Last month, late at night, searching for a painkiller for my wife I came upon an old stock of tablets I had been prescribed for a muscle injury. It was a combination peculiar to India, and among other drugs it included Paracetamol and Diclofenac. Since she was still breastfeeding I took care to check the tablet only to find the combination I had taken for over a week was banned in several countries due to the possibility of a life-threatening reaction.

I had been prescribed the medicine at one of many new private medical hospitals that have recently sprung up in India. The old government hospitals gave off an intense smell of phenyl (a once ubiquitous disinfectant), patients would usually spill out of the wards on to long dingy hospital corridors, wastebaskets would be overflowing with discarded injections and bloodied dressings and even a dog or two roaming the wards wouldn’t be taken amiss. They were among the few places where the existence of the Indian elite couldn’t be completely cut-off from the reality of this country.

This is no longer the case. The private hospitals are run according to the same insurance driven model that funds medical practice in the US. They cater exclusively to the post-liberalization elite and medical tourists from other countries. In look and feel they resemble the four and five star hotels that have mushroomed in the country at much the same time and pace. Over the past three years I have had reason to observe them up close as my father has gone from a healthy middle age to radiotherapy for a malignant prostate, a gallbladder removal, three major surgeries for a persistent subdural hematoma, a mild stroke, all the while requiring monitoring for his diabetes and his weakened heart. All things considered he has come out of this rather well, but now on my mobile phone instead of a single number for a general practitioner I carry the contact details of a host of specialists who individually deal with the brain, heart, prostate and other assorted body parts.

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Our visual system to seamlessly informs us about and guide us through the outside world so that we typically hardly notice its actions. However, our brain has limited processing capacity, and must filter visual input to extract the more biologically meaningful features from the totality of the visual scene. Optical illusions, in which a perception about an external scene does not match the physical reality, emerge from this filtering process. Illusions thus reveal a dissociation between the physical world and our perception of it, allowing a glimpse into the workings of the mind.

The Ebbinghaus illusion is a widely studied optical effect in which the perceived size of a circle is affected by circles of a different size surrounding it. In this illustration, most people perceive the orange circle in the right hand group as larger than the orange circle on the left. This perception is variable among individuals, with the strength of the Ebbinghaus illusion reflecting both developmental and environmental influences. The effect is absent in young subjects and in some individuals with autism, and it also varies in strength among subjects from different cultures. It can also be abolished entirely if the central circle is an object of known scale, such as a coin.

A report from last month’s Nature Neuroscience (Schwarzkopf et al.) reported an intriguing correlation between the strength of the Ebbinghaus illusion and individual functional variation in the brain. Visual information enters the body through the retina, where it is partially processed and relayed toward the primary visual cortex (V1) at the rear of the brain. The surface area devoted to V1 is known to vary by up to threefold in the general population.

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Famed ice-hockey scholar and literary critic Michael Bérubé has written in several places about the notorious Science Wars, but not always to my satisfaction, especially as we both march under the banner of post-Rortyan pragmatism. We've gone a few rounds in the past, and I haven't yet been able to make my objections clear to him; but his recent article (see also here, for an invigorating comment thread) gives me a chance to try to do better in this space.

One of Michael's concerns is to defend “theory” and “science studies” in a broad sense from its attackers like Alan Sokal (of Sokal Hoax fame). He admits that things got a little out of hand in the 80s, what with the pony-tailed left-academic brigade making the humanities look bad with (in Michael's sublimely witty rendition) “their queering this and their Piss Christ that and their deconstructing the Other”. The Hoax seemed to many to burst that Theoretic bubble and restore sanity to the academic realm, or at least provide a clear criterion for same (which, alas, not everyone meets, even now). But what is its real significance when science seems now to be threatened from another front?

As Michael relates, “[i]n my academic-left circles, Sokal’s name was mud, his hoax an example of extraordinary bad faith” while “everywhere else […] Sokal was a hero, the guy who finally exposed the naked emperor.” Michael's verdict, and mine, is more mixed. In our view, Sokal got them good, no question: anyone who knows what the axiom of choice is (or the axiom of identity, or even non-linear dynamics), would catch the joke immediately. And they didn't. This sorry result corroborates Sokal's charge that, as Michael puts it, the Social Text crowd “were overstepping their disciplinary bounds and doing 'science studies' without any substantial knowledge of science.” This is a problem, because if this is right, then they can't be familiar enough with the practices of science to say anything useful about it theoretically, as they claim to do.

