by Evert Cilliers

“Larry, I can never get an easy explanation from Tim Geithner. He's always looking down, like he's talking to his dick. Explain to me how his bidding thing works to buy toxic assets.”

“Mr President, we now call them legacy assets. Words matter.”

“Words be damned, Larry. This is me talking to YOU, not to some dopes in Congress or in Turkey.”

“I hear you, Mr President.”

“I need me some straight guy talk, Larry, not the slick stuff we put out for public consumption. Tell me how this bidding thing works.”

1. ANY WOMAN NAMED HILLARY

“Like this, Mr President. The chosen hedge funds bid for the legacy assets with money we lend them, and then they hold the assets for a profit that could make an AIG bonus look like chump change. If they lose on the deal, we make up the difference.”

“So the hedge funds win whatever happens — and we're screwed whatever happens?”

“As your top economist, I wouldn't put it like that, Mr President.”

“How would you put it?”

“We protect them against any loss so they can bet in comfort.”

“We make it a sure bet for them.”

“As sure as betting that you won't find any woman getting reamed by Bill Clinton answering to the name Hillary.”

“Watch it, Larry. You're here as an economist, not a court jester. I've got Joe Biden for that. So who loses?”

“The taxpayer, Mr President.”

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David Schneider

Last Sunday, April 4, Spring came to New York City. Sixty-two degrees it was, and calm in the bright sun of a cloudless sky. The city had been waiting.

The winter seemed unusually brutal and long. As late as March we got mugged by the winds Chicago-style – sucker-punched from the northeast, a roundhouse kick to the southwest quadrant, then a blow to the kidneys and thrown into traffic. The winter was long. But the city was waiting.

Rites were given: the cruellest month, 1968. No, the City said, the greatest respect that can now be paid is called celebration, and forward. Miniskirts and boots, scarves sun-yellow and lollypop red, out the door on the long stroll and the City was again a New Thing.

In the East Village, across 3rd Avenue from the regal brown bulk of the Cooper Union on Astor Place (where Lincoln and Rushdie have spoken) a new extension of Arts and Sciences is rising: titanium cladding on the north, glass-frame on the south, and a delicious titanium wave cascading down four storeys: its form says, We'll surf this. It adds a dangerous excitement to the new skyline of the Bowery, where a white sail of a condo rises. Behind it, the textured white boxes of the New Museum totter like blocks stacked by Modernism's gargantuan infant.

At Lincoln Center, the new Alice Tully Hall is a clean, white, graceful dagger of 21st-century elegance, angling its excellence to a fine point: the classical performing arts yet have a home in this new era; “In this silicon world, art remains organic,” the Alice Tully Hall says with its soaring wood interiors. Is it unfortunate, or symbolically meaningful, that its broad, 30-foot-tall windows look out upon, and reflect, ugly '70s tower blocks and bland '80s condos? What does it say about this Temple of the Performing Arts erected on a razed block of Puerto-Rican tenements where West Side Story was sourced?

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Krzysztof Kotarski

The first time I visited Berlin, things looked a little more like this.

Or maybe not. I was young then, so my memory could be playing tricks on me. I know that I was on the eastern side of the city, so the grey concrete slabs in the photo look right, but I suppose that it's all a matter of perspective. Since I took the photograph above in April 2009, I could walk up to the wall, face southeast, and take a picture from a 30 degree angle. Back then, that may not have been possible.

In any case, this is not a post about the past, but one about the present. (Funny, I just reread that sentence, and if I wrote “future” instead of “present”, I would have captured the modern Republican Zeitgeist rather well.) And today, we like to think that the wall, if it still stands, looks like this.

Of course, the reality is a little different. The wall is almost all gone, and in present-day Berlin, a famous Joseph Beuys phrase is sometimes interpreted in a rather literal way.

Indeed they are. And Berliners tend to see this as a mixed blessing (at best), even if it is probably much too late to have an academic discussion on the virtues of this particular form of democratic expression.

