Haiku, Naming Things and the Poetics of Reason

Posted on by Dick Edelstein

by Dick Edelstein

Irish poet Geraldine Mitchell begins her new collection as she means to go on, choosing as an epigraph an untitled, haiku-like poem in an exalted tone:

a blackbird knaps
the flint of my heart,
sparks fly

Written in a non-classical style, the epigraph is a signpost indicating the celebratory mood prevailing in this collection, her fifth in 15 years. The mini-poem is the first of several graceful haiku-like forms sprinkled throughout the volume like pixie dust. Formally diverse, mostly without titles, standing alone on a page, they resemble marginalia. Like a Greek chorus, they make meta-commentaries on the text as well as statements and observations.

seabirds
face into the wind

waves explode
like outraged snow

 

trees are open
cages where birds
in safety
sing their limits

Seeking new challenges, Mitchell experiments with form without becoming wedded to a formula, so each collection is a revelation. The haiku-like poem below has a title, a more formal syntax, and a discursive tone, and it manifests an element of surprise, giving readers a chance to consider how much the feeling of haiku is associated with a particular syllabic arrangement, as opposed to line breaks or thematic content.

FOLLY

I have fallen in love
with a tree.
At my age.
Imagine.

This collection is permeated by the notion of age, of longevity and mortality, something inquieting and hard to ignore. Read more »

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Of True and False Selves: Donald Winnicott’s View

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

The power and peril of seeing, and being seen, has been with us from the beginning. Almost the first thing Adam and Eve do is seek to hide from being seen by God. (Good luck with that!) Much later, Hegel showed how, in contrast, the desire to be seen—the desire for recognition—is a motive force of human history. Later still, we are learning how critical being seen is to a child’s development.

The negative effects of not being seen are a core theme of Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child. This book made a deep impression when I first read it years ago, long before I became a psychotherapist. At the risk of triggering those (including myself) with an allergy to therapeutic speak—I felt seen. I wasn’t alone. Since its publication in 1979, the book has sold well over a million copies worldwide.

Miller explores how some children use their “gift” of sensitivity to adapt to inadequate parenting. In particular, she describes how a “false self” develops from the “true self.” This distinction comes from the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who observed and thought deeply the relation of parents and children. (Many people besides biological parents can play the role of caregiver; I will use the words “parent” and “mother” to preserve the archetypal resonances.) I expect many readers will recognize aspects of their experience in Winnicott’s influential account of how we can come to feel lost to our true selves.

We all make use of a ‘false’ self. As Winnicott notes, “Each person has a polite or socialized self, and also a personal private self that is not available except for intimacy.” (Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, Norton & Co, 1990. All quotes are from this book.) Someone gives you a heartfelt gift that you don’t like. But you say you like it because you see there is nothing to be gained by saying how you really feel. The social world depends on having this polite self capable of getting along by masking our true thoughts and feelings. Read more »

10 Rules For Making An Advent Calendar

Posted on by Eric Schenck

by Eric Schenck

A quick definition of “Advent calendar” in case you have no idea what I’m talking about: a special calendar used to count down the days of December before Christmas.

If you celebrate Christmas (and even if you don’t), you should make somebody an Advent calendar at least once in your life.

Truly, an Advent calendar is the most under-celebrated joy of Christmas. If presents under the tree on Christmas morning are the rich and highly accomplished lawyer of the family, an Advent calendar is his far less successful (but way cooler) little brother.

You can buy one, sure: but the ones you make on your own will always be the best.

With that in mind, here’s your guide to creating an Advent calendar that’s guaranteed to delight.

10 Rules For Making An Advent Calendar

1) Make sure your person has fun with it

We start with the Golden Rule. It does you no good to create something so beautiful, so thoughtful, if the person receiving it isn’t going to enjoy it. So make sure you do your homework. Excitement looks different for everybody, so the best Advent calendars will be unique.

What you create, for example, is highly dependent on the age of the recipient. If you’re making one for your grandma, a little more sophistication might be called for. You four-year-old nephew? You can likely get away with a simple one. 

That’s certainly how it was with my first Advent calendar. This was the version many of us are familiar with: the rings. Every night before bed I’d grab scissors and lop off another one. As a kindergartener, that in itself was an accomplishment. Here I was, unable to think about anything but Christmas, and I was able to accept just one day at a time.

