by Charles Siegel

The dishonest and cynical way in which RS 5000 was tested and marketed reflected a culture within Celotex stretching back to at least 2009.

That was a key finding of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s “Phase 2” report, released on September 4, 2024. The finding appears at the beginning of a long, meticulous examination into the acts and omissions of Celotex, Ltd., the company that manufactured the insulation used in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower in London, which burned in a catastrophic fire in 2017. The report led to outrage in the press and among victims’ groups, and to terse denials by Celotex.

It was a damning indictment.  But to anyone familiar with Celotex, it was ruefully laughable.  Celotex, Ltd. had begun its corporate life nearly a century earlier, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of an American company of the same name.  And this American Celotex had displayed precisely the same dishonest and cynical attitude toward the users of its products, and indeed toward its own workers, for many decades.  Tens of thousands of them had died as a result of that corporate culture. The horror of Grenfell was but a gruesome, if entirely foreseeable, coda to this ghastly history. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

I know teachers who imagine the tune is what they have on repeat in hell, but I myself am strongly pro-Kahoot. If (like me) you were born too early to have your own school experience center around a large screen, and (unlike me) you have one of those boring non-teaching jobs, a brief explanation is in order. Kahoot is an app that lets you ask multiple-choice questions on your class screen, and have students answer them on their own devices to earn points. With its bright colors and  some other bells and whistles, it hits a sweet spot in the teenage brain that magically makes it care about getting mathematical terminology right. It’s the best thing.

Or perhaps the best thing is actually Blooket. A self-paced quiz app, where getting questions right can give you the edge in a larger game in which you are trying to catch fish or steal crypto from your classmates. To get a genuine sense of what playing a Blooket is like, you will have to wait until Generation Alpha starts producing its own great literature. My own grasp of the different game modes is primarily inductive, based on the yelps and cries of my students rather than on first-person experience. I agree with my colleagues that ‘Café’ works well, but only if you can give enough time. Else, students complain their investments don’t pay off; they get to upgrade different breakfast ingredients to higher levels, you see, in order to make more money.

These apps embrace an important fact about school life, namely that students and teachers don’t want the same things at the same time. Though in the end we are all interested in demonstrating that learning has happened, some teenagers apply a steeper discount function to that outcome than I do. Gamifying ‘kahootable’ skills is one way of harmonizing our short-term aims. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Crystals in Monochrome. Harlem, February, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Note: This is Part 2 of my Umrah Travelogue. Link to Part 1: “Here I Am, Labbayk”: A Travelogue

Everywhere you turn there is the face of God (Surah al-Baqarah, 2:115)

At the Ka’ba, you spiral the great Oneness, now drifting closer, now farther, keeping your gaze centered, raising your hands to your lips and sending a kiss in the direction of “Hajar-e-Aswad” or the “black stone” when you turn its corner. You understand that this stone or any other stone is as much in service of the One as every single being in creation— from an atom to a galaxy-cluster, that the Ka’ba’s alignment with the sacred throne (“bayt al mamoor”), and your alignment with it when you offer prayers far away, is but a mercy that aids your faith, for God’s face is everywhere. You are asked to witness Oneness here as a Oneness of faithful hearts. In the millions. Yes, here you are sublimely inseparable, and sublimely solitary, much as you were in the womb. This is the land of spiritual gestation and birth; it teaches you the meaning of faith via the exiled heart, first in the tradition of Hajar/Hagar (AS), then, Muhammad (PBUH). Your teachers— men and women among them—gather insights into these Prophetic bearers of Divine “Rahma” (Merciful Love), a corollary of “Rahm” (womb), and you learn to discern the imprint of the sacred feminine in all beings.

Makkah feels every bit the desert you imagined, despite modern conveniences such as air-conditioning, shuttles and cold water. Not much vegetation as far as the eye can see, only some hodge-podge Western-style buildings that rim the holy sanctuary, bringing to focus your own exiled heart, exhausted body, and a mind that fails to compute the brutality of the times. Everywhere you turn: a Quranic verse that holds you in its embrace. What embrace could be wider, more majestic or comforting than the Divine mirror that is reflected in all creation, even in its harshest, most confounding, painful aspects. The ayat points to the Cosmic Qur’an; everything in time, space and dimensions beyond perception, is an “ayat,” a “verse”, a “sign.” Read more »

The writer died while mixing with the rebels, these are
natural accidents of war . . . —Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco

The country has to toughen up … part of the problem is nobody
wants to hurt each other anymore, right? —US president, Donald Trump

The Last Days of Federíco García Lorca

Federico in pajamas and blazer died at night
wearing the sudden-death clothes of a poet killed
because there’s nothing more dangerous to despots
than an artist who tells the day’s truth simply
because some force within insists.

