I’m getting to know you. You who came with the first Archaeon’s spark
Everything was new then, even you, you parenthetical tail of vital events, you old telegraphic protoplasmic stop, you callous caboose bringing up the ends of trains of eloquent clauses, small words, grunts and final remains, you little, but lethal, punctuational dot.
You came on the scene with the first cell-knots waiting, you loomed in the dark as first hearts began beating, in celebrations of birth you took orchestra seating, at wakes you confirmed your ruthless deleting.
Never kind to lovers you bathed the earth in shade two-stepping with light —its dissembling side: what it made you unmade …………………………………….. It Comes! —alarms went out when your hacking heralds came through making it clear you’d come to snuff anything new:
alone in your shadow lovers wept …… embracing only the smoke they’d kept ………… of the flame you’d smothered before you left
Is it like that first moment when you touch certain parts of yourself as a child and find pleasure in it? Or that first drink, that first cigarette?
When I opened Facebook the morning after Trump got shot in Pennsylvania, several Facebook friends who share my basic politics were questioning what had happened. Could this awful event that seemed to sound the death knell to Democratic hopes in 2024, maybe the whole flawed American democratic experiment, possibly have been staged? No one would worship Trump like a martyr if he were known to fake his own assassination.
Now that I’d determined that the shooting was staged, what other realities could I question? All my life I could have rejected political outcomes that bothered me—Reagan in 1980, Trump in 2016, and both Bushes in between. Cowardly Vice Presidents had certified those results. The Republicans had brought out their dead to vote along with the help of their Ukrainian/Russian/Venezuelan/Cuban allies. They’d fucked with voting machines.
However unbelievable, Trump was really shot in his upper right ear, one of his supporters losing his life to another bullet. Trump really did have the guts to pump his fists rather than crumble in terror like I would have surely done. Along with cannabinoids in our brains, I think we have conspiraboids that get activated when political events don’t go our way. Given America’s horrific revenge after 9/11, the massive death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan, the CIA black cites in Eastern Europe, the idea that it was actually Bush who took down the Towers appealed to me for at least a moment when I first heard it until my conspiraboids settled down, and I faced the reality of Osama Bin Laden, Mohamed Atta etc.
Like the opiate epidemic but maybe even more free ranging, conspiraboids are lighting up in people’s brains all over the world. Ukrainians are really Nazis. Rohingya are recent invaders of Myanmar. Moslems aren’t really Indians. Illegal alien rapists and murderers are descending upon the southern border of the United States. Read more »
In the first part of this series on Affective Technology, I talked about Poems and Stories, using Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” as one example and a passage from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer as the other. Coleridge’s poem talks about an injured poet having to spend the afternoon alone while his friend’s take a walk through the countryside. Thought the process of actively imagining his friends enjoying themselves, the disconsolate poet pulls himself out of his funk to the point that he is able to bless them in their journey. The passage from Tom Sawyer mirrored something I did as a child when I was sent to my room as punishment for something I’d done wrong. I would imagine that my parents were lamenting my death and their imagined lamentations would enable me to feel better. The passage from Tom Sawyer was more or less like that, though a bit grander, as befits Tom’s sense of himself. Tom and his friends had run off to the river and the townspeople began searching the river for their drowned bodies. When he realized what was going on, Tom snuck into his Aunt Polly’s house at night and listened to the women commiserate over the deaths of their boys. It made him feel good. The point is a simple one: we use poems and stories to regulate our emotional life.
In the second article, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility, I introduced the concept of state-dependent memory, which holds the our memories are chemically keyed to the neurochemicals active during the experiences themselves. Thus, I suggested, “if the sexually aroused self has trouble recalling any life episodes other than those involving sexual arousal, and the vengeful self can recall only incidents of vengeance, and the thirsty self has little sense of any geography beyond that leading to water, then how can we see ourselves and our fellows whole?” Using Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The expense of spirit,” as an example, I went on to argue that literature, and art more generally, provides a (neurochemically) neutral ground giving us access to a full range experience. And this allows us to construct a coherent sense of self.