My imagination ran wild with these rings. Each one I cut was one more day of North Pole preparations. What was Santa doing? What were his elves up to? Was my gift already prepared and packed up?

2) Avoid being sentimental at all costs

An Advent calendar is more about the experience, and less about the message. Making one as an adult puts you back in middle school. You have to play it cool. Your friends, your family, that secret crush at work –under no circumstances can they know just how much you like them. Make it, give it to them, and let the dice fall where they may. 

And if you’re giving one to a kid? Now is not the time to tell them how much you love them. Your kids already know that. What they’re after is the sugar.  Which brings me to my next point… Read more »

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

What the Law Supposes

Posted on by Barry Goldman

by Barry Goldman

“You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and, indeed, are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.”

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass — an idiot.”

―Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

I am an arbitrator. I serve mostly in cases between labor unions and employers, but I also serve for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) in cases between customers and brokerage firms. I am not a judge, but the principles that apply to judicial and arbitral decision making are essentially the same.

Unions and employers come to arbitrators with disputes about the meaning of terms in their collective bargaining agreements. The agreement might say, for example, “Employees assigned to this work shall receive premium pay until the task is complete.” Everyone agrees on what the contract says. But what does it mean? What is “the task?” And when is it “complete?”

The union says the task is the whole project. The employer says the task is the particular assignment within the project. How is the arbitrator to decide?

There are rules for this sort of thing. Some of them are very old and have Latin names. One of the rules says a term in a contract has the same meaning whenever it appears. So, if we don’t know the meaning of the term “task” in Article 7, we can look at the rest of the contract and see if the word appears somewhere that we do know the meaning. Then we just apply the rule. It means in Article 7 what it means in Article 12.

There is a corollary to this rule. Arbitrators assume if the same term is used the same meaning is intended, and we assume if a different term is used, a different meaning is intended.

There are many other rules like this. We suppose, for example, that everything in a contract is there for a reason. Collective bargaining agreements contain “no mere surplusage.” We also assume the contract, read as a whole, makes sense. If there are two possible readings of a provision, one of which conflicts with another provision elsewhere in the contract and one which does not, we construe the contract according to the internally consistent meaning.

There is a fiction at work here. The law supposes the drafters of the contract combed through it painstakingly, searched out all the inconsistent usages, ambiguities, vaguenesses and infelicities, and rooted them out. The drafters, we assume, knew precisely what they were doing, and went about it with scrupulous care. Anything that remains is intentional.

No one who has ever been in the room where a labor negotiation was taking place believes a word of this. Read more »

All In Against Efficiency

Posted on by Derek Neal

by Derek Neal

I was recently subjected to an hour of the “All In” Podcast while on a long car ride. This podcast is not the sort I normally listen to. I prefer sports podcasts—primarily European soccer—and that’s about the extent of my consumption. I like my podcasts to be background noise and idle chatter, something to listen to while I do the dishes or sweep the floor, just something to fill the void of silence. On the way to work this morning I had sports talk radio on—the pre-podcast way to fill silence—and they were discussing the physical differences between two football wide receivers—Calvin Johnson and DK Metcalfe—before switching to two running backs—Derrick Henry and Mark Ingram.

You think DK Metcalfe is big, one host said, but then you see Calvin Johnson and you’re like, whoa, this guy is massive! How does a human get that big? Yeah, another host said, and then you see Derrick Henry next to Mark Ingram, and you’re like, how do these guys even play the same position? Ingram is tiny next to Henry! It doesn’t make sense! After this exchange, the first host remarked sarcastically that this was great radio—just naming some guys and talking about their physical stature. Yes, I nodded my head, this is great radio, this is what I want on a frigid December morning, the first morning I’ve had to sweep the snow off my car and let it idle in the driveway to warm up. The silence is deeper in winter, and I remembered padding down the stairs of my childhood home before the sun had risen, 15 or 16 years old, hearing Mike & Mike on ESPN Radio blaring out of the living room speakers as I quickly ate cereal before rushing off to school, wondering why in the hell my dad was blasting this stupid sports talk radio at six in the morning. But now I know. When you get older, sometimes the silence is too much, and the only remedy is the sweet nothings of sports talk radio.

