So here we are, celebrating our 5th Newton's Day at 3QD. Along with Richard Dawkins, we independently and simultaneously came upon the idea of celebrating Newton's Day on December 25th in 2004, and each year since then I have written a little something about Sir Isaac. Here are my posts from 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. Today, I'll explain a simple but very useful mathematical technique called Newton's Method, discovered by Newton in 1669, though he published it later.

Newton's Method is a way of iteratively finding closer and closer solutions to a certain kind of mathematical equation (a real-valued function f(x), to be technical). We do this in the following way (it may help to look at the concrete example from Wikipedia in the graphic following my description of the general method, to better understand what I mean):

1. Take a guess at the solution (a value for x).
2. Plug in this value for x and see what f(x) is.
3. Draw a line tangent to the function at this point.
4. The point where this line intersects the x-axis is your new and improved value for x.
5. Take this new value for x and go back to step 2. (This repeating is called iteration.)

Have a look at the graph (from Wikipedia) on the right. The function f(x) is the curved line shown in blue. In other words, for any point x on the horizontal axis, the blue line shows the value of f(x) on the vertical axis. The root (or solution) of the function is where the function crosses the horizontal axis; in other words, where the value of f(x) is zero. In the graph here, this is the value marked X. So we take a guess, X_n, go up the dotted blue line to the function, and then calculate the tangent line to the function at that point. This is shown in red. We see where that line crosses the x-axis, and take that point, X_n+1, as our value for x in the next iteration. As you can see, X_n+1 is a better approximation of the actual root, X. When we repeat the process over and over, one can very quickly converge on the correct solution.

How exactly do we do this? Let me show you. We know from calculus (as did Newton, since he invented it) that the derivative of a function f(x) at given point, written f'(x_n), is just the slope of the tangent line at that point. But we also know that the slope of a line is just the “rise”, in this case, the value of f(x_n) (on the vertical axis), divided by the “run,” the amount we move from X_n+1 to X_n on the horizontal axis. Setting these two quantities as equal, we get this equation: the derivative of the function at X_n is equal to the value of the function at X_n divided by the distance between X_n and X_n+1. In proper algebraic notation:

f'(x_n) = f(x_n) / (X_n – X_n+1)

Mutiplying both sides by (X_n – X_n+1), we get:

(X_n – X_n+1) * f'(x_n) = f(x_n)

Dividing both sides by f'(x_n), we get:

(X_n – X_n+1) = f(x_n) / f'(x_n)

Subtracting X_n from both sides, we get:

– X_n+1 = f(x_n) / f'(x_n) – X_n

And finally, multiplying both sides by -1, we get:

X_n+1 = X_n – f(x_n) / f'(x_n)

So that's how once we make an initial guess X_n, we get our next value X_n+1. And then repeat the process.

Look at this nice example from Wikipedia, where one wants to find the square root of 612:

In each successive result on the right hand side above, the correct digits are underlined. As you can see, one converges to a very accurate (to nine significant digits) approximation rather quickly. Well, there you go. That's Newton's Method. Interestingly, since computers are very fast at doing this sort of iteration, Newton's Method has become even much more useful now than when he invented it.

Oh, and if you don't understand “derivatives”, just take my word for it: the derivative of the function “x² – 612” is “2x” and don't worry about the details…

I wish all of you a very happy holiday season, and also best wishes for a wonderful new year!

David Schneider

It's Christmastime, Solstice-time, that annual ritual of family and SADness. But whenever I get depressed, I remember that poets frequently intuit the nature of the world long before psychologists, physicists, biologists, mathematicians or theorists are able to parcel out their pieces into numbers, formulae, and systems. I remember, for example, how the German and British Romantic poets grasped an understanding of complexity, relativity, and organic growth that was largely alien to Enlightenment science and the Industrial Revolution – understandings we now take for granted in the scientific conceptions of Relativity Theory and Chaos Theory, which were devised, respectively, nearly 100 and 200 years later.

And so, as we return home to the faces yet more familiar than the years before, we return to Larkin. He was right. Your mom and dad fuck you up – and we might now understand why.

In a new theory that could revolutionize the practice of psychiatry, neuroscience and genetics, Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, propose – in essence – that men are stupid and women are crazy.

I joke. A bit. It's only that when an idea this elegant, this simple, and this beautiful is proposed, the mainstream press (and blog commenters) will try to publicize it using truisms – that blaspheme its beauty, and jeopardize the great conceptual leap that's been taken – which harm the reputation of Science.

But I digress.

Crespi and Badcock propose that

I think of Keats:

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///
House of an Evil Jin
Jim Culleny

Smoke snakes from house roofs
in lazy loops of loose thought

as idle as the wisps of dreamers
who burn to know why god has wrought

I drive by with windows open
the smell of char comes drifting in

It's more like March than January
so odd the way this year begins

Malingering smoke might mesmerize me
and lazy thought could do me in

as easy hours may hypnotize me
till my skull's the house of an evil jin
.

Bookstores don’t often make people’s heads snap around, but there’s a lot of competition along Venice’s engorged thoroughfare, Salizada del Fontego dei Tedeschi. Amid the temptations of gelato for breakfast and designer Italian clothes, anything less opulent than the window display at La Carta would go ignored.

