ABP is a house; it is one quarter of a house, the bottom left corner of New Haven’s 111 Howe Street to be precise. ABP is short for Alif, Bay and Pay which are the first three alphabets of the Urdu language. It has been given the name ABP by the three Pakistani undergraduates from Yale University who live there. A name only the friends of the inhabitants know. Three Pakistani undergrads live there but, more importantly, every Pakistani at Yale (and many non-Yale ones) have been in this decadent den to sleep, eat, get help with their Math problem sets, play HALO and watch life pass by. You must understand that ABP is a house full of Pakistanis, and specifically, Pakistani men.

ABP is located on the piece of Howe Street that falls between Elm Street and Edgewood Avenue. Howe Street is an enigma. It is one of those roads that fall on the very boundary between Yale and New Haven. And you can see New Haven’s culture diffusing into Yale’s pretentious Gothic around this point. This is a place where people become darker, don’t wear polo shirts, smoke cheap cigarettes and hang out around gas stations rather than libraries. ABP is right around the corner from Main Garden, Elm Street’s worst Chinese restaurant. It is one of those grubby little affairs whose dirty kitchen you can see through a side door that is permanently open to the street and where nobody speaks English nor does anyone make authentic Chinese food. Everybody is trying to find their own homes and their own identities on Howe Street: two Chinese brothers behind the counter, a few black men near the gas station and a bunch of Pakistanis in an American house.

Once you arrive at ABP you realize that like any respectable counterculture house the proper entrance is at the back. The house has three bedrooms on the ground floor and a common room and a kitchen in the basement. The common room is the place that holds the house together. It has three couches and a table in the middle, cluttered with fast food leftovers, math textbooks, Xbox remote controllers and BlackBerrys. On certain days, the table is cleared to play poker. The couches, all of different sizes and providing different comfort levels, are booked early in the day by people sleeping over. There is a large television facing the table and the couches which is exclusively used to watch cricket and to play HALO. The common room is always slightly dark and very loud. The kitchen is always dirty and never used. Unlike the basement, the upstairs is not a communal space. White broken stairs lead you to a narrow corridor and three very different bedrooms. The first room belongs to Muneeb, more commonly known as Bubbles or Bubbz, and is in total disarray. Muneeb, a generously proportioned guy, is the primary sight of the room and there is not much else to see but litter. The second room belongs to Oosman and serves as the second common room. The third room belongs to Owais, who is the eldest and most religious. His room is meticulously ordered and decorated by calligraphy posters with quotations from the Quran hung on the walls. This is the room you go to find useful but rare things like nail cutters, old textbooks, spare sandals and good advice.

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Cold Sting

Last night under a full moon
with a threat of frost
we threw row covers over the kale

We stumbled from a pile near the tracks
with bins of river rocks
to weigh the covers down

Wind waved their white lightness
over the Red Russian and Lacinato
as if we were flagging Nature,
signaling Ok, ok, you win again

We laughed and mocked ourselves
for hauling stones so late in the day
in a black plastic bin among full-mooncast-shades
stumbling over clods of autumn-tilled rows
covering kale to save ourselves and the stuff of soup
from the cold sting of this newest
turn of the earth

by Jim Culleny,
November 2010

The day Tariq Ramadan came to the university to speak, I had just been teaching my social anthropology class about the contradictions between the ethical and pragmatic aspects of Islam. How can people claim Islam is egalitarian when Muslims around the world use religion to justify intolerance and patriarchy? I hadn’t been thinking about Ramadan, the Swiss philosopher and Islamic scholar who is the grandson of Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but since he was here and would be speaking about tolerance in Islam, I asked my students to go listen to him. Ramadan’s father was exiled to Switzerland, so Ramadan grew up in the European intellectual tradition, studying Islam at both the University of Geneva and Al-Azhar University in Cairo. After years of being denied a visa by the United States government, losing him a position at Notre Dame University, and after a challenge that worked its way through numerous courts, Ramadan was finally able to come to the US this year.