Whether Berliners like it or not, the city is famous for its ubiquitous graffiti, which ranges from great, to downright awful. Of course, how one judges such things is usually a function of one's age, one's level of tolerance for non-linear expression, or one's cultural or political sensibilities. Still, when considering the photo above, most probably agree that the Beuys quote falls into the “awful” category since it sits atop one of the 100+ murals painted by international artists on Mühlenstraße, along a 1.3 kilometre section of the Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery.

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Heidi Newfield's been getting a lot of press lately as the result of her five nominations for the Country Music Association awards. She's the former singer in a successful country band, Trick Pony. Now she's getting a lot of airplay for her new single “Johnny and June” (referring to Cash and Carter, respectively). She's a talented singer and songwriter. She's also the subject of some strangely unnatural photography poses.

Consider this image:

Here the hapless Ms. Newfield, who is a dynamic and dominant performer on stage, is reduced her to a physical position of submission, artificiality, and objectification. The photographer has placed her in a pigeon-toed stance, backed into a corner, with her hands pressed against each wall. Her blouse is suggestively open, revealing the top of her bra line. She is photographed from above, as if she's staring upward at a viewer who is larger and more dominant. Her face is radiating what used to be called a “come hither” stance.

In other words, she's been subjugated.

Then there's this image:

Here Ms. Newfield is perched on a couch, with her feet once again pigeon-toed. She is cantilevered forward and to one side, which gives her an unnatural center of balance. This picture has less of a sexual undertone. The primary subtext appears to be, “I'm off balance.”

This author was once one of the subjects of the photo shoot for a corporate brochure. The photographer asked me to perch on a desk, lean over a “colleague” seated at the desk, and point to the piece of paper she was holding in her hand. The shoot was interrupted while he taped my tie to my shirt, causing it to seemingly defy gravity. Then he insisted I increase my angle of attack on the paper until I, too, had lost my center of gravity. Finally the inevitable words came:

“Look natural.”

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Michael Blim

Banks have never been good to my family. My father’s father lost his life savings in a Depression bank failure. He lost his house shortly thereafter.

Three of my uncles worked for banks. They were Irish, or Scots-Irish, and their parents were cops, postal workers, and telephone operators. They were Irishmen who wanted to join the WASP world, and banks were their points of entry. All three made vice-president of their respective banks, but one was later fired, and the other two were forced to retire for health reasons.

They worked through the sixties and into the seventies in local Chicago and suburban Chicago banks. The banks weren’t small for their time, but they look like pygmies from the vantage point of today. Local banks were protected, and indeed my uncles were protected by Illinois law that until 1985 forbade “branch banking,” whereby a bank could operate out of multiple locations. The downtown, money-center banks stalked the local banks relentless, buying their shares privately, seeking confederates on their boards, and linking them to big loan syndicates. But the big banks couldn’t take over the local banks, and the local banks continued on servicing their local business communities and writing local mortgages that remained part of their asset portfolio. The local banks were dull, stable, and profitable.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, my uncles would warn me that branch banking was coming. The downtown Chicago money-center banks with their Fortune 500 clients and political influence, they said, were votes away from getting their way in state legislature. The spectacular failure of the Continental Illinois Bank, then the country’s 7^th largest bank, in 1984, scared the state political class into granting limited branch banking in 1985. By 1993, state law provided that a bank could operate at an unlimited number of locations statewide. Federal law in 1994 opened up the country to unlimited branch banking. My uncles’ banks became branches of money-center and soon national banks, and each uncle left his bank, each in his own unhappy way.

Fifteen years later, America’s banks had become so few and so big that the government dared not let them fail.

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Time Enough
Jim Culleny

A clock and you me alone in a room with time
to settle accounts, still time enough to bare and binge,
to rewrite ends, swapping thoughts that make us cringe,
some so hot & fierce they make our memories singe.

The clock and I are willing but the flesh is weak.
I worry what the wound in you might speak.

Before the snow of last night’s furies melt
love would not be a bad wrap,
tell me what you felt.