What happens if, however, the process of constructing a self fails? Read more »
I noticed around the time I turned 30, conversations at parties and get-togethers inevitably turned toward real estate: how much homes cost in which neighborhood, who people know who had bought a house – and how. There was an innate understanding that financial success was tied into owning a home and in a city like Los Angeles where I live, getting into a house is no easy feat.
The house with a white picket fence has always been the symbol of the American Dream. Especially in the postwar era, Americans prided themselves on an upwardly mobile middle class who could own at least a small piece of their country.
American homeownership peaked in 2004 at 69.4 percent and today hovers at around 65 percent which is still favorable to the entire 1960s when homeownership was around 63 percent.
Imagine a country with 90 percent homeownership. Imagine what it would mean to have a society with that rate of homeownership – with that high a level of security and wealth accumulation.
That’s exactly what Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister did. Although educated in economics and law at University, Lee Kuan Yew noticed as a child the differences between neighborhoods dominated by homeownership versus those that were mostly rented. Cleanliness, stability and low crime rates were among the benefits of an owned neighborhood.
In 1965 when Singapore declared its independence both from the Malaysian Federation from which it was ejected and from the United Kingdom from which it was being decolonized, Singapore had a roughly 27 percent homeownership rate. Shockingly low.
Many of us live in a punitive, carceral type of society that can make it difficult to have compassion for ourselves or others. It’s an era of the glorification of the individual over the group, leading to perfectionism and narcissism and so, so much loneliness. We can’t connect when we’re working with blind determination to find our place above the rest. We can’t connect when we don’t dare show an ounce of vulnerability for fear of being taken down like a wounded gazelle on the Serengeti. Our quest to rise to the top for the security we think comes with status and money is completely at odds with our very real need to feel authentically known, within the security of a community.
We’re no longer following that love and forgiveness bit from Christianity, if we ever really did wide-scale. And we project our fear of losing on anyone who has suffered through difficulties, no matter if it’s a natural disaster or massive layoff. We distance ourselves from the suffering of others by convincing ourselves they must have done something stupid to be in this position, and, therefore, we’re safe as long as we keep on going hard. It’s just a trick to make us feel safer, that unwittingly keeps us from too consciously noticing the floods and fires, layoffs and illnesses lapping at our heels. Read more »
Around ten years ago—before the physical and cognitive decline that began during the pandemic; before his removal from autonomy to a care home in the north end of Montreal; before his death there at the beginning of this month—my father entrusted me with his personal collection of jokes.
As he approached his eighties, the decade of their lives in which both of his parents had died, dad had begun to feel increasingly elegiac, a mode not easily compatible with his professional role as a raconteur. Indeed, by his own account, his narrative powers generally—upon which he had relied, during his career as a novelist, poet, and professor of creative writing—were on the wane. “I feel like I no longer have a story to tell,” he said during a visit I made to his apartment in 2013: and thus, a fortiori, he must also no longer be a teller of jokes.
The Word file my father mailed me, ten years ago, from his PC in Montreal’s Mile End to my MacBook in Zurich’s sixth district, is some 250 pages long and counts almost 122,000 words. It comprises between 700 and 900 jokes—it’s difficult to give a precise tally, since some of the entries are of shaggy-dog length, while others are multipart variations on a theme: spoof ad campaigns for Viagra, mock letters to Dear Abby, ostensibly alien words that turn out simply to be the phonetic rendering of “redneck” pronunciations. There are cameos by all the types familiar from the commedia dell’arte of Golden Age American stand-up: St. Peter; various “blondes” and Mothers Superior; talking parrots; bartenders; “Irishmen”; and, of course, The Lord Almighty Himself, in His aspect as begrudging distributor of attributes to tardy recipients.