On the other hand, Sokal and his fans seem to think that the hoax proved a graver charge than mere ignorance and Dunning-Kruger style hubris: that is, that among the “howlers” inserted by Sokal but missed as such by Social Text were blatantly nonsensical claims, self-refuting in the familiar way, by goofy French types like Derrida and Lyotard to the effect that objectivity is a phallogocentric myth, that there's no real world, and so on. This failure supposedly established that science studies types are soft on, or even sold on, the sort of anything-goes relativism (again supposedly) found in English departments and across the Channel.

Michael wants to preserve a role for Theory's constructive claims, so he provides a corrective designed to acknowledge the former of Sokal's charges and deflect the latter. If successful, this will allow the academic left to overcome its tradition of self-laceration long enough to confront its common enemy: right-wing irrationalism and its politicized attacks on evolutionary theory and climate science. In a way, this means that he is trying to do well what Sokal did poorly, which is to show that it is not the very idea of science and rationality, but instead adolescent rebellion against same, which — especially now — serves anti-progressive aims. This is better, again, in Michael's view, because it leaves room for the real contributions socially-minded theory can provide, rather than discarding them as pernicious nonsense and ceding the entire task to the sciences.

I will focus here on one promising but elusive slogan in Michael's corrective; but in true hermeneutic fashion, I will insist that, well, it depends on what he means.

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Imagine someone named Sue finds herself in possession of some information about Bob that he would prefer she not reveal to anyone else. So she offers him a deal: “Pay me $10,000 and I’ll keep my mouth shut.” Is that wrong?

Most people intuitively feel the answer is yes. But it’s surprisingly tricky to explain, in a coherent, consistent manner, why that should be the case. The paradox of blackmail has bedeviled legal scholars and philosophers of law for years: while it’s typically legal to reveal information about someone, as long as that information is accurate and legally-obtained, it’s illegal to threaten to do so as a way of soliciting money from him.

Unlike with extortion, where the perpetrator is threatening to do something illegal if she isn’t paid (e.g., “Give me $10,000 or I’ll burn down your house”), with blackmail the perpetrator is threatening to do something legal. If the act itself – revealing the information – isn’t bad enough to be criminalized, then why is merely threatening to commit the act so terrible?

This paradox is often expressed in terms of blackmail being a criminal act composed entirely of uncriminal parts. Telling someone you'd like $10,000 isn’t a crime; revealing someone’s secret isn’t a crime; and yet, telling someone you'd either like $10,000 or you're going to reveal his secret is a crime. How can that be?

Some scholars have countered that there is no logical reason to think that several unobjectionable parts can't add up to an objectionable whole. Philosopher Saul Smilansky, in the book 10 Moral Paradoxes, makes this case using the examples of bigamy and prostitution: It’s legal to marry one woman, and it’s legal to marry another woman, but it’s not legal to marry both. It’s legal to give someone money, and it’s legal to have sex, but it’s not legal to give someone money for sex. Blackmail may not be a complete aberration.

However, Smilansky acknowledges, even if there's no contradiction entailed by blackmail being illegal despite its component parts all being legal, we still need some explanation for why this particular combination of parts produces an objectionable result. He writes, “The way in which the ‘alchemy’ of the novel emergence of badness or wrongness operates in ‘ordinary blackmail’ remains mysterious… If one may threaten to do what one is (otherwise) allowed to do, offering not to so act in return for monetary compensation does not seem capable of bringing forth the sense of radical and novel heinousness that blackmail arouses.”

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Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing data to Wikileaks, allegedly did so while listening to Gaga:

(2:14:21 pm) Manning: listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltratrating [sic] possibly the largest data spillage in american history

Audio is a most seductive medium. In 2004, when the IPOD was but a finicky, clicky-hard drived baby, New York Times reporter Warren St. John went to New York’s streets to chart what effect the device had on the urban landscape and the human relationships within. Were New Yorkers becoming as atomized, as isolated, as Californians were in their cars? Baristas and bagel bar owners were quoted lamenting that Ipod listeners were holding up the line, not hearing the cashier shout “Next!” New Yorkers love their imagined tribes, and one likened Ipod owners to one, identifiable only by those little white wires. Another tribal said the machine “makes him feel as though he is in his own music video.”

