoomp, but what is leaking 'round here besides my woe-ridden joints? Information, you say? First of all, Isaac, you know not to interrupt me once I've begun. But more importantly how could 'Information' be a-leaking and a-flowing when we are unable to receive so much as a single sensible Reply to our Quaeries?

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