The All In Podcast also had a lot of chatter, but the topic was finance and politics rather than sports. The hosts, who were all venture capital millionaires/billionaires in the tech industry, cracked jokes and were occasionally self-deprecating, but I was left with the disconcerting feeling that the four hosts believed in their own importance. These guys think they have something important to say, I realized, and even worse, this is the sort of podcast people listen to to learn something. Reader, I have a general suspicion of people who claim to have something important to say, especially those who claim to be able to teach me something. The only people I immediately trust are the ones who foreground their own stupidity and failures, like the journalists on my rotation of European soccer podcasts. Read more »

Monday, December 9, 2024

Art Or Artifice: Agency And AI Alignment

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

The leader of the Luddites, the (possibly apocryphal) weaver Ned Ludd who is said to have broken two knitting frames in a ‘fit of rage’. Image Credit: Public Domain.

When the Luddites smashed automatic looms in protest, what they saw threatened was their livelihoods: work that had required the attention of a seasoned artisan could now be performed by much lower-skilled workers, making them more easily replaceable and thus without leverage to push back against deteriorating working conditions. Today, many employees find themselves worrying about the prospect of being replaced by AI ‘agents’ capable of both producing and ingesting large volumes of textual data in negligible time.

But the threat of AI is not ‘merely’ that of cheap labor. As depicted in cautionary tales such as The Terminator or Matrix, many perceive the true risk of AI to be that of rising up against its creators to dominate or enslave them. While there might be a bit of transference going on here, certainly there is ample reason for caution in contemplating the creation of an intelligence equal to or greater than our own—especially if it at the same time might lack many of our weaknesses, such as requiring a physical body or being tied to a single location.

Besides these two, there is another, less often remarked upon, threat to what singer-songwriter Nick Cave has called ‘the soul of the world’: art as a means to take human strife and from it craft meaning, focusing instead on the finished end product as commodity. Art is born in the artist’s struggle with the world, and this struggle gives it meaning; the ‘promise’ of generative AI is to leapfrog all of the troublesome uncertainty and strife, leaving us only with the husk of the finished product.

I believe these two issues are deeply connected: to put it bluntly, we will not solve the problem of AI alignment without giving it a soul. The ‘soul’ I am referring to here is not an ethereal substance or animating power, but simply the ability to take creative action in the world, to originate something genuinely creatively novel—true agency, which is something all current AI lacks. Meaningful choice is a precondition to both originating novel works of art and to becoming an authentic moral subject. AI alignment can’t be solved by a fixed code of moral axioms, simply because action is not determined by rational deduction, but is compelled by the affect of actually experiencing a given situation. Let’s try to unpack this. Read more »

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part One—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin
Photo from https://wel-metcamps.com/

by Barbara Fischkin

People who have never been to sleepaway camp, don’t get it. They tease me when I speak about memories that are decades old, as if I am recalling a past life that never happened. They find it strange that I view my many years at camp as not merely summer vacations but as forces that helped to make me who I am. These camp memories visit me more deeply when the winter sky sets early, fooling me into believing that 4:30 pm is really past midnight. If I am roaming, I wonder if it is already time to go home. I linger. Yes, my summer camp taught me to roam physically—and in my imagination. It was free and free-range.

I’ll tarry briefly where many good tales begin. In the middle: My teenage years, as a camp clerk and then as babysitter for a camp director and finally, as a counselor. These summer jobs were woefully underpaid. But the fringe benefits were great: Opportunities to break rules that were often not enforced, anyway.

I smoked my first joint, out in the open, sitting with friends on a large rock by the lake, right after a late summer sunset. If caught by a camp director, we would have been fired. I don’t think they wanted to catch us. They were somewhere else, smoking their own joints. Romance, along with pot, seemed to be part of the plan for young employees, particularly in regard to the kitchen boys over whom we swooned. My camp, socialist at its core and run by lefty social workers, did not believe in waiters. To check out a kitchen boy, campers and staff had to go to one of several pantries to pick up or deliver food, plates and utensils. A chore made joyful.