This last idea is the only one in the article that still seems relevant: somehow our bagel lines move smoothly again even if we’re all plugged in, but the idea of creating one’s own little cinemascape, audience of one, is stickier. The listener St. John quoted isn’t at all concerned by the idea of being in his own music video. It is rather an empowering, joyous thing, one any urban dweller who moves through the city freely and possesses such a device might relate to. Indeed, the idea that the Ipod might have a pernicious, or at least complicated side, struck Apple as “wacky” in St. John’s article ''it's a little wacky to look at it that way, when the iPod has brought so much happiness into people's lives.''

The social aspects of music enjoyment – at a concert or a club, or even through Ipods and mobile phones (Wayne Marshall's teenagers “clustered around a tinny piece of plastic broadcasting a trebly slice of the latest pop hit”), are recognized as important, or demonized, parts of the urban tapestry. There’s a lot being said about what this all means for the public space. Here though, I want to focus on the private space: that more intimate, profoundly antisocial relationship, between oneself, one’s music, and one’s earbuds. When you’re not sharing, when its just for you. What does it mean to be in one’s own music video?

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“The only God worth keeping is a God that cannot be kept.
The only God worth talking about is a God that cannot be talked about.
…God is present when I confront You.” *

Modern Times
by Jim Culleny
……………………
I and Thou (stern and bow)
may have plowed from then to now
(but can’t make way from now to then
through angry seas) split apart
end from end
……………………..
I and Thou must make amends
and join ourselves bow to stern
one with one from now till now
—as of now! or we will burn
………………………..
I and Thou, one with one
into the red eye of the sun
—being we, being now
being one, you and
I I
and Thou

Let’s forgive each other darlin’, let’s go down to the greenwood glen
Let’s forgive each other darlin’, let’s go down to the greenwood glen
Let’s put our heads together, let’s put old matters to an end **

* Walter Kaufmann; prologue to I and Thou by Martin Buber
** Bob Dylan; Rollin’ and Tumblin’, Modern Times

by Jeff Strabone

Why is it that people who argue against the government's role in the economy don't likewise advocate for the flip side: that corporations should not be allowed to influence government? Is there an industrialized democracy more in need of checking corporate power over government policy than the United States? I expect that in any society, in any era, the powerful will have more sway over the making of laws than the powerless. Here in the U.S., corporate influence does not just distort our laws: it distorts our land. The power of the petroleum and automobile industries is inscribed in our very topography, and recent decisions by Republican governors to scuttle federally-funded rail projects suggest that their power to warp the landscape remains as strong as their power to warp democracy. The two go hand in hand.

Corporate power leaves its mark on the world in many ways. Coalmines and mercury-poisoned rivers are the most obvious examples. But what about strip malls and highways and the everyday landscape that many people take for granted as they drive a few miles to the nearest supermarket? Aren't they as American as the amber waves of grain that are the stuff of national song? Let us ask ourselves, how did they get here and what do they tell us about our national inability to build the high-speed rail lines that are the pride of so many other countries?

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By Maniza Naqvi

I laugh now, at how, as a child, I understood the narrative of Moharram and still (I think) managed to get the point of all the fuss.

I was left to understand the narrative of Moharram mostly on my own—because my parents, while observing its essential features for the first ten days of it weren’t really interested in instilling religion in me. I pieced it all together through my grandmother, who was very interested in telling me the “facts.” And I picked it up through various other sources of information available to me which included Pakistan Times, Radio Pakistan, the war with India and movies about cowboys and Indians. Through all of them I tried to patch together and make relevant the stories told to me about the events of 1400 years ago when the prophet’s grandson and family, the good guys, were besieged at Kerbela, denied water, died fighting for justice and did not submit to Yezid’s overwhelming force of bad guys. I imagined the heat, the desert, the overwhelming military force of the oppressor. And I concluded from the people around me that all this sorrow led to an abundance of poetry and painting. And when politics was added into the discussion mix with wine then the heroism of Kerbela was sure to be remembered. My father always read to us a Marsiya by Mir Anis’s on the tenth of Moharram. It was also mentioned many times over that Faiz Ahmed Faiz had written a Marsiya after Sadequain chacha had told him that an Urdu poet isn’t a real poet unless he has written a marsiya.

