Cutesters: the Horrific New Trend That’s Consuming London

Clive Martin in Vice:

Cutesters-and-london-body-image-1419260598The change is interesting and very much real, I think. But for me, the question isn't, What is a cutester?—that has, more or less, already been answered. The question for me is: Where the fuck did the cutester come from? How did one of the world's most oppressive and unforgiving cities give birth to something so infantile and inane?…

It would be easy to pin the cutester on the usual suspects—to lay into BuzzFeed, the Cereal Cafe, Secret Cinema, “free hugs,” and Boris Johnson's breakfast burritos for siring this epidemic of the infantile. But London wasn't always like this. I personally had a very different image of the city growing up. To me, it was a city of knife amnesties, Irish fighting pubs, cruising saunas, City boy hooligans, Crystal Palace players with Streets of Rage haircuts, debutantes with blocked noses and clubs like Caesars in Streatham. The closest thing there was to a mayor was probably crime boss Terry Adams, and a “secret cinema” was a place you went to jerk off in public without getting your head kicked in, not dress up like a character from Back to the Future in public without getting your head kicked in.

But somewhere along the line, that changed, and undoubtedly it took a concerted effort for that to happen. It's hard to place the blame anywhere in particular. If there was any grand social project drawn up, it's one that has never been made public— there was no great speech made, it just kind of started to happen and never really stopped, in that ceaseless way that money has where it needs to keep creating more room for itself.

However, if I were forced to pinpoint the origins of the great shift that has led to the cutesters becoming as defining an image of London as the street gang Peel Dem Crew once were, I wouldn't choose the moment where Boris was elected, or when the first Krispy Kreme landed here, but the point when London decided to re-market itself as the knot of villages it ceased to be with the advent of trains in the 19th century. When London devolved into some weird former version of itself but with fewer dead infant chimney sweeps and more ads; a hybrid of the shopping center at Bluewater, Disney World, and a quaint town that never actually existed. When London became a poorly-travelled American's impression of itself.

Read the rest here.

Families in Literature: the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited

Moira Redmond in The Guardian:

BridesIf you read Brideshead Revisited for the first time in your teens (as so many of us do) you can come away with the idea of a Cinderella story: middle-class Charles is scooped up by the happy aristocracy – the deserving poor boy looking longingly through the window is allowed in, gawps at the magnificence, is grateful for the attention, and of course falls in love with Sebastian. But when you read it again, you see that Brideshead is not a book about Oxford, or homoerotic love, or social climbing: it’s a book about religion – and about families. It is Sebastian who is in love with Charles, jealously wanting to keep him to himself:

I’m not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They’re so madly charming. All my life they’ve been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with their charm, they’d make you their friend not mine, and I won’t let them.

Charles has no idea of family life – he lost his mother in an absurd Waugh manner during the first world war, and while his father is occasionally kind he is vague and not very paternal. Then he discovers the Flytes. “That summer term with Sebastian,” he says, “it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood.” The sadness is that Sebastian wants to grab on to Charles in order to get away, while Charles wants to belong. Brideshead is “where my family live”, says Sebastian, prompting Charles to reflect: “I felt, momentarily, an ominous chill at the words he used – not, ‘that is my house’, but ‘it’s where my family live’.”

More here.

Dare to Dream of Falling Short

Richard Friedman in The New York Times:

BookEver hear the joke about the guy who dreams of winning the lottery? After years of desperate fantasizing, he cries out for God’s help. Down from heaven comes God’s advice: “Would you buy a ticket already?!” Clearly, this starry-eyed dreamer is, like so many of us, a believer in old-fashioned positive thinking: Find your dream, wish for it, and success will be yours. Not quite, according to Gabriele Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University and the University of Hamburg, who uses this joke to illustrate the limitations of the power of positive thinking. In her smart, lucid book, “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation,” Dr. Oettingen critically re-examines positive thinking and give readers a more nuanced — and useful — understanding of motivation based on solid empirical evidence.

