by Eric Feigenbaum

From a corner room in Singapore’s Peninsula hotel, I spent many nights staring out the windows, watch sparks fly silently from the nearby construction sites. Up on the 18^th or 14^th or 20^th floors, Singapore looked still and calm at midnight or 1am. Unlike many big metropolitans, Singapore streets – even in the city center – become quiet at night, especially a weeknight. There was an other-worldly quality watching Singapore’s downtown sleep at night.

My very first visit to Singapore was in February 2004. As business had it, by the end of the year, I was going frequently and for increasingly long stretches – sometimes for seven to ten days at a time, until I rented a condo in March 2025.

But 2004 was filled with nights looking out at the big, fast-moving clouds, giant sky, ships anchored offshore and ever-growing skyline. And sparks. Always sparks coming from below.

It took me a visit or two to realize the new National Library building being built just a couple of blocks away was under construction seemingly 24 hours a day. Which meant from visit to visit – even if it was just a few weeks between – the building grew rapidly. In fact, the 16-story, 338 foot tall, 121,675 square foot site with a gross floor area of 632,918 square feet was completed in less than 18 months. An amazing accomplishment.

As a comparison point, a recently very similar sized project in San Francisco – the 5M Office Tower at 415 Natoma Street took began in mid-2019, taking two years and nine months. Its cost – $158 million – is only $3 million more than the National Library’s – and ironically, the building received a development loan of $393 million from Singapore’s United Overseas Bank.

In a similar time-period as the construction of the Singapore National Library, my alma mater, the University of Washington, built a new Business School building – PACCAR Hall – on nice flat land in exactly two years from 2008 to 2010. Despite it being five stories and 133,000 square feet of total floor area – almost one fifth of the National Library’s – it still took six months longer to construct.

Obviously, 24-hour a day construction gives Singapore an advantage in construction time. But doesn’t that create around-the-clock noise that disturbs the city? Isn’t it inordinately expensive? Aren’t labor unions protesting? Read more »

by Charles Siegel

There can have been very few musicians who played such key roles, in so many different bands in so many different genres, as Danny Thompson.  When he died at 86 in September, music lost one of its great connectors.

I first learned of Thompson as a freshman in college, when my roommate introduced me to Pentangle. There had never been a band like Pentangle, and there really hasn’t been one quite like them since either. They were an utterly unique melding of folk and jazz. The band’s guitarists, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, were two of the leading English folk guitarists of the day when Pentangle was founded in 1967. Terry Cox was an established jazz drummer, and Jacqui McShee was an up-and-coming folk singer.

At the center of it all was Danny Thompson on bass. By 1967 he’d already had a wide variety of musical experience, not to mention a turbulent life.

Born in Devon, he never knew his father, a miner who joined the Royal Navy at the start of World War II and was killed in a U-boat attack.  His sister died not long after, and he and his mother moved to Battersea, then a rough area of London yet to be gentrified.

He was a good soccer player — good enough to play for Chelsea’s youth teams. And he was a good boxer, winning 22 of 23 fights. But already, music was becoming his consuming passion. By the time he was a young teenager he had tried guitar, mandolin, trumpet and trombone. He told an interviewer that one reason he gave up trombone was his boxing, “because a smack in the chops is not very good for that.”

After all of those instruments, he settled on the double bass. Like pretty much every young musician in England in the 1950s, he started out playing in skiffle bands, and like everyone from Paul McCartney to Jimmy Page, he was inspired by Lonnie Donegan.

From there, he played in strip clubs in Soho and on American military bases. In keeping with his already ornery personality, in 1957 he was arrested for failure to report for national service.  Three days before he was sent to prison, he married his girlfriend, and then was posted to Malaysia for two years, where he took up the trombone again in an army band. Read more »

by Akim Reinahrdt

Language: Ooh, a talkie!
Strong Language: No shit
Disturbing Images: Worse than a mirror?
Nudity: Promises, promises
Sexual Content: Awkward birds & bees talk?
Sex: That’s not sex
Substance Abuse: That’s not abuse
Alcohol Use: Shots!
Smoking: With what cigarettes cost nowadays?
Product Placement: Good reminder not to buy any of it
Violence: You talkin’ to me?
Child Abuse References: I could use a good spanking
Birth: The horror!
Graphic Medical Procedures: Democracy’s autopsy?
Flashing Lights: Bamp-Bamp-Bamp da-da-da-da
Suicide: Spoilers, people!

