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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by Liam Heneghan

“Industries have been migrating steadily from the larger cities, leaving behind a lazarus stratum of the urban population that exists partly on the dole, partly on crime, partly on the sick fat of the city… Nothing more visibly reveals the overall decay of the modern city than the ubiquitous filth and garbage in its streets, the noise and massive congestion that fills its thoroughfares, the apathy of its population toward civic issues and the ghastly indifference of the individual toward the physical violence that is publicly inflicted on the other members of the community.” Murray Bookchin (1979) Limits of the City Black Rose Books (reprinted in 1996).

“The more it [the city] concentrates the necessities of life the more unlivable it becomes. The notion that happiness is possible in a city, that life there is more intense, pleasure is enhanced, and leisure time more abundant is mystification and myth.” Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 2003 (1970)

Despite our brooding discontent, our lingering sense that our environing world is in decline, that the world around us is aflame with war, famine, disease, climate weirdness, that our cities are unlivable, that our economies are doomed to collapse, that we are brotherly and sisterly no more, that under our use and abuse, nature’s web is frayed and weary; despite all of this, surely our best days should be ahead of us?

We are, after all, a vernal species, freshly minted by evolutionary processes dating back no more than a couple of hundred thousand years. If a species typically sticks around a million years, by simple calculation we have run less than a quarter of our course. Can we really have squandered all of our chances so very soon? In a recent project poet Chris Green and I ask, paraphrasing Seamus Heaney, if poets, artists, creative writers, philosophers, and photographers, can help redress the environmental problems that beset us. Artists who live where the flames rise highest, that is in cities – seemingly the very epicenter of our crises, cannot necessarily be appealed to for succor in tough times. Good art after all may do very little, but by the reckless blaze of good work, surely we can see the new terrain in all its ambiguity and complexity, and re-envision the task ahead in a more hopeful way than we have become used to.

Our natural proclivities equip us for debacle and solution in seemingly equal measure. Primates, such as we are, are characterized by generalized natures, there is little that is distinctive about all of us other than our lack of distinction. Said another way we have evolutionary suppleness – a commitment to innovation. We humans, for instance, having no specialized defense mechanisms – we exude no toxic or noisome chemicals, our teeth may gnash but rarely assail, we have no carapace to shield our moist vulnerability. Biological features noteworthy about us are extensions of our beastly condition: we are mobile, and we have brains swollen like ripe fruit atop erect bodies; clever apes that we are, we have perfected the manipulation of the surrounding world in a manner that extends our reach beyond bodily limitations – technology, another extension of primate innovation, is our ecology. For ninety-nine percent of our history we exclusively gathered, and occasionally hunted, and our numbers were modest; we lived within the confines of local ecological systems. Though perennially extending our range, pullulating out from our African home-range to encompass much of the inhabitable earth, we have generally been more constrained by nature, than we were a strain on nature. A mere geological moment ago, everything changed. Ten thousand years ago we became dramatically less mobile, we cultivated and accumulated rather than collected, we domesticated plants and animals, and indeed we ultimately domesticated ourselves. The reverberations of this agricultural revolution, this domestication revolution, are still omnipresent. Anthropologists inform us that civilization and its accoutrements: permanent architecture, metallurgy, writing, villages, towns and cities, are aftershocks of the agricultural revolution.

About one year ago, a decided marker in the quarter million year gestation of this species was reached. Our primate tendencies of mobility, braininess, dexterousness, and suppleness, characteristics that had served us handsomely on the savannas of the world had resulted in the completion of the following colossal transition: we had now become an urban species. More than fifty per cent of the world’s population now lives in cities!

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The celebrated post-modernist Urdu writer Naiyer Masud’s book of stories The Essence of Camphor¹ begins with a black and white photograph of the author as a young boy of four to five years, lying on a bed facing the camera, eyes somewhat askew yet curious, clutching onto his favourite ball. Behind the bed, sheathed by an ornate bed cover upon which the young boy lays, is a table or a chest covered similarly and on which sits an alarm clock. A drape behind this clock completes this seemingly aphasic tableau, plain and perhaps white, but embellished with a floral pattern in its centre. The focal point of this image seems to be the clock – one’s attention is immediately drawn to it. The text below the photograph reveals that the author was very sickly then, suffering from a continuous fever for over forty days. All hopes of his survival were lost. Consequently, the author’s parents called in the famous Lucknowi photographer, Mirza Mughal Beg, to make a portrait of the dying child – a memento mori. The author had willed that his ball be buried alongside him in the grave that was to be his final resting place. Done in the western pictorialist style of deathbed/post-mortem photographs of the 19^th century, the clock’s centrality is not merely to mark a referential time of death, but also to symbolically represent the passage, and indeed, the very evanescence of life itself. The ornate bedcover and drapes act as embellishments, funerary accoutrements, to beautify the scene, to render it as the stage of an exalted, melancholic event in the creation of the idealized ‘mourning portrait’ – a relic for the bereaved with which they could grieve in a ‘novel and acute form(s)’² and retain the presence of their departed loved one.

