by Mary Hrovat

The other day I was looking up an anthropological discovery I’d seen mentioned online someplace. The discovery seemed a little dodgy upon closer inspection, but in my search I found the Wikipedia page List of places with columnar jointed volcanics. I wasn’t looking for information about volcanic rocks that have undergone columnar jointing, but I was happy that this wonderfully browsable list exists. 

When I hear the word lists, I tend to think of the kind that are perhaps necessary but rarely enjoyable: the shopping list (often incomplete, seldom structured well with regard to the layout of the grocery store) or the to-do list (possibly a bad idea altogether). There are also lists that make me feel like I’m being forced down the neck of a narrow funnel with small benefit to myself: anything that begins “Your application must contain the following” or “You may be eligible for this tax credit if any two of the following are true (but see also the table on page 129).” 

I’m also not fond of the lists encountered when seeking healthcare, although on rare occasions I’ve found them mildly entertaining. Once I was going down a list of symptoms to identify the ones I’ve experienced, and I asked my companion the difference between anxiety and nervousness. “If you have to ask…,” he said, smiling. “Oh yes, I’m going to check both boxes,” I said. “I was just curious.” A little further down the list, we puzzled over whether “dry mough” meant dry mouth or dry cough. In short, this list seemed a bit slapdash. Technical checklists should be the clearest and least ambiguous of all lists, but at least this one’s ambiguity was amusing. (Besides, it was an eye doctor’s office; if they really cared about my mough, they would have corrected that error long ago.) Read more »

Ron Amir. Bisharah and Anwar’s Tree, 2015. From the exhibition titled Doing Time in Holot.

C print.

“The work of Israeli artist Ron Amir exposes complex social situations that tend to stay outside our field of vision. Between 2014 and 2016, Amir photographed African asylum seekers living in the Holot Detention Center in the Negev, and this important project of politically engaged photography was the subject of his first solo exhibition at the Israel Museum. The publication accompanying the exhibition presents an album of Amir’s images and an analysis of his work by curator Noam Gal. Texts by Reut Michaeli of the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants in Israel and by the eminent social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai extend the discussion to address the project’s national and global aspects.”

More here and here.

by Mike Bendzela

The greatest of stories has no proper beginning, at least none that we can yet discern, but proceeds from a warm, shallow shore some 375 million years ago.

There a lobe-finned fish found a way to use its bony limbs to stand up under water. It was thus able to lift its head out of the murk and gaze upon new shores that its descendants would populate.

Down through seemingly endless iterations of change, these fins were further exapted for such tasks as slogging through mud, scurrying through grass, clambering up trees, plucking fruit, scribbling letters.

The story continues on a cool, northern island, in a place called Downe, in June of the year 1858. There one of this fish’s descendants, Charles Darwin–a travel-weary, physically ill, gentleman scientist–holds in his hand an envelope addressed from the island of Ternate in Indonesia. The enclosed missive will change his world–and everyone’s–forever.

Darwin is not ready for this blow. His infant son, Charles Waring Darwin, born with Down syndrome, is not doing well: the boy is infected with the bacterium that causes scarlet fever, the same disease that killed his older sister seven years ago.

After this girl, Anne, had finally succumbed to the disease, Darwin wrote that his wife Emma and he had buried “the joy of the household,” and he settled into a long sadness.

And now it is happening again. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

In recent years, some of the most powerful people in our society have claimed to be beleaguered outsiders. The former president is just one of the many powerful, wealthy, privileged people who declared themselves victims of a society out to destroy them and their way of life, which we’re meant to understand represents that of “real” Americans. Despite experiencing an incredibly privileged life, they claim to be the ones who are victims of jackbooted leftist thugs. There seems to be a whole cottage industry of people who rake in money by the bucketload while claiming to speak truth to the oppressive liberal/marxist power structure. They claim to be the authentic voice of the American working class, unlike the coastal elites who have no understanding of “real” life, but of course, despite their obvious privilege, they do understand the struggles of the common man. How did we get here, where men who benefit most from our social structures, position themselves as the little guy? This comes from a longer history of political shifts in America and of the rise of mass cultural consumption as a means of political expression. As culture came to stand in for political rebellion, the far right sought to weaponize mass culture to sneak in far right, reactionary ideology via the back door. But their ability to embrace an outsider status is evidence of their own privilege, as being an outsider has a strong cultural cache in our current mass mediated environment. Read more »