The window was a triptych set back from the street and hooded from the Venice sun. Only an artificial light from inside, a flattering golden-brown bronze, illuminated it. The centerpiece was a replica yacht with white canvas sails, intricate rope rigging, and a hull as polished as a bowling alley lane. Surrounding the ship were the accoutrements of a belles lettres lifestyle ca. 1875. A box with iron tooling for personalized wax seals. A vase filled with pens you’d have to dip in ink and possibly sharpen with a knife. Ribbons. Letter openers capped with colored Murano glass. Leather-bound journals for gossip about duchesses. Magnifying glasses, and gyroscopes for paperweights in a pinch. It looked like an estate sale from some universe where Proust had become a ship’s captain.

As it did to others, La Carta’s window tugged me almost gravitationally, pulling my neck and torso it while my feet were still walking forward. Before setting out that morning I had pulled from my luggage a sheaf of papers, directions to half the bookstores in the city, and I made this my first stop. My mission was simple (if admittedly daft). I figured I’d absorb political, religious, and architectural Venice by osmosis, without really trying. I was looking for literary Venice. That sounds a bit precious, but even when I’m ignorant of the local language, I visit every bookstore I can on vacations: I simply grasp a foreign culture most easily through its books.

And I wanted to know what Venice would have been like for a bookish person now and in the past, what sorts of stores they visited and how they got their verbal fix. The knowledge seemed far from Doges’ palaces, secreted away on a bookshelf somewhere, and I wanted to pull the volume down and peek inside.

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Graphics by Kate Vrijmoet

Elatia Harris

It is 2 a.m., and I am in my reading chair, building a list of modifiers that people set on writing about their animals had better shun. Here are a few.

little
sweet
sweet little
angelic
sweet angelic little
furry
sweet angelic furry little
tiny
sweet tiny furry little angelic
so tiny
sweet furry little angelic [noun] that is so tiny

This is the stuff, and its wretched tenderness actually finds a more just expression, an expression more fevered still, in devotional painting. Hence, the dog retablos, based on my own animals. It’s not possible to be more dog-besotted than I am — and still have anything else going on, that is. I’m hoping to establish my bona fides that way with pictures, and to get somewhere else with words. Everybody feeling safer now?

The Dream

Describe a dream, lose a reader, Harold Robbins used to say. But this one’s different.

The morning of the dream, Lina, my poodle puppy, weighed in at 19.2 lbs. What if Lina got as big as a pony? In the early days of a global financial crisis we cannot fathom, I have taken on a moon-colored puppy that eats and eats. And I have had the dream I know is dreamt the length and breadth of my family-oriented neighborhood, where visible disturbances of prosperity are so very few. I dream I am asleep, and Lina enters my bedroom prowling for food. She takes fluid strides on her hind legs, her eyes avid, sweeping the room. She’s taller than a man, and spectrally thin under bright scant fur, as thin as the zoo bear that survived the siege of Sarajevo for 200 days, too weak to eat the apple a soldier finally brought her. My baby — rising up in her need, and enormous. And she cannot be sustained.

Okay, so I am in my reading chair. It is 2 a.m., and I am fending off the dream. Facing me, Lina sits in my lap on her haunches and hooks her forepaws over my shoulders, her long head level with mine and so close that I see two of her. But for my nightshirt, of the thinnest Indian cotton, we are fur to fur the length of our abdomens. Better not to write about the tongue-showing that goes on, except to say we’re both doing it. The veridical Lina, who still has a puppy tummy, erases anxieties as surely as if she licked them away. She gives off that deeply comforting poodle smell — of violets and civet, salt flats and fresh kelp, sun on white linen. She is my creature, my teething thriving creature, whose love bites are puncture wounds, who’s in a great, great mood. And we have a long way to go.

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Krzysztof Kotarski

My grandmother loves me very much. The feeling, of course, is mutual.

So, with that qualifier out of the way, please forgive the following anecdote. I am a good boy at heart, and my grandma’s English is poor enough that she will never read this.

In early June 2007, I flew to The Middle East (“The” has to be capitalized, for reasons that will become clear). I landed at Ben Gurion International Airport and made my way to Ra’anana, one of the satellite communities around Tel Aviv, where I presented an academic paper on a Polish journalist who interviewed the famous (and infamous) Avraham Stern shortly before his death.

My grandmother, who raised me in my youth and with whom I enjoy an Obama-ish relationship, was quite proud that I was presenting my research at an academic conference in a foreign country (“My grandson! Look at him!”). However, she was worried. A conference was great, she said, but why did it have to take place in what she still refers to as the Holy Land, which, in her mind, is a country of bombs, raids, irate settlers and marauding bulldozers, each liable to maim or kill her eldest grandson.

“Why don’t you present the paper in Canada?” she asked when I first told her about my trip. “Or come visit, and do it here?”

Although I had no answer for her at the time other than my customary “don’t worry,” I began to consider my grandmother’s anxieties.

She has never been to Israel, Palestine, Jordan or Egypt (my itinerary), and the last time she set foot in “The Middle East” was in the 1980s when she travelled to Libya to visit my grandfather who was among the Polish engineers helping the then-evil Gaddafi regime build highways in exchange for oil.

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by Evert Cilliers

There are two political figures in America who are masters of self-invention.