Conventional wisdom has it that dreams are supposed to excite us and inspire us to act. Putting this to the test, Dr. Oettingen recruits a group of undergraduate college students and randomly assigns them to two groups. She instructs the first group to fantasize that the coming week will be a knockout: good grades, great parties and the like; students in the second group are asked to record all their thoughts and daydreams about the coming week, good and bad. Strikingly, the students who were told to think positively felt far less energized and accomplished than those who were instructed to have a neutral fantasy. Blind optimism, it turns out, does not motivate people; instead, as Dr. Oettingen shows in a series of clever experiments, it creates a sense of relaxation complacency. It is as if in dreaming or fantasizing about something we want, our minds are tricked into believing we have attained the desired goal.

More here.

The Winners of the 3QD Philosophy Prize 2014

PhilTop2014 Philosophy Strange Quark 2014 (1) 2014 philosophy

Huw Price has picked the three winners from the nine finalists:

  1. Top Quark, $500: Grace Boey, Is applied ethics applicable enough? Acting and hedging under moral uncertainty
  2. Strange Quark, $200: Ryan Simonelli, Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and Rorty’s Strange Looping Trick
  3. Charm Quark, $100: Marcus Arvan, The Case for Libertarian Compatibilism

Here is what Professor Price had to say about them:

Like most academics, I spend far too much of my time practising the three Rs: reading, rating, and ranking. But I relished this particular task, because 3QD has long been one of my favourite escapes from these and other academic chores. Tired of making decisions, feeling outranked and over-rated, I'll relax with Raza's Reliable Recommendations —what a pleasure to let someone else do the choosing! (“No need to think, entrust the job to us”, as the sign at Trusty's Dyers and Cleaners used to say, many years ago.) So it was a treat, as well as an honour, to be asked to reciprocate by making some choices of my own from a field selected by 3QD's readers and editors.
I read all the nine shortlisted pieces eagerly and twice, when Abbas first announced the shortlist. Conveniently, I found that I had three clear favourites. I then came back to the entire field three busy, 3R-filled weeks later, and was pleased to find that my opinions hadn't changed. The same three were my favourites. I had my winners.
That was the easy bit. Ranking the final three was very hard indeed. They are very different pieces, and I liked them for very different reasons. How should I rank their competing virtues? Indeed, how should I deal with my uncertainty about what the standards should be, in a competition of this kind? Happily, this question led me to my top choice, which is Grace Boey's lovely piece, Is Applied Ethics Applicable Enough? Acting and Hedging Under Moral Uncertainty. This is just what the informative, expository kind of philosophy blog post should be, in my view. It is admirably fresh, lively, clear, accessible, and concise, and introduces its fortunate reader to a novel and fascinating philosophical topic.
With that settled, there was just one hard choice to make. At this point, no matter how much I tried to apply myself with solidarity to the task, I couldn't silence my ironic voice. It kept reminding me of the contingency that lies at the foundations not only of of my present choice, but of our entire evaluative lives! But that gave me my tie-breaker: second prize goes to Ryan Simonelli's Absolute Irony: Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and Rorty’s Strange Looping Trick. This is a longer and more ambitious piece than Boey's, but remains nicely coherent despite its length. It is held together by a strong and interesting theme, philosophical irony itself, which is the backbone of a little intellectual narrative, in several episodes. And it has one of my favourite pictures of Rorty at the top! How could I have been in any doubt?
Third prize, then, to Marcus Arvan's Flickers of Freedom: The Case for Libertarian Compatibilism. This is easily the most ambitious of the three —some may think over-ambitious— but enjoyable for its sheer philosophical chutzpah. Arvan argues that we can find evidence that we live in a computer simulation, a kind of vast P2P botnet, in the nature of some of our most profound puzzles in physics and philosophy. It would be an understatement to say that I didn't find it entirely convincing —some of the 'X is just like Y' claims seemed a little under-developed, for one thing! —but it is entertaining, thought-provoking, well-written and fun.
Congratulations to all three winners, and warm thanks to 3QD and its readers for giving me this opportunity, and to all the philosophical bloggers who make the blogosphere such a distracting place!