What is notably absent from my dad’s jokes, however, is anything that might properly be termed a dad joke. This may be because “dad jokes” typically arise ad hoc, out of a particular real-world context, and are thus less suitable for isolated transcription and transmission than more generic, self-enclosed, typologically defined anecdotes. Or perhaps it is due to the fact that, according to my own observations, the typical dad joke is not sexist, not racist, not violent—and therefore not conventionally funny, since humor derives its explosive force, in psychoanalytic interpretation, from its ability to release otherwise shameful aggression in a socially acceptable fashion. Dad jokes also often feature—indeed, are often centrally built around—puns, which are likelier to elicit groans than laughter; and my dad, for all his professional attention to the concrete effects and semantic vagaries of language, typically grew impatient at what seemed a fetishistic dwelling on the phonemic or even lexical surface of words. What interested him, when telling a joke, was getting a laugh. Read more »
I walk into the local convenience store, and next to the two ATMs is a third machine selling Bitcoin. You can slide a bank card into the ATMs and get cash. You can slide your credit or debit card into the third machine and buy a Bitcoin, or a percentage of one if you can’t afford to shell out roughly $65,000 for a whole one.
But you know what you can’t do? Turnaround and use your brand new bitcoin to buy anything in the convenience store where you purchased the bitcoin.
There’s a machine in the store that will sell you money that you can’t use to buy anything in the store.
I’m tempted to say this is my Bernard Baruch moment. The famous apocryphal story is that Baruch realized it was time to get out of the stock market, just ahead of the 1929 crash, when a shoeshine boy tried to give him a hot stock tip. When everyone wants to get in, it’s time to get out.
But this can’t be my Bernard Baruch moment because Baruch made a fortune on the market before it crashed, while I’ve always steered clear of Bitcoin, never having had faith that it, or other block chain currencies, would prove to be anything but a game of musical chairs speculation. I can’t get out if I never got in. Instead, the convenience store Bitcoin machine was just a moment of confirmation. Perhaps something like, it’s been years since you believed in Santa Claus, and then one Christmas Eve you happen to catch daddy drinking the milk and eating the cookies.
Recently, we may have seen less Baruchian sign that yet another bubble is near popping: Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality. It certainly feels like something has changed over the last month. Read more »
Idray Novey Ways to Disappear Jennifer Croft The Extinction of Irena Rey Haruki Murakami on The Great Gatsby
1.
A translator living in Pennsylvania is worried, because her favorite client is missing. And it’s not just any client but the Brazilian cult novelist Beatriz Yagoda whose work the translator has labored on for years. For peanuts too.
And when I say peanuts I mean that the author and the translator each get about $500 per book! As a translator with a manuscript of poetry translations of my own ready-to-go, I know that if I ever do try to shop it around, I’d be lucky to get even that much. Translation does not pay. And neither does poetry… I am on a ten-week fellowship with ten other artists, and one of the more successful writers here, a poet with a fabulous publisher, said she is turning to novels since she learned first-hand how little poetry pays, and I wondered does fiction really pay then? But I digress.
So our American translator immediately books a ticket to Rio. I mean, what’s she supposed to do? She feels without a shadow of a doubt that being the author’s translator, only she “truly understands” the author and is therefore the best person for locating her.
The author’s daughter thinks this is ridiculous. She herself had never read her mother’s books. But who but a daughter knows the mother best?
She had no patience for the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels. What about knowing what a writer had never written down—wasn’t that the real knowledge of who she was?
Ways to Disappear is such a fantastic novel. The author Idra Novey is herself an award-winning translator. Most notably of Clarice Lispector, whose life has some resonance with the translator protagonist in Novey’s story. Both being physically beautiful and having been born outside of Brazil. I didn’t know this about Lispector that she was born in Ukraine but at an early age the family emigrated to Brazil to escape pogroms. Read more »
Climate change first came to many Americans’ attention in June, 1988. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the signal of long-term warming from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere had emerged unmistakably from the noise of year-to-year variation in weather.