 In regard to specific romance, I remember the night I spent with a slightly older male counselor, sleeping with him in his tent—and not doing much more than sleeping. (Maybe it was the pot). Before dawn I shoved him awake and said: “I have to go, I will get into trouble.” He laughed a sleepy laugh, perhaps a stoner laugh and said: “Barbara,  this is Wel-Met. Nobody gets in trouble for sleeping with someone.” Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Fun In Space

Call me nomad.
Rootlessness is my routine.

From where I stand
space seems to beg for exploration
not occupation. Occupation of space
requires a military state of mind,
armies train for it. But individuals
grow dull and lethargic just occupying space

~~

There’s no substitute for dynamism
when facing space.

When I stumble upon a new chunk
I like to engage it many times over
laying out alternate trajectories,
bisecting circles,
flying off on tangents,
or just nosing around looking for
shortcuts.

If the wind’s right you might catch me
boogalooing along an hypotenuse
or oscillating between the foci of an ellipse.
I go at it from all angles by any means.

For instance, I’ve found a trampoline’s
a great way to explore space:
up, down, up, down.
Along similar lines (if you have the bucks)
a space shuttle’s good too:
up, down, up, down.

~~

There are various ways to approach space:
We can grid it off and tackle it one little block at a time
or go at it whole, working it as Jackson Pollock would a canvas.
Our choice depends upon our depth of indoctrination,
or personality disorder.

Whatever our milieu, space can be an exhilarating place
–or is it places?

In fact, space is full of surprises
(moving beyond bland Euclidean space that is,
the plainest of all geometries). Still,
you gotta hand it to the guy.
Euclid’s space may be old hat,
but it’s a space that’s served us well over the years,
try getting from here to there without it.

~~

But what really psyches me
are novel topologies of space.
There’s nothing more exhilarating
then space that pushes the envelope.

Consider the tasty appeal of a torus
(the deep-fried, sugary cuisine of cops),
the intriguing infinity of a Möbius strip,
or the warm and cozy feel of a
conversation-laced pub.

Those are boundary-pushing spaces all,
but they’re nothing up against the
reality-bending possibilities of warped space
as given by Einstein, or the mystically tangled
theory of strings.

Just the thought of Einsteinian space
trumps any sense of metaphysical claustrophobia
left over from grade-school catechism
under hard nuns.

~~

Now?

I never miss the chance to savor space.
With seven billion of us on the planet,
at our present rate of consumption,
you never know when
we might run out.

Jim Culleny
June 2007

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Sunday, December 8, 2024

In the Field

Posted on by Monte Davis

by Monte Davis

Only a moment ago he asked Mrs. Murdoch to fetch his parents. Now all three are standing in the kitchen doorway, watching the reflected sunlight that skitters above the stove, across the ceiling. When he notices the adults, he mischievously directs it into their eyes. John Clark Maxwell squints and raises a hand to block the glare, but his  voice is indulgent. “What are you up to, Jamesie?”

“It’s the sun, papa. I got it in with this tin plate.”

Before the afternoon is over, Jamesie will roll the plate around the pantry floor until Mrs. Murdoch sends him outside; beat it as a drum, marching against Napoleon with the Iron Duke; fill it with pink granite pebbles; empty it again, set it afloat on the duck pond, and bombard it with pebbles until it is swamped by the interlacing waves.

1

The antenna turns slowly against the spin of the earth, tracking a galaxy eight billion light-years away. That far away, that long ago, the galaxy’s core was exploding with unimaginable violence. Here and now, the radio outburst is almost lost in background noise. Penzias and Wilson thought that the noise in their antenna might be caused by pigeon droppings. Instead, it was the echo of the Big Bang.

Where did the Big Bang go? Into waves.

Waves in what?

In the field. The electromagnetic field. Maxwell’s field.

What is the field?

It’s like the water for ocean waves. It’s like the air for sound waves. It’s like the earth for seismic waves. It’s like…

No, it isn’t. We’ve just forgotten how strange it was.