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (remember, you must claim the money within one month from today—just send me an email). And feel free, in fact we encourage you, to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Many thanks also, of course, to Huw Price for doing the final judging and for his liking of 3QD.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed by me, Carla Goller, and Sughra Raza. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Hobbes, Boyle, and the vacuum pump

by Charlie Huenemann

1024px-An_Experiment_on_a_Bird_in_an_Air_Pump_by_Joseph_Wright_of_Derby,_1768

An experiment on a bird in an air pump (Joseph Wright, 1768)

Sometime in the late 1650s, Robert Boyle built an apparatus that removed the air from within a glass dome. The members of the newly-formed Royal Society promptly set about devising all manner of experiments to perform with the newfangled device. They placed candles, mercury barometers, and then – just as one might expect of unsupervised boys – living mice within the dome and watched what happened as a piston systematically drained the air away. (It is probably a good thing for the local fauna that the experimenters did not have a bigger air pump at their disposal.)

The effects of these experiments were easily seen, but controversies raged nonetheless over what was really going on. Did the device truly empty everything from the dome? Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, and others insisted that a pure vacuum is impossible, and that some sort of rarified matter must remain in the dome. Their reasons for asserting this so confidently are various. Some found the suggestion of a specific volume attached to no material thing unintelligible. Others found it ridiculous to believe that as Boyle expelled the air out of the dome, and nothing took its place, the volume of the universe would necessarily inflate by just that amount.

In his “Physical Dialogue on the Nature of Air,” Thomas Hobbes offered his own view of what the air pump was doing. Hobbes and Boyle both denied that there is any real qualitative difference between fluids and piles of particles: the differences in their behaviors were the result of the sizes and shapes of their constituent particles. Fluids consist of slippery, eel-like particles that easily slide past one another in a liquid way, and piles consist of blockier particles whose shapes prevent such easy motion. From this fact, Hobbes went on to explain that when the piston of a so-called “vacuum” pump withdraws from the chamber, the piston pushes upon the sea of particles outside the chamber, with the result that very, very tiny eel-like particles forcibly squirm their way back into the chamber (for they are the only ones that can slither through the very, very tiny pores of the chamber's glass walls). The pond of particles inside the chamber is thus made increasingly pure and light – and this is what these fellows meant by the aether. This aether is a real, material thing, they said, but is not sufficiently rich to sustain the life of a flame or a mouse. Furthermore, Hobbes's theory explained why a very great force would be required to withdraw the piston, since there ends up being a particle traffic jam around the chamber's tiny pores.

Read more »

Monday Poem

.
—from a TED Talk

Idea

what is the space of
creativity?

lightning flash

…. stroke

…….. epiphany

………… eureka!

……………..something new?

………………….no

an idea's a network
a liquid network

a new configuration
a slow hunch
hatched from the minds of many thinkers
gaining capacity
which for decades flickers and finally
surges into view
.

by Jim Culleny
12/18/14

On Fear of Surveillance Technology

by Emrys Westacott

Surveillance of people by governments and other institutions is an ancient practice. According to the legend, the first Christmas occurred in Bethlehem because of a census ordered by the emperor Augustus. One of the first acts of William the Conqueror after becoming king of England was to commission the Doomsday Book–an exact accounting of people and property throughout the realm.
ImagesKnowing who people are, where they live, what they own, what they think, and whom they associate with has long been recognized as key to holding and exercising power. Not surprisingly, therefore, chief surveillance officers like Cardinal Richelieu and J. Edgar Hoover have been among the most powerful men of their time.

It is a commonplace that the technological revolution based on the digital computer has made possible a revolution in surveillance. This process is well underway and can be expected to continue into the foreseeable future. Innovations that constitute this revolution include:

  • cameras monitoring highways, airports, banks, shops, malls, streets and other public placestelephone records of every call made, often including a record of the actual conversation
  • monitoring and recording of e-mail, text messages, and other internet activity; of all financial transactions, particularly banking, credit card purchases, and loans; and of individual shopping habits from large item mail order purchases to the particular brands of tinned fruit one prefers at the supermarket
  • digitization (which allows for more detail plus enhanced accessibility) of hence of medical records, academic records, and other data bases of personal information, including fingerprints and other unique identifiers, used by police, immigration services, and other government agencies concerned with law enforcement or security
  • tracking devices attached to people or vehicles
  • implants that monitor such things as a person's pulse or insulin levels and send alerts if these change dramatically

The list could be extended almost indefinitely. One notable consequence of all this monitoring is that the police and other agencies with access to this information can track our movements much more easily than in the past. Every time we send a text message or swipe a credit card, they fix our location.