One is Arnold Schwarzenegger. The other is Barack Obama.

Arnold invented himself as a body builder, movie star, and Governor. Barack Obama invented himself as a black man, Christian, and President.

(A quick aside about self-invention. It's not starting over, which is the reason people immigrate to America. It goes further. For example, the two richest men in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, didn't self-invent themselves. Bill Gates was fascinated by computers from an early age, and Warren Buffett started trading in his teens. They merely followed their destinies. On the other hand, the Jewish garment guys who started Hollywood not only invented new selves, they also invented a part of all of us.)

As a self-inventor, Arnold had it easier than Barack, because in his teens he discovered a role model: Steve Reeves, the muscleman who became a film star in Italian sword-and-sandal epics such as “Hercules.” Arnold deliberately went into body building to become a movie star.

Barack Obama had a more winding road to his current self-invention as our President. He had no role models, except for his mother: a sixties social rebel, unafraid of the Other (she married a black man from Kenya and an Indonesian), who set high educational and moral standards for herself and her son. But she gave him neither an identity nor a community.

Those he had to invent for himself.

He started as an anomaly. He grew up white, but he looked black.

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by Jason S. Bardi

The holiday season is upon us, and spending the weekend at the relatively unconnected house of a close relative makes me long for all those modern conveniences I take for granted: cell phones, PDAs, digital cable, and high-speed wireless. Lack of wireless is going to force me to find an internet café in a little while, as soon as I am done writing this. Meanwhile, being cut off from the Web is the perfect entry into telling the story of how our modern era of electronic communication came to be — its ancient origins — a story that I recount in my latest book “The Fifth Postulate,” which is hitting store shelves this month (published by John Wiley & Sons).

This year, 2008, is the 175th anniversary of electronic communication, though the anniversary passed quietly and went, to my knowledge, unnoticed. It was born 175 years ago thanks to a clever invention by the great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who in the 1830s invented an early working telegraph. Though he was never able to develop the technology further, he clearly saw its potential. A single tap, he would write, would enable instantaneous communication between distant cities.

Like many of the great discoveries Gauss made in his life, Gauss's telegraph was not appreciated until after his death. Neither was non-Euclidean geometry, another one of Gauss's great inventions. Both developments are featured in my new book.

Now here's the story:

The Sunday churchgoers in the town of Göttingen discovered a new feature adorning the steeple of their beloved St. John’s Church in 1833. Two lines of curved wires, one up to the top of the church and one down again on the other side, had been installed at the orders of the local celebrity scientist, Carl Friedrich Gauss, a man who in some depictions bears a strangely strikingly similar resemblance to Ebenezer Scrooge. He was, by all accounts, extremely un-Scrooge like as a scientist, and this was most apparent in his collaborations with those in his life with whom he shared scientific or mathematical interest. He devoted himself generously to such collaborations at various times in his life.

You have to understand that Gauss devoted himself to these collaborations despite the fact that he may not have had much to gain from any of them. There were none in his day and very few in the history of mathematics who could have taught him much of anything. Gauss is often grouped with Isaac Newton and Archimedes as one of the three greatest mathematicians in history. Gauss was, like those other two, a solitary genius who made his greatest discoveries while working alone, without ever consulting anyone else. While it is hard to know how Archimedes treated his collaborative peers, if indeed he had any, Isaac Newton struggled to maintain civility in the collaborations throughout his life. At times, his collaborations erupted into nasty disputes.

Somehow, though, Gauss managed to have several very fruitful collaborations, and one of the most fruitful was his work with a twenty-four-year-old scholar named William Weber, who arrived at Göttingen to be a professor of physics when gauss was in his 50s. Gauss was a patron of sorts for Weber. The death of a Göttingen professor had created a vacancy at the university, and the government bureaucrat in charge of filling it wisely asked Gauss whom he should hire. Gauss had met Weber four years earlier at a conference in Berlin, and he enthusiastically supported the young scholar for the position. Weber's arrival sparked the final period of great productivity in Gauss’s career.

Though Weber was half Gauss's age, their relationship quickly grew close. They became fast friends and were often dinner guests in each other’s homes. More than that, they had countless scientific discussions, performed experiments together, and started a journal to publish their results.

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///
Where Buddha Was
Jim Culleny

I thumb down the pile of books:

Paper Dance, 55 Latin Poets

Wislawa Szymborska, Poems
New and Collected

Poetry Like Bread (maybe the way
my mother made), Poets of the
Political Imagination

And Billy Collins Sailing Alone Around the
Room

which is pretty much what we all
do to a great extent

until, at the bottom: Precise V5,

which is not a book at all
but the label on the black pen

that lies there in
incandescent light at the
bottom of the ziggurat of books,
its axis aligned with their stepped spines
upon the golden oak table so perfectly. There

for a moment Buddha was.

“See,” he says, “I'm not so far-fetched
as you'd hoped.”
.

In the forties and fifties the Beats created a geography of the American imagination that continues to attract new generations. At the same time, a group of Soviet researchers wanted to re-engineer society with computers and communications. It remains to be seen whether either group’s intellectual heirs will shape our digital future, or whether real change will come from somewhere else altogether – like the Islamic world.