I see crystals heaped three inches deep
on a branch of the Magnolia tree
where they thaw and drop for you and me

by Colin Marshall

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by Anjuli Raza Kolb

Patricia Highsmith, whose belated literary celebrity everyone is tearing their hair over, has these exquisite miniatures of horror that are so deadpan in their brevity that they often read like news items or reports, nearly unwritten. They lack even the tiniest indulgence in atmospheric detail or the fast and loose literary pop-psychology that sometimes comes with free indirect discourse. Some of them hardly bother with character. “The Hand,” published in her 1974 collection Little Tales of Misogyny is one such miniature. The story is about a grave misunderstanding; a two-part breakdown in the Herculean effort of language to haul around meaning. It begins, “a young man asked a father for his daughter’s hand, and received it in a box—her left hand,” and expires a page and a quarter later as the young man, “feeling now he was insane beyond repair, since he could make contact with nothing, refused to eat for many days, and at last lay on his bed with his face to the wall, and died.”

What can have happened to the young man’s love? What abyss can have opened up with such demonic speed between language and meaning? How could this ubiquitous, socially ratified expression—to ask for a hand when one means a woman’s life, her fidelity, her reproductive organs and genetic material—fail to do its shifty dance of signification? How does the literal reveal the horror of the figural? With stories of such lucid succinctness, what one can say runs the risk of putting a leaden helmet on a fledgling bat, intercepting its tightly calibrated sonar and chucking it earthwards. But since the horror of this story is first, that of misprision—a mistake or misunderstanding, a miss, or maybe a mrs.—and second, of “making contact with nothing,” I think it’s more like rehab than assault to bring Roman Jakobson’s amputated poetics of aphasia together with Highsmith’s “stump concealed in a muff” (not joking!) to let them make phantom contact.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

The body has its ways, and jetlag is one of them. I want to sleep and it wants to drum its fingers on the bed springs to – what is this rhythm? – a kind of bhangda-fandango. I want to go dancing but it has already clocked off, tuned out, leaving me to text out my regrets while I tuck it to sleep. In my years of managing jetlag, I’ve come to understand that I can only coax my system gently, never force it into an artificial pattern, for it will only revolt, and push back with stubborn insouciance: “You thought we could stay up late, but you know what, it’s time to wakey wakey again! Hmm-hm-hm-hm-hm-hanh-hanh, hail to the conquering heroes, hail hail to Michigan, the leaders and the best! Feeling drowsy now?” Like the flailing parent of a rebel teenager, I’ve completely given up the fight of late, allowing my body-clock to set his own times, picking up after him, hoarding midnight snacks for when he wakes up hungry and demanding, allowing him to break evening appointments without explanation. Jetlag is evidence that whether or not I feel at home in the world, my mindbody-system enjoys a home in time, where it is housed in the rhythms of sleep, the routines of rousing, the comforts of food and the movements of bowel.

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Part 1 of “A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat” can be found HERE.

Part 2 of “A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat” can be found HERE.

(Note: I do not use the real names of people, nor do I identify the specific Ashram. I changed a few details. The purpose is to protect the privacy of the individuals. Readers who are familiar with this Ashram will probably recognize it.)

The Idea of God

God is an idea. God is a thought. God is a concept. God is an abstraction. The idea of God originated in the human mind. Like any other idea, it has no reality apart from the human mind's ability to conceive it, develop it, use it, and communicate it to others.

As with other powerful ideas, the idea of God manifests itself in human experience. The idea of God is observed in the affairs of humanity in ways that are small and large, obvious and subtle, assuaging and painful, creative and destructive, capricious and profound, vengeful and compassionate, loving and tyrannical, indifferent and personal.

The idea of God can inspire the most exquisite of humankind's devotional expressions in art, poetry, literature, architecture, music, and ritual. The idea of God can be usurped and reshaped into an instrument of the powerful and the greedy. The idea of God can intoxicate the spirit of humankind in an embrace of all creation as one. The idea of God can corrode peoples and cultures when forged by the sadist and hater into a sword of punishment, suffering, and murder.

Because God is an idea, it is accessible, along with other related ideas, to science and the scientist. Science is an approach to understanding nature and ourselves. Science has method and it has content. The method of science is systematic observation of phenomena, and the recording of data. The content of science comes from organizing information into a body of knowledge.