Ramadan is a lean man with receding gray hair, a closely trimmed beard and burning eyes, a charismatic figure. I saw two of my students in the auditorium seats before me, a young woman of Indian heritage, the other African-American. They alternated between gazing spellbound at the stage and scribbling furiously in their notebooks. I filled page after page of my legal pad. So many quotable quotes, both from the Quran that Ramadan recited in Arabic, then translated, and from the man himself. He gave us verses from the Quran that praised diversity (“If it had been God’s will, you would be one community.”) and that demanded a connection to the Other (“He created out of you the other, and between you love and mercy.”) and toleration (“You have no power to impose belief on others. If God had willed it, the world would be all believers. Who are you to impose your belief on others?”). Indeed, according to the Quran, difference and struggle are necessary because they provide a balance of power (“If God hadn’t set people against each other, the world would be corrupt.”).

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By Namit Arora

In December 2005, I took a bus out of the coastal city of Vijayawada in South India. Heading west, I passed small towns and villages whose names—opaque to me because written only in Telugu—I kept guessing at from a map. After years of regional drought, the monsoon had been bountiful this year. We passed field after verdant field of cotton and pepper in a region infamous for its depleted water tables and farmers fleeing to other regions, or committing suicide to escape debt. It took most of the morning, on three buses and an auto-rickshaw, to reach my destination: a village with tourist facilities near the ruins of Nagarjunakonda.

A city flourished around 1,800 years ago at Nagarjunakonda (‘Hill of Nagarjuna’). A great religious and educational center of Brahmanism and Buddhism, one of the names it had then was Vijayapuri, after king Vijaya Satakarni of the Satavahana dynasty. Thereafter a capital of the Ikshvaku dynasty (225-325 CE), it fell into terminal decline after the demise of the last Ikshvaku king. It was only in 1926 that a teacher, S Venkataramayya, discovered the ruins of the ancient city. Much of it now lies under one of the largest manmade lakes in the world, Nagarjuna Sagar, formed in 1960 by the Nagarjuna Sagar dam across the Krishna River. Archaeological digs in 1926–60 turned up finds from the early Stone Age to medieval times, spread over 130 sites across 24 sq km. Many structures were moved and reassembled on what is now an island on the lake, as well as on the lake’s eastern bank at Anupu (much like the ‘saving’ of Abu Simbel from the Aswan Dam in Egypt).

The island’s modern name was inspired by one of the ancient city’s most illustrious citizens, Nagarjuna, a Buddhist monk-philosopher and founder of the ‘Middle Path’ school, who most likely lived there sometime in 150-250 CE. Called by some ‘the second Buddha’, Nagarjuna’s work is indispensable to several Buddhist schools, particularly Mahayana. ‘Nagarjuna’s philosophy represents something of a watershed not only in the history of Indian philosophy but in the history of philosophy as a whole,’ writes Douglas Berger, a scholar of Southasian thought, ‘as it calls into question certain philosophical assumptions so easily resorted to in our attempt to understand the world.’ [1]

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Justin E. H. Smith

Some readers will recall the exposé I wrote a few months ago on the life and work of the American poet Jason Boone. What might not have been obvious in that piece, as I would urgently like to clear up now, is that it was all entirely made up: every last word of it, from the meetings I had with Boone at Nirvana concerts in Sacramento in the late 1980s, to the documentary about Boone's life supposedly made by an MA student in the Media Arts Program a the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. There is no Media Arts Program in Fairbanks! In fact, the interviewees in the segment of the film I included in the exposé, one supposedly named 'Michel Pupici' and the other 'Dylan Cooney', are both plainly the same person filmed from different angles. What is more, anyone who has ever met me will be able to confirm that it is I myself, the author, Justin Smith, in both of those roles. I am looking unusually fat, true, and I do not appear entirely sober, but personal identity persisting as it does through such superficial changes, I feel I must come clean and acknowledge my role in the ruse. It was me. All of it. The entire operation behind the Jason Boone story was a one-man job, and that man was not Jason Boone.