Fifty years ago Soviet and American cyberneticists were creating the theoretical framework for the Internet – or something like it – as an engine of social design. At the same time, the Beat writers were challenging the entire concept of social engineering in favor of more spontaneous ways of living.

So, a thought experiment: Would the Beats – those old American freethinkers – have taken to the Internet as a new medium of expression or rejected it as too dehumanizing? Would they have been bloggers?

Yeah, I know. It sounds like the set-up for a satirical piece: “Beatnik Blogs.” Or better yet, Beat Twitter. The 140-character limit might have attracted them the way that haiku did:

DULUOZ is watching his friends burn burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders

POETGUY is wondering how many windows Moloch has for eyes. Am figuring a thousand, give or take.

Blogs? They're linear, static. They're old lit. Twitter is new lit.

But these are questions of form. What about content? The Beats were drawn to geography – the road, the mountains, the rivers, and the cities.And there may never have been a time in history when it was possible to feel less connected to your actual geographic location than you can today. You can live large chunks of your life without it much mattering whether you’re in Los Angeles, Dubuque, or Teheran. Virtual “worlds” like Second Life and massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, are total immersion environments that absorb large amounts of time, money, and energy for their participants.

If aliens wanted to reprogram humanity for extraterrestrial slavery, they might have created something like the Internet. It severs us from daily interaction with the Earth, releases us from the need for face-to-face social contact. So, doesn't that make it dehumanizing? Wouldn’t the Beats have rejected it?

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by Maniza Naqvi

The nurse steps back after she finishes wrapping Danis’s head in a bandage of fresh white gauze. Danis is dying of brain cancer. He is dying gracefully despite the horrible pain. She takes a look at her handiwork and smiles as she strokes his head and thinks back to the thick mane of snowy white hair the kind that the men of his generation sport and which she had shaved off months ago at the time of Danis’s brain surgery. She sees the pain in his clouded blue eyes—which once must have sparkled before she knew him. There now you look like a Prince she says—from the Arabian nights! He winces and suppresses crying out in pain. She tells him that he has courage. He tells her that he has nothing of the sort, he has nothing to fear. Only those who fear need courage! He is confidant that God is waiting for him. She looks around her to see if the coast is clear—puts a finger to her lips conspiratorially, pulls a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. Then lights one and sticks it between his lips—letting him take a few puffs, while she readies the injection. Before each terrifyingly long needle he requests the nurse to say 'Bismillah' before administering the shot. He shuts his eyes as the nurse taps his vein on his wrist or his hand or in the crock of his elbow. Just as the needle punctures skin and moves further in a peaceful expression smoothens his yellowing and weathered pain-beaten face. For him God’s presence is evident in everything in his whole life—his birth, his health, his chances of survival—everything is based on God. For Danis, God is love and God is hope and against all odds God is present when there is nothing else to hold on to. Danis clings to hope. Reason, he says dismissively makes you want to die. Faith keeps you alive. Danis says this often. But then when the nurse leaves him to tend to others, he is quite capable of muttering that he is an atheist. He has to talk about God to the nurse—he tells others, so as not to make her lose her will for keeping him alive. Danis knows that hope is the most important and essential ingredient to human will and so it is he figures for those who are trying to save him. The least he can do in this worthy struggle is to do his bit of playing along. Atheists after all, respect above all, the human will.

Danis thinks back to the pain and hurt and struggles of his life so that he can cast upon everyone who has played a leading role in his life, a gaze of compassion. All those, who, with their absences and their cruelties made the presence of God an absolute necessity in his life when he was just a small child. Danis tells the nurse these discoveries that he is making while lying in this hospital with its smell of antiseptic and its gleaming pale yellow and white walls. We are all people of faith in the Balkans, he tells her. Loved by God. From time to time we’ve changed teams but never lost love. Bogomils—the Bulgar eastern Christian church—the heresy they may have converted to Islam perhaps as a rebellion against the Vatican but maybe because of the Ottomans—who-ever, what ever the reason, love, spite, or oppression, no one ever betrayed God here. Betrayed each other, betrayed Tito, a wife, a husband, a lover, but never God. Danis, was a communist, but was always a true believer in the purpose of God. When there seemed none at all he believed completely in love and hope. And by his own description by all accounts he should have been a delinquent destined for a madhouse had it not been his deep instinct for survival and his constant companionship with Allah. Fortified, so, he chronicles what he has endured and overcome. All the cruelty: the last war, the illness, the death of family. And none of it—not the daily ups and downs with all the surgery—nor the war and its aftermath, none can surpass the cruelty and ever present pain that he suffered in his childhood at the hands of his parents. His father left him, for the love of another woman. Left Danis, his mother and a baby sister. What followed in the aftermath was the agony of suffering and of misplaced resentments the beatings that Danis endured from his parents. Danis was separated from his father by a social worker and a system that insisted on rules and not feelings. Danis remembered as though it was a fresh memory, how his mother’s new husband had beaten him when his mother was away during the day. How he had run away from home to his father’s house only streets away and how he had banged on the window with his tiny fists his face red and swollen from the beating and begged his father to take him back. How his father had kept Danis with him and fought against the social workers and his ex-wife and had finally prevailed in keeping his son. And then how his father’s successive wives came through Danis’ life wreaking havoc. His father sank into silence and a sadness interchangeable with unpredictable bouts of sudden rage and more beatings for Danis. Beatings for Danis, by women, for whom, he was never a good enough child. Danis had been a five year old for whom war had begun early in life. And for whom the horror of ethnic cleansing and war at the age of sixty years would not be as cruel or as memorable as the pain suffered in childhood. Now lying in his hospital bed he forgave his parents because they were young and had suffered cruelty in their own childhoods.