Last Christmas eve, when asked about how Moharram was proceeding for me given that the lunar calendar placed the first ten days of Moharram during December 18-28^th I came up with my usual answer, that as usual, I had done nothing. I am a Shi’a and identify myself as one. And during Moharram or any time of the year I can weep and feel the pain personally at the mention of the plight of the innocents, the family of the prophet Mohammad, at Kerbela, in 680 AD and in their journey to and imprisonment in Damascus. I am moved deeply at the very mention of Hussain’s sacrifice at Kerbala, particularly the trials of his sister Zainab and her exemplary and courageous conduct. Such is the power of this immortal narrative of courage and resolve against tyranny, as received and passed on through the centuries from Zainab, the daughter of Imam Ali, the sister of Imam Husain and Hazrat Abbas, the witness and narrator of Kerbala. Such is the affect of the story of Kerbela as received from Zainab that through the centuries it has been expressed through dirges, passion plays and laments about struggle and resistance and it is for me and for millions of others an article of faith.

But as a child a little knowledge left me shaken and not stirred. As a child I lived in an enclave in Pakistan nestled between Mirpur and Mangla on the border with India. Water and rivers dominated my world—Mangla dam where my father was an engineer and where American contractors were building a massive dam was the world I grew up in, insulated from the larger Pakistani society. I tried to make sense of Moharram within the context of the world I lived in. I grew up in what would be labeled, in today’s world of fear and apologies, as a secular-agnostic Shi’a Muslim family. My upbringing as a child was isolated from the larger Pakistani society and confined to a rural enclave where an international community was busy building the largest earth filled dam of the time. And then, of course, there was the atmosphere of war in 1965, we were close to the Indian border and the constant fear of India attacking was very frightening for me.

On Christmas eve my first grade American teacher borrowed me from my parents—not clear why I was borrowed or lent—but it was because my teacher and her husband didn’t have children of their own to shower presents upon on or to spend Christmas with and so I got to be the proxy. In hindsight, I would hazard a guess that they were young missionaries, probably Mormons, who, out of the best of intentions, like my grandmother, were seeking to save my sweet soul.

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Writers are risk-averse. Necessarily so, because writing is really a sort of willful blindness, each sentence depending on all the ones preceding it, the way digging a tunnel depends on each shovel scoop. Experimentation is potentially catastrophic (or worse, embarrassing). With the exception of a few scurries into modernism and postmodernism prose has barely evolved since Charles Dickens’ era, at least compared with its poetic and visual counterparts. The reason for this is partly that writing is intelligible on a granular level; word for word, there is far less room for ambiguity between words than brushstrokes on a painting. A word that isn’t understood is moot; like a blockage in the aforementioned tunnel. That goes double for syntax. A reader can endure a fair amount of acrobatics for a short duration, like a poem, but kicking through 75,000 words of strange… is difficult. Good writing is clear, concise and almost always formally conventional, that is, on the page. Drafting and re-writing do, in theory, let an author step back and intervene in a more architectural manner, but such interventions are powerful and jarring and are used sparingly, often only in the most dire of circumstances. Drafting is more akin to buttressing than transmutation. Shifting tense, or modes of narration (from a first-person “I” to an omniscient third-person, for example) can easily collapse a text. Yet as rigid a channel as prose writing may be, there are a few zones of complete ambiguity in a piece of prose, which have become the site of a rich, strange and evolving alchemy.

Readers of unsolicited texts –‘ slush piles’ in publishing industry argot – develop an uncanny ability to identify monstrous prose from a mere glance. Some of this is obvious: choosing a quirky font, for example, is never a good sign; but there are other more subtle queues. A series of monotonously sized paragraphs marching down the page is an unambiguous tell that something has been written by a rank amateur. Paragraph breaks may not have semantic content, but they contribute something tangible to a text. Same goes for any other whitespace. An author who doesn’t manipulate his or her spaces is likely not paying much attention to anything else in his or her prose. But this suggests something else as well. Absence of text may not ‘say’ something but it does do something.

The paragraph break is probably smallest unit of absence in a prose text. Words and sentences map onto reality pretty well, since, for the most part one’s internal monologue seems to consist of words and sentences – or at least sentence fragments, and it is easy to imagine punctuation marks as pauses for breath, a querulous chirp, or sudden spurt of rage; but a paragraph is a strange and unnatural thing. It is an artificial break; a gap in what should be a continuous feed of chatter from the brain. Higher-orders of division are more peculiar still – sections, chapters, books, volumes and sets – some are vestiges of the printer’s trade, others evolved from older forms, but all share one quality: they interrupt text, break it into a segment, and by doing so delineate a beginning and an end to a discrete unit of information; or to put it another way, they force a feed of information into a rigid form.