You can thus imagine my surprise when, not long ago, on the morning of this year's Canadian Thanksgiving, I received a telephone call from a certain Augusta Aardappel. Readers will recall that Aardappel was supposedly the South African academic who had written a dissertation, in a Deleuzean vein, on the poetry of Jason Boone ('The Boone Rhizome'), and who apparently had dated Boone for a while in the early 1990s. But again, I made her up along with Pupici, Cooney, Coombs, and the rest. Anyone who has the faintest familiarity with the sonorities of Dutch should have been able to detect that she was a fabrication: 'Aardappel' literally means, 'earth-apple', and, on the model of the French 'pomme de terre', serves in Dutch as the word for 'potato' (in Afrikaans it is 'aartappel'). Have you ever met anyone named 'Mr. Potato'? Of course not. It is a name for fictional characters, not for real people.

Yet here was this woman on the telephone, on the morning of Canadian Thanksgiving, with a fully convincing Afrikaner accent, claiming to be none other than Augusta Aardappel. Of course at first I did not believe her, but I was also very intrigued, since my fiction had not previously inspired a great number of copycat hoaxes (I write in a non-existent genre –hyperlinked, multimedia, serial metafiction– and my readership, if I may be honest, is fairly limited). Curious to figure out why anyone would bother to perpetrate such a pointless fraud, I determined to keep this 'Augusta' on the phone for as long as I could.

I asked her how the weather was in Pretoria, what was her opinion of vuvuzelas, Julius Malema, and Die Antwoord. She complimented me on my familiarity with today's South Africa, and I told her it was really nothing, I just get it from my friends' Facebook status updates. I could conjure an equal semblance of knowledge, I told her, about Vietnam, Tonga, or Sakhalin Island (with the last of these I could even add some Chekhovian flourishes).

When I felt I had gained her confidence I put to Ms. Aardappel the inevitable question. Why, I asked, would she claim to be someone I had made up?

“There's something important I need to tell you,” she replied evasively. “Jason didn't die.”

“Of course he didn't die,” I answered. “He never existed in the first place. I made him up too. Now tell me where you're calling from and what it is you want.”

“I'm calling from across possible worlds,” was Augusta Aardappel's answer. “I'm calling because I need your help.”

I knew immediately she was telling the truth.

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I’ve never been in this position, but the person demanding a newspaper or magazine correction—the insider claiming he was quoted out of context; the scientist whose nuanced position didn’t come across, quite; the dead person who’s not really dead—must get a certain satisfaction from seeing the correction printed. It might be the grim satisfaction of a wrong set to rights too late, but satisfaction nonetheless. Then again, in a digital publication, a correction can work to the source’s advantage in some sense. If s/he finds the mistake early enough, an editor can amend it instantly and make sure that (most) everyone reads the correct sentence the first time. Some publications even mark the factual boner with an asterisk, which not only emphasizes the correct version of things, but provides some instant sympathy for the wronged party.

But as a disinterested reader, I’d never gotten actual delight from a correction until a few weeks ago, when the New York Times ran one for an article about study skills and retention (“Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits”). I’d read the uncorrected article online at first, then went back to reread it, for reasons soon ejected from my mind. I’d gotten through half the story, and was going to click through to the second page. And I was grimacing in anticipation of a paragraph I knew was coming up. The author had needed a metaphor conveying something about unintended consequences, and apparently wanted the imprimatur of science. So he fell back on that canned summary of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—you know, the idea that measuring a property of a particle alters the property itself.

Except that’s not what the Uncertainty Principle says. All the Principle actually says, in its entirety, is:

∆x∆p ≥ h/4π

That’s it.

Now if you insist on translating quantum mechanics into English (always risky), the Principle says the uncertainty in a particle’s position (∆x) multiplied by the uncertainty in its speed and direction (taken into account through its momentum, ∆p) always exceeds the number “h divided by four times π.” (The h stands for Planck’s constant, a very tiny number; the π is the familiar constant from circles, 3.14159…) In simpler terms, if you know a particle’s position very well, you cannot know its momentum well at all, and vice versa.

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“The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined.”

– WikiLeaks’ Twitter Feed, November 22^nd

Julian Assange may be some new kind of journalist, but he is without a doubt some new kind of historian, too. He and his organization often frame their mission in terms of redefining history, as above, or in terms of offering history to the public. When asked what the consequences of the Iraq War Diaries would or should be, Assange answered, “the truth doesn’t need a policy objective.” Assange was also asked if the diaries were “a gift to historians.” He said no, the gift was not for historians, rather that the Iraqi people “need the history of the last 6 years” to better understand and operate in the present. Last night’s “Cablegate” release only amplifies this sense of breaking not just news, but history. As the New York Times notes in its coverage, the leak represents an unprecedented leap in access to primary sources: until last night only diplomatic cables up to 1972 were publically available.