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by Michael Blim

In Washington, D.C., liberals are back, and so is J.M. Keynes. As financial panic has swept through the American economy, economists on the center-left who had drifted toward the doctrinaire neoliberalism of de-regulated markets and a state apparatus friendly to capitalist expansion have made a big course correction. Regulation is back, signaling a return to the last century progressive politics of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

But as the threats of domestic deflation and a growing American output gap have put the fear of the Great Depression into the new Obama administration, the same liberal economists so taken with neoliberalism have embraced J.M. Keynes once more. The Keynes of massive fiscal stimulus, and to a lesser extent the Keynes of Bretton Woods, are now in desperate fashion.

We are likely about to see a finely tuned, more technically adept New Deal II. This time, though, Obama, unlike Franklin Roosevelt, will likely have fewer qualms about spending as much as it takes, nor apparently for as long as it takes. With two economic historians of the Great Depression close at hand, Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve and Christina Romer at the Council of Economic Advisors, Obama has doubtless internalized the lesson learned through Roosevelt’s mistake of calling off massive fiscal stimulus too soon and contributing to the 1937 plunge back into deep recession.

Of the liberal economists who are public figures, Larry Summers will probably turn out to be the most important, as he appears to have been become the de facto quarterback of the Obama economics team. His academic reputation rests upon rigorous empirical analysis of questions designed to upset conventional wisdom in a wide range of economic sub-fields. Formerly a deficit hawk and a defender of unregulated derivatives markets, Summers was one of the first (though Paul Krugman was way ahead of everyone) to recognize the gravity of the current crisis and quickly shifted onto Keynesian ground in calling for massive fiscal stimuli, and in particular redistributive strategies that would put resources into the hands of the working and middle classes.

Others have similarly forsaken neoliberalism’s strictures for liberalism’s largesse. Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who prescribed “shock therapy” for ailing Bolivia in 1983 and the same for former socialist countries such as Poland and Russia after 1989, now heads up the Earth Institute at Columbia University and is the Director of the United Nations Millennium Program. He represents a growing number of American economists that have been supporting direct American state intervention wherever vital economic interests are threatened by the current crisis. Sachs is currently pressing for direct economic relief for the U.S. auto industry, a position opposite to but consistent with his past remedies based upon state-centered economic activism.

Joseph Stiglitz, former chair of the Clinton Administration’s Council on Economic Advisors and former chief economist of the World Bank, won the Nobel Prize for showing the adverse and unexpected effects caused by asymmetries of information that often underlie market transactions. Not surprisingly, he is a vigorous advocate of the regulation of financial markets. He is also highly critical of the U.S. for abusing its hegemonic role and distorting capital markets and international trade for its own ends. In some respects, Stiglitz’s advocacy of fair trade for poor countries in the Doha round underscores the return of the Bretton Woods Keynes where trade, though free, is rationalized through international agreements and rules.

Stiglitz, Sachs, and Summers, the “three S’s,” (and perhaps adding Krugman, we couldemploy an accounting firm rhyme like “SSS & K”) highlight fairly the shift in economic belief and strategy brought on by the economic crisis and Obama’s victory.

Call it the “’New’ New Deal.” It consists of: (1) as much fiscal stimulus as necessary to push up demand and avoid deflation; (2) activist state intervention to save and/or restructure vital parts of the national economy; and (3) strong regulatory measures to curb abuses of markets and to assure that they function with maximum transparency and efficiency. Commitments to free trade with “fair trade” concessions for poor countries and assistance for dislocated workers in rich countries remain surprisingly strong, perhaps another legacy of the Keynesian analysis of the Great Depression that guides current thinking.

Will it be enough? Can the “’New’ New Deal” work this time?

There are some problems.

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by Alan Page

Mexico City traffic is a looped catastrophe, a rope that frays and frays but never snaps. Several years ago, hopelessly stuck in an utterly paralyzed Viaduct, it occurred to me that of all things made by man, our peculiar brand of traffic most resembled the Weather in all its unpredictable force and magnitude. It elicits the same kind of speculation, the same panicked scrambling for shelter.

What is most puzzling is that you can actually get used to something like this. And you do. You begin to associate sundown itself with the endless string of breaklights, the rasping of engines. We have all suffered this misery. And it’s strange, because after a while in this category of traffic, you know something inside you is hurting, you just don’t what it is. Added insult, (¡faltaba más!): there is something about this kind of suffering that is entirely incommunicable. (In this, it is similar to getting roiled by our homebrewed strain of bureaucracy.) Example: a close friend called, spitting with exasperation, after having to cross the city on a holiday weekend, Friday payday: 3 hours, as they say, at the speed of a turn of the wheel. And as he raged about how impossible it is to blablablá in this city, I did my polite damnedest to get him to stop, or shut up, or change the subject. It wasn’t that I was unsympathetic. Not in the least. But it wasn’t sympathy he as asking for, it was a call for empathy – for me to try to feel with him what he’d been through. And I’d rather sip hot tar.