Frederica Krüger, 2005 – 2023

Take her and cut her out in little stars,
And she will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

by John Allen Paulos

Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s new book, I’ve Been Thinking, just came out, and I was reminded of a party game he’s written about. A variant of the child’s game of twenty questions, it is relevant to an increasingly pressing question: How do different social bubbles, media subcultures, or cults develop. Let me start with the game, generalized versions of which are ubiquitous. It’s probably one of Dennett’s most compelling intuition pumps; that is, thought experiments with made-up, but plausible outcomes.

Imagine a group of people at a party who choose one person and ask him (throughout, or her) to leave the room. The “victim” is told that while he is out of the room one of the other partygoers will relate a recent dream to the group. He is also told that on his return to the party, he must try, asking Yes or No questions only, to do two things: describe the dream and possibly figure out whose dream it was.

The big reveal is that no one relates any dream. The party-goers decide to respond either Yes or No to the victim’s questions according to chance or, perhaps, according to some arbitrary rule. Any rule will do and may be supplemented by a non‑contradiction requirement so that no answer directly contradicts an earlier one.

What might happen is that the victim, impelled by his own obsessions, constructs a phantasmagoric, or at least a, weird dream in response to the random answers he elicits. He may even think he knows whose dream it was, but then the trick is revealed to him. The dream, of course, has no author, but in a sense the victim himself is. His preoccupations dictate his questions, which even if answered negatively at first, frequently receive a positive response when slightly reformulated. These positive responses are then pursued. Read more »

To the Palestinian Arabs

after Iqbal (1877-1938)

Sir Mohammad or Allama Iqbal, a giant of South Asian poetry in the 20 th Century writing in Urdu, attended in 1931 the General Islamic Conference in Jerusalem. Iqbal’s message to the Arab world was: “. . .not have any trust in the West and the League of Nations,” the earlier incarnation of the UN, which was headquartered in Geneva.

Neither Geneva nor London will honor your claim
because Arabs haven’t yet learnt to manipulate

the West which is still impassive
to the passion igniting your soul.

History shows, people with unyielding spirit
themselves free from occupation.

Translated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari

by Richard Farr

Part one: A mere analogy

You’ve always dreamed of foreign travel and you’re aware that there’s a long history of people doing it, and benefiting from it. But you live under a regime that closed the borders a couple of generations ago, at the same time criminalizing the act of researching potential destinations. (Many countries were dangerous, they said, and some tourists were coming home with tie-dyed shirts and peculiar ideas.) To protect the vulnerable, a War on Travel was announced. In the years since, you have grown up with little more than rumors of other cultures, climates, cuisines. 

Change is afoot, however: members of a professional group, the globiatrists, are pushing back. They have looked into the history of travel and they agree it’s fraught with peril. But there’s evidence that some destinations may be the best way to treat Immobility Syndrome (IS), a condition involving chronic inability to be happy with never going anywhere. Drugs have been developed that sometimes help IS sufferers think about something else, but more and more globiatrists say that “for treatment-resistant patients travel may be a risk worth taking, so long as they are chaperoned. By one of us.”

In due course things do loosen up. Amid concern that unwise people might attempt to travel alone (or are already doing so illegally), permits are issued for some IS patients to take “trips.” 

Unfortunately, even seeing a globiatrist and being tested for IS is too expensive for many people. Also the diagnosis may be negative, in which case you have to go to a different globiatrist and try again.  Read more »