But Naiyer Masud did not die (most fortuitously for us) and what was intended to be his last photograph turned out to be his very first portrait. In the Proustian render of the image, the talismanic ball, its underlying theme, its accompanying caption, and its surreal context, suffused with as intense a melancholic character as one can extrapolate from the archetypal untimely death of a masterful writer-in-making, this portrait of an artist as a near-dead young boy, is not so much moderated or tempered as it is instead amplified on a parallel plane to, suggest cunningly, a Borgesian duplicity of sorts – a literary trick, a fiction, a defeat of time, destiny and death itself. Perhaps emblematic of his writerly life, mimicking the spectral atmospherics of his stories, wherein ghostly psychological afflictions and unspoken incantations drift by in Lucknow’s old quarters, by-lanes, and the minds of the characters who inhabit the city and the narrative, the image, perhaps in shadowy pursuance of ‘the signs of the soul in men’³, can be read as a conceptualist artifice, invoking the conceits of many a literary and artistic prankster.

Susan Sontag informs us that ‘picture taking is an event in itself’; immortality is conferred on the event by the ‘image-world that bids to outlast us’.⁴ Further, she also argues that ‘photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are …touched with pathos’, and that ‘all photographs are memento-mori’. If that constitutes an emotive register there is always the claim to ‘another reality’; the native surrealism inherent in photographs is in part due to ‘its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past’.⁵

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“The sign of being at home is the ability to make oneself understood without too much difficulty, and to follow the reasoning of others without any need for long explanations.”
—Vincent Descombes, on Proust's narrator, and all of us

These people step into the room, in pairs or alone. They’re all the way from towns you’ve never heard of in Georgia and Kentucky and Oklahoma and Arkansas. From Kansas and Louisiana and Texas. They manufacture farm equipment, or they preach. Or they speak only Korean at home, and what they do for work – or used to do – never fits into this stilted conversation.

Welcome to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

The old man who looks more like Nora’s grandpa than her father has his hair newly buzzed and wears the name of his equipment manufacturer on his shirt pocket and asks what good will it do them, what we’re teaching them. He really does mutter something about commie liberals a few times. I’m sort of amazed at how calmly I am able to answer him. He talks about a much older girl they have who went upstate for a teacher’s degree – and he guffaws at how Nora in seventh grade scored, well, so much higher on the SAT than the older girl did on the way to college. This funny knack his kid has, like how some people turn out double-jointed or ambidextrous.

The divorced father of the girl we’ve been calling Anastasia, from outside Plano, scratches out notes with a pencil and says very little. His hair is an artificial grey and his forehead shines. On the phone, his ex-wife is alternately condescending and irate. Stacy’s older sister didn’t do so great on her ACT, but she knew what she wanted to go to school for and it was easy to sign her up. But then, now, Stacy got this perfect score in seventh grade, and it seems like she’s good at mostly everything. And I don’t know what to do for her. The father’s face is like putty.

Nora’s mother, who must be a couple of decades younger than the old man, tells how the older girl was kind of lazy and used to ask her little sister how to spell out certain words and what they meant. Here was this nearly grown high school girl asking her little third-grade sister to check her homework for her, the mom remembers. The old man says maybe Nora’d like to go to work for the family business – though she’s got her eye on the city university. He snorts at this – the most expensive college in the state.

They ask me what they should do with Nora. I speak slowly because I’m sleep deprived, and they mistake this for calm and gravity.

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On Thanksgiving Day, 1970, Indians took Plymouth back from the Pilgrims.

It was the work of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which had been founded in 1968 by Dennis Banks and several other Anishinaabe men (more commonly known as “Ojibway” or “Chippewa”) living in Minneapolis. Banks and his partners originally formed AIM to help the local Indian population, which had grown substantially in many cities around the country since WWII. During the previous quarter-century, there had been two forces driving people away from reservations and towards urban centers. One was access to better paying jobs in the manufacturing sector, which had recuperated with the outbreak of war and grew during the heyday of America’s industrial might that followed. The other was a disingenuous federal program of the 1950s-60s called Relocation. The actual goal of federal policy makers had been to liquidate reservation populations by luring Indian people to distant cities with empty promises. The actual result had been the rise of Indian ghettos that cropped up in cities across America.

Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the emerging Black Power movement, and a desire to re-connect with their Indian culture and heritage, early AIM efforts included openly monitoring the city police to prevent and report abuses against Indian people, fighting housing and job discrimination, and setting up Survival Schools: after school programs for Indian children where they could stay out of trouble, pick up tips on handling the city’s mean streets, and learn about Indian culture and history, topics that were still absent from most public school curricula.

Initial successes led to increased popularity and funding, and organizational expansion soon followed. In early 1970, a Cleveland chapter of AIM was founded by Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota Sioux from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota who had mostly grown up in the Bay area of California after his father had taken a job at a defense plant during the war. As an adult, Means had gone back to South Dakota, briefly working as an accountant at the nearby Rosebud Reservation. By then, the failures of Relocation were obvious to all, and Indians were routinely using the program for their own purposes, not the government’s. In that vain, Means had used Relocation to move his family to Cleveland where he founded the Cleveland Indian Center in 1969.

Means had a forceful personality, tremendous charisma, and he was fearless in advocating for issues he believed in. He also brought to AIM an inspired appreciation for political theater. Though there would eventually develop a long history of tension and competition between them, Banks’ and Means’ talents, approaches, and interests dovetailed substantially, and the two of them would soon emerge as the Movement’s primary leaders and spokesmen. Thanksgiving Day, 1970 would provide them the opportunity to perform on a national stage for the first time.

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The late spring/early summer of 2010 was much wetter than normal in West Central Illinois. The sewer backed up into my basement while I was out of town. I returned home to an unmistakable smell and dismissed it as a “freak event” while I cleaned it up. A couple weeks later, I was home during a particularly Biblical downpour. The sewer began to back up again and, despite my best efforts to staunch the flow with a plunger, sewage poured out of my basement toilet with a ferocity that was reminiscent of the elevator scene in Stanley Kubrick's “The Shining” except in sepia-tone. When I called the city to remind them that I paid for sewage to be taken away from my house not delivered to it, I was told that May and June of 2010 were unusually wet and that the city's old-school combined system could not handle it (newer systems have separate pipes for sewage and storm run-off). The voice on the phone told me that we had received 24″ of rain in May and June. I checked the weather for 2010: In May we received 11.90″ and June 11.78″. I checked the climate records: The long term average for May was 4.27″ and the previous record for the month 11.29″ recorded in 1908. The long term average for June was 4.26″ and the previous monthly record of 13.97″ had been set in 1902. In other words, in two consecutive months we had nearly equaled or exceeded all time records, which were set over a century ago! This gave me something to think about as I squee-geed, shop-vacced, and Cloroxed my basement for the second time in as many weeks: How does a culture or civilization respond when all of its assumptions about the world (and the resulting necessary embodiment in infrastructure) no longer apply?

The instant flood and prospect of illness presented by the excrement got me thinking about two classic tales in the Old Testament: The Noahic Flood from Genesis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt from Exodus. As a Biologist I get some grief for being a scientist and for Science and Religion being incompatible. On the one hand, science is not known for supporting supernatural explanations of any kind. On the other hand, naturalistic accounts could explain some phenomena that appeared to be supernatural to people of the Old Testament.

I was brought up by a completely lapsed Southern Baptist, thoroughly agnostic father and Bahá'í mother (who was herself the product of a non-practicing Jewish father and non-practicing Catholic mother). Not surprisingly, I decided at a pretty young age that everything in the Abrahamic tradition could be read metaphorically rather than strictly literally, so I was amazed when I began to realize there was a cottage industry of scientists who tried to explain things in the Bible using modern methods and methodologies. If for no other reason than that I could tell people that science supported some of the things in the Bible (and that therefore they were not completely opposed to each other), I began to save some articles and make some notes.

In the late 1990's a pair of geologists published a book that explained the Noahic flood as the flooding of land around the Black Sea as the Mediterranean rose from melting glacial ice sheets and spilled over the Bosporus and offered some compelling evidence to support their ideas. At about the same time, a pair of epidemiologists (Marr and Malloy, 1996) arrived at a plausible epidemiological explanation of the 10 plagues of Egypt. I would like to explore both of these hypotheses a bit and put together my own synthesis.

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by Terrance Tomkow

The Wall Street Journal reporting Peter Singer's new book tells us:

In his latest book, “The Life You Can Save,” Mr. Singer argues that failing to donate money to help the roughly 1 billion people suffering from poverty and preventable diseases is a moral offense equivalent to standing by as a child drowns because you don't want to ruin a nice pair of shoes.

Equivalent. But how bad is that I wonder? Given that Singer is on record saying there is “no intrinsic moral difference between killing and allowing to die” he would seem committed to saying that failing to donate is morally equivalent to drowning a child. Pretty bad!