Accepting death for being one’s self
is life’s condition of being one’s self
because to speak is to be.

This condition applies to all in all times
because nothing ever changes the insistence of love
& witness under any sky or sun.

Although the atmosphere of eras & place swings from
heaven to hell on a dime before the head-count has time
to blink, and because the intractable who paint “Guernica”
or write “Canto Libre” or “Satanic Verses”
(artists who dare) could well end with bullet-through-skull
because, to a despot, silence is golden (long-lived or brief)
because despots know that painters and poets,
sculptors and dancers will always speak
from momentary possession
because they’ve found the straightway
to the brainsoul of human-kind,
the place despots only enter
by means of fear & blood
which always mocks
the divine

Jim Culleny, 3/7/19 rev-2/22/2025

“head-count” meaning, “the people”,
during the period of the Roman Empire.

Federíco García Lorca

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by Nils Peterson

A Memorable Fancy I

On the last day of the year, I think about the very first day.

One early morning a Minnesota friend turned his iPhone towards his Minnesota window and we saw snow and a grove of slim, bare trees. He’d been singing, so music was in the air and looking at the beautiful scene I remembered the song, “Morning has broken like the first morning” and I found myself wondering if this is what the first morning looked like.

We think of Eden as summer, everything in bloom, everything perfect and perpetual. A naked Adam and Eve parading around comfortably in their skin suits with navel or without depending on the artist, but suppose the first morning was like this one in Minnesota though the trees, unlike the ones outside my friend’s window, would not have lost their leaves – they would not yet have gotten them. Our hibernating friends, bears and moles say, would be created asleep in their caves or little hollows beneath the new trees. They’d soon awaken for the first time – and the seeds and tubers would begin to stir to their unfolding, to the finding out their size, their shapes, their colors – what they’ll be when they grow up – fruit, flower, vegetable – the creation a child of time, not a creature of eternity.

Adam and Eve came wholly finished later. They entered time without growing into it. Maybe that was their trouble, our trouble, that separation. Also, God told them it’s better not knowing, indeed, ordered them not to know. Perhaps He/She was thinking ahead to Thomas Gray’s line, “Where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be wise.” but we chose knowing, we chose folly, marvelous folly, and have learned much, but we have not yet chosen wisdom. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I’ve most recently read, including upcoming titles.

I’m a sucker for a certain type of European novel, or if not actually European, something that trades in all of those connotations of that continent, of that word. Specifically central European and eastern European settings, perhaps because of some deep ancestral affinity for that borderland between the occident and orient, a place of beets, carraway seeds, and sour-cream, of gnarled primeval forests and grey rivers, of craggy ominous mountains or lonely sunflower covered steppes, massive brutalist apartment blocks and picturesque little Medieval hamlets of onion domed churches and red-tiled roofed homes. For that reason, this past year I’ve continually drifted towards either novels from folks originally from the Balkans, Poland, Russia, or I’ve read American imaginings of that broad inchoate land bordered by the Adriatic and the Bosphorus, the Black Sea and the Baltic, along the banks of the Danube or the Volga.

Daniel Mason’s 2018 The Winter Soldier was a particular type of eastern European story, an epic war account from the perspective of introverted Austro-Hungarian medical student Lucius, a scion of Viennese society from noble Polish stock who is unfortunately sent as a medic to the homeland of his forefathers on the eve of the Brusilov Offensive. My introduction to Mason was this past summer, when I read Northwoods, his brilliant, polyvocal, magical realist, slightly gothic, maximalist account of American history from the colonial era through to the near future all as focalized through a single western Massachusetts house in the woods, a character its own right. The Winter Soldier, in an envious display of Mason’s tremendous talent, is a profoundly different book.

Effectively a realist novel in the vein of a Boris Pasternak more than the Thomas Pynchon on display in Northwoods, Mason’s earlier attempt is a novel of the Great War, with accounts of charging Cossacks and rationing in Vienna, of railroad stations filled with fleeing refugees and of cruel Hussar officers. There is, of course, a love story (and a mystery) as well, Lucius inevitably falling for the nun who works alongside him as a nurse, but it is heartbreakingly depicted, with sentimentality but no schmaltz. Beyond that, however, Mason has written an indelibly effecting account of medicine, as Lucius is forced to develop from a shaky student in the distant cosmopolitan capital into a frontline emergency physician treating soldiers whose minds and bodies have been blown apart. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

Comic horror’s fundamental lesson is that the world is not what it looks like. This thought is given particularly sharp expression in John Langan’s The Fisherman:

‘When I look at things – when I look at people – I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid…All a mask…and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask? If I could break through the mask, if I could make a fist and punch a hole in it…what would I find? Just flesh? Or would there be something more…Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us.

