by Ed Simon

Bad poetry can tell us as much about the art of writing verse as can good poetry. Much can be learned by close reading poetry, which is well written, that has withstood the test of time or for which there is a general critical consensus regarding excellence in terms of technique or influence, impact or experimentation. By reading bad poetry, however, the critic can analyze the multitude of things that can go wrong in verse, the awkward turn of phrase, the strained rhythm and meter, the convoluted rhyme, the tortured metaphor, or the inappropriate image. There is a temptation to understand bad poetry in terms of a variation of Tolstoy’s contention about unhappy families, for there are as many ways to pen a bad lyric as there are ways to write one. Of course, the vast majority of verse ever written hasn’t been good, much less great, though it would be hard to gauge what percentage is truly bad (it might not be unfair to presume that most of it is, though thankfully the bulk of that is inaccessible to the average reader, hidden away in Moleskin or silicon). Most of us have little to gain in reading such work, much less in penning a hatchet job about their (lack of) merits. Which is to say that to close read the sophomore effort as a means to denigrate a poetic attempt is neither pedagogically or ethically sound, but there are some published poems, written in such unthinking and foolish pomposity, that we do gain knowledge by considering them.

Consider the nineteenth-century versifier Julie A. Moore, whom Britanica informs us was an author of “maudlin, often unintentionally hilarious poetry” that was “parodied by many.” Moore falls into a common pitfall of the bad poet, which is to valorize the strictures of form beyond anything else. When an idol is made of structure, you can inadvertently end up with lines like “’Lord Byron’ was an Englishman/A poet I believe, /His first works in old England/Was poorly received./Perhaps it was ‘Lord Byron’s’ fault/And perhaps it was not. His life was full of misfortunes,/Ah, strange was his lot.” Even after we get past the ungrammatical construction in the second-line, and the garbled meter, Moore’s poem about Byron sacrifices syntactic sense in favor of maintaining her plodding rhyming couplets. It’s not that the rhyme scheme itself is bad – after all, John Dryden and Alexander Pope made great use of the same rhyme scheme – but that here it’s a Procrustean bed hacking at meaning rather than limbs. Why does Moore write that Byron was a “poet I believe?” The speaker presumably knows that Byron is indeed a poet, and the verse itself appears allergic to any kind of ironic interpretation. Why the quotation marks around “Lord Byron?” What was “strange” about his lot – we’ve been given no indication. What’s conveyed isn’t mystery or ambiguity, but mere befuddlement, and not on the part of the reader but rather of the poet. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

I. The Best Meal Ever

My mother’s father died during, but not because of, WWII and so she went back to Sweden on the first possible boat – 1946 – September leaving my father, brother, and me to get along. I, soon to be 13, had just started high school.

We’d always walked home from Evergreen Grammar School for lunch which mother made for us, then back again to school. It must have been an hour break and the walk was not short. But now we had to do other. There was a lunch program at the grammar school my brother went to, and there was a cafeteria at my high school. If you ate quickly, you could go out and pitch pennies against the curb of the graceful, curved driveway with the other guys – the trick was to toss your penny up close but not to touch the curb. if you touched it, you lost your coin. If you were closest, you got to pick up all the pennies which would jingle comfortably in your pocket all afternoon. Maybe “Open the Door, Richard” was the big song, at least for me, though lurking somewhere by way of I think by way of Life Magazine was Slim Gaillard’s “Cement Mixer, Putti, Putti.” But I liked a lot of things on Your Hit Parade too.

But some days I would meet my father for lunch. The war had given him a place where his ability could be recognized – and he moved from the maintenance department – his first job with Mack Motors, the company he’d joined to help with the war effort passing the chauffeur’s job, which he liked, over to Victor Nicholson – to night foreman, to day foreman, to plant manager, this from a man who had to leave school at the age I was at that moment and go to work in a factory which then made two thirds of the world’s stick matches.