Gore: Lesley, Frank or Vidal, I’m good. Al or Tipper I’d like a heads up.

[SCENE]

There’s a voice that says The following is intended for mature audiences only. Viewer discretion is advised and I want to slit its throat so that all the blood drains from its veins, for only then can I be sure it will never chide me again.

There is something wrong with me, to be sure.  But there is also something wrong with the show or movie I’m about to watch.  That’s what the voice is telling me.  Be discreet.  Think twice before letting others know you have watched it.  Will you watch it?  Are watching it.  Are you watching it?  Be careful.

What is wrong with you?  Why would you watch this show we made for you?  We’ve warned you.  There’s something wrong with it.

Maturity is required.  Are you mature enough to hear the alkaline truth?  There’s something wrong with you.  You’re trying to hide away what everyone else already sees.  You’re thin skinned and have a fragile ego.

It was a simple advisement, not a searing admonishment, but you couldn’t handle it.  You turned the objective into the subjective.  You were lacking in discretion. Read more »

by Michael Liss

No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic field there is tranquility and contentment, harmonious relations between management and wage earner, freedom from industrial strife, and the highest record of years of prosperity. —Calvin Coolidge’s “Annual Address,” December 4, 1928

“Silent” Calvin Coolidge was a man of few words, but he might have uttered those particular few with a sense of satisfaction. Times were good in America in 1928—not for everyone, not for every industry, but, in the main, there were more jobs that paid a living wage, new industries that had great promise, and less rancor both politically and between the classes.  

The Roaring Twenties had begun with a political earthquake—an electoral realignment. America wanted something different from the status quo, and the status quo was Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s second term was dominated by America’s late entry into the war, debates over the League of Nations (as the country was growing more isolationist), and general domestic unrest.  He was a man of great intellect and serious talent, but, if there was a sunny, optimistic side to Wilson, he hid it well. This was even more so after the serious stroke he suffered in October of 1919, a time in which he essentially sequestered himself from the public and even from most of his Cabinet. It is perhaps a measure of his monumental ego that, post-stroke, he still saw himself as a potent political force, not merely able to discipline his own party, but to convince the public to give him a third term.  

Any rational viewer would have seen that as completely impossible, and a third Wilson campaign never got off the ground, but it was not merely his dyspeptic temperament, but also his policies which more and more of the country doubted or outright rejected. The forces that had given him the White House in the first place now inverted themselves. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt had sought to reclaim the Presidency from his former VP pick, now turned President, William Howard Taft. TR wanted a continuation of his Progressive policies, and Taft was by nature and ideological preference a conservative. Losing the White House to a Democrat (and a Southern one at that) convinced many in the GOP to move further away from the Progressive wing and Progressive values. That shift was echoed by a smaller (but decisive) transition in the views of the electorate.  Read more »

Rowan tree, also known as the mountain ash and its bright treasure of berries. With its yellow-orange leaves, it looks particularly striking at this time of year. Photo taken during a walk last week through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, on a sunny day with beautiful light.

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by Paul Braterman

Throughout most of the UK (Northern Ireland is a partial exception) evolution is regarded as established science, and no politician would make belief in separate creation part of their platform, for fear of ridicule. In the US, this is far from being the case. Although evolution has become more widely accepted over time, one third of Americans still believe that God created humans in their present form. Here I discuss the enormous influence of creationism in US politics and analyse the arguments put forward in its favour, as set out for example by Charlie Kirk, the recently slain leader of Turning Point USA.