They say that journalists write the first draft of history. A Latin American term for a first draft is a “borrador” or “eraser.” But the line between journalism (or indeed history) and fiction is easily smudged. Statements like those above from WikiLeaks and Assange assume primary sources, like the ones WikiLeaks provide give us the whole truth, or at least possess a unique “truthiness.” But documents like those released in the war diaries and Cablegate do not represent “the truth,” but rather are simply another vantage point from which to try and glimpse it. How much of a first draft do you ever end up keeping?

If we believe “truth” in history is just a sheaf of diplomatic cables, or Pentagon memos – that if we just read them all, then we’ll know – we deny the shifting, impossible project that history is.

That instability is something we are taught to deny. Just as journalists – and fifth graders – are taught the 5 W’s: Who, What, When, Why, and hoW, so too do historians write – and students of history are taught to write, if they are to be considered “serious” – with a sense of inevitability as their guide. This is true at least at the mainstream and lower branches of the academy (I include my own BA here), where it is not so au fait to imagine that, for example, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or the accession of Gorbachev were anything more than matches falling into existing stacks of kindling. Teleology is seductive.

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by Hasan Altaf

In a city like DC, the think tank circuit does a roaring trade in “developing countries,” their problems, and an endless list of ways to solve those problems and take those countries, to use the easy dichotomy of think tanks, from developing to developed. The hottest commodity on the market, lately, the dream subject of international development, is Pakistan. It has become the perfect laboratory for think tank experiments, a veritable Petri dish of everything that could go wrong and every possible way to imagine a solution; rarely does a week go by without a presentation or, at least, a visiting expert.

Recently, I went to one such presentation at a respected think tank in DC. It was raining, and people straggled in one by one, shucking off their overcoats and placing their umbrellas carefully under their chairs. The room filled up with suits and briefcases as the interns ran sound checks. The atmosphere, as the audience milled around waiting for the presentation to start, was so far removed from what we were there to hear about that it felt almost theatrical. It’s hard to tell, in such circumstances, whether you are part of the show or simply there to applaud – or, perhaps, both.

My usual instinct, out of not so much cynicism as sadness, is to avoid these events, and I had forgotten that their real purpose is never the one stated. The presentation is an afterthought, a sweetener. The real point is the social gathering, the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes. It was fascinating to watch the not-so-idle chitchat as people ran into old friends and found new ones, to overhear the experts trading war stories from their time “in the field.” People discovered friends or colleagues in common, experiences they had shared, times they had just barely missed each other. In a way, it was heartwarming. This world, of international development and the research that surrounds it, is a small one, and people stick together.

Somehow, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. It felt as though the last century had disappeared and that all of a sudden we were back in the olden days. Coffee and bagels have replaced the gin and tonic, we have lunch meetings instead of chhota pegs and rounds of polo, and we wear business casual instead of whatever they wore back then, but the spirit of the thing is the same. These are safe spaces, as far as possible from the noise and the mess, for the agents of civilization – and, now, the native elites – to discuss and fix problems that are oceans away, to alter the courses of lives that are not their own.

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Years ago, London neurobiologists discovered a way to visualize the structural dynamics of memory formation using just a laser, a microscope, and a window. To start, they vivisected the craniums of dozens of laboratory mice and surgically embedded tiny glass panels into the outer fleshy folds of the living, exposed brains.

The researchers specifically targeted an area of the brain known as the visual cortex; their goal was to define the relationship between vision and memory. These implanted bits of glass were to serve as physical windows to the branching, ductile neurons of the brain; when scanned by a laser, they would allow for capture of microscopic images of fluorescing neurons and provide a glimpse into the creation of memories.

In 2009, their laborious efforts paid off. Mark Hubener’s lab at University College reported in January’s issue of Nature magazine that they had found a link between distinct neural growths and memories of past experiences. Through miniscule peepholes, Hubener’s team saw bud-like spines emerging from the branches of the brain’s neurons. These spines seemed to sprout most in response to new experiences, implicating them as the brain’s physical storage areas for memory.