Captured, text circulates: it has a beginning, an end, and, ostensibly, a way to reel back to the beginning all over again.

The larger the gap, or to put it another way, the more of an impediment to the reader an interruption becomes – ranging from a few milliseconds flex of one’s ocular muscle through a line of blank space, to closing a book and (perhaps) starting over – the stronger the circulation. Within a text, each a paragraph break transfers momentum, a quantum of flexion, almost like a heartbeat. Alone, this is meaningless, but as paragraphs accrete, they develop a rhythm, one that a skilled operator can use to modulate the momentum of a piece of writing, or even alter its meaning.

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Last year, at Christmas dinner with my husband’s family, I was stumped by a seemingly simple question: “What was the biggest scientific discovery of 2009?” What a great question, I remember thinking, as the papers and news I’d read over the past year churned through my mind, struggling to bubble up to consciousness. For a biology graduate student, it should have been easy; I should have been able to come up with something, anything, that was a notable scientific achievement, yet also engaging enough to be of interest to my in-laws. (The overlap between these two spheres of science is smaller than you might think. In fact, as I tried in vain to pull an answer from the murky depths of my memory, I was beginning to believe it was non-existent.)

I fumbled for a long minute, and exchanged a blank glance with my husband (who was also a grad student) – he too was at a loss. (After all, not all research comes with the headline-grabbing, NASA-approved stamp of extra-terrestrial life.*) One of us eventually bumbled towards an answer (I think it was the Mars rover’s discovery of water), but I vowed at that moment to be better prepared in 2010.

So today, I present you with three science-y things from 2010 that you can talk about around the dinner table. Some were striking enough for me to remember on my own, others were featured in ScienceNOW’s excellent compilation of the most popular stories of the year, or Nature magazine’s top science articles of 2010. All have two things in common: 1. They make great conversation starters. 2. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand them.

#3. Men with good dance moves attract women.

The Gist: What exactly is a ‘good’ dance move? Researchers at Northumbria University in the UK identified the essential elements of a man’s good moves by devising a way to separate the attractiveness of the dancer from the attractiveness of the dance. When attempting to quantify a woman’s perception of a man’s dancing ability, it’s nearly impossible to control for the appearance of the dancer. His height, clothing, body shape, and facial features can all influence her impression of his skills.

To remove these confounding factors, the authors in the study used 3D motion-capture technology to create computer-generated avatars. Each dancing male wore 38 reflective markers distributed from his wrists to his neck to his ankles, and danced to a 30-second clip of music in front of a camera that recorded every shake, twist, bump, and grind. Videos were played for women, and researchers analyzed body position, movements, and speed.

The Controversy: No real controversy (or surprises) here. Heterosexual women like men (or at least purple gender-neutral computer avatars) who can dance. The authors speculated that good dance moves could signify important qualities in a potential mate (such as coordination, health, vigor, and athletic prowess). Don’t fret if you’re a badly dancing heterosexual male though; this study offers instructional advice. My favorite tip? Get that right knee moving. According to the study’s authors, it was one of the most important signs of dance quality.

Why I like it: It may not be ‘the greatest scientific discovery of 2010’, but it’s worth watching the videos of good and bad dancing avatars on YouTube. (I’m not the only one who likes them; combined, the videos have nearly 740,000 hits- not bad for a scientific article.) There’s no word yet on whether the ‘good’ moves have sparked a new dance craze, but I’m holding out hope.

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by Hasan Altaf

Reading about Pakistan has become, for me, a fraught experience. Every time I see the country mentioned in a headline, my first reaction – the news or analysis being so unending, and so uniformly disheartening – is to hold my breath. I don’t know how other people interpret our current ticking-time-bomb situation, but to me, it feels like a particularly bizarre and dramatic existential crisis, dragging on and on without end. I can never resist the articles, but it’s an exercise in masochism.