The revolution in surveillance technology gives rise to at least three different kinds of fear.

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FORGETTING WHAT WE USED TO KNOW

by Brooks Riley

Icicles_on_the_Launch_Tower_-_GPN-2000-001348I had an uneasy feeling on the day of the Challenger launch in January 1986. My memory tells me that I didn’t even watch it live, although I had, growing up, watched early shots into space: Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, and later, the first manned flight to the moon. I was excited by the idea of a civilian, Christa McAuliffe, flying up there with the pros of the space program. But the weather bothered me, even if I didn’t yet know about the serious technical problems with O-rings at much milder temperatures.

It was bitterly cold in Florida on the night before the launch, with record-breaking temperatures well below freezing. Although the weather was clear, there was ice everywhere, probably the result of high humidity in the air. My worry stemmed from first-hand knowledge of the destructive power of ice.

Anyone who’s ever grown up in a drafty old house knows that when winter comes, the water should be turned off and the pipes drained in those parts of the house that are unheated. If not, sub-freezing temperatures will freeze the water, the ice expanding and ultimately bursting the thickest of metal pipes. The damage comes later, after the thaw, when water starts pouring from the hole in the pipe. I know this from experience.

Wikipedia describes it this way: The effect of expansion during freezing can be dramatic, and ice expansion is a basic cause of freeze-thaw weathering of rock in nature and damage to building foundations and roadways from frost heaving. It is also a common cause of the flooding of houses when water pipes burst due to the pressure of expanding water when it freezes.

How much condensation had seeped into the rockets’ seams and frozen there, the ice expanding and putting pressure on the joints? Does it matter that the O-rings were blamed, they too having been damaged by the cold temperatures? Might there have been other damage inside the rockets as well? We’ll never know.

The fact that the O-rings held as long as they did during take-off surprised even the engineers who had tried to stop the launch. If the mysterious puff of grey smoke before lift-off (before or after ignition?) truly heralded the failure of the O-rings, how could the Challenger have managed to go 73 long seconds before it began to break apart? Could the destruction of the Challenger have been caused by ice damage?

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Extended Cognition (Part I)

by Carl Pierer

Andy Clark and David Chalmers present a thesis of extended cognition andClark&Chalmers extended mind in their seminal 1998 paper: “The extended mind”. In it, they attack the idea that cognition and mind should be confined to the boundaries of our skull. Instead, they suggest, that the tools and instruments used in cognitive processes are part of the cognitive process. Clark and Chalmers support this claim by the following consideration. Suppose, Wolfram is seated before a computer screen and asked to play Tetris. He has to decide whether certain shapes that keep appearing on the top of the screen will fit into slots at the bottom of the screen. There are three scenarios:

1) Wolfram rotates the shapes mentally to decide whether they fit or not.

2) Wolfram presses a button to rotate the shape on the screen and then compares the shape to the slot.

3) Wolfram lives in the not-so-far future and has a neural implant which allows him to rotate the shape physically in his head. He can either use the neural implant to decide whether the shape will fit or use the initial method in 1). (See Clark & Chalmers 1998)

Clark and Chalmers think that in 3) it does not matter whether Wolfram uses the implant or the mental rotation, either way deciding whether the shape will fit counts as a cognitive process. To meet obvious objections, it can be supposed that the neural implant works exactly like the computer in 2). But if it is the case that the neural implant in 3) is functionally just like the computer in 2), there is no difference between 3) and 2). Neither is there a difference between 1) and 3). But then, if 1) is like 3) and 3) is like 2), 1) must be like 2). Therefore, since 1) is a cognitive process, 2) is a cognitive process as well and cognition extends.