Because Hubener’s work is fairly visual in nature, it’s easiest to begin with a mental picture of the brain. Let’s start by imagining its most basic component, the neuron, as a tree in winter, leafless with many branches, or dendrites. If the neuron is a tree, then the brain, quite simply, would be the forest where it resides. Now, if you can imagine that forest with one hundred billion trees densely packed into a space the size of a grapefruit, then you’ve got a basic idea of what the human brain looks like.

Not impressed? Each tree in your brain forest physically contacts the branches of thousands of other trees; in children, these contacts, or synapses, number a quadrillion, in adults, this number decreases then stabilizes to a mere few hundred trillion. If synapses were dollars, we’d have enough money to pay for the Bush administration’s tax cuts… for two thousand years*.

So, what’s the purpose of all of these branching contacts? Synapses serve as conduits of communication between neurons- they allow information to race from dendritic branch to dendritic branch, relaying messages of sense, perception, reaction, and thought. But what about memory? Where are our recollections of past experiences stored among this vast network of neurons?

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In the wake of Republican defeat in the 2008 election, conservatives started casting about for a new standard-bearer. One name which then resurfaced was that of Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives. A conservative firebrand during his Congressional days, Gingrich had reinvented himself as a pragmatic innovator, pushing high-tech solutions for our continuing dependence on fossil fuels. However, as we’ve seen from his subsequent output, he's still the same old culture warrior in other ways. Here he is in a 2006 interview, discussing his then-recent book The Creator’s Gifts: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: “[I]n the minds of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and the people who wrote that document, they literally meant that your rights come from God, that you then loan them to the government, which is why the Declaration of Independence begins ‘We the people…’. And therefore if we drive God out of the public square we drive out the source of our own rights and our own source of power.”

Of course, it's the Constitution, not the Declaration, which begins “We the people…”; but anyone, even a history Ph. D., can misspeak in an interview. The important point is this conception of the “creator's gifts” and their significance. Alan Keyes, whom Barack Obama defeated in their 2004 Senate contest, strongly endorsed the same idea during his own presidential run. What should we make of the idea that our rights “come from God”?

This idea of rights given by God is the conceptual flip side of duties imposed by God: any right possessed by A is ipso facto a duty imposed on B not to violate that right. This latter idea has traditionally provoked the question of whether morality should, or even can, be identified with divine command. The paradox of this account of morality, first discussed 2500 years ago in Plato's Euthyphro, is brought out by this question: Is something the right thing to do because God orders it, or does God order it because it's the right thing to do? The second answer simply abandons the divine command theory, but the first answer isn't any better. It requires us to say why something we know to be wrong – say, torturing the innocent – would not thereby be made right if God happened to demand it. One natural answer is that God, being ideally good, wouldn't actually do that; but now we are explaining morality in terms of God's ideally good nature, and not in terms of divine command after all.

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People are worried about the Euro. As bad news flows out of Europe – persistent unemployment, popular discontent over painful austerity measures, and catastrophic bank losses tied to still-deflating real estate markets – international investors continue to cast doubt over the Euro-Zone’s short- and long-term stability. Fear of at least a partial disintegration of the monetary union is rampant. Indeed, Morgan Stanley recently released the results of a survey of 150 of its clients; while only 3 percent of the investors thought there is more than a 60 percent chance that the Euro-zone will break up, three-quarters of the respondents thought there was some probability of a breakup. These statistics raise a double concern. First is the fear that this nightmare scenario will come to pass, an unprecedented event that could fatally wound investor confidence in the Euro, potentially eliminating its viability as a secure store of value. Second, one might fear this fear itself, as these investors’ worries might contribute to their own realization.