Mike Pence, Vice President during Trump’s first term in office, had argued in Congress for creationism, while creationists have been prominent in the various faith councils supporting Trump. At least three members of his present cabinet (Pete Hegseth, Scott Turner at HUD, pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church, Doug Collins at the VA, one-time pastor at Chicopee Baptist Church) are committed creationists, as is Mike Huckabee, another former Southern Baptist pastor, now ambassador to Israel. So is Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who has done pro bono work for Answers in Genesis, now the leading creationist organization. Russell Vought, co-author of Project 2025, whose role at the Office of Management and Budget is pivotal role in the distribution of federal funds, is an elder of a church that explicitly rejects evolution, and sees Satan as “the unholy god of this age.” Vought is also acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and on 28 October 2025, in this capacity, rescinded the rule that, in some States, prevents medical debt from showing up on credit reports.

We can understand the link between creationism and US right-wing politics in terms of the appeal to US conservatives of loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. These all favour absolutist theology, which demands submission to divine authority, loyalty to the community of believers, and the preservation of pure doctrine. With this in mind, we can understand the appeal of Christian Nationalism and Trumpism to creationists. Thus as early as 2015, Answers in Genesis praised Trump, not for any specific policies, but because he spoke, just as Jesus spoke to the Pharisees, as one with authority. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Rafaël Newman

In June 1932, half a year before Adolf Hitler was sworn in as German Chancellor, Victor Klemperer watched Nazis on a newsreel marching through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. A professor of Romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden, whose area of specialization was the 18th century and the French Enlightenment, Klemperer (1881-1960) was unpleasantly gripped by this first encounter with what he termed “fanaticism in its specifically National Socialist form,” and by the “expression of religious ecstasy” he discerned in the eyes of a young spectator as the drum major passed by, balanced precariously on goose-stepping legs while he robotically beat time.

This initial morbid fascination—with National Socialist martial aesthetics, and eventually with Nazi ideology as expressed linguistically—was to prove a lifesaver after 1933 when Klemperer, although a convert to Christianity, was systematically deprived of his academic privileges, and then of his civil rights, by the Nazis now in power, who regarded him as an unalterably “biological” Jew. Klemperer’s marriage to an “Aryan” woman saved him from the deadly fate reserved for millions of others, but he nevertheless suffered as a form of torture his exclusion from libraries, his confinement with his wife to a Judenhaus, and the mindless industrial work he was forced to perform:

In my hours of revulsion and hopelessness, during the endless drudgery of sheerly mechanical factory labor, by the side of the sick and dying, at gravesites, when I myself was in distress, at moments of the greatest agony, as my heart was failing in my body—the demand I made of myself came faithfully to my aid: to observe, to study, to remember what has occurred—tomorrow things will look different again, tomorrow you will feel different again; set down the way this moment announces itself, record its impact. And very soon, this call to elevate myself above the situation and to preserve my inner liberty had been condensed into a secret formula, one with reliable effect: LTI, LTI!

“LTI,” Klemperer’s “secret formula,” was his shorthand for the project that sustained him: documenting the language used by the National Socialists as they gradually exerted totalitarian control over German minds (and “non-German” bodies). “LTI” stands for Lingua Tertii Imperii, Klemperer’s own taxonomy for “The Language of the Third Reich”. Read more »

by Angela Starita

When my mother was a teenager in the early 1940s, a NY-area radio station ran a weekly contest, asking listeners to vote for their favorite singer among two: Crosby or Sinatra? How people made this preference known remains unclear to me: did you need a phone in your house to make a call to the station or was sending a postcard enough? Whatever the method, the winner would be announced each Sunday afternoon. While Sinatra often took the prize, Crosby occasionally outpaced the Jersey boy who grew up two towns south of Cliffside Park, my mother’s hometown. On those occasions, she told me, she’d stamp around my grandparents’ railroad apartment, enraged at the abject stupidity of her fellow listeners. When she’d tell this story, my mother would marvel at her parents’ forbearance, the way they’d accept these outbursts without comment, though they were highly disciplined, gloomy people for whom the idea of having an “idol,” or caring about his fate on a weekly radio show was surely alien. I like this insight into them, a softer side that I myself had only witnessed a few times.