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Cubas of the Imagination

by Lisa Lieberman


Weekend 3“Get ready for a torrid tropical holiday!” That's how the announcer on the trailer for Weekend in Havana (1941) introduced this film. Torrid: full of passionate or highly charged emotions arising from sexual love. Now there's an adjective to get your heart rate up! The list of synonyms in my thesaurus includes lustful, steamy, sultry, sizzling, hot, and here's Carmen Miranda, promising all that and more. I dare you to sit still through the opening number.

Granted, the Hays Code strictly limited how much steamy sex you could show explicitly in a 1941 movie, but directors were free to use innuendo. Here's handsome leading man John Payne working out the details of his (ahem) business relationship with Ms. Miranda. Meanwhile, Alice Fay is finding romance in the arms of a Latin lover, played by the Cuban-American actor Cesar Romero, a.k.a. “the Latin from Manhattan.” Rumba, anyone?

The archetypical Latin lover was Italian heartthrob Rudolph Valentino, of course. Back in the 1920s, he drove women mad with desire in his breakthrough role as a gaucho in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, stealing another man's partner and whisking her off in a tango faster than you can say, “Shall we dance?” Before his untimely death at the age of 31, he'd play a sheik (twice), a Spanish bullfighter, a Cossack, a maharaja, and a French aristocrat. The Latin bit had more to do with machismo style than nationality, it would appear. The gaucho's imperiousness on the dance floor was matched by the sheik's in ordering women about; in a famous scene from the sequel, Son of the Sheik, Valentino even initiates nonconsensual sex with the dancing girl whom he believes has betrayed him. (Valentino's films were all made before the Hays Code.)

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Manic Social Body

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

TrafficThe traffic jam has become a peculiar construction in relation to the Global South. As I began writing, I wasn't sure what to focus on when looking at the traffic jam. Where does one go to find it? To the city of course. Can one touch it, taste it, smell it? Yes to all of the above. In methodology, should one speak about the everyday possibilities of tiny jams? Or should one traffic in images of the big thing as it were, such as the one in Beijing that lasted more than ten days and was endlessly tweeted, facebooked, and hyperlinked? An article in the Wall Street Journal dated August 2010 reports on this modern-day wonder:

“A 60-mile traffic jam near the Chinese capital could last until mid-September, officials say. Traffic has been snarled along the outskirts of Beijing and is stretching toward the border of Inner Mongolia ever since roadwork on the Beijing-Tibet Highway started Aug. 13. As the jam on the highway, also known as National Highway 110, passed the 10-day mark Tuesday, vehicles were inching along little more than a third of a mile a day….Other cities around the world face similar congestion headaches. The worst are in developing countries where the sudden rise of a car-buying middle class outpaces highway construction. Unlike in the U.S., which had decades to develop transportation infrastructure to keep up with auto buyers. Still, Beijing beat out Mexico City, Johannesburg, Moscow and New Delhi to take top spot in the International Business Machines Corp. survey of “commuter pain,” which is based on a measure of the economic and emotional toll of commuting.”

Of course, this is not a new “developing country” story. Too many cars, and too little road, which then naturally extends into the argument, too much government, and too little capital. The story of the traffic jam becomes an oft-told tale. And the kind of great traffic jam that I refer to performs a very interesting function. It is a spectacle that obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present. But of course, as anybody who has been in any kind of traffic jam will tell you, it does feel like a never-ending present.

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Is Moral Offsetting™ Right for You?

by Thomas Rodham Wells

Do you want to be a good person but find yourself always falling short?

It may not be your fault. These days it is difficult to feel like good person. In fact the more you try, the more you may feel like a failure. Thanks to egalitarianism, globalisation, activist NGOs, the internet and over-active moral philosophers the calls on our moral attention are multiplying at an absurd rate.

Everywhere we turn there are people demanding that we take moral responsibility for ever more features of our lives and the implications of our actions. Almost everything we do turns out to be involve a moral choice, or more than one, in which our deepest principles are at stake. If you're an egalitarian, how come you help your kids with their homework? If you're against child-slavery, how come you still eat chocolate? If you're against racism, how come you enjoy ‘white privileges' like not being afraid when the police pull you over? And so on. Want to put milk on your breakfast cereal? There's a moral philosopher out there who wants you to read about murdered baby cows first.