I have been that call, and I have heard my interlocutor’s voice go slightly limp. And that’s when I know I will have neither redress, nor company, nor consolation. I submit to the members of the board: there is something the citizens of Mexico City know about traffic, something essential about it, about what it does to the human soul. And it is a knowledge so asphyxiating, so utterly noxious, that we expend a great deal of energy trying to white it out.

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by Colin Marshall

As an aesthetic-historical artifact, a primary source documenting the lost, oft-fetishized swinging jauntiness of early-1960s Western Europe, Cléo from 5 to 7 works. As a story that keys into the low-level dread and inklings of personal fraudulence that rise within us all from time to time — not too often, if we're lucky — it's more effective still. Agnès Varda pulls off an impressive balancing act by stacking a tale of fragile superficiality momentarily shaken by mortality's quake atop what's essentially a documentary of idealized Paris. (But if it's documentary footage, it by definition captures the real Paris rather than an ideal one; critics have surely tied elaborate mental knots about this before.) It's fiction in the foreground with fact in the background. The fiction, though, gets at something very real as well, albeit differently real, with a treatment that stands well apart from other films' before and since.

Cléopatre Victoire's bit of bad news hits her almost immediately, delivered via a tarot deck in this black-and-white picture's sole color sequence. Despite the fortuneteller's boilerplate buffer of hand-waving about change and transformation, Cléo knows full well what that card with the hunched, scythe-wielding skeleton predicts for her. Alas, for two whole days she's been trapped in a sickening limbo familiar to too many: Waiting For The Test Results. Though medical science will come through with the dirt on her possible cancer in a mere two hours, the prognostication confirms her worst fears: as many male (and envious female) heads are turned by her appearance and as many spins as her newly-cut pop single receives on the radio, she's a pretty blonde chanteuse whose days are numbered. The other cards reveal a heartening new acquaintance in her future, but the damage is done; impervious to reassurance, Cléo leaves despondent. (“She is doomed,” the prophet then tells a man, previously unseen, sitting in the next room.)

This would be more tragic if Cléo were at all sympathetic. “Ugliness is a kind of death,” she thinks to herself on the way out, checking out her own reflection in the foyer's mirror. “As long as I'm beautiful, I'm alive.” To label her as vain misses the point. It's not as if she has a tendency toward these moments of high aesthetic self-regard; most of her actions revolve around the examination and manipulation of her own surface. Even the tears shed at the close of her tarot appointment look timed and released to be maximially photogenic in the given context. Moments later, Cléo waltzes down the street, tractor-beaming the gazes of strangers, apparently her usual self. Hers is a broad, generic beauty, one that commands glances by the dozen but rarely provides a gateway to any substantive human contact. (Indeed, it may be an active repellent; she looks, by modern standards, imposingly, laboriously constructed, like her own wax museum figure.) It's no wonder she equates loss of beauty with loss of life — she's got nothing else.

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Part I of this piece appeared last week at 3QD and can be seen here.

by Stefany Anne Golberg

May 12

2pm

Bill was raised in a poor mountainous village in Zhejiang province (“Where is Hangzhou you will go there”), the son of tea farmers. He was allowed to leave his village and attend university in 1964 but his studies were cut short in 1966 by the Cultural Revolution. “We went mad, you know, we went mad,” he says over and over. He tells us he joined the youth militia and criticized the teachers he went to the city to learn from. He passes around his faded Red Guard armband, laughing at it. He sings about Our Great Leader (“we went mad, you know, we went mad”) and soon the bus driver joins in mechanically, paying more attention to the road. When Bill met his wife, she was a city girl in high school. Bill married her out of benevolence. She suffered in the country, we are told, though we’re not given details. Then suddenly, the Cultural Revolution is over and things start to change. Mao dies, Mao’s wife is arrested, and in return Bill’s wife is allowed to escape the rural toil of farming life. She moves to the city and a few years later in 1982—the government needing tour guides in the city as much as history teachers in the country—Bill and his son are allowed to join his wife, in the city where he resides today, still a tour guide at 64.

By the time Bill finishes his tale, half the bus is asleep with mouths gaping and eyes closed. A Canadian woman snores. Bill’s real name is Huang.

From the spotty window, the farms of Hubei province whiz by. Eight people dressed in unremarkable clothes stand before a gravestone in what appears to be a random spot in a field. A trio of horn players point their brass instruments into the blazing sun, their song silent from the tour bus.

6pm

Aboard the M.V. Emperor, where we will spend the next four days, we are assaulted by a long line of grinning uniformed crew members. Two haggard men in ripped t-shirts stumble into the crowd. They carry a load of heavy suitcases that dangle from a bamboo stick balanced on their shoulders. Among the tourists, there is an audible gasp and nervous giggling. They deposit the bags heavily and someone fumbles around in her pocket for a yuan or two. But the crooked men have already left.