Of course, not everyone denies moral significance to the difference between killing and allowing to die. Some philosophers distinguish between “negative” duties (e.g., not to drown children) and positive ones, (e.g., to save children from drowning), holding that positive duties are not as morally onerous as negative ones. But Singer's arguments pose a challenge for this position.

After all, this bystander who stands by while a child drowns (for the sake of his shoes!) is a bad man. Let us not mince words; he is a sonofabitch. If failing in positive duties makes us as bad as that guy, then the difference in weight between positive and negative duties must itself be morally slight.

I give negligible amounts to charity. So is Singer calling me a sonofabitch? Apparently. And you too, if you fail to donate money to the starving billion when you could (and you know you could).

Is there any way to defend ourselves?

Well, one problem with Singer's view is that no one really believes it. Not even Singer.

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When I saw him he had only a couple of months to live, and the days I spent at his chairside were hardly pleasant. He had adopted a mask of stoic resignation to his fate (the best way to induce guilt in the living), so I feigned a cheerful ignorance of it (the best way to induce envy in the dying).

I found him in The Wheatsheaf with a woman by his side, surrounded by sycophants and nursing a large whiskey. A Florence Nightingale of the single malt. He was talking about hurricanes.

“It’s no wonder Hurricane Alan caused so much damage. A wind with a crap name obviously has something to prove. Hurricane Robert – fine. Probably rattles a few roofs. Hurricane Alice – expends its fury at sea. But can you imagine Hurricane Darren? Or tropical storm Kylie? That’s when you run for the cellar. Fear an anticyclone with a chip on its shoulder!”

People sitting round his wheelchair proposed other names for storms, and laughed as he assessed their ferocity. “Hurricane Arnold? A closet queer. Expect gusty wind and localised flooding”. As the sun set over the Caribbean, the one English pub on the island was full of uncontrived mirth. Choosing a lull in the chatter, occasioned by one of his coughing fits, I suggested the name ‘Percy’. After all, that is what he’d christened me.

A dissolute life led to the full. That is how he’d like to be remembered, and the first part is literally true. He was soluble in anything. He certainly managed to wow my mother and her crazy family for a couple of years, and even though she hated him for the rest of her life, you could tell that all her attempts to love anyone else were futile. She certainly never remarried, and nor (as far as I know) did she ever seek a divorce.

So he started off Hurricane Percy with a huge pompous thunderstorm, but then he had the decency to stop mid-sentence when he recognised who I must be, and to the obvious astonishment of his woman and his disciples I wheeled him outside and sat on a bench next to him.

I had imagined this moment for most of my life, and yet neither of us could think of anything to say. He had coloured my life by his absence rather than his presence, and apart from a Y chromosome there was little I could think of that he’d actively done to influence me. I’d occasionally got a birthday present on April 25^th – a hundred dollar bill twice and a backgammon board also twice – but I was born in September. That’s his birthday.

He broke the ice by saying “I’m sorry”, and then “I’m dying”. Both turned out to be individually true, but at the time I thought they were connected. Actually, that was true too. He was truly sorry that he was dying.

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To someone from the subcontinent, it is hard to believe that Indian restaurant owners in the United States are not malicious, reactionary, or in thrall to an obscure formal ideology. How else to explain what seems to be a concerted effort to trivialize a noble family of cuisines, both by reducing them all to a monotonous handful of sauces, and by violating the general structural principles that make these meals meaningful? It is well known that Indian restaurant owners are at the forefront of the right-wing movement to construct a homogenous dehistoricized South Asian identity[1], and the tragedy of Bangladeshis cooking bad Punjabi food is lost on no one. But, for the moment, let us forget that this iteration of Indian food is a particular, abstracted and displaced version of the cuisine of the Punjab and its surroundings, and that it ignores most of the other cuisines of the subcontinent. And let us forget that “Indian” food really should mean South Asian food.

But how to explain this fetishism of particular signifiers, this combinatorial generation of a menu from {chicken, lamb, shrimp} and some handful of sauces, these ungrammatical and unpoetic culinary utterances? How to explain the same sauce applied, with minor variations, to produce aborted versions of the same dish under many different names. What drives such promiscuous corruption of the understanding? Whence such systemic violence?

Even the most materialistic among us must realize that if we have no hope of seizing the means of production, we can still hope to educate. The following curry is as an example, not an essential exemplar or generative grammar. All of these principles are violated somewhere; still, they are a glimpse into the overlapping set of rules and resemblances that make up the cuisines of South Asia, whose grandeur and allusive depth is matched only by those of the French and of the Japanese.

Finely slice a kilogram of onions and deep fry them in very hot oil until dark brown (not black) and crisp. Set them aside and strain the oil…

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