Penzias and Wilson weren’t the first to have noise problems. Their radio astronomy traced back to Karl Jansky, trying to understand annoying static from nowhere on earth. Which went back to Marconi, who made a revolution out of a laboratory curiosity. Which went back to Heinrich Hertz in a darkened room at Karlsruhe, adjusting the gap between two brass spheres until he saw a spark: the first deliberate radio message. Which was only part of a message from James Clerk Maxwell that is still unfolding. Read more »

“Their Wives Wind Them Up While Asleep”

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

A line of about half-dozen men, bundled up against cold, affix bolts and assemble magnetos for Ford's Model T. The image shows the first assembly line created for Ford's car assembly line in 1913.
Workers on the First Moving Assembly Line Put Together Magnetos and Flywheels for 1913 Ford Autos, Highland Park, Michigan. 1913. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1633486. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ford_assembly_line_-_1913.jpg.
Rights: Public domain

Restoration of my old car took well more than a decade before it again powered itself along US Highway 501. With time and experience, differences between a craftsman and me would continue to diminish, as my inexperienced hands layered their actions into bodily remembered history and embodied knowledge. My hands remained bumbling and hesitant, though in time a little less than when I began. A craftsman’s hands would be effective and confident, mastering both tools and materials. The craftsman’s eyes, hands, and mind work in concert—far better tuned than mine. But despite the gulf of experience between craftsmanship and my labor, the years hunched over the car opened or, better, finely textured my understanding of how work helps to fulfill human life. That seemingly basic understanding was, paradoxically, obscured by the automobile itself.

A common element that the craftsman and I shared throughout the process amounted to the perspective of the whole project. Even when the car’s parts were contained in Ziplock bags, its chassis stripped to bare metal (much rusted through, too), my mind saw the product that my work, bumbling or not, could bring forth. Mine was an unjustifiably sturdy and very hopeful vision; the same would go for the craftsman, though he had skills to justify the hope. That hopeful perspective, justified and not, formed the strongest bond tying the craftsman and me.

A stripped down chassis of a 1963 Jaguar E-type with badly worn light brown "sand" paint. The chassis has no engine and is stripped bare. It stands on jackstands.
Barely a bolt remains on the car chassis a week after it was pushed into the garage. The rest of the car’s parts were stored in Ziplock bags or boxes. Putting it all back together took about fifteen years, and a lot of learning. Digital photograph by Mark DeLong, September 20, 2002.

In the mid-nineteenth century, William Morris used hope to draw the distinction between “useful work and useless toil.” “What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing?” Morris asked in Signs of Change (1888). “It is threefold, I think—hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality.” Morris along with William Blake and John Ruskin nostalgically revered craft, and Morris particularly romanticized it. Yet, if nostalgia and idealism colored his vision of work somewhat, Morris understood the special qualities of craft work: its connectedness to meaning, its close tie to qualities of uniqueness, beauty, and durability—its reverence for things and the making of them.

Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” loomed in the factories of the time. The three men yearned for the good old days of craftsmanship as a reaction to the indifferent brutality of the Industrial Revolution, though what they desired—a pleasantly medieval fantasy, really—may never have supplied the needs of their own time. Read more »

Friday, December 6, 2024

In the Footsteps of Du Fu

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

1.

American poet, essayist, and translator Eliot Weinberger opens his new book, The Life of Tu Fu, describing a seminal moment in the Tang dynasty poet’s life, when he had just failed the Imperial Examination —for the second time. Weinberger, it should be said, has not written a biography of the eighth century poet as the title of the book might suggest. Nor has he come out with a new translation of Du Fu’s work. Rather, Weinberger has created a montage of fifty-eight original poems inspired by Du Fu’s life. And in his opening gambit, taking on the voice of the young poet, he compares all the candidates who failed the examination that day to hundreds and hundreds of chickens:

They say this is the only tree in the world that has these pears, for these pears have no desire to propagate elsewhere.

I thought of The Old Man Who Called His Chickens. He had hundreds of chickens, each with its own name. He could call its name and the chicken would come. I thought of him when all the candidates, including me, failed the exam.

One wonders: how is it possible that one of the greatest minds the world has ever known failed the examination not once –but twice? Scholars continue to argue about it. But one thing is clear: this second failure was only the start of Du Fu’s troubles!

2.