Enough! These demands would challenge the forbearance and commitment of a saint. Trying to satsify them all would leave no room for getting on with your own life.

But it gets worse. Although they are presented as moral challenges, as tests of your principles, many of these demands are actually moral puzzles with no right answer. Flying to England to visit your sick grandmother, perhaps for the last time, is absolutely the right thing to do, but it's also absolutely the wrong thing to do if you care about the environment and justice for future generations.

You just can't win no matter how hard you try!

The rising tide of moralisation has been rather more successful in making us feel constantly guilty about everything we do than in inspiring us to live morally better lives. And this is not surprising since it demands that we take on the burden of extended moral responsibility – for the well-being of children in Cote d'Ivoire, for future generations, for the survival of rare species, and so on – without giving us the tools we need to manage that responsibility. Unfortunately feeling guilty all the time is morally debilitating. It undermines our ability and motivation to make good moral decisions in the first place.

If everything we do is wrong, why bother to even try to do the right thing?

Fortunately the solution is at hand. Here at Moral Tranquillity plc we believe that good people should be able to live a life free from guilt. That's why we have developed a range of Moral Offsetting™ products that make meeting your moral responsibilities simple and affordable.

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POSTCARD FROM SPAIN #2

by Randolyn Zinn

Is travel a cure or a placebo? Maybe just a place to be.

Sometimes when I close my eyes, the towers of the Alhambra stand gleaming beyond our hotel garden where we picked a lime from a low-hanging bough. Other times, the noisy crush of Bodega Castenada comes back, how its neighborhood crowd parted slightly to let us squeeze through its front doors for a taste of salty tapas and a swallow of sherry.

Best, though, is the indelible image we found in Arcos de la Frontera. After climbing up and around its narrow streets, intermittently glimpsing through open doors or windows, women sizzling sofrito or kids playing video games, the cathedral San Pedro looms over the town at its highest point. Cold enough inside to preserve the moldering body of Saint Fructoso (3rd century) and statues of saints — including the beautifully clothed marble Virgin who holds her heart in one hand pierced by seven swords — the church is hammered with half an acre of Aztec gold for a dazzling refuge of superstition and repository of prayers.

In one of the cathedral's recessed chapels, aptly named Our Lady of Loneliness, we lit a votive before a glass case where a rosy porcelain infant Jesus rests his downy head on a human skull. I lost my breath for a second while contemplating this image of innocence at peace with death for it embodied the consolation I hadn’t known I was seeking.

Feliz Navidad.

Baby Jesus on skull

photo by R. Zinn

The Undocumented Journey North, Through Mexico

by Hari Balasubramanian

On Oscar Martinez's “The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail” — the English translation of “Los Migrantes Que No Importan” (The Migrants Who Do Not Matter). Translation by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington.

—-

ThebeastFrom 2000-2006, I was a graduate student at Arizona State University in the Phoenix metro area. My neighborhood, a ten minute walk from the university, had cheap apartments where Asian students lived alongside immigrants from south of the US-Mexico border. We students had visas, had made safe journeys on flights, and now worked and studied on campus. Many Hispanic immigrants, in contrast, had made life threatening journeys and had crossed the border illegally. They now did construction, farm, and restaurant jobs for a living. At the neighborhood Pakistani-Indian restaurant, I remember seeing – through a decorative window shaped as a Mughal motif – three Hispanic workers in the kitchen patiently chopping the onions and tomatoes that would go into the curries that I enjoyed.

Some Indian students looked down on these immigrants, blaming them for petty bicycle thefts and how unsafe the streets were at night. And just as all East Asians were “Chinkus”, the immigrants from south of the border were “Makkus” – a twist on “Mexican”, used mostly (but not always) in a negative sense. No one, though, had a clear sense what the stories of these immigrants were. While it is true that a large percentage of those who cross the border are from Mexico, tens of thousands each year come from the troubled countries further south – Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. This year, an estimated 60,000 unaccompanied minors from Central American countries, fleeing violence in their home towns, will cross the border. Surprisingly, even hundreds of undocumented South Asians cross via Mexico – but more on that later.