So I’d walk out of Plainfield High School, up Park avenue to the White Tower and my father would drive down to meet me and we lunched side by side – sitting on stools before the counter with other working men – my father dressed now in a suit – and we’d order hamburgers made of thin slices of ground meat, topped with grilled onions and slices of sour pickle. I don’t think the world, our world, had yet discovered French fries. The bun was soft. I don’t think we added ketchup. Maybe my father did. Fifteen cents they cost, maybe a dime, but the fancy lunch my godmother was cooking for the rich up on Hillside Avenue was not more heavenly than this gritty texture of meat, tart sharp salt taste of pickle, and onions, the onions, a heaven of fried onions –their taste, their smell, the crispness of the ones slightly burned – and sitting there on stools side by side with my father in this lunch heaven of working-male energy, our varied futures waiting outside the door to carry us away when the milky coffee was finished. Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

Of all the jobs I have had over the long years of working, from being  a salesperson, a waitress, a cook, a travel agent, a teacher (elementary school to high school, college, and night school for adults), a high school counselor, a school administrator and a mental health therapist, my favorite has been teaching high school. I was fired from only one job, as a waitress in an Italian restaurant, when I was told by the much younger restaurant manager that I was not taking my job seriously on a day I was a little late for the lunch crowd, due to having been on an interview for a better paying and more stable position. I told her I agreed with her and returned my uniform. She was nervous and I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, so I reassured her that she is doing the right thing. At another waitressing job in Philadelphia, when I was 25 years old, I learned a lot about human behavior. My regular after-work drinking crowd would get louder and louder as the evening went on, flirting after too many drinks and oversharing their feelings. Random people would tell me their deepest secrets, especially in the early afternoons when the place wasn’t crowded. One guy whose fiancée went to the restroom asked me out and when I told him she just showed me her engagement ring, he explained that he is not going to marry her, but she doesn’t know that yet and that’s why we could go out. When she returned, he acted all normal again and when he paid the check, he added his phone number by the signature line in case I changed my mind.

The corporate travel business was like factory work, all of us in large rooms, connected to a head set and a computer. The supervisors distracted everyone by treating them to donuts some days, or after work drinks at the bar across the street from the company. I told colleagues that management was distracting everyone with free food and drinks, but my colleagues didn’t care because they were mostly young and care free and loved partying. I, on the other hand, wanted more money that the measly $180 I was making per week. After one year at this place known for being an established travel agency in Philadelphia, I asked for a raise of $20 per week. My argument was that I was a hard worker and I had a college degree. My manager, a beautiful blond who never smiled and did not have a college degree denied my request and said I had to jump through different hoops if I wanted a raise, specifically being more enthusiastic on the phone with clients about selling our name and brand. I saw her a few years later at a dentist office as a receptionist, after she was let go for probably not being enough of the cheerleader they were looking for.

When I finally landed a job as a teacher that matched my children’s school schedule, I considered myself very fortunate. I was now an ESL teacher (now called many other things) to students from kindergarten all the way to high school, and even adults in a night program. I understood what it was like being in a new country where you don’t speak the language and don’t know how to navigate the system. Read more »

Reflections in puddles on train tracks in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Jeroen van Baar

Since the murder of UnitedHealthcare (UHC) CEO Brian Thompson drew everyone’s attention to the insurance company, two reports on its dealings have made my blood boil. Background info: UHC’s parent company, UnitedHealth, also owns a service provider branch called Optum and a pharmacy branch called OptumRx. The Wall Street Journal wrote in December that UnitedHealth had bonused Optum doctors to diagnose elderly patients with conditions that did not require treatment but did allow UHC to claim more money from the federal Medicare Advantage fund. Weeks later, the Federal Trade Commission alleged that OptumRx unnecessarily marked up the prices of some life-saving drugs by more than 1,000% to boost revenue, which was made possible by controlling companies throughout the drug supply chain. The profits, of course, were billed to by tax payers and consumers.

It’s particularly easy for me to get mad at all this because—perhaps you guessed it—I am a UHC customer. When I acquired U.S. health insurance last September, I was initially pleased. UnitedHealthcare sounded great: who wouldn’t want to be united, healthy, and cared for? The name of my plan—Choice Plus 80—sounded even better. And I trusted my employer, Columbia University, to select the right insurer for me. I rested easy, knowing I could not be blindsided by Kafkaesque communications and frivolous bills.