May 13

6:53am

The peagreen Yangtze moves beneath us as we set sail upstream. The river is dotted with small pointy fishing boats. Brick shacks peek out between the trees that cover the surrounding high mountains. The air is alive with tiny white butterflies. You’ve seen it in pictures: the mist, the cliffs— it hasn’t changed for a while or so it seems. But the Yangtze is indeed is changing, it’s just that much of the past is already far beneath the surface.

8am

Our first breakfast on the ship is what has now become my daily morning fare: congee (white, black, corn, millet) topped with spicy pickled things. It is the only item that never seems to run out at the breakfast buffet. “There was some sort of earthquake yesterday,” a woman says.

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In reverse chronological order:

• Expand the Police Force, in Dawn, 9/2009
• Defending Dictatorship: Another View on Pakistan, in n + 1, 3/2008
• The Bhutto Dynasty Must End Now, in Foreign Policy in Focus, 1/2008
• Welcome to America…You’re Under Arrest, in The Smart Set, 1/2008

[S. Abbas Raza’s writing for 3QD can be seen here.]

Justin E. H. Smith

Maureen Dowd is in my bed. I can tell it's her. That shock of red hair spilling across the pillow, those red high heels kicked haphazardly onto the floor.

What is she doing in there?

I'm going to have to wake her up and ask her to leave. She'll think I'm afraid of intelligent women, but that's not true. My wife is very intelligent. In fact, that's just the problem: Maureen Dowd is not my wife.

Come to think of it, where is my wife? Did I shift possible worlds, into one in which I –or should I say my counterpart-me?– am married not to my wife, but to Maureen Dowd? Did my wife somehow metamorphose into Maureen Dowd while I was out getting her more flu capsules, like some Gregor Samsa, though with an infinitely more gruesome fate?

I suppose the only question that really matters is: am I now married to Maureen Dowd? Whether this marriage was sealed through world-shifting or through metamorphosis is of little interest, except perhaps to the metaphysicians. Perhaps they would tell me that in the latter case we're basically looking at a cosmic annulment by reason of change of substance. I married my wife after all, not my wife-or-whoever-my-wife-might-turn-into.

I'm just going to have to wake her up and get to the bottom of this. I hope she doesn't talk like she writes. That would be unbearable, especially if, metaphysically and legally, she is in fact my wife. Then I would have to put up with it. I would say: “I seem to have shifted possible worlds or something, for I don't recall ever marrying you, Ms. Dowd.” And she would reply: “What a pretty pickle,” or: “So, darling, is it going to be Taming of the Shrew, or more Mister Magoo?” or some other rhymed literary reference that I'll feel I ought to understand, yet won't.

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1.

Somewhere between growing up in farm country and leaving it, I watched my eight-year-old brother fall into a pile of afterbirth. One minute, we were poking the afterbirth with sticks—we couldn’t help ourselves, it was so strange, that pool of black milk, the recent discard of twin lambs—and the next minute, my brother was twitching in the grass, his sneaker anointed with the oddest of glues. He twitched for awhile, and when he stopped twitching he was initiated into the strange nature of hospitals, and after much in the way of cat-scan and examination, he was declared epileptic and released with a small vial of pills. At the time, no one could have convinced me—though I was old enough to know better—that those pills weren’t intended for the sole purpose of preventing my brother from turning into a lamb, as I’d seen him touched, comic-book style, by a substance capable of altering his genetic makeup. Whether I entertained this delusion because I would have preferred my brother as part-sheep—docile, wooly, and scarcely capable of competing for my parent’s affection—or because I believed the animal life to be more inviting than the human variety, remains up for debate.

2.

Emerson claimed that every word was once an animal, and when one is drawn to both words and animals with a frightening amount of affection, there is a temptation to elaborate on this system and transform the rules of grammar so that they might join another kingdom. What results is a cacophony of alphabet and heartbeat, furry vowels, clawed consonants. Sometimes nouns are horses and verbs are monkeys. On any given day, the fluctuations of adjectives are extreme, unpredictable, scampering from moth to snake to hamster. A school of fish is less institution, more living thesaurus, providing synonyms for what it might mean to be endangered or sublime.

3.

Words can be herded, animals, less so. I’ve attempted to blame my obsession on some crazed gene, an unavoidable blip in the familial blood. As children, we were surrounded by aunts and uncles capable of training possums and leading wild horses to makeshift pastures. But the origins of this gift were solely with my grandmother, Estelle, a high-haired little woman who once wore the bite-marks of a weaning kitten on her hand like strange jewelry. When she died in the living room after a long illness, the animals of the house were brought to her side, so that they could understand Our Loss. We watched them sniff her stillness curiously, obsessively, and the precise moment when grief occurred to them was obvious to us, and violently so. Howls went up, tongues came out, my grandmother’s cheek was licked with an alarming intensity, and shortly after, she was buried in her best dress with the ashes of her Great Dane, who’d once stood as the taller of the two while on tiptoe. At the reception that followed, my sister and I let the parrot do all the talking, and examined a beetle crushed at the curb by a mourner’s foot. Our familial tradition is pity for the roadside lost, our inheritance a moral conscience that has swapped the cartoonish hover of devil and angel with the perch of the warm-blooded, and the cold.