In the long view of history, this is how things look. First, European immigrants ethnically cleanse most of North America of its American Indian inhabitants. This was illegal immigration – just consider the number of land treaties broken – but at the time it was glorified as Manifest Destiny. With help from Africans kidnapped and enslaved against their will (coerced immigration) European settlers eventually create a powerful country that now draws people from all continents. Among modern trends in immigration, it is the Hispanic one that stands out. Undocumented immigrants – the numbers are hard to estimate, but there seem to be 10-12 million of them in the US – have altered the demographic and culture in many states, much to the consternation of American conservatives. An interesting fact, though of no practical consequence, is that the mixed race (mestizo) and indigenous immigrants of Mexico and Central America, crossing over in their tens of thousands, happen to be the closest genetic relatives of the North American Indians.

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Jesus

by Maniza Naqvi

CarI can hear the Hallelujah man down on Broadway near the subway station. Ha-Le Lu yah—Ha-Le-Lu-Yah! Gee—Zuz! Gee Zuz! Gee-Zuz! I love you—-I love you—I love you—Ha—Le-Lu Yah—Ha-Le-Lu-Yah.

And I'm reminded suddenly of that time one evening when Jesus walked into a bar with a Pakistani and an Indian in Sarajevo.

I guess it's a good time to tell you this story.

Jesus looked very serious that evening a decade ago and formal too as Sanjay invited me to supper with them.

‘We're taking you to the finest restaurant in all of Sarajevo!' Sanjay said. And before I could say it was a tourist trap or anything like that Jesus solemnly added,‘It is my favorite.'

I think that was the first time I had heard him speak. He never uttered a word during staff meetings—just took notes and nodded from time to time. He wore Save the Children ties.

Now who was going to argue about where to go and what to eat with Jesus? Not me. Not with Jesus from Procurement or Sanjay from Financial Management both of whom, had my project document on their desks for review and which I needed back from them cleared and approved by c.o.b the next day. If this was the finest and the favorite restaurant in town who was I to show them the error of their ways or contradict them at nine p.m. on a cold and quiet night when I had nowhere else to go to. So be it. Done.I braced myself for the boring evening ahead.

On the short walk to the restaurant I stopped at an ATM machine. As I withdrew a couple of hundred Convertible Marks, I commented to them ‘This probably functions as surveillance. Someone somewhere knows that I'm standing at the corner of Olitsa such and such at such and such time in such and such city.'

Sanjay laughed ‘You are so paranoid. There is no such thing. This is the year 2004 not the book 1984!'

Jesus remained silent.

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How the Victorians Invented the Future

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Iwan Rhys Morus in Aeon (image by SSPL/Getty):

Before the beginning of the 19th century, the future was only rarely portrayed as a very different place from the present. The social order, like the natural order, was supposed to be static, with everything in its proper place: as it had been, so it would be. When Sir Isaac Newton thought about the future, he worried about the exact date of Armageddon, not about how his science might change the world. Even Enlightenment revolutionaries usually argued that what they were doing was restoring the proper order of things, not creating a new world order.

It was only around the beginning of the 1800s, as new attitudes towards progress, shaped by the relationship between technology and society, started coming together, that people started thinking about the future as a different place, or an undiscovered country – an idea that seems so familiar to us now that we often forget how peculiar it actually is.

The new technology of electricity seemed to be made for futuristic speculation. At exhibition halls in London, such as the Adelaide Gallery or the Royal Polytechnic Institution, early Victorians could marvel at electrical engines that promised to transform travel. Inventors boasted that ‘half a barrel of blue vitriol [copper sulphate] and a hogshead or two of water, would send a ship from New York to Liverpool’. People went to these places to see the future made out of the present: when Edgar Allen Poe in 1844 set out to fool the New York Sun’s readers that a balloon flight had just made it across the Atlantic, he made sure to tell them that the equipment used had been ‘put in action at the Adelaide Gallery’.