That trust is now thoroughly shattered. When I need medical attention, my insurance company might try to draw extra profit. If I just need rest, I might get a costly referral. If I need medication, I might be overcharged. And everyone I deal with in these interactions might secretly be working for The Company. Instead of cared for, I feel exploited; rather than protected, I feel exposed.

At the face of it, the American health insurance debacle is in line with other products’ recently losing their appeal. In online platforms such as Facebook and X, ‘enshittification’ has made the user experience progressively worse as tech companies start to sacrifice quality for advertiser revenue and eventually shareholder value. Aerospace giant Boeing revealed its incompetency when a door plug fell off a plane mid-flight last year, causing passengers to rush to Airbus-only filters on booking sites. And even mundane items like clothes are of much poorer quality than even ten years ago. We tend to respond to all this with a shrug of resignation. Oh well, we say, it’s a shame we can’t trust classic brands anymore, but we’ll just shop around for an alternative.

But insurance is a special case. With insurance, the trust is the product. Indeed, trust itself produces the outcome health insurance is meant to promote in the first place: health. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Tim Sommers

In Bowers v Hardwick (1986), the Supreme Court Case that affirmed the government’s right to criminalize sodomy, Justice Antonin Scalia famously insisted there that there was no “right to homosexual sodomy.” This was disingenuous in more than one way. First, the statue in question criminalized sodomy in general and not homosexual sodomy in particular. But, more fundamentally, no one was arguing for sodomy as a basic right. They were arguing for a basic right to be free to make their own decisions about their own bodies, consensual intimate relations, and families – including intimate relations and the families shared by people of the same sex.

Such a right, if it exists, is unenumerated. That is, it’s not specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, the Ninth Amendment says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The tricky bit, of course, is how to know which other rights might be retained by the people though unenumerated.

In Roe v. Wade, Justice Douglas cited a “line of decisions” that established a “penumbra” of privacy. He was much lampooned for his language, “penumbra” in particular, but there’s a relatively straight forward line of reasoning available here. One way to derive an unenumerated right is to show that it is implied by, or follows from, an enumerated right. The enumerated right of citizens to be secure in their persons, houses, and papers and effects (the 4^th), for example, makes no sense without the underlying assumption that you have a right to be in control of your person in the first place. Further, the “liberty” and “property” that the 14^th Amendment says shall not be denied “without due process of law” surely includes the right to some degree of control over your own body.

One of the few things that Justice Alito gets right in the Dobbs (2022) decision (allowing States to criminalize any kind of abortion and, to some extent, birth control) is that he doesn’t describe the issue primarily as “privacy” – but rather as an appeal “to a broader right to autonomy.”

The relevant string of cases that develop and extend this right to autonomy and, yes, privacy, too, includes (at a minimum) Loving v The State of Virginia (the most aptly named SCOTUS case in history since it decriminalized interracial marriage), Griswold v Connecticut (access to birth control for married people), Roe v Wade (abortion decisions are left to pregnant people), Lawerence v Texas (reversing Hardwick, it decriminalized same-sex intimacy), and Obergefell v Hodges (legalized same-sex marriage). Defenders of this tradition argue that it, like the Bill of Rights itself, this is not part of a haphazard list of freedoms, but what follows from a cohesive conception of liberty. “The only freedom which deserves the name,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.” Read more »

Anjum Saeed. Untitled (After Rumi). 2012.

Oil on canvas.

“I am the dust particle in sunlight. I am the round sun … I am the wind … I am a tree … Rose, and
the nightingale lost in the fragrance … You the One in all, say who I am. Say I am You.”
Jalaluddin Rumi

With permission from the artist.

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by Katalin Balog

In the past, when I asked students if they would want to enter the Experience Machine – a fictional contraption thought up by the philosopher Robert Nozick – they would generally say no. In the Experience Machine, one would have virtual experiences: for example, of a life blessed with mountains of pleasure, great love, monumental achievements. But one would lose touch with one’s actual life. My students did not want to leave their actual lives behind. In the last few years, things have changed. Most of them now proclaim their readiness to ditch it all for the virtual pleasures of the Experience Machine.