Considered by some people, and I am one of those people, to be China’s greatest poet, Du Fu’s work never went out of style in China. Not even during the Cultural Revolution, when so much traditional culture was canceled, did Du Fu’s light fade. The reason usually cited for this is that Du Fu has always been considered the poet of the common people. He gave voice to their suffering. And he also understood that violence, natural disasters, and war fell disproportionately onto their heads; for unlike the elite, the poor had few options open to them when things got rough. British historian and documentary film-maker Michael Wood, in his wonderful 2023 travelogue In the Footsteps of Du Fu, writes about China’s millennium-long love affair with the Tang dynasty poet. Tracing Du Fu’s life across the vastness of China, from the mountains of Sichuan to the great lakes of Hunan, he wonders whether there has ever been any other poet in the pre-modern world, who “so urgently recorded what it feels like to be a refugee, fleeing for your life?”

When asked: “Why Du Fu?” Wood replies that Du Fu is fascinating for many reasons, not least of all having been born at the precise moment of lift-off of the glorious Tang, considered to be one of China’s great ages of cultural and literary flowering. While Du Fu began life comfortably well-off during the heyday of the Tang, by mid-life he was suffering through the worst of the great chaos following the An Lushan uprising, which saw millions dead with countless more people fleeing for their lives. Read more »

Lessons From Singapore: Urban Planning and Garden Spaces

Posted on by Eric Feigenbaum

by Eric Feigenbaum

Anyone who has ever watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit knows Los Angeles’ entire trajectory was changed dramatically in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s when politicians and planners of the day  – perhaps spurred by some alleged corruption – believed cars and freeways were the direction of the future and invested massively in roads instead of the Pacific Electric Railway system (aka The Red Car) that provided a vast network of affordable public transportation.

The result was the quintessential example of urban sprawl. Within twenty years Los Angeles quickly grew into one of the world’s physically largest cities, eventually encompassing 502 square miles – 44 miles north to south and 20 miles east to west. And that ignores the areas around it that comprise the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area.

As a result, my hometown, is a patchwork quilt of architecture, design and landscape. Some neighborhoods have charming homes and duplexes built in the 1930s while others are filled with rundown Victorians and still others composed of 1950s cookie cutter bungalows. There are Frank Lloyd Wright houses tucked in obscure locations around the city and ostentatious palaces in the Hollywood Hills or overlooking the coast in Malibu. And we won’t discuss the San Fernando Valley which was developed as a sort of suburb within the city – only with power lines, billboards and all manner of lit-up business signs lining the main thoroughfares.

Perhaps that’s why when I first visited Singapore in 2003, its neatness and composure were striking. Even the drive from the airport to city center – or maybe especially the drive from the airport to the city center – along the East Coast Parkway was remarkable for the rain trees forming a canopy over the neat, clean, fast-moving highway which winds along the water. The City Center had people, but also a sense of calm I’ve never seen in any other major metropolitan.

Singapore is planned city and nation.

Prior to Singapore’s independence in 1965, the island was mostly a dry red sandbar. Singapore’s founders sought to put the nascent nation on the fast track to foreign direct investment and while there were many steps involved, they realized first impressions mattered – a lot. If executives and bankers were going to choose Singapore, they would need to have confidence in the country – and aesthetics played an important part.

“After independence, I searched for some dramatic way to distinguish ourselves from the other Third World countries. I settled for a clean and green Singapore,” wrote Lee Kuan Yew, founding Prime Minister of Singapore. Read more »

Thursday, December 5, 2024

Great Awakenings of the American Man

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

There’s a lot going on right now. Lowlights include racism, misogyny, and transphobia; xenophobia amid undulating waves of global migrations; democratic state capture by right wing authoritarians; and secular state capture by fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu nationalists.

Among the many factors causing and influencing these complex phenomena are: the rebound from Covid lockdowns and the years-long economic upheavals they wrought; brutal warfare in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa among other places; and intense weather-related fiascos stemming from the rise in global temperatures. But one I’d like to focus on is a growing sense of male insecurity.