The basic function of science is to describe the properties of things. Things include ideas. Darwinian evolution is an idea. The particle nature of subatomic phenomenon is an idea. Mating ritual is an idea. Borderline personality disorder is an idea. Darwin described the origin of species in words and illustrations. Physicists describe quantum mechanics with differential equations. Social scientists describe a culture's mating rituals in words, videos, and cross cultural comparisons. Psychiatrists and psychologists describe mental disorders in statistically consistent patterns of behaviors and objective assessments.

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New Morning
Jim Culleny

First I check to see if the sun's up –yes.
There it is in the sash of the second window from the right
a third of the way across because it's the 25th of March.
It blazes in blue beyond imagination
radiating like a lover's heart.

Then I look left for you –you're there.
You under the blankets, a ridge undulating so much like
the mountain that has just produced the sun,
but rising and falling almost imperceptibly
still sleeping though the day's begun.

Third, I check to see if I breathe because it's clear
heaven's just another way of saying, “Here.”

Justin E. H. Smith

We may as well start with a joke:

Primatologist to chimpanzee: “Bongo, bring me some food.”
(Bongo brings a pile of stones instead of food, and shows a wide, teeth-bearing grin.)

Alright, perhaps not a joke, really. More a primate proto-joke. However we classify it, though, I believe this report (based on a true story), gives us everything we need to generate a theory of humour. To get there, we will have first to do some propaedeutic work, in order to determine exactly what such a theory ought to explain, as also some metatheoretical work to explain where exactly such a theory fits in relation to other, similar projects.

1. The Funny and the Beautiful

Arthur Danto has noted that every systematic philosopher, whether a refined aesthete or a complete philistine, has at some point taken on the topic of art. One might add that nearly every one of these has included an account of wit, humour, jokes, comedy, or laughter, or some combination of these, within his theory of art and beauty. Why is this? Is gelastics –to borrow a neologism coined by Mary Beard from the Greek ‘gelan’: ‘to laugh’– a subdomain of aesthetics? Let us consider some of the reasons for holding such a view.

There seems to be a great similarity between the way people talk about the ‘aesthetic stance’ and the way they conceive the ‘sense of humour’. The perception of something as a joke or as a work of art requires a certain stance or perspective. Even if it is hard to say what this will be, it seems that the explanations for the one often serve just as well as accounts for the other. For example, Edward Bullough’s criterion of psychical distance, which would account for the reluctance theatre-goers feel at the thought of getting up to save Desdemona from Othello, seems to function in the same way to provide the moral distancing that enables one to laugh at a cruel joke (and most, perhaps all, jokes are cruel, a point to which we might return later).

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Anything to Declare?

My baby came to me this morning
She said “I'm kinda confused
If me and B. B. King were both drowning –
Which one would you choose?”

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By Namit Arora

The US pulled out of Vietnam (video) in 1975 after more than a decade and a humiliating defeat. The war had been expensive, the draft unpopular, and too many white boys had come home in body bags. A strong antiwar mood had set in amidst the public and the Congress. Most Americans now believed it was never their war to fight. The Nixon Doctrine held that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.”[1] At least in the short term, direct military engagement in the third world seemed politically unviable for any US administration.

Besides Vietnam, the US had fought and lost another war in Indochina – in Laos – but rather differently. This was a proxy war, sponsored by the US but led by Hmong mercenaries on the ground. It was waged in relative secrecy, far from “congressional oversight, public scrutiny, and conventional diplomacy.” The advantages of such a war were soon evident: “Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that in Laos, the USAF had fought ‘the largest air war in military history … dropping 2.1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation — the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during WWII.’”[2]

In the 60s and 70s, anti-colonial and nationalistic struggles were cropping up in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Blinded by its anti-commie paranoia, the US saw even popular movements for social and economic justice as precursors to communism, their leaders as Soviet proxies, and was determined to combat and crush them. But, given the unviability of direct military engagement on so many fronts, proxy war was the only military option left to the US. There was one minor obstacle though: how to finance all these proxy wars? Many Congressmen asked awkward questions, especially after the disaster in Indochina. When they agreed to fund, they wanted debates and oversight. The idea of a new, recurring source of money — bypassing the Congress — gripped the minds of many.