Four of the warmest years on record had come earlier in the 1980s, and 1988 would be another. One wildfire after another had begun to spread in Yellowstone Park. As that summer advanced, what would be a historically severe and costly three-year-drought took hold in most of the United States.
In 1824, Joseph Fourier reasoned quialitatively that the atmosphere must let the sun’s visible light in more readily to warm the earth than it lets that warmth out as infrared radiation.
In 1859, Joseph Tyndall identified water vapor and carbon dioxide, CO2, as the most important components that absorbed — “trapped” — and re-radiated downward some of the infrared energy.
In 1896, a century into the industrial revolution and its hunger for fossil fuels, Svante Arrhenius calculated very roughly that a 50% increase in CO2 would warm the planet on average by 5° to 6° C. The good news is that his estimate was almost four times too high. The bad news is that the next century of the Industrial Revolution – and more coal and more oil and gas, and population growth – blew out all expectations. Arrhenius speculated such an increase would take many centuries, but we will reach it in 2026. And keep going. Read more »
The principles of Jefferson are the definition and axioms of free society…. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. —Abraham Lincoln, April 6, 1859 Letter to Henry L. Pierce and others.
Constitution of the United States. National Archives Museum.
An extraordinary man. Two extraordinary men, whose lives were bound together by a common thread of devotion to an idea of self-government in which all men are created equal. It is true that they did not understand it in exactly the same way (you cannot ignore the stain of slavery). Yet, the kind of people who rejected Jefferson’s core concept had—in his time, in Lincoln’s time, and now—a purpose: in Lincoln’s words, “supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste and legitimacy.”
We are less than two years away from the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s defining words, and yet it seems we are less certain, less secure, perhaps even less committed to the idea of self-government.
There is a stunning AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll that was just released, which reported the finding that “[o]nly 21% of adults feel U.S democracy is strong enough to prevail no matter who wins the election in November.”
Just exactly what is the “U.S. Democracy” that may not prevail? Before we go further, we ought to get some nomenclature misunderstandings out of the way. Let’s introduce Democracy’s cousin, the “Constitutional Republic.” Yes, we live in a Constitutional Republic and not a Democracy. No, that’s not a concluding and conclusive argument any time someone wants to make government more representative, more answerable to the voters, or less beholden to privilege. Opponents of change who invoke the phrase “mob rule” just highlight the fact that what’s at stake isn’t high principle, but rather a desire to “supplant[] the principles of free government, and restor[e] those of classification, caste and legitimacy.”
There are no “pure democracies,” even if we frame it that way out of convenience. To quote from a 2017 essay by Ryan McMaken, Executive Editor at the (very not liberal) Mises Institute:
[I]f anyone wants to argue against majoritarianism, he should simply do so. There is no need to rely on a half-baked usage of the writings of ‘the Founding Fathers’ who clearly supported a political system in which majority votes play a big part in selecting elected officials, and which is obviously a democracy according to the modern usage of the term.
In actuality, we have always had a constitutional republic, rather than a democracy. That we call it Democracy changes absolutely nothing. It’s the substance of the argument that ought to matter. The Founders did not first put an electric fence of privilege around the Constitution, and then bind for eternity all succeeding generations. Rather, they understood that Madison’s intricate document was imperfect, but it created a mechanism (through Amendment) to update it. It’s not easy to pass an Amendment, but it has been done many times, and in the service of expanding individual liberties and “Democracy.” Read more »
Rothstein, Arthur. Room in which migratory agricultural workers sleep. Camden County, New Jersey. October 1938. Photograph. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. Click source URL for enlargement: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/518bdec0-b97b-0138-ebbc-059ac310b610. See footnote [1] below for information about the title of the photograph.Gullies had deepened, though puddles—some pond-like—had seeped into the ways, so that the challenge of driving was a matter of keeping axels clear of the swell of ground between tire tracks. Never really good, the roads still showed wounds from September’s hurricane, now known as The Great New England Hurricane of 1938. It had blown by New Jersey, a bit out to sea, but still whipped the coast with hundred-mile-an-hour winds. The state’s tomato crops were ruined, and angry winds and downpours had bitten a chunk out of the apple harvest. Potatoes, at least, nestled snugly under clotted soil, protected from the winds.