For that reason, I was both eager and anxious to read two recent collections of Pakistan-centered writing. The cover of Granta’s Pakistan issue, designed like one of the brightly painted trucks that were the representation of our country in what seems like a happier time, was a pleasant surprise; by itself, it did a great deal to alleviate my nervousness. The Life’s Too Short literary review was impressive for its novelty, its uniqueness – and its sheer audacity, too: In the middle of the madness, life goes on, life is lived, and life is always too short.

Beyond theme, the two collections have little in common, and they leave the reader with very different impressions. At first read, Granta seems more familiar, more in sync with other contemporary coverage of Pakistan. It’s not all beards and bombs, but none of the pieces seem too far away from the country we read about every day in the New York Times or the BBC – it has that sense to it, of bated breath, of decades of decay, of disaster around every corner.

The other anthology is kind of jarring; reading it, you would never know that this country has become a war zone, a deathtrap, a state whose list of failures grows by the day. In these stories, Pakistan is just a place, where people live and die, get by or don’t, fail and succeed, love and hate – as people do everywhere, anywhere. These are really the more familiar stories: what we did today, where we went, where we came from – but in the context of Pakistan, somehow I did not expect such ordinariness.

It would be oversimplifying to say that the difference between the two is that of macro and micro, capital-H History and ordinary stories. It’s more likely that the collections simply reflect their different intentions. Granta is geared to the “international market,” which in this context means, I imagine, the Western market, and that market has certain expectations from Pakistani writing. The Life’s Too Short anthology will probably not be read as much, outside of the country, and so does not have to meet those expectations.

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Which of the following would best be described as an hiatus?

Which of the following would most likely be considered a furlough?

For extra money, an hour or two most days, I pose variations of these questions over and over. Each of them, along with its set of possible answers, goes into the database of an on-line vocabulary-building tool. It's a pretty straightforward formula, the interrogative of multiple choice. However, what strikes me with each variation is the tense in which it must be formed: would be most likely to, would best be described as, would most likely. Always the conditional – to signal, I suppose, that these are all hypothetical instances – and thus the words here deployed are equivalent to blanks in a loaded gun: they make the same sound but do not pierce us in any way.

And so I compose these questions, one after another, ten to fifteen an hour, careful to insert the conditional, as if I were setting up a practice shooting range, a multiple choice of clay pigeons and cardboard targets. I do wonder, though, how effective this sort of vocabulary building will be for its subscribers. (I have no concrete research before me, but I suspect that learning vocabulary outside of its natural habitat¹ is somewhat analogous to swallowing vitamin pills instead of eating actual vegetables: less is absorbed.) But to be perfectly candid, I'm not so much concerned about the improved verbal scores of these potential subscribers as I am just a bit saddened each time I confine another word to a purely hypothetical existence.

“Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday,” Wittgenstein so quaintly tells us in his Philosophical Investigations. He was getting at how difficult it is to actually learn much at all about words and their attendant conventions once you've removed them from the everday speech and printed page that is their office – once you're fanning an isolated word with the palm front of philosophical analysis.² And certainly the practice shooting range of this vocabulary-building tool is just such a holiday setting. Being presented with a cursory definition of a word, its part of speech, and then asked to identify the most plausible instantiation of it in a lineup of four, is hardly akin to encountering it under workaday circumstances. But this, of course, is true of any number of tools and programs aimed at improving one's vocabulary. What really underscores the disparity between holiday and workaday, it seems, is the use here of the conditional tense – that single block of would – that confines each word to something like a cryogenic chamber of unreality.³

Which of the following would most likely be considered a sabbatical?

Because, you see, what is never explicitly stated in these questions, but what's undeniably understood, is the condition for using the vocabulary word in question – the condition, of course, being actuality. If this weren't a practice shooting range; if you were ever to encounter these words in their natural habitat – each question implicitly (hauntingly) begins. The would that always follows, in the explicitly stated clause of the question, is that ghostly class of the conditional called the speculative, or counter-factual, conditional The Bedford Handbook's⁴ description of it gives me chills: speculative conditional sentences express unlikely, contrary-to-fact, or impossible conditions in the present or future. I.e., it is unlikely, contrary-to-fact, or even impossible that you, the type who subscribes to this kind of vocabulary-building tutelage, will ever, ever encounter these words in their natural habitat.⁵

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by Feisal Hussain Naqvi

Being a Shia means different things to different people. In my case, being a Shia means that if I am as professionally successful as I hope to be, someone will want to kill me. Or, to be less melodramatic, it means I can’t play golf on Ashura.