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Elatia Harris

Not long ago, I was leafing through an old notebook, of the kind kept by artists on the prowl for imagery. I found some 16th century recipes I’d copied out, lines rich with imagery that never made it into a painting. “If you yearn to turn a woman green,” one recipe urged, “decoct a chameleon into her bath.”

Whose thinking was this? I had his name, Giambattista Della Porta of Naples, and the work referenced was his 20-volume Magia naturalis ( The Book of Natural Magic), a compendium of popular science of the 1550’s that gave its author, then a very young man, renown almost beyond telling. Prof. Louise George Clubb, a scholar of Italian studies, writes of his reputation as a “wonder-worker who had penetrated the secrets of nature, and was expected at any moment to discover the philosopher’s stone.” The Duke of Mantua came to Naples for his sake, the Duke of Florence and the Emperor Rudolph sent emissaries. He was a seer, a cryptographer, a dramatist, a mathematician, a horticulturist, a physician – and so much more. A polymath, it used to be called.

And he could spare a thought for how to turn a woman green.

The painting under the title, Caspar van Wittel's View of the Largo di Palazzo, was painted after Della Porta's death, but shows a Naples that would have been familiar to him. That's the Royal Palace on the right, the old seat of the Viceroy, built in 1533. In the 1830's, it made room for the Teatro San Carlo. The church buildings on the left were demolished in the Neoclassical period for something grander — the ecclesiastical complex of San Francesco di Paola, with its vast colonnades. And it's no longer the Largo di Palazzo, but the Piazza del Plebiscito, renamed for the plebiscite in 1860 that brought Naples into the unified kingdom of Italy. So this is neither a view nor even a viewpoint — you can't stand just there — that can any more be had. Della Porta of Naples might recognize it today only as the largest public space in the city, with the red-walled Royal Palace, currently the National Library, a persistent gracious feature.

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by Meghan Falvey and Asad Raza

In 1981, Irish republican prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, conducted a hunger strike at HM Maze prison near Belfast. Steve McQueen's Hunger is an account of that strike. It opened in New York City on Friday, and we recommend you see the film before reading this.

Meghan: The restraint of your summary suits the movie, I think. I come to any movie or story about sectarian violence in Northern Ireland expecting that I'm going to be attacked with sentiment, with a light scrim of history thrown over a pretty standard David vs Goliath root-for-the-underdog set up. It bothers me that that stuff can get into my Irish-American lizard brain– I cried watching Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and it was only partly out of frustration that I was susceptible to romantic nationalism. Also I expected another exercise in telling stories about recent history that are meant as metaphors for the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the War On Terror's illegal captures and torture. At the beginning of Hunger I felt like I braced for a similar assualt, and then it never came– I almost relaxed as it went on! The two Thatcher voiceovers were the closest thing to melodrama– what a ham she was! But that's enough, maybe, about what Hunger isn't. I watched it as a– well, what did you make of it?

Asad: The first thing that occurs to me to say to readers is: please see this beautiful, terrible film. I watch a lot of movies, and this one, from the first pounding sequence, felt fresh. More than fresh: new. There's lot to be said for letting a talented visual artist try to make a movie with total control–McQueen's technical confidence and maturity are so… there. There's a moment in the film where the Bobby Sands character breathes and as he does, there are three very brief dissolves to birds flying, and then back to Sands. He's near death. That brilliant use of an age-old technique–the dissolve–was so evocative and so sad that I cried. Even as a structure, the movie is very bold–it's a triptych in which the parts are almost totally distinct. (We have to talk about that middle “panel” in more detail below.) As for the politics of the film, which you bring up, I think they are my favorite kind: the politics of the body and not the body politic. Know what I mean?

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by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Online social networking is in the news of late–particularly as it applies to active, “older” users. Technically, that is me, though I’m inclined to dispute “older” as a demographic label (I’m 39! At least, according to Facebook’s Realage application). But I can’t argue that I’m active. Over the past year, in fact, I’ve gone on something of a cybernetworking binge, re-connecting with former classmates, “meeting” other writers, and composing lists of random facts, desert island playlists and theoretical “bail” estimates (645, if you’re interested. O.K., 645.50).