In October 1938, 23-year-old Arthur Rothstein drove the roads on assignment to document the lives of the nation as part of his job in the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This time, his assignment was New Jersey, and in Monmouth County he was interested in where potato-picking migrants slept, usually in shacks near the fields they worked. He took lots of pictures of ramshackle buildings—ones you would easily assess as barely habitable: a leaning frame taped together with tar paper, a “silo shed” that sheltered fourteen migrant workers, a “barracks” with hinged wooden flaps to cover windows—in fact merely unscreened openings, one dangling laundry to dry. Rothstein, like his colleagues at the FSA during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, documented the need for the government programs. Squalid housing matched the dirt and brutal labor of migrants, many of them cast into their situations by the disaster of the Great Depression.
Amidst such architectural photographs, one sticks out. Actually it is one of a pair of photographs, both taken indoors of sleeping quarters—no one would comfortably call them “bedrooms.” One shows a narrow unmade bed near a window shabbily curtained with a frayed and loosely hung blanket. In the other one, more tightly framed, the image draws close enough to reveal a carved headboard, a rumpled newspaper open to a full-page ad for Coca-Cola (“Take the high road to refreshment“) and other papers pushed to the corner of the bed. Neatly cut pictures of luxury cars from newspaper advertisements decorate the flimsy particle board wall that served as meagre insulation.[1]
When I saw the picture with the cars, I noticed a change in visual tone. The image felt hopeful. Read more »
Jokes about JD Vance’s romantic entanglements with living room furniture have been ubiquitous for about two weeks now. Professional comedians like Chelsea Handler and John Oliver have leaned into them. Friends on social media have traded quips about Vance’s “one nightstand” and his illegitimate “love seat.” Kamala Harris’ own PR team even joined in on the fun.
When we say that something is true, we generally mean one of two different things. The first is that whatever claim we are making is factually accurate. “Kamala Harris attended Howard University” is true because she did, in fact, graduate from that institution.
The second is a bit more slippery. Think of the way in which a great work of fiction like Heart of Darkness or The Color Purple can express profound truths about the human condition. Novels aren’t factual, but what they reveal can still be true in a deep way. That’s what we call narrative truth, rather than factual truth.
19th-century philosopher William Whewell wrote that facts are like pearls, valuable in their own right, but that in order to make a necklace out of them, we need a string: a coherent story that connects all the facts together in order to give us a deeper understanding. The narrative that allows us to make sense of the world is as important as the facts it connects.
Democrats have long been obsessed with factuality, with the pearls. “Find the Falsehood” is practically an Olympic sport on the left. Steve Bannon knew this, and he encouraged Donald Trump to “flood the zone” by telling as many whoppers as he could, turning Democrats’ fact-checking obsession into something akin to the last level of Space Invaders, when there were so many alien ships you could barely shoot them all down.
Accusatory reevaluations of the COVID-19 era are underway. Anthony Fauci’s new memoir addresses the accusations—or does it?
Oversight and Accountability
Some six weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared before the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, an investigative panel of the U.S. House of Representatives. I watched the first hour (the full session lasted roughly three-and-a half), but that was enough to get the gist. Republicans portrayed Fauci as the malevolent demiurge of the COVID-19 pandemic, with his suggestions leading to mask mandates, school closures, forced vaccinations, and possibly even the virus itself. Democrats, conversely, lamented these attempts to smear Fauci, painting them as Big Lies beginning in and persisting from the Trump era, and apologized to Fauci for the attacks on his professionalism.
Since then, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the candidacy withdrawal of President Biden have shifted the political focus in American politics away from Dr. Fauci. But for better or worse, I’ve stayed fixated. When I saw Anthony Fauci’s memoir, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, on the NEW BOOKS shelf at my local library, I knew that I would review it here.