The speaker here is in grief after his entire family was killed in a traffic accident, and there is a sense that only such large dislocations can jar us out of a sense of the reality of the world around us. There is another sense, however, in which this dislocation is a fundamental condition of modernity. A person in the Middle Ages could stand on a still, firm platform and watch the universe revolve around her. It was obvious the platform was solid and still – she wasn’t moving, was she? – and from that fact many other conclusions could proceed. (This is, of course, a vast over-simplification of the medieval worldview, which, for one thing, very much did believe in non-terrestrial realities. But it remains the case that for a large part of human history the route from perception to conclusion was reasonably short.) Now, not only must we accept that we are, in fact, travelling at tremendous speeds in various directions relative to other objects, but we also do so through space that is curved, though time that slows down the faster we go, and, thanks to quantum mechanics, upon a platform where “solidity” does not mean what we expect. The winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022 won “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” The actual meaning of this is beyond most people – it certainly is beyond me – but the net result is that now one may approach the oracle Google, ask whether the universe is “locally real,” and receive the answer, “No.”

When Kamala Harris, in August of 2024, began calling Trump and his base “weird,” it resonated first and foremost through the intricate codes of behaviour MAGA has indulged itself in. “Let’s go Brandon,” wearing diapers and massive ear-bandages, and the bizarre religious fetishism for a man who is in no way Christ-like, all contributed to the idea that Trump’s supporters had become, as was and is commonly said, “disconnected from reality.” Much of this may, in fact, be derived from the online world where a good deal of Trump’s support originates; to be strange is the simplest method by which to weed out the normies. This sort of political coherence is hard to come by; even so, Trump’s response was, as is common with him, reflective in the sense that he merely threw the insult back: “They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.” “I think we’re the opposite of weird, they’re weird.” And, an increasingly long time ago, at the moment of the Sixties counterculture that gave rise to the modern Democratic party, they were weird.

So MAGA is weird, and their cultural and political opponents are weird. Are they weird in the same way? Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

In the poem Tavalodi Digar (Another Birth), by the brave Iranian poet Foroogh Farrokhzad, she writes:

There is an alley
which my heart has stolen
from the streets of my childhood.

There is a village which my heart has stolen from the summers of my childhood. Every summer, my grandparents went there to escape the heat of Tehran and check on their land and property. The village is in the desert between two major ancient cities known for their hand-knit carpets and handcrafted metalwork. The village was home to five landowners who came in the summer, and about ten or so local families who lived there year-round and worked on the land, and cared for their animals, mainly sheep and goats. Surrounded by mountains, this tiny dot of green in the dusty and dry landscape of the desert is where I went every summer of my childhood and stayed for the whole time until my parents came to pick me and my sisters up before school started. The village was without running water or electricity and had the most fantastic night sky where you could see the Milky Way.

The village owners were all siblings and second cousins of my grandmother, who had received the land and house as a dowry from her father. The primary agriculture was almond trees, wheat, walnuts, and fruit. After the harvest, the owners took their share of the crop every year, and the rest was distributed among the workers who toiled on the land. This was a feudal system where the crop was not distributed equally, although my grandmother always did. Because water was scarce, an underground water system emptied into a large pool area, which was the source of many water ownership fights between the workers and indirectly between the land owners. Each day, whoever’s turn it was to water their land, had to allow the water to flow to their batch of land by creating small damns around the path. Sometimes, someone would ‘accidentally’ siphon some water into their fruit or vegetable patch and hope no one would notice. Read more »

by O. Del Fabbro

In recent public debates it has been argued that the implementation of Artificial Intelligence in weapons systems is changing the nature of war, or the character of war, or both. In what follows, my intention is to clarify these two concepts of nature of war and character. It will show that AI is a powerful technology, but it is currently neither changing the character nor the nature of war.

Nature of War, Character of War

In order to make sense of the difference between the nature of war and character of war, it is worthwhile to go back to the philosophy of war of the Prussian commander Carl von Clausewitz, who has systematically introduced that distinction.

Let’s start with the easier one. When referring to the character of war, one speaks of the accidental and concrete conflicts that emerge in the history of mankind and that we usually point at, when we talk about wars: World War I and II, the Napoleonic Wars, the Thirty Years’ War, the Peloponnesian War, the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and the Ukraine-Russia war. The character of war is contingent, concrete and historical.