My students’ recent eagerness for the virtual is a symptom of our culture’s alienation from the world. During my life, I have witnessed the slow but unstoppable advance of commodification and technology, which has brought us to the threshold of escape from the world – certainly in fantasy, but perhaps in reality, sometime soon.

1 Consuming Experiences

When I was young in my native Budapest, we – my family and friends – didn’t think of life in consumerist terms. We couldn’t, as it was communism, and there was not much to consume – but in any case, the idea of collecting pleasant experiences seemed frivolous and alien. Beautiful Budapest was run down, its buildings still showing bullet holes decades after the war. Tourists didn’t crowd around its “attractions”. It was our city. Sure, we listened to music and attended plays, there were parties where everyone wanted to be, we bought ice cream and cakes, but we didn’t make a habit of maximizing pleasurable, beautiful, or edifying experiences; we didn’t have a plan that would ensure the best results. Much was left to chance and improvisation, as life in those days was hard-scrabble, and things could – and often would – go wrong. Everyday necessities were sometimes hard to obtain, and we had to stand in line a lot. People were generally rude and wielding whatever little power they had in a hostile manner. Our goal was just… to live our life and have the experience that comes with it. But we were also not fazed or annoyed by unexpected obstacles in the way a more committed consumer or tourist would be. Of course, some people I knew went skiing and climbing in remote and beautiful places; that was a thing one could do as well. But most of the time, normal people did normal things, and that was our life. Communism, for a while at least, constrained the consumer in us. I am not idealizing this state of affairs – I was in the underground resisting the oppression that maintained it; just pointing out the difference it made in our attitude to life.

I noticed the contrast between this and what was normal in the West especially clearly when, after moving to New York, I was already between worlds. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

By “worm” I mean not earthworm but larva of the infamous lepidopteran, Cydia pomonella, or codling moth. The pom in its species names comes from the Latin root “pomum,” meaning “fruit,” particularly the apple (which is why they’re called pome fruits), wherein you’ll find this worm. It’s the archetypal worm inside the archetypal apple, the one Eve ate. (Not. The Hebrew word in Genesis, something like peri, just means “fruit.” No apple is mentioned. And please, give the mother of all living a break.)

The imperative Let in the title is a bit rich, given that this worm does not need your permission to decimate the core: It will do so anyhow, once you have let it in. Short of destroying the apple, there is nothing you can do about it.

This worm is quite the animal. In spite of humanity’s scorched earth campaign against it in orchards worldwide, this worm persists. There is great irony in this: Persistence proceeds not just from chemical resistance but from the simple fact that, in addition to poisoning this worm, we continually feed it. It basks in our attentions, however antithetical. Plant an orchard, it is there. In the presence of so much fruit, the fruit-eater becomes, well, fruitful.

We’re quite chummy with this worm in our tiny northern New England grove. Decades (which seem centuries) ago, we planted a few dozen heritage seedlings and counted on our organic virtue to see us through seasons of pruning and growth, to autumns of cider and pies. We patrolled the orchard with backpack sprayers full of kaolin clay mix (basically diluted kitty litter) hoping to impede and disrupt the worm’s feeding. Seeing holes in fruit, we immediately zapped them. To no effect.

It took some time and training to learn that prophylaxis is key. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Andreas Grüntzig’s plane blew a 38-foot-wide crater in the Georgia dirt where it crashed. Investigators needed several days to collect and identify the remains of the famous physician, his second wife, Margaret, and their two Irish setters, Gin and Tonic. People who write about Grüntzig after his death compare him to a shooting star, a comet, or the incautiously winged Icarus. This is to be expected when the subject is a high-flying medical hero who dies hitting the earth at an estimated 300 miles per hour.

The journal Cardiology called Grüntzig “the father of modern cardiology.” His story is told in engrossing detail in David Monagan’s book Journey into the Heart, whose introduction declares, “Grüntzig, once derided as another charlatan, changed the course of medicine … His work inspired an arc of discovery that has never stopped rising.”