The latest “crisis” in masculinity is not more important than other issues. However, I’m currently attuned to it for several reasons. One is that as I wade through late middle-age, I’m becoming ever more secure in (ie. relaxed about) my own masculinity, which in turn leads me to better notice gender insecurity in other men. Another is that I believe American male insecurity played a vital role in the recent election of Donald Trump and, as such, demands attention. Qualitative and quantitative data about Trump getting more votes than expected from young men with college education, from black men, and from brown men, signal something. And finally, as a historian, shit storms rising up from perceived crises in masculinity are not new to me.

In the United States, a broad crisis of white masculinity first emerged during the early 19th century. Then, as now, it was driven by economic changes and by challenges to established patriarchy, and it found expression in religion and politics. Read more »

Jury Duty

Posted on by David Winner and Angela Starita

by Angela Starita

Ottoman-era manuscript showing Rumi meeting fellow poet Molla Shams al-Din.

In October, I received a jury summons for Kings County Supreme Court. The first day—exactly two weeks before the presidential election—lawyers vetted potential jurors for a case made against the defendant, David Cruz, who was on trial for second-degree murder and related gun charges. Looking down at my hands when the charges were announced, I had to consciously take in the severity of the case since, of course, the judge had taken a dispassionate tone, the same one he might have used in a civil trial around a sidewalk fall or a landlord withholding heat. I immediately began dreading the possibility of being on the jury, fearing an ambiguous case with vindictive or thoughtless jurors. With an hour to go before dismissal, the lawyers choose me to serve. The judge told the 17 of us to return the following Monday, the day the trial would begin.

I spent the week trying to stop myself from imagining possible scenarios. I met up with a friend whose mother, a smart, generous woman who like most of her family loved Donald Trump, was dying of lung cancer. At the end of the evening, I told my friend my fears about jury duty, possibly jailing the wrong person, and even jailing the right person considering the state of our prison system. Though I hadn’t named the crime, he assumed murder and then stood over me and said, “Well, you’re just better than the rest of us. I guess you’re ready for your robes and sandals.”

Like the rest of his family, my friend is witty, quick with a comeback, and much of our closeness rests on my appreciation of his humor. So standing there on that subway platform, I wondered if he were joking. I said nothing, not quite sure what had just transpired. He took a step back looked worried, then asked what was wrong. Not yet sure what had happened, I made some sort of excuse for going still. Another beat passed, and then he stepped close again and made another holier-than-thou crack. This time, it was clear there was no humor intended.

To be fair, he was drunk and exhausted after months of worry about his mother.  At the same time, his wife has been searching for work, and he really couldn’t see how he could build a reasonable future for his son with only one income. His stress was palpable. Read more »

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Their Eyes Weren’t Watching God

Posted on by Rafaël Newman

by Rafaël Newman

View upward from the men’s prison at Elmina Castle

Saidiya Hartman made her second trip to Ghana in 1997. She had visited the country briefly the year before, as a tourist, but now, having recently completed a doctorate at Yale and published her first book, she was in Ghana as a Fulbright Scholar searching for historical evidence of local resistance to slave raids. She was also, as a Black American, in quest of a connection with her putative ancestral homeland, and hoping to flesh out her work, both scholarly and personal, in the archives, where she had had a fleeting glimpse of her heritage as the descendant of people kidnapped and indentured, as “chattel,” to slave-owners in the New World.

I chose Ghana because it possessed more dungeons, prisons, and slave pens than any other country in West Africa—tight dark cells buried underground, barred cavernous cells, narrow cylindrical cells, dank cells, makeshift cells. In the rush for gold and slaves that began at the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes, and Brandenburgers (Germans) built fifty permanent outposts, forts, and castles designed to ensure their place in the Africa trade. In these dungeons, storerooms, and holding cells, slaves were imprisoned until transported across the Atlantic.

Until it wrested its independence from the British in 1957 Ghana was known as Gold Coast, a name that commemorates the commodity that had first brought Europeans to the region in the 1400s, but which belies the more nefarious commerce that kept them there four centuries long. The country we now call Ghana, named by its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, for a revered but defunct medieval kingdom to its north, was until the 1800s the crossroads for several slave routes from the inland to the sea, and to passage, for those kidnapped, across the Atlantic to a life of servitude. Ghana’s coastline is studded with forts and castles—command centers and entrepôts for the trade in people enslaved from throughout west central Africa: effectively concentration camps—like a string of poisoned beads. Read more »