The nature of war is theoretically more complex. Clausewitz also calls the nature of war the spirit (Geist) or concept (Begriff) of war. The nature of war is war’s essence. That is, the nature of war is on a conceptual and abstract level, and not war’s manifestation in reality. Three major aspects or principles of the nature of war are highlighted by Clausewitz. First, war is a duel between two parties. Clausewitz uses the image of two wrestlers trying to subdue each other by forcing their will upon one another. War is thus the physical coercion of the opponent, or his destruction. War is violent, it is filled with hatred and animosity, it is a blind natural drive. War is fought by a people or a state. Second, war is politics by other means, that is, war is not a self-sufficient system, isolated from other realms of reality. War is an instrument of politics. Third, war is like a game (actually a game of cards), that is, war is about chance and probability. War is guided by commanders, who need talent and courage in order to subdue the enemy. All in all, these three pillars of war are what Clausewitz calls the trinity of the nature of war.

It is absolutely crucial to understand that both, the character and nature of war, have a dialectical relationship, that is, they influence each other. That’s why one cannot talk about the character of war, without mentioning the nature of war, and vice versa. In this sense, the distinction is also a heuristic tool. It helps to understand for example, if indeed there has been a change in the character or the nature of war. Read more »

View from my kitchen window last week on a foggy morning.

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by Priya Malhotra

When I think of New York City, the first image that rises to the surface isn’t its vaunted skyline, those defiant towers scraping at the heavens. It isn’t the classical grandeur of the Metropolitan Museum where civilizations whisper through marble and canvas, nor the razzle-dazzle of Broadway where melodies unfurl amidst a fever of lights and applause. No, of all the things I could remember, the image that lingers most is one of angst—dense, unrelenting and amorphous, like yellowing seepage on the walls of an old house, eating it from the inside out.

The city I left after 25 years reminds me of the insidious decay in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”—that creeping, spreading rash of dread and despair. It’s there in the hunched shoulders of a Wall Street banker blindsided by an unexpected layoff; in the downcast eyes of a writer crushed by his hundredth rejection letter; in the quiet sighs of a woman realizing her partner may never be the man of her dreams; in the blank stare of a man who can neither stand being with anyone nor being alone. In New York, to thrive is to strive, and anything less than relentless striving feels like failure. More isn’t just a goal; it’s a religion. The hunger for more—a leaner body, a loftier career, a flawless relationship—is the battle cry of a city that worships ambition. But the consequence of exalting “more” is a constant, gnawing sense of lack.

In New York, not having the job you dreamed of becomes intolerable. Not achieving the extraordinary marriage you envisioned becomes unbearable. Not being able to confide your deepest fears to the mother you thought you were close to becomes insufferable. Life, in New York, is measured not by abundance but by longing, not by what is present but by what is desperately desired.

I know I’m generalizing, and this doesn’t apply to everyone. But there’s a dominant cultural strain, a restless pulse in the city that beats with this energy of craving.

Meanwhile, in New Delhi, the capital city of India to which I’ve just returned, I’ve been startled to find a different rhythm altogether – slower, steadier, and far from the edge of a precipice. Here, the streets hum with chaos, the air is thick with dust and petrol, and the disparities between wealth and poverty gape wide. And yet, amidst this, I see people who seem—dare I say it?—happier. Their circumstances, when measured against any global standard of “quality of life,” are objectively harsher than those of the stressed and striving New Yorkers I left behind. But their faces, their words, their mannerisms suggest something else entirely.

Curious, I decided to dig deeper. I asked around ten people from lower-middle-income backgrounds in Delhi to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. The responses astonished me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Jonathan Kujawa

Among our many flaws, humanity prefers to be shortsighted. We tend to set our priorities by what we see right in front of us. This makes some sense. After all, there is no point in worrying about storing food for the winter when facing down a saber toothed tiger. But eventually winter arrives.

There is a reason Aesop told us the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. Children want to stay up late, eat candy for every meal, and skip anything that seems like work. As we grow up, we hopefully learn the value of investing in our future.

But just planning for the next winter is not what got us to where we are today. Hobbes said the natural life of a human was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”. We may still sometimes be nasty brutes to each other, but most of us have long lives filled with health, wealth, and ease.

The progress of the last century is astonishing. When my grandfather was a young boy, the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. When my parents were children, polio was a real worry [1]. When I was young, international phone calls were a dollar per minute, shopping options were limited to whatever the local stores carried, and the sum total of knowledge on a subject was contained in the encyclopedias at the library. Now we have transcontinental flights, a polio vaccine, and the internet.