Like many earnest writers, I rationalize these lost hours as a sunk cost of doing e-commerce in the new millenium. After all, I have an upcoming paperback to promote. And with many publishers just discovering the brave new world of online publicity and the industry itself in screaming freefall, an internet presence seems as crucial to authors these days as family money, or jobs that actually pay. Which might explain why on some “work” days, I spend more time on my status update then I do on my second novel.

What I’ve had more trouble rationalizing, however, is the increasing chunk of time cybernetworking takes up in the lives of my daughters, eight and five respectively. Neither is on Facebook yet (a good thing, as I’d hate to defend my bail score to them. Particularly that last 50 cents). But they are both staunch fans of Club Penguin, a site that some see as a Facebook training ground of sorts.

I first learned about this parallel penguin world last year, when my eldest interrupted an important Facebook dispatch (a self-assessment of my general high school nerdiness) with a somewhat alarming question: “Hey Mom! What’s your Paypal password?”

“Uh–why do you need it?” I asked.

“I’m buying a penguin.”

Granted, a better answer than some of the alternatives (I’m getting a Snuggie! A Nigerian’s sending us money! Or worst of all: We’re eligible for a Disney cruise!) Still, the idea of a wet bird joining our psycho cat, attention-starved dog and two surly salamanders (soon to become one, thanks to either the dog or the cat) halted me in my cybertracks. And not only because the dog also happens to be a birder.

Putting aside, for the moment, the pressing question of whether or not my teen self was “considered a flirt” (it was not) I joined my eldest daughter—who was still trying to crack my bank account–on the couch. Repossessing my backup laptop, I backtracked a few pages. I found myself on a snow-covered island with several cheerful, oddly-dressed penguins. “Welcome to Club Penguin!” the site greeted me. “Waddle around and make new friends!”

“What is this?” I asked.

“Club Penguin,” Katie said, in a tone that suggested I’d just asked her to remind me of her name.

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by Jeff Strabone

Two famous men known for reinventing themselves have spent most of this decade in hiding: Osama bin Ladin and David Bowie. Away from the public eye, Bin Ladin has been busy releasing mixtapes of varying quality over the past few years, but Bowie not so much. Bin Ladin's listeners, at the CIA and around the world, are very devoted to his work: no matter the content or the production values, they really get into each of his new releases and perform close readings in order to make sense of the man and his œuvre. Bowie has his share of fans, too, myself included, who stand ready to parse his latest offerings, but he has not released a new album in almost six years. I think it's time he came out of his cave and faced the music. Aside from a handful of guest appearances with everyone from TV on the Radio to Scarlett Johanson, Bowie has been missing in action as a recording artist since September 2003 when he released his latest album Reality.

My friend Daniel F has suggested that it's far better for Bowie to wait out a potential creative dry spell than to make bad music. I intend to argue the exact opposite: that it is far better for a great artist to make bad work than to make no work. Yes, you read that right: I am demanding more bad art. And in Bowie's particular case, I hope to convince you to join me in asking him to get off the couch and release some new music, no matter how good or bad it may turn out to be.

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By Olivia Scheck

Whatever role one believes emotions should play in moral judgment, new research demonstrates that the influence of these low-level passions is profound. In fact, a study published in Science earlier this month suggests that many moral judgments are mediated by the same emotional mechanism that is activated by rotten leftovers and dirty socks.

“We started from this funny phenomenon where people will describe…moral offenses as ‘disgusting’…and we were wondering whether that actually means that people are feeling disgust,” explains Hanah Chapman, a graduate student in Psychology at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author. “In its basic form [disgust] has to do with food and eating and really concrete things. So it was surprising to us that it might be involved in something as abstract as moral codes.”

To test this question, the authors used electromyography to compare the activation of facial muscles in response to bitter tastes, pictures of physically disgusting stimuli and, finally, moral transgressions. Not only was the disgust expression elicited in all three conditions, it was also shown to predict future moral decisions – suggesting not only that moral disgust exists, but that it is – to a surprising degree – driving our behavior.