Grüntzig invented balloon angioplasty, today one of the most commonly performed complex medical procedures. The technique has been adapted for use throughout the body, but its marquee application is the treatment of coronary artery disease, a leading cause of death and disability worldwide.

Balloon angioplasty is not an obvious idea. A catheter (thin, flexible wire) with a small, deflated balloon at its tip is inserted into the target artery and guided to the site of the blockage. Once in place, the balloon is inflated, compressing the plaque against the artery walls and restoring blood flow.

If not for Grüntzig, there is no guarantee balloon angioplasty would ever have happened. He alone, it seems, had the vision to imagine the device, the diligence to build it, and most crucially, the power of personality to win over a hostile and skeptical medical world. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

The big blue behemoth of a garbage truck came barreling toward me. I knew I was going to die. I was in the middle of an intersection about to make a left turn. One moment the intersection had been clear, with the truck about a half mile distant.

In the next moment, the truck had sped up and was almost on top of me. I couldn’t turn in any direction without driving into traffic. I had about three seconds left to live…

This day, possibly the last day of my life, started out as a normal spring day in April. My husband, Rick, and I had errands to run in Michigan City. We were driving our cars in tandem to the tire store, so we could drop his car off for new tires and drive home together. He was in front of me and made the left turn; I followed. As I explained above, I was caught in the intersection with no place to turn.

I was about to be hit by a truck, and there was a good chance it would kill me.

I didn’t panic. I was not afraid to die. I just relaxed and waited for the end.

Time moved slowly. I was never unconscious, but I have amnesia for a good part of the event. The car was struck on the left side, which triggered the left side airbags. The impact pushed the car into the next lane, where it was struck on the right front fender. I don’t remember hearing or feeling the first impact, but I do remember the second. By this time, Rick had reached my car, and looked in to see if I was okay. He was the first person there. I told him I was fine except for chest pain (due to hitting the steering wheel). The paramedics arrived shortly thereafter, and soon I was settled in an ambulance with oxygen. I was taken to a nearby hospital where I spent 2 days, until I no longer needed oxygen. Afterwards, recovery was fast, and (eventually) the insurance company totaled the car and sent me a check to cover the purchase of an equivalent, replacement car.

It takes a close call like this to realize how poorly prepared one is for death, and to give some thought to what death might be like. Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

The Australian author Richard Flanagan is the 2024 winner of the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for his book Question 7. The book is a brilliant weaving together of memory, history, of fact and fiction, love and death around the theme of interconnectedness of events that constitute his life. Disparate connections between his father’s experience as a prisoner of war, the author H.G. Wells, and the atomic bomb all contributed towards making Flanagan the thinker and writer he is today. The book reveals to us his humanity, his love of family and of his home island of Tasmania; it is what Flanagan expects of a book when he says, ‘the words of a book are never the book, the soul is everything’, and this book has ‘soul’.

The book opens with Flanagan visiting the site of Ohama Camp where his father was interned as a slave labourer in the undersea coal mines in Japan during World War II. There is ‘no memorial, no sign, no evidence’ of the camp or the suffering that existed on that spot; all that remains is a ‘love hotel’, but his visit to this site establishes the first link in a chain of interconnected events in his life.

Flanagan’s father never expected to survive the cruelty of the guards and the grinding work as a slave labourer in the coal mines, yet faraway in Europe, unbeknown to him, scientific minds were actively working on the idea of a bomb with extraordinary lethal potential, a bomb that would save his life and have  a profound impact on the  future of humanity and shape world events. The Japanese city of Hiroshima became the experimental testing ground for this atomic bomb and tens of thousands of ‘unknown souls’ perished, ‘vaporised’, by the force of the energy of such a lethal weapon. The atomic bomb brought the war to an end, saved Flanagan’s father’s life and ultimately brought Flanagan himself into existence. Read more »

My wife (offering me an apple) and me on a late Sunday afternoon walk near Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by David J. Lobina

A new year, and a new opportunity to write on some more contentious topics (and/or be cancelled), my new year’s resolution in 2024. I wrote about universality and diversity last year, as well as on the identity conditions of, well, identities, and I now start the year 2025 by reviewing a book published by Oxford University Press on inclusion in linguistics. I should warn any potential readers that this is possibly the worst book I have ever read in my career, and that it is hardly about inclusion to boot, but to understand what I mean by this one will have to read the 4000-word review I have written. I would say enjoy, but…(NB: the review is due to appear on LinguistList at some point, unless they change their minds).