How did we get from there to here? I can tell you what we didn’t do. We didn’t just solve today’s problems. We also invested in solving future problems, even problems we didn’t know existed. Even the times when we made a maximum effort to solve a hard problem of the day (the atomic bomb, the moon landing, the Covid-19 vaccine), we depended on the prior work of people who were interested in developing our fundamental knowledge with no immediate application in mind.

There will always be a tension between the problems of today and an investment in the future. We have pressing needs, and it can be hard to trust that research driven by curiosity is worth the cost. Especially when the research sounds nonsensical or when its utility is impossible to imagine. And it’s true that much of that research will never come to anything.

But when it pays off, it pays off big. Non-Euclidean Geometry was an idle amusement until it was key to understanding spacetime and, in turn, gave us space travel and GPS. The numerology of elliptic curves was an esoteric glass bead game until it became the ubiquitous key ingredient of modern cryptography. The theory of Linear Algebra was developed with no idea that it would be essential to Google Search and the current AI explosion. All of mathematics could be funded on a tiny sliver of the profits generated off of the discoveries of a century ago [2].

by Lei Wang

[This is part of a series on bringing magic to the everyday through imagination.]

Someone once told me the trick to fasting: take long walks. That way, your body believes you are at least on the search for food and temporarily forgets its hunger. When you’re in the mode of actually solving the problem, the problem tends to go away, as opposed to endless rumination about the problem. Then again, the person who told me this was the kind of person who could do things merely because she knew they were good for you. This was another one of those common sense yet counterintuitive things I often fail to put into practice, along the lines of how using energy somehow begets energy, while sleeping all day makes you sleepier.

I rarely fast, but I often find myself hungry and slightly irritated—I am one of those people—and wonder if I can take the trick a step further, using my imagination. Hunger already lends itself to animal metaphors—“I could eat an elephant,” “I’m a hungry hippo”—so why not take it all the way? On the sidewalk nearing noon, I become a large savannah cat chasing my wildebeest. At my desk, a squirrel savoring each nibble of a stolen cashew. Or a crocodile lying in wait by the marsh grass/microwave. I must, in fact, focus and stay still to get my lunch, and this calms me down. Hunger starts to feel less like a problem and more like a game. Bringing meaning to things: this is what humans do, isn’t it? And we can just make up the meanings.

Of course, one can also just have a granola bar. I’m not even concerned so much about true physiological hunger—this being a sphere of excess—but the psychological kind. I am interested in dealing with our evolutionary wants, our programmed desires, with creative and unpunishing ways to choose otherwise. In other words: how do we not act like dogs when it comes to the food instinct, even if (let’s face it) we probably all long for the life of a very good middle-class dog? Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait At Home. December 2024.

Digital photograph.

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by Tim Sommers

John Austin was cursed with famous friends, among them Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Carlyle, James Mill and Mill’s son John Stuart, whom Austin tutored in the law. Cursed because, while they were all impressed by his intellect and predicted he would go far, he did not. His nervous and depressive disposition combined with his ill-health lead to his failure as a lawyer, an academic, and as a government official. In 1832, Austin wrote  The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, which almost no one read and promptly went out of print. Almost thirty years after his death, his widow published a second edition. This time, everybody read it.

Austin is considered the first positivist. Positivism is so-called because the law, on this account, is a “posit.” That is, all law is human-made, separate from morality, and identifiable as law by the details of how it came about – and (most importantly) the fact that the source of law is habitually obeyed. Positivism aspires to be an empirical approach to the law. So, Austin says laws are rules, but, empirically, are also a species of command.

Specifically, a law is a command made to a subject, or political inferior, by a sovereign, or political superior, habitually obeyed, who can back the command up with a credible threat of punishment of sanction. No law without sanction. If I offer money to whomever finds my dog, even if I am the sovereign, it’s not a law.

There are problems with this approach. First of all, it seems to apply best to criminal law – and only with retrofitting to other kinds of law. As my Constitutional law professor, Paul Gowder, used to say, despite what people think, “The law does not, primarily, tell people what they can’t do. It tells them how to do what it is that they want to do. Get married. Open a business. Drive a car. Make a will.”

Secondly, in post-monarchial society, who exactly is the sovereign? Austin himself had difficulty. He was forced to describe the British “sovereign” of the time, awkwardly, as the combination of the King, the House of Lords, and all the electors of the House of Commons.

Finally, as Hart emphasized, it’s not clear, on this account, that we can make a principled distinction between the commands of the sovereign and the commands of a criminal with a gun. Read more »