Financiers justify the distinctive double movement of the last several decades by arguing that markets are efficient. Neither the proliferation of capital markets nor the wearing away of regulations on them would be legitimate cause for concern if markets could be counted on to allocate capital to the areas of the economy that deserve it. Yet this period’s continual booms, busts, and crises provide a substantial and ever-increasing body of evidence that these supposedly rational capital markets are, in fact, anything but. As much as Florida’s decaying, uninhabited subdivisions attest to the dangers of irrational exuberance, Ireland’s swaths of unsold houses and imploding, too-big-to-fail banks attest to the power of expectations. They demonstrate that rather than allocating resources on the basis of soberly considered “economic fundamentals,” capital markets have a stubborn tendency to synthesize their own realities from the grist of investors’ expectations.

Consider how the now-familiar contagion of financial crisis replays itself in each of the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain), adding to the uncertainty about the Euro-Zone’s continued solidarity. First, the hard slap of reality deflates a convenient and officially supported untruth, swamping the government’s budget with red ink. In Greece, it was Prime Minister George A. Papandreou’s acknowledgement that his predecessor had been hiding massive government obligations in complex financial instruments, cleverly designed by the whizzes at Goldman Sachs. Ireland’s difficulties stem from the painful popping of its massive real estate bubble, which hit its banking sector with losses so big they overwhelmed the Irish state’s aggressive bailout attempts. In both cases, deficits quickly piled up and investors started to worry that the governments might default on their sovereign debts.

This is when a new and dangerous set of self-reinforcing expectations took hold of the situation. To appease investors worried about the riskiness of their debts, the Greek and Irish governments were forced to raise the yields on their bonds. Perversely, increasing the price of their sovereign debt service further strained their budgets and made defaults more likely. This, in turn, made international investors more cautious about lending to these governments, necessitating further increases in bond yields. Worse, the more concerned investors become about any one of the PIIGS, the more likely it is that the contagion will spread to the other fragile countries gorging themselves at the trough of international capital markets.

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By Maniza Naqvi

On the way to Elderidge street to view Saul’s work on, well, as later we discuss at the gallery, over beer and wine and under fluorescent light: Man’s Hegemony–Anyway—On the way there, changing from the One to the D to meet Ali at 42^nd street, speeding, hurtling downtown —reading poetry, MTA’s overhead, that is, and surrounded by every type of light and commotion and the train’s rattling —pounding out the question it seemed to me–What is slow and what is night? Over and over again and again the same sound. What is slow and what is night? Then, came to mind another town. There, in that quiet and hush in dark’s first blush an inkling of slow and of night when the sun goes down. Then, a single naked bulb, lit and dangling from a wire, each, in each shack teases beauty through a quivering tungsten tongue murmuring of a still and separate universe. In the near black out town, of Jijiga when the sun goes down every shack and dozens more begin to glow and seem to unwrap themselves like tiny gift boxes, in rows upon rows. And just beyond and out of reach how indeed a sensation begins to grow as the stars too, descend to take dominion over the earth. Every evening, in Jijiga’s night and slow, every shack unfolds its own magical show. Which illuminated, so, each a miniature carefully curated. Colored tarps stand in as walls in emerald, turquoise, orange, blue along the narrow Jijiga dirt roads. Day light’s hovels by night transformed as though each one a story’s page. Or each one a framed painting —Or, perhaps, each a window onto something else. Or each a separate theater set or a stage. There, look, just beyond the glow a silhouette of a warrior, in shadow, chewing chat taking a rest from the undeclared war for his oil and gas. For which the script directs that he will lose to a foe, a stronger and a most unwelcome guest, sneaking, slinking and slithering in. A year, perhaps, to photograph all this? Another two perhaps to write it all down? And then to sketch and paint it too—for display in some far away space and perhaps to win accolades? On the way to Elderidge street to view Saul’s work on, well as we discuss later at the gallery, over beer and wine and under fluorescent light: Man’s Hegemony–Anyway—On the way there, changing from the One To the D to meet Ali at 42^nd street, speeding, hurtling downtown surrounded by every type of light and sound I thinking of what is slow and what is night: In Jijiga’s quiet and hushed streets a single naked bulb, lit and dangling from a wire, each, in each shack teases beauty through a quivering tungsten tongue murmuring verse of a still and separate universe.

Lions and Hyenas

No I never heard them fight,

The lions and hyenas late at night

I guess I slept too well in Jijiga.

Gathered there as we were,

Us—

With all the feigned piety involved for

Transfers

Ourselves,

Migrant workers at a high price

Exchanging astonishments for all the places in

Common:

Last promotions, last stations

Last incarnations.