What I like even more about the story is what it says about my mother’s taste—excellent—and that her knowledge and passion for the American songbook went way back. I suppose you could say that last statement was true for almost anyone young in those years, but I doubt there were many casual listeners who, years later, could pick out the pop standard undergirding the inventive tangents of Cecil Taylor or Milt Jackson recordings. But none of this was an identity for my mother or something she talked about or was even aware of as somehow unusual: she liked the music, knew it deeply, and there was no more to it. Her tastes were definite and clean, like the beautiful seams of well-made clothing that don’t depend on distracting accessories or patterns. She dismissed the likes of Judy Garland and Sammy Davis Jr.—too needy—and championed Johnny Mathis, Jo Stafford, and Sinatra for their understated elegance. Despite her own performance as an irate teenager, she was her parents’ daughter in prizing reserve on stage. No big gestures or frenetic moves across the stage. Read more »

Anushka Rostomji. Waq Waq Tree, 2023, of the Flesh and Foliage Series.

Charcoal and pencil on paper.

More here and here.

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by Katalin Balog

“…eventually he regained his balance and dismissed all thought of resistance from his mind, and concentrated on accepting the dizzy state of the world that was spinning round him as a perfectly natural state of affairs…” —László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance (trans. George Szirtes)

I grew up in communist Hungary, the country that is the original source of the bitterness of Krasznahorkai, winner of this year’s Nobel prize in literature. During my upbringing there, and before, for generations, politics had been a constant presence in everyday life, and history, too, with still fresh memories of fascism all around. I am not saying that politics dominated everything; there was life beyond it, but still, it was unavoidable. It provided the oppressive, at times humiliating, at times ridiculous mise en scène of our lives. During my youth spent in dissolute opposition to the tired version of communism in the 1980s, I knew that there was an alternative: the democracies of the West, which struck me, on my visits as an impoverished tourist from Eastern Europe, as obviously, vastly, and exhilaratingly superior to the places on my side of the Iron Curtain.

When I moved to New York in 1989, illusory as some of my expectations turned out to be, I reasonably concluded that I escaped history’s clutches. Like a good enough mother, guarding inconspicuously the safety of her children, American democracy turned out to be, from my vantage point in any case, the constantly humming background of a normal life unmarred by the intrusions of a power-hungry political regime. The newspapers, by and large, reported the facts instead of the tendentious, strangely formulated distortions and outright lies I grew up on, and there seemed to be a certain, minimal level of decorum in public affairs. I didn’t feel the need to be constantly on alert; I didn’t even need to know much about politics at all.

But now it looks like history has caught up with me again. So I started wondering if the Eastern European experience can shed any light on the present predicament of the US. If it can teach something about the meaning of resistance. Read more »

by William Benzon

Jersey City is a medium-size city on the West bank of the Hudson River across from Lower Manhattan. Up through the middle of the 20^th century it was a port and a railroad hub but that disappeared when containerized freighter became too deep to travel that far up New York Bay. Without any freighters the railroads were no longer needed. Light industry disappeared as well. Jersey City became back-offices and bedrooms to Manhattan-based business.

In the 19^th century the Morris Canal carried coal from Eastern Pennsylvania to the Hudson River at Jersey City. Most of the canal has been filled in, but the eastern-most bit remains. You can see it in the photo to the upper right. The small building to the left of center is an abandoned industrial building of some kind. As you can see various walls have collapsed, as has part of the roof.