Bringing the future home, Alfred Smee, then surgeon to the Bank of England, told readers of his Elements of Electro-Metallurgy (1841) how they would ‘enter a room by a door having finger plates of the most costly device, made by the agency of the electric fluid’. The walls would be ‘covered with engravings, printed from plates originally etched by galvanism’, and at dinner ‘the plates may have devices given by electrotype engravings, and his salt spoons gilt by the galvanic fluid’. It was becoming impossible to talk about electricity at all without talking about the future.

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King of the Dump

Jared Downing in Roads and Kingdoms:

ThailandToday, Fred Stockwell, a white-haired Englishman, is the only Westerner out on the landfill, patrolling the garbage in a dusty pickup. The squatters, migrants from Myanmar, just across the border, come out of their bamboo and steel shacks and make hand signs for the boots, batteries, and medicine stacked in the truck bed. Stockwell tells me last week a woman gave birth in the truck; the next morning he filled it with kids and drove them to school.

“No smile from you, huh?” Stockwell says to a man in rubber boots who pauses to scowl while rummaging the trash for recyclables. “He doesn’t like me because he didn’t get any rice the other day.” A group of volunteers from Australia had handed it out by the sack-full, but Stockwell got stuck with the blame for the villagers who missed out. He’s been growling about it all morning. “They’ll come in, throw out rice, throw something out, shoot photographs, lots of dirty kids. They want to see misery,” he sighs. “They ruin everything I’ve set up here.”

When he came to Thailand seven years ago, Stockwell’s community-based organization, Eyes to Myanmar, was the only one serving the roughly 400 migrant squatters settled on the mountain of trash. Decades of strife in Myanmar had already made the border city a philanthropic boomtown, but only in the last few years has the city’s landfill caught the attention of the smattering of NGOs, community-based organizations, religious ministries, and volunteer teams who come bearing rice, shoes, toys and, of course, their own cameras.

They all encounter Stockwell—or as they sometimes call him, the King of the Dump. The 70-year-old is a key figure in a philanthropic turf war that began when first newcomers planted their flags in the garbage. The trash heap a notorious graveyard of failed humanitarian projects.

Christina Jordan insists that Piglets for Progress, which supplied young pigs to village families, isn’t the dump’s latest causality, but it’s hard not to think of it that way. When she told her local consultant that the project wouldn’t continue, “He just sort of smiled and said, ‘They never do.’”

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Sending off ‘The Colbert Report’ at just the right time

Alyssa Rosenberg in The Washington Post:

ColbertThe #CancelColbert kerfuffle earlier this year never seriously threatened either Colbert’s current job at Comedy Central or his move up the ladder to one of broadcast television’s prized late-night spots. But the incident, in which Colbert was criticized for a bit that invoked anti-Asian animus to mock Washington football team owner Dan Snyder’s attempts to buy off opposition to his team’s name, signaled a shift. “The Daily Show” (once Stewart arrived at the anchor’s desk) and “The Colbert Report” became hugely popular precisely because they were insurgent voices, aiming Rube Goldberg-style verbal slingshots at the George W. Bush administration, conservatives in Congress and on the Supreme Court, and emerging powerful right-wing donors such as the Koch brothers. Whatever differences existed on the left (or in the frustrated center), viewers could unite around the genius of a concept like “truthiness.” But as the Obama years have faded into frustration and obstructionism, the left has turned inward. #CancelColbert grew out of the idea that no matter how much Colbert had done to target racism on the right, he didn’t have standing to employ anti-Asian sentiment, even in jest and even in service of a larger point about the continuing cultural and material discrimination against Native Americans.

This is a difficult environment for a satirist of good will to operate under, though the turn toward sincerity has produced plenty of other pieces of great pop culture. One of the biggest hits of 2014 has been the breakout podcast sensation “Serial,” in which Sarah Koenig struggles to be fair in her assessment of an old murder case. In superhero movies, the wisecracks of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) have given way to the moral meditations of Captain America (Chris Evans) and the unabashed enthusiasm of Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who goes by the decidedly unselfconscious moniker Starlord. Lorde’s achingly direct album “Pure Heroine” continued to be a refuge from the wearisome posturing of rapper Iggy Azalea. And rather than be rendered irrelevant, Colbert is in a strong position to fit right in.

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