You too? No! In Dushanbe?

1996 and 2004?

Kabul—2002 through six months ago?

Well of course!

And now Jijiga!

What are the odds of that?

No I never— heard them fight

The lions and Hyenas late at night

I guess I slept too well in Jijiga

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The economy, political events and even the sun’s course have converged to make these bleak and darkening days for many of the world’s developed nations, and certainly for America. What we need is expert and effective guidance on the impact of policies and programs. What we get is a cacophony of conflicting, often incoherent, ill-informed just-so stories backed by some combination of intuition, self-interest, resentment, herd thinking, natural and social scientific theory, and cherry-picked statistics. The modern social sciences in particular, which had as their mandate and their promise to guide us in times like these, have often become simply another part of the problem, providing dueling experts for hire with dubious track records. That is, when they are not busy generating results that are completely irrelevant to real life practical problems.

How has this happened? We can blame human nature or ideological corruption, but I think it’s time to come to terms with the fact that one of the central activities of social science is a fool’s errand, because a core assumption that underlies it is wrong. That central activity is to create mathematical models that explain social phenomena by identifying and measuring a limited set of contributing causes. This is done using statistical tests for significance, explanatory power, accuracy and reliability (the p-values, F-tests, confidence intervals, factor analyses and so on). With minor variations, this is what the “scientific” work of political science, sociology, educational theory and social psychology consists in. Doing this is what it takes to get published in major journals and achieve tenure at major universities. Even economics uses these and related statistical methods, when it stops being social metaphysics and decides to get dirty with evidence. A core assumption that underlies this work is that there are unchanging relationships between the variables that can be identified in causal models.

Despite millions of hours of effort, the inconvenient truth is that there is not a single non-controversial quantitative model in the social sciences. I don’t mean a qualitative model which reformulates a truism, or is logically derived from prior assumptions. Nor am I referring to a mere statistical snapshot with no claim to durability (though the vast numbers of these too are contested). I mean a robust causal model, with dependent and independent variables, with measured and fixed coefficients giving the relative influence of the independent variables on the result, and applicable beyond the test scenario to a wider range of cases which have been successfully applied with precision. The sort of thing that litters the natural sciences like bones on a particularly grisly battlefield, allowing experts to build hydroelectric dams, synthetic organisms and Xbox 360s by exploiting precise and unchanging mathematical relationships. If there is such a quantitative model (or, one hardly dare utter the word, “law”) in the social sciences, I have not seen it. I’m willing to bet that neither have you.

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As legions of cool-hunters trawling the Internet and bohemian sectors of cities are well aware, given that most subcultures are spun around a kernel of hoodlum glamour and guilt-free rutting, selling youth culture is not exactly hard. Youth movements are appropriated and neutralized at such a ferocious rate, that no musical subculture since “Gangsta Rap” has been subversive enough to resist the American mainstream for long save for one: the juggalos (sic) – the off-brand soda flinging, hatchet-wielding followers of The Insane Clown Posse.

Insane Clown Posse are a band of forty-somethings who sing threatening lyrics set to menacing music, all while wearing full circus makeup. The ICP aesthetic is flabbergasting in its audacity and tastelessness – picture jarringly artificial colors appropriated from energy drinks and candy wrappers, loose prison garb and a symbology incorporating death’s heads, jesters and improvised weaponry. Their lyrics hew close to contemporary gangsta rap and other so called hard-core bands, using a lot of profanity to describe violence and sex with a certain swaggering bravado. Every now and then they’ll put out a more soulful, slow, softer ballad that often digs into the band’s philosophy.

Humble-born youth have always managed to appall their elders and betters, but juggalos are so spectacularly unappealing to mainstream tastes that in the eighteen years the band has been playing for major audiences they remain a cult phenomenon. This is despite albums that have gone platinum and gatherings that attract tens of thousands of teenage fans clutching wads of disposable cash. ICP has such a hold on its fans that juggalos have actually been buried in the bands colors. Juggalos are more a collective than anything else; they refer to themselves as “Family” and defend their lifestyles fiercely.