The fact that being a Shia means such wildly divergent and generally irrelevant things to me also indicates that I am not much of a Shia, which I confess to be true. The question then is, why do I feel compelled to identify myself as a Shia.

Before I try to answer, some background is in order. The roots of Shi’ism go deep into Islamic history, more specifically, into the issue of who was to succeed the Prophet as the leader of the Muslim community. Ali, the Prophet’s son in law, was favoured by one group while Abu Bakr, one of the Prophet’s closest companions was favoured by another. Ultimately, the group supporting Abu Bakr prevailed, so much so that Ali did not become Caliph until two other members of the community (Omar and Usman) had preceded him. When Ali did become Caliph, he faced a challenge led by Aisha, one of the Prophet’s wives (and also the daughter of Abu Bakr).

The schism worsened after the assassination of Ali in 661 AD. Ali was succeeded as Caliph by Muawiya, the governor of Syria under Ali. When Muawiya’s son, Yazid, took over as Caliph in 680 AD, the stage was set for another clash.

Shortly after Yazid’s accession to the caliphate, Ali’s son, Hussain, was called to Kufa (a city in present-day Iraq) by leaders of the community there. Hussain set off from Medina with his family and a small group of followers but he never made it to Kufa. Instead, at a place called Karbala, his family and he were surrounded by the armies of Yazid. For three days, Hussain and his family were not allowed access to water. On the 10^th day of the Islamic month of Muharram (now called Ashura), Hussain, his family and his followers were slaughtered to a man. The only survivors of the battle were the women of Hussain’s family and his son Zain ul Abedin, who had been too ill to accompany his father into battle.

The Shias, then, are those people who mourn the tragedy of Karbala and who believe that Ali should have succeeded the Prophet. But that is only the simplest aspect of Shi’ism. What Shias also believe is that the Prophet, Ali and his descendants (the Imams) were intrinsically superior to other humans and that they were thus qualified to lead the Muslims in a way that no other Muslim could ever match.

There is, of course, much more to Shi’ism than what I have just outlined. The point I was trying to make though is that mourning the martyrdom of Hussain is essential to the concept of being a Shia. Each community of Shias is different in its mourning rituals, but every year, the first ten days of Muharram bring to a halt the lives of devout Shias.

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Every year it seems, the weeks at the end of the calendar designated as the “Christmas Season” expand further and further in the direction of the blessed sunny months. Like a plodding, methodical, remorseless, invading imperial army, moving inward slowly and ineluctably towards the capital, grinding up territory with terrifying banality, the “Christmas Season's” expansion is relentless. I fear it shall not be content until it reaches the holy shrine of Memorial Day, which currently stands as an indefatigable bulwark, ushering in our unofficial beginning of summer, whether it be in long simmering Georgia or resplendently spring-like Wisconsin.

But it was not always this way. In days of yore, not even the most precocious child dared to speak of it before December, lest they incur the wrath of a Santa Clause who was still more associated with donations to the Salvation Army than frenzied 40% markdowns on garish clothing made by exploited Indonesian children; a stern, Teutonic St. Nick who really did keep two lists, who never dreamed of offering punch-card guarantees on the latest electronic do-dads, whose ire manifested itself in the form of coal lumps, who demanded to be placated not only with modesty and obedience but also with offerings of milk and cookies, and who seemed to more closely resemble a red-robed Karl M arx than some jolly, docile servant whose fetching and offering was at the beck and call of screaming, sugar-crazed children.

But that was then. Things were different. During the war there was rationing. Before that, during the Great Depression expectations were understandably minimal. If Santa showed up at all, you cried tears of joy, stared to the heavens, and thanked him earnestly for that raw wooden block with crudely drawn wheels. My friend Tom, who’s proudly pushing 90, remembers that the most amazing gift he would get each Christmas was an orange. Not an orange iPod, but the actual fruit, which was rare, delicious, and expensive.

And before the Depression? Hell, today’s consumer economy was just a twinkle in the cold, glassy eyes of early ad men. The portable vacuum cleaner was a modern fucking day miracle in 1907 when it was invented by a janitor in Canton, Ohio. His brother in-law was a saddle maker named William Hoover who, despite not being of Scottish descent, nonetheless figured out a way to make the new contraption look more like a bagpipe, and to make it sound just as sweet. A Wii and a NetFlix subscription? You’ve gotta be kidding me, right?