Is disgust just a metaphor?
As Chapman notes, we often employ notions of disgust when describing social violations, claiming that such behaviors make us “sick” or leave “a bad taste” in our mouths. And in certain cases this makes some sense. Popular “moral” issues like abortion and sodomy may include elements of physical contamination, so it’s possible that this is what people are responding to when they describe these practices as disgusting.

But we also use these terms to describe moral violations that don’t involve physical contaminants – transgressions like dishonesty and theft. (As Adam Anderson, another of the study’s authors, points out, a Google search for “Blagojevich and disgust” yields around 49,000 hits. “Madoff and disgust” yields around 658,000.) Are we actually expressing disgust – the kind that is inspired by cockroaches and flatulence –in these instances? Or are these invocations simply metaphorical?

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On “the sequencing of the mathematical genome”

Mathematics is funnier than it gets credit for, and the best laugh I ever had about math involved a friend in college and a course so intimidating he almost quit his mathematics major after hearing the name. “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” it was called, a title that betrayed a martinet attitude. Whereas your average multivariable calc class was flabby and slack-ass, here you’d finally get some goddamn discipline, boy. You will throw up.

Word around the chalkboard was that every homework problem in “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach” required six sheets of paper, because you wrote out every nitpicky step and made every assumption explicit, no matter how obvious—not even arithmetic was taken for granted. For some reason I got endless delight terrorizing Mark by pointing out all the horrid, spindly-legged theorems in other books he would have to dissect in “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” predicting the logic would drive him actually mad. Every time I mentioned the class, I used its full draconian title, “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” and fear of it drove him to the brink both of hyperventilation and of dropping his major, which probably would have meant him dropping out of college.

Mark was spared by an administrative overhaul of the department, so he never took the class. For my part, I’d almost forgotten the whole incident until I came across a curious bundle of papers in a recent issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society—four treaties on the future of mathematical proofs, and specifically on how computers were going to take over a large burden of the work in mathematical proofs. However unpromising that topic sounds, it soon had my thoughts dilating like a marijuana smoker’s thoughts into all sorts of wild conjectures, because it turns out (1) “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach” was flabby and slack-ass compared to what’s coming in formal mathematics, and (2) the idea of mathematical beauty might soon be extinct.

First, a few lines of history (cribbed from the papers, natch): The first great revolution in math came from Pythagoras, Euclid, and the rest of the Greeks, who introduced the concept of proofs. You saw examples of this in your high-school geometry class. Next, in the 1800s, came the next big thing, rigor. Oddly, rigor in math is most easily recognized as a feeling—the scrotum-shrinking embarrassment that even people really, really good at college math feel upon realizing that some people are way the hell smarter. Namely, people who do original work in rigorous mathematics.

The next and latest revolution in math was the subject of the NAMS papers—formalization. Formalization means tracing math back to fundamental axioms, the kind of migrainous set theory that takes pages to explicate just why two is the successor of one. It turns out there’s currently a movement in mathematics—and the authors of the quartet of papers claim that not even most mathematicians realize at, or at least don’t admit it—but there’s a movement to make all mathematical proofs fully formal. To basically take a six-page homework problem from “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach” and apply even more destructive methods to every single line of that problem, expanding the amount of rigor geometrically if not exponentially.

Why? Because when you tease apart every atom of every line, you can actually convert very hard mathematical concepts into a series of very simple steps. The steps might seem stunted and overly obvious and useless, but they lo and behold add up to something in the end. It’s like someone explaining how a car engine works by starting with the theory of bolts screwing onto threads and going into incredibly arcane detail about it, and then repeating that nut-and-bolt explanation every time you came across another screw. You’d get pissed off, but you’d also probably understand how a car engine worked if he continued to break everything down to concepts that simple. That’s formal mathematics. And once you’ve checked all the ticky-tack steps between lines of a proof, you can be pretty darn sure it’s correct. One paper’s author called this “the sequencing of the mathematical genome.”

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