So why can’t the clowns cash in? Gangsta Rap was arguably more of a threat to mainstream America than the Insane Clown Posse, with lyrics as fierce and misogynistic, and an added element of racial outrage and shock. Aside from the purely aesthetic (Blender famously voted Insane Clown Posse as the worst band in any genre in 2004 and reviews in general have tended to be sharply critical) last month came a clue as to how the clowns can maintain such a hold on their fans while paradoxically repelling mainstream consumer culture.

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By Feisal Naqvi

Every night on my TV screen, Alan Shore stands up in defense of a quixotic quest. Sometimes he defends the clearly guilty; sometimes he protects the innocent. But in each episode full of courtroom magic, he bends the jury to his will.

As a lawyer working in Pakistan, I have no shortage of interesting cases. But it is difficult for me to re-enact my Lahori version of Boston Legal because we have no jury trials in Pakistan.

Interestingly, the case which led to the end of jury trials in the sub-continent was certainly worthy of a Boston Legal episode, if not several.

In 1959, Kawas Nanavati, a commander in the Indian Navy, was stationed at Bombay. Married to an English beauty by the name of Sylvie, and universally described as handsome, the 34-year-old mariner seemed to have it all. Unfortunately for him, his wife was sleeping with his best friend, Prem Ahuja.

On April 27, 1959, Nanavati confronted his wife and learnt of her adultery. Pausing only to sign out a revolver from the Navy’s storeroom, Nanavati then dashed off to Ahuja’s house where his friend was lolling around in a towel. Nanavati asked him if he would marry Sylvie and take care of the children. Ahuja’s somewhat undiplomatic response was blunt: “Will I marry every woman I sleep with?”

What happened next is unclear. Nanavati claimed that after Ahuja spotted the revolver, he and Ahuja struggled and that he shot Ahuja during that struggle. In self-defence. Three times.

The Bombay police did not agree with Nanavati’s interpretation of the facts and promptly charged him with murder. The trial became a cause celebre in India. The Parsi community to which Nanavati belonged was outraged, organising rallies and petitions in his favour. Newspapers gave saturation coverage to the case, and later the trial. When Nanavati left the court room after testifying, he was showered with hundred rupee notes smeared with lipstick. Like many teen idols after him, he received marriage proposals by the handful, as India concluded that he was too good for his wife even as a penitent Sylvie, dressed in a white nylon sari, testified in favour of her husband. Bombay’s merchant community also jumped in on the act, selling miniature Nanavati revolvers and Ahuja towels.

The prosecution, of course, never had a chance. Their biggest talking point was that if Nanavati had indeed struggled with Ahuja, Ahuja’s towel would have come off instead of staying on. The fact that Nanavati had first dropped his family off at cinema before signing out a revolver under false pretences also seemed to indicate that he had been in control of his emotions and that the “heat of the moment” story was not true.

None of this mattered to the jury which returned a not-guilty verdict. Considering the judgment to be perverse, the trial court judge referred the matter to the Bombay High Court which ultimately found Nanavati guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Shortly thereafter, the Indian government abolished all jury trials on the grounds that jury verdicts were overly susceptible to media pressures.[i]

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Huddled in certain city areas all around Metro Manila, motels have taken on a different kind of notoriety. They have huge flashy signs, spelling out specific hour promos, and sometimes feature Christmas lights in the middle of the year. Attendants position themselves on the driveway, ready to direct cars to empty rooms. Beyond providing respite for travelers, motels are a favorite destination of lovers and everyone in need of a quick romantic getaway, availing of the per hour rates which have gone lower and lower over the years. The signs which often feature lovers sleeping peacefully, or pictures of roses and wine, can be availed of for as low as two hundred pesos (less than five US dollars), for the standard three hours.

These motels feel like an adult’s version of a theme park, with each featuring its own packages, themes, promises. The buildings huddle together, compressed into one area, as if asked politely, to contain themselves. Certain cities are famous for having their own motel centers. Pasay City is famous for its pollution and its petty crimes, its cheap late night entertainment of seedy bars and a quick five minute ride to the motel of your choice. These forms of entertainment, susceptible to police raids and Phoenix-style resurrections, are also a quick ride away from century old Churches.

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