I read On Call while I was on a long car trip with my wife and kids, during family vacation. And while I didn’t start the book any strong feelings about Fauci, I should admit a few preconceptions. For one thing, I’m instinctively suspicious of doctors. When I had appendicitis, I refused to go in until my appendix had fully burst. Also, I’m usually drawn to memoirs by people who are basically unreliable. The other memoir I read this summer—Glenn Loury’s Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative—contrasted Loury’s sexual and chemical adventuring with his “cover story” as a moral crusader.
On Call was not written for me. It’s for Fauci’s preexisting admirers, and is the opposite of a confession—more like an unapologetic self-defense. The book eventually gives readers what they want (in “Part Five: COVID”), but after 300+ pages detailing Fauci’s demonstrable successes, this part ultimately seems embarrassing, an unsatisfying conclusion to a triumphant career.
The chapters of On Call are each just a few pages, and they go by quickly. I got both the hardback and the audiobook, and alternated between them, sometimes reading, sometimes listening as I watched the red vistas scan by, the vastness of Fauci’s story complementing the vast southwestern landscapes outside. But like any visitor in unknown territory, I tried to keep alert for any unexpected movements—signs that this narrator was unreliable after all. Read more »
he now has no address or his address is now not numbered there’s no street to be remembered there’s no place that I can place him and, now ephemeral, I miss him
he was a bollard I could tie to I could call him when I’d want to, I could talk with him of childhood and the changes we had gone through (how that world seemed less in torment) and though we knew our days were numbered we could go there in a phone call but, palpable as past was, when we laughed about our dreaming we could riff on time still streaming in the moments we were living, we could pick up where we’d left off the last time we were speaking as if years had lost their meaning, as if nothing other mattered as we swapped our thoughts while breathing —we had no reason to be grieving
A group of island neighbours were enjoying a glass of wine in the old wooden boathouse when our quiet conversation was interrupted by an explosive Whupf! from the direction of the sea. We turned to look just in time to see the black-and-white hulk of a six-ton orca, curving gracefully into the water after a deep breath, its six-foot-high dorsal fin marking it as a mature male.
Where there is one orca, others are sure to follow. Loud blasts of spray echoed through the evening air as other members of the pod appeared, mothers with calves, juvenile males, a couple more large mature males. Some close to shore, others a half a mile out at sea. The whales’ appearance hadn’t been a complete surprise, one of our group having received a text alert from a fellow sighter in the Southern Gulf Islands Whale Sighting Network that the orcas had been seen heading west from Saturna Island towards our vantage point by Brooks Point on South Pender Island, the southernmost of the Canadian Gulf Islands, in the heart of the Salish Sea and smack in the middle of southern resident orca critical habitat.
As suddenly as they had arrived, the orcas were gone, continuing west towards Vancouver Island. Then, moments later, a much louder explosion of breath took us by surprise. This we were not expecting. Gazing seaward again, we watched as a far larger black body edged silently above the surface, like a nascent island arising from a seafloor volcano, a high cloud of fine mist dissipating above its pair of blowholes (orcas have only one). The adult humpback, forty tons give or take, perhaps more easily imagined as the size of a school bus, had passed less than a hundred metres from the point, heading northeast. Unlike the orcas, the humpback travelled alone, and there was no apparent interaction between the two species. To watch both in the space of ten minutes at relatively close range left us awestruck. Leviathan tends to have that impression on puny human observers.