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By Stefany Anne Golberg

There’s a curious smell in Chinatown. It smells of fish and death and moldering cardboard. The streets teem with people moving and spinning like the Teacups ride at Disneyland. I try to keep up with my mother, father, and older brother but they are too quick for me. My father is looking for the perfect dim sum restaurant. People bump into me, there is no space in this part of town, not even for a little girl. In every city, anywhere we go, my father takes us to Chinatown. He loves Chinatown. He loves the food, loves the style, the smell, mostly the food.

In every American city, where people mostly travel alone, and eat alone, and shop alone in big big stores, there is almost always Chinatown, where people are packed together, and eat together, and are together. When I am a girl, Chinatown is a world that has been created for me and not for me at all, that I can go to and will never be mine. Chinatown is the rest of the world, its possibilities and its failures. Somewhere, there is a whole country of Chinatown that sustains this one, that creates the magnificent trinkets cluttering the streets, wonderful, beautiful crap, cheap props in a street play.

I learn to love Chinatown too, in any city, anywhere I go.

May 7

6:49pm
“I was a Red Guard member in 1966, saw Our Great Leader Chairman Mao in Tiannanmen Square,” Bill says with a big smile. “I tell you my life story, very sad. That’s why I’m writing a book! About all my life experience. There’s a picture of me in my Red Guard uniform during Cultural Revolution. I will show you!”

8pm
In the hotel room I turn on the television. On one channel there’s a great battle scene from ancient times. On another channel, a man in a suit sits behind a desk and angrily scolds another man, with his pistol. Another shows a march of bloodied soldiers and filthy extras—men, women, children—dragging themselves down a dirt road. There’s an elaborate Tang opera and an infomercial channel dedicated to selling products I can’t identify. Hu Jintao addresses a congress and advertisements for the Beijing Olympics pop up regularly. On the one English-speaking channel, Mongolians in folk costumes frolic through wide grassy fields. In the upper left-hand corner of most channels is a CCTV logo, the major state-run television broadcaster.

11pm
My mother meets me at the Jiangxian Grand Hotel in southern Beijing. She disappears into the elevator with her friend and I finish a late-night plate of bok choy in the empty Western-style restaurant, watching pink plastic lilypads bob in an artificial pond that overlooks the lobby.

May 8

4:30am
Neither my mother nor I can sleep. As she showers, there is a knock at the door. I throw on a robe and open it. A young man’s hands are full of soap cakes and mini bottles of shampoo. He eyes me nervously and says nothing. I hold out my hands and he dumps all the soaps in them. I close the door and put the soaps on the TV. “Who was at the door?” my mother asks. “It was a man with soaps,” I say. “I read that in China if you ask for something you get it immediately,” she says. “Did you ask for soaps?” I ask. She pauses and turns to me. “No,” she says, “I don’t think so.”

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The year in terror has been building and rising, but few expected it to rise to this dramatic crescendo. Boats, control rooms in key buildings, AK-47s, grenades, hostages. As I begin to write, my television continues to bleat the worn platitudes of so many blind men and women of Hindoostan panning reality with their telephoto lenses, over the muffled roar of helicopters and machine gun fire.

Terrorism is high impact and ethics-free anti-art using global media. My imagination has been leached and my insides need cleansing, like an extra travel day spent watching porn in a hotel room. Still, one must concede their mad genius, uniting a new day of mourning in India with the pilgrim feast of Thanksgiving in America, both doused in the same hot stream of media violence.

I am already getting unsolicited text-forwards from cousins and acquaintances. India is planning to bomb Pakistan, says one. My friend Usman, in London, texts me just as he has every time this year, in the wake of each terror strike: “All ok?” “We’re invading Pakistan, but otherwise all okay,” I squeeze out. I’m not sure how funny he found this, for he writes back, “Re: Invasion, ok good. I was worried in the post-Obama fervour the world was becoming too sensible.”

Traveling through Mumbai this week is like living in an alternative dystopic reality, where malls, hotels and airports are surrounded with metal detectors, and armed guards. The usual ceremonies of entry and departure from colonnaded porticos have been suspended, and everyone is being forced to walk the last five blocks to the single entry of their sealed building. In the wake of the attacks, any number of international trade and industry conferences have been cancelled throughout India. Skittish international capital is reevaluating the risk of doing business in India, and so the attacks are having their desired economic effect.

The news channels have been branding it “India’s 9/11.” It is media hyperbole, it serves an ideological intent to align with and perhaps out-victim the US and UK, and it makes it easier to suggest retaliatory military action within the borders of Pakistan. But the label also lingers while we struggle to come to grips with what it was all really about. Not the tragic repetition of someone else’s history, but perhaps a sign from the future.

The attacks exceed the everyday violence that we have become inured to in the subcontinent, even when it has communal intent, even when hundreds die. There is the daring, of course, not only to attack India by sea, but to hit out at the public palaces and perches of the rich and famous. There is the urban, architectural and maritime research, the cross-border planning, the wireless coordination of personnel and armaments. There is the lateral imagination to transform a self-involved metropolis that itself has often threatened to secede from the dirty Indian hinterland into a cowering and precarious place on the edge of a dangerous sea. The Indian people, of every class and region, want to know why this was done to them, and no one really has any ready answers.

The hard answer that Indians are looking for is that there can be no peace for a prosperity that one’s neighbors do not share in, and that we are destined to share not only our past inheritance, but also our future fortune.

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