*

The volume Inclusion in Linguistics showcases the work of over 40 authors across 20 chapters on what is perceived to be a lack of inclusion in the field of linguistics, with North America as the main focus of attention (with some exceptions). Edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, this collection of papers is part of a project that includes the volume Decolonizing Linguistics, also published by Oxford University Press. The overall project started in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement and its stated aim is to achieve equity and justice in linguistics on the basis of race, disability, gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, Indigeneity, and global geography (p. 2). As an instance of a social justice endeavour, therefore, the contributions are mostly focused on the sort of actions needed to achieve greater inclusivity in the field, and in these very terms, the editors encourage readers to use both volumes as guides for scholarly work as well as for pedagogical purposes, with further material to be had on a dedicated website.

I shall very briefly summarise each chapter first and then I will engage with parts of the content below, where I shall name the respective authors when pertinent to do so. The volume itself is divided into 4 thematic parts. Part 1 focuses on intersectional models of inclusion; Part 2 details possible institutional pathways to achieve more inclusion in linguistics; Part 3 is devoted to some of the resources available to teachers and lecturers to build more inclusive classrooms in schools and universities; and Part 4 outlines various examples of inclusive public engagement in the field. The background to the overall project is chronicled in the book’s preface whilst the Introduction describes the general approach as well as each contribution, with the Conclusion highlighting the lessons learned. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Richard Farr

After I moved from the UK to the US it took me only a couple of years to cede to my friends’ pleas and start driving on the right. When in Rome, and all that. But I still like to irritate Americans by maintaining that we Brits are better at this essential mechanical skill. I mean, when we drive, we drive. Or, OK, we drive while texting, shaving, putting on makeup, or having sex. However, we absolutely draw the line at driving with a gallon of Coke in one hand and a three-pound tub of fries clutched between our sweating thighs, while using a dripping Deluxe Double Bacon MegaBurger with Extra Pepper Jack as the sole point of contact with the steering wheel. 

My wife still teases me about my unwillingness to eat while driving, and conceivably I’m wrong to suspect that getting a spear of dill pickle in the eye increases accident rates on American roads. But on a related safety issue my prejudices have been given support recently both by unimpeachably anecdotal evidence and, better yet, a random video I found on YouTube. 

The typical American freeway has three to five lanes. (If nineteen, you’re in L.A.) Widespread laws ban trucks from the far left lane. A large majority of states have at least something on the books requiring all traffic to move over unless exiting or overtaking. Even those members of the Union in a primitive stage of legal development (Hello CA! Hello MA!) at least encourage this behavior, because everyone who’s ever thought about it agrees that “lane discipline” improves both efficiency and safety.

Yet many American drivers seem never to have thought about it. Whether burger-steering at the speed limit or at that most annoying 4 mph less, they love to camp out in the middle lane or even the left one, sometimes for days at a stretch, strenuously exercising their Constitutional right never to look in the mirror or exhibit any awareness of the traffic around them. Recently on I-5 near Seattle my car and several others were stuck for miles, at sixty-something in a seventy limit, behind three cars that were flying next to one another as if in formation, one per available lane. It was like trying to shop in a hurry at Costco on Saturday.

A video explainer by Christophe Haubursin and Joseph Stromberg, available on Youtube, confirms my darkest suspicions: this one particular national driving tradition / habit / symptom / affliction / pathology, so immediately striking to foreigners, (a) messes with the national blood pressure averages, (b) makes Eisenhower’s magnificent highway system far less efficient than it might be, and (c) kills large numbers of people.  Read more »