Humpbacks and Orcas–Gentle Giants and Dolphins with Attitude
The contrasts between orcas and humpbacks are striking. Both are cetaceans, the animal group whose name derives from the ancient Greek word for sea monster. Cetaceans comprise two groups: whales with teeth (toothed whales) and whales without (baleen whales, including the humpback). Toothed whales include narwhals, belugas, sperm whales, beaked whales, porpoises, and dolphins. All dolphins are whales but not all whales are dolphins. The largest of the dolphins is the orca (Orcinus orca), commonly known as the killer whale, an apt descriptor for a meticulous and cunning predator with very specific tastes: chinook salmon for southern resident orcas, marine mammals for transit orcas otherwise known as Biggs orcas. Orca pods have been known to attack humpbacks on occasion, but generally only when an adult is accompanied by a juvenile, a potential meal for mammal-eating orcas. Read more »
I do not specifically remember when I lost my you-know-what about the way the word “humanitarian” is being tossed around these days. Possibly it was when a State Department spokesperson referred to what he called “humanitarian circumstances”, implying thereby that the designation could be sensibly applied to purely chance events. Or maybe the sheer obscenity of tagging the word to “zones” in middle of what is probably the most hellish place on earth right now (only to bomb the same areas anyway, subsequently) did the trick. Whatever it was, I have decided to try, for what it is worth, to come to terms with the matter. So here goes.
In my lifetime, which has spanned 63 years and some change now, I don’t recall the word being used that much except to describe individual persons and certain organizations, until rather recently. But, maybe starting in the ‘nineties, conditions began taking on the designation, especially in the media and in public relations; and phrases like the one I have chosen for my title, “humanitarian disaster”, or “humanitarian catastrophe” became more common. I distinctly remember at this time being annoyed by this: was the disaster supposed to be experienced primarily by the humanitarians? It kind of sounded to me like that was a real possibility. If that was not the case, why use the word humanitarian at all? Why not just call it a disaster or catastrophe? It seemed like something unseemly lay at the core of the reasoning that surrounded the employment of such phrases; like something rather sanctimonious was being smuggled in, too.
So I decided to try to understand what might be at the logical core of this kind of usage of words. What struck me at first was the employment of the word humanitarian was possibly being invested with a tacit, but palpable preeminence amongst possible adjectives in any specific case. Humanitarian concerns are somehow supposed to reflect a self-evident moral superiority over other ones, so that when the word is employed, there is a suggestion that the humanitarian concern should, perhaps prima facie, be considered the most important consideration. I am certain many people would, naively or otherwise, assent to this assertion (some environmentalists might consider environmental concerns to be paramount compared to humanitarian ones in certain cases, but, even here, many of them would consider both environmental and humanitarian matters to be of utmost importance). Read more »
My sister Leyla and I are walking in New York City, talking about how some people love their dogs almost more than their children. In fact, in a very uncharacteristic moment, Leyla shares that she can’t stand the late night tv ads for abused dogs when there are people who are going hungry and suffering; and not only do I agree with her, but add about dogs’ different odors and that dog people think their dog doesn’t smell even though I can tell a house has dogs the minute I walk into one.
Growing up in Iran, we had two dogs at different times and invariably, something unexpected would happen to them. Shouka, a beautiful black and white hunting dog, lived with us, a large family of two parents, five girls, and two grandmothers. He was quite playful and once he made it all the way upstairs from the yard where he lived, to my sister’s bedroom. My sister woke up startled and Shouka was punished for frightening her. I felt bad for my sister who was getting comforted but felt even worse for Shouka who was all excited to hang out with us upstairs and was re-banished to the yard.
Shouka didn’t last with us very long. He was accompanying my father and his friends on a hunting trip in the mountains outside Tehran, according to the story we were told, and he disappeared. My dad said Shouka was so beautiful that probably a commercial truck driver must have stopped and offered him a piece of meat or other treat and there went this disloyal dog. Maybe he preferred being a dog that lives in a truck and gets to travel around, without the pressures of finding whatever poor bird my dad and his friends had shot. Maybe being in a family of too many females and only one male was too much pressure on him; I will never know because he never came back to us. Read more »
Many of us live in a punitive, carceral type of society that can make it difficult to have compassion for ourselves or others. It’s an era of the glorification of the individual over the group, leading to perfectionism and narcissism and so, so much 
Here’s what a bubble looks like.
Jokes about JD Vance’s romantic entanglements with living room furniture have been ubiquitous for about two weeks now. Professional comedians like 
