by Meghan Falvey and Asad Raza

In 1981, Irish republican prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, conducted a hunger strike at HM Maze prison near Belfast. Steve McQueen's Hunger is an account of that strike. It opened in New York City on Friday, and we recommend you see the film before reading this.

Meghan: The restraint of your summary suits the movie, I think. I come to any movie or story about sectarian violence in Northern Ireland expecting that I'm going to be attacked with sentiment, with a light scrim of history thrown over a pretty standard David vs Goliath root-for-the-underdog set up. It bothers me that that stuff can get into my Irish-American lizard brain– I cried watching Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and it was only partly out of frustration that I was susceptible to romantic nationalism. Also I expected another exercise in telling stories about recent history that are meant as metaphors for the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the War On Terror's illegal captures and torture. At the beginning of Hunger I felt like I braced for a similar assualt, and then it never came– I almost relaxed as it went on! The two Thatcher voiceovers were the closest thing to melodrama– what a ham she was! But that's enough, maybe, about what Hunger isn't. I watched it as a– well, what did you make of it?

Asad: The first thing that occurs to me to say to readers is: please see this beautiful, terrible film. I watch a lot of movies, and this one, from the first pounding sequence, felt fresh. More than fresh: new. There's lot to be said for letting a talented visual artist try to make a movie with total control–McQueen's technical confidence and maturity are so… there. There's a moment in the film where the Bobby Sands character breathes and as he does, there are three very brief dissolves to birds flying, and then back to Sands. He's near death. That brilliant use of an age-old technique–the dissolve–was so evocative and so sad that I cried. Even as a structure, the movie is very bold–it's a triptych in which the parts are almost totally distinct. (We have to talk about that middle “panel” in more detail below.) As for the politics of the film, which you bring up, I think they are my favorite kind: the politics of the body and not the body politic. Know what I mean?

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by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Online social networking is in the news of late–particularly as it applies to active, “older” users. Technically, that is me, though I’m inclined to dispute “older” as a demographic label (I’m 39! At least, according to Facebook’s Realage application). But I can’t argue that I’m active. Over the past year, in fact, I’ve gone on something of a cybernetworking binge, re-connecting with former classmates, “meeting” other writers, and composing lists of random facts, desert island playlists and theoretical “bail” estimates (645, if you’re interested. O.K., 645.50).

Like many earnest writers, I rationalize these lost hours as a sunk cost of doing e-commerce in the new millenium. After all, I have an upcoming paperback to promote. And with many publishers just discovering the brave new world of online publicity and the industry itself in screaming freefall, an internet presence seems as crucial to authors these days as family money, or jobs that actually pay. Which might explain why on some “work” days, I spend more time on my status update then I do on my second novel.

What I’ve had more trouble rationalizing, however, is the increasing chunk of time cybernetworking takes up in the lives of my daughters, eight and five respectively. Neither is on Facebook yet (a good thing, as I’d hate to defend my bail score to them. Particularly that last 50 cents). But they are both staunch fans of Club Penguin, a site that some see as a Facebook training ground of sorts.

I first learned about this parallel penguin world last year, when my eldest interrupted an important Facebook dispatch (a self-assessment of my general high school nerdiness) with a somewhat alarming question: “Hey Mom! What’s your Paypal password?”

“Uh–why do you need it?” I asked.

“I’m buying a penguin.”

Granted, a better answer than some of the alternatives (I’m getting a Snuggie! A Nigerian’s sending us money! Or worst of all: We’re eligible for a Disney cruise!) Still, the idea of a wet bird joining our psycho cat, attention-starved dog and two surly salamanders (soon to become one, thanks to either the dog or the cat) halted me in my cybertracks. And not only because the dog also happens to be a birder.

Putting aside, for the moment, the pressing question of whether or not my teen self was “considered a flirt” (it was not) I joined my eldest daughter—who was still trying to crack my bank account–on the couch. Repossessing my backup laptop, I backtracked a few pages. I found myself on a snow-covered island with several cheerful, oddly-dressed penguins. “Welcome to Club Penguin!” the site greeted me. “Waddle around and make new friends!”

“What is this?” I asked.

“Club Penguin,” Katie said, in a tone that suggested I’d just asked her to remind me of her name.

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by Jeff Strabone

Two famous men known for reinventing themselves have spent most of this decade in hiding: Osama bin Ladin and David Bowie. Away from the public eye, Bin Ladin has been busy releasing mixtapes of varying quality over the past few years, but Bowie not so much. Bin Ladin's listeners, at the CIA and around the world, are very devoted to his work: no matter the content or the production values, they really get into each of his new releases and perform close readings in order to make sense of the man and his œuvre. Bowie has his share of fans, too, myself included, who stand ready to parse his latest offerings, but he has not released a new album in almost six years. I think it's time he came out of his cave and faced the music. Aside from a handful of guest appearances with everyone from TV on the Radio to Scarlett Johanson, Bowie has been missing in action as a recording artist since September 2003 when he released his latest album Reality.

My friend Daniel F has suggested that it's far better for Bowie to wait out a potential creative dry spell than to make bad music. I intend to argue the exact opposite: that it is far better for a great artist to make bad work than to make no work. Yes, you read that right: I am demanding more bad art. And in Bowie's particular case, I hope to convince you to join me in asking him to get off the couch and release some new music, no matter how good or bad it may turn out to be.

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By Olivia Scheck

Whatever role one believes emotions should play in moral judgment, new research demonstrates that the influence of these low-level passions is profound. In fact, a study published in Science earlier this month suggests that many moral judgments are mediated by the same emotional mechanism that is activated by rotten leftovers and dirty socks.

“We started from this funny phenomenon where people will describe…moral offenses as ‘disgusting’…and we were wondering whether that actually means that people are feeling disgust,” explains Hanah Chapman, a graduate student in Psychology at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author. “In its basic form [disgust] has to do with food and eating and really concrete things. So it was surprising to us that it might be involved in something as abstract as moral codes.”

To test this question, the authors used electromyography to compare the activation of facial muscles in response to bitter tastes, pictures of physically disgusting stimuli and, finally, moral transgressions. Not only was the disgust expression elicited in all three conditions, it was also shown to predict future moral decisions – suggesting not only that moral disgust exists, but that it is – to