When you get closer you can will that the walls are marked with graffiti, which I saw when I first approached the building in the middle of 2011. The graffiti changed from week to week and month to month. It is for that reason that I took to thinking of it as the ‘urban design studio.’ This is the south wall; the Morris Canal is behind us and the Hudson River is about a quarter mile to the right. Read more »

Brevity

I need a good poem
lifespan-short, one
I can shoe-horn between instants
which in that pinch says so much
I’ll understand long and short
by the depth of calluses
built upon my brain—

but it’s not happening
I’m already up to nine lines
so it’s too late for brevity—

what I want is one
that says something
without rolling on forever,
Amazon-like swaying
to topographical switches and
twists in rivers and streams
or cul-de-sacs of human error,

but now I see
this won’t end here
in brute summation
like a dead fish
wrapped mafia-like in newsprint
warning of impending
but once-avoidable
consequence,

no, it’ll go on
until all nouns,
verbs, conjugations,
& absolute clauses
have been spent,

until this mine of
memory and metaphor
is no more complete
than the store of meanings
dragged inside-out
by the flow of pregnant clauses
rendered in blood & bone
which lead to others and others and others
like cups filled & spilled into the flow
of sea-bound floods of multitudes of
sisters and brothers and cousins,
uncles and aunts and
fathers and mothers;
…………………………….—what if “brevity”
is just one more thing that seems?

Jim Culleny
7/1/18

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by Nils Peterson

At my senior center we have a Shakespeare class led by marvelous young woman, actor, playwright, professional clown. Her main method is to assign us parts and have us read the text out loud. I taught Shakespeare for a bunch of years and did some of this. But this class makes me wish I had done more of having students read out loud. I kept most of the good lines for myself. Selfish. Speaking well-ordered words is one of the great physical pleasures. Yes, physical pleasure. The body responds to good words in the right order (when you say them out loud with appropriate energy) in the way it does to a sip of good wine at evening,

We’ve been doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I got the part of Bottom. Here’s what I got a chance to read and rediscover in the reading:

Bottom: When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is “Most fair Pyramus.” Heigh-ho! Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout the tinker? Starveling? God’s my life, stol’n hence, and left me asleep?

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it in the latter end of a play before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

I had thought to call this piece “The Poetry of Of Incoherence,” but when I thought about it, that title is exactly wrong. Bottom is the most coherent of poets. What is the poet’s job but to find language to explain and share his experience. At this, Bottom is wonderfully successful. His experience is – to be loved by the queen of fairies while wearing an ass’s head. I know enough about wearing an ass’s head in romance to have the publisher of my first book of poems insist that the name of it be The Comedy of Desire. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

Some time ago – I can’t remember if it was before, during, or after the pandemic – I read Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, which is an account of Christopher Knight, a man who, in 1986, drove his car as far as he could into the Maine wilderness, adandoned it, and then proceeded to live in the woods without human contact for 27 years. My first reaction, and I sure I’m not alone in this, was to say “Ah, wouldn’t that be nice, to get completely free from everyone!” followed very swiftly by the realization that I wouldn’t last a day in such circumstances, not just due to my total incompetence as an outdoorsman, but also that I have a limited tolerance for isolation. I live what’s likely a more solitary life than most, but I still need contact with people, at least on occasion. Nevertheless, I remain impressed with Knight; like a person who has complete immunity to some serious disease, Knight seems to have been completely invulnerable to loneliness.

A Google search will provide you with a raft of recent articles which informs us of the deleterious social, mental and even physical effects of loneliness, and their increasing pervasiveness. In January of this year, the Atlantic published an article entitled “The Anti-Social Century” about our tendency to isolate even in settings where we used to commune with others; we go to the bar, take out our phones, and drink in a solitude nearly as complete as if we just stayed home. Now, not three weeks after the Atlantic published the above article, it published another one questioning the existence of a loneliness epidemic, so perhaps we can rest a little easy – but the potential seriousness of the issue ought also to concern us. Loneliness is not just a private or purely social concern; there are, as Hannah Arnedt told us, serious political concerns here. Lonely people lose their connection to others and, Arendt thought, to reality itself. These people become deeply manipulable and subject to the predations of those who would unite them into groups bent on destruction; loneliness is a precondition for totalitarianism. A common quality of contemporary warnings against the dangers of loneliness is that we all must “reconnect;” stop looking at your phone at the bar and talk to somebody – the bartender’s always there, right? Read more »