But after the war ended, another war began: a war against crass commercialism, spiraling consumer debt, and the guilt and shame born of unreasonable expectations. After the war. THE WAR. That’s when it all started to change. First the barrier got pushed back to Thanksgiving weekend, and the late November beachhead had been established. Then the weekend itself eroded, and the Friday after Thanksgiving yielded, in a precursor to the grotesque spectacle that is Black Friday. The dominoes continued to fall, and soon the entire month of November was occupied, marking Halloween as a new Last Stand. And by the 21st century, perhaps even sooner in some quarters, Christmas displays had begun to precede cardboard turkey cut-outs and pre-fabricated children’s costumes in stores.

Something inside you dies the first time you see a box of candy canes sitting on a store aisle with quiet confidence and indiscretion in late October.

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I live in a town of about 10,000 in the Midwest. The largest employer in the town is a pork processing facility that handles more than 9,000 hogs per day (the similarity of those two numbers is a bit disturbing). About a mile to the north is the plant's own sewage treatment facility to handle the voluminous waste of newly-processed and about-to-be-processed pigs. Across the highway, to the south of the plant, is a supermarket, and when the wind blows from the north, the complex aroma of viscera and feces is unavoidable as you walk towards the front door to shop. When bacon and hams are being smoked, hickory provides a more pleasing “finish” to the olfactory experience.

Recently, I was scanning the frozen meat section at the market when I happened across a package of pork chitterlings or “chitlins”: Pig intestines. What was astonishing about this particular package was that it was conspicuously labelled as being a “Product of Denmark”. After suppressing immediate thoughts of Shakespearean puns relating to “Hamlet” and “something being rotten in Denmark,” I gasped: Here I was literally across the street from a slaughterhouse and the chitlins came from half-way around the world?! Where were our local chitlins being sent? Did geography no longer matter?

This is not the first time I've been faced with the paradoxes of our industrial agricultural system. I once remember stopping at a grove-side fruit stand in Florida only to be offered bottled orange juice that contained something like “a reconstituted concentrate of a mixture of juices from Florida, California, & Brasil.” So much for fresh squeezed.

My great uncle, on my dad's side, was a citrus grower in central Florida for many years. When he started his grove just after WWII, oranges were still picked when ripe, shipped, and eaten. Soon thereafter, concentrate technology was developed. Fresh orange juice would be boiled down to a syrup, separated into its constituents, precisely reassembled to maintain quality control, and frozen for easy storage and transport (McPhee 1967). The concentrate could then be reconstituted and consumed at any time in the following year(s). Seasonality was no longer an issue for citrus sales, and production was scaled up to supply juice to make enough concentrate for an entire year for a huge national/international population.

My other great uncle, (on my mom’s side), served in a logistics unit during WWII. When Roosevelt set up a meeting with Churchill on a ship in the Atlantic in the months before we were drawn into the war, he wanted to serve ice cream. Roosevelt claimed he wanted to serve all-American fare but my uncle was convinced it was a not-so-subtle way of demonstrating to Churchill that the U.S. could deliver anything, anytime, anywhere on the planet. My great uncle was tasked with making sure there was ice cream to serve. They packed the ice cream into metal canisters that could be carried like munitions in airplane bomb bays. Unfortunately the air in the ice cream expanded at altitude and it leaked all over. After several trial runs they were able to pack the ice cream in so tight as to squeeze out most of the air and then seal the canisters. It worked: Churchill’s delegation was served ice cream and it made enough of an impact on them that his bodyguard commented on it in a draft of his memoirs (Borgwardt 2005). After the war, my great uncle enjoyed a successful career managing supply chains for garment manufacturers.

This was the Greatest Generation's legacy to us. They survived the Great Depression only to have to defeat fascism in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. As they returned to civilian life, they made absolutely certain that their children, the baby-boomers, would never suffer hunger or want for anything. Roosevelt's vision of anything, anytime, anywhere was channeled into civilian goods, and in the subsequent decades we have elevated this expectation to a high art or perhaps even a pathological obsession. The global merchant marine fleet has nearly doubled in the last 30 years. The tonnage of vessels idled by the current recession just around the port of Singapore is about 41 million tons, which is about equivalent to entire world's merchant marine fleet in 1918, but only about 4% of today's fleet (Bradshear 2009)!

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