by Eric Schenck

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 »

by Brooks Riley

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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 »

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 »

Sughra Raza. Being In the Airplane Movie. Dec 4, 2024.

Digital photograph.

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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 »

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 »

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 »

by Angela Starita

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 »

Wild apple tree still hanging on to its apples, if not its leaves, in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Rafaël Newman

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 »

by Brooks Riley

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by William Benzon

If Harold Bloom is correct in asserting that, in some sense, Shakespeare invented the human, not in the sense that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, Thomas Edison the light bulb, Hedy Lamar got a patent for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, not to mention Yahweh’s work on Adam and Eve, but in the modest sense that he bequeathed us a deeper understanding of ourselves through giving voice to aspects of human behavior that had hitherto gone unremarked. Bloom singles out Hamlet for special consideration, arguing that he is perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest gift – though Falstaff is in the running. Hamlet has come down to us as the melancholy Dane. Accordingly, let us conjecture that modern man was born in melancholy.

A few years later Robert Burton would publish The Anatomy of Melancholy. It was a smash hit and went through five more editions during Burton’s life. It made Burton’s printer a fortune. While the book is indeed about melancholy, it is also about damned near everything else under the sun. It was subsequently parodied in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, no mean feat as the original has something of a parodic character unto itself.

Here is how Burton defined melancholy:

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.

To live is to know melancholy. We post-moderns are more likely to call it depression.

That’s what this post is about, depression, but also growth. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Science Experiment as Painting. April, 2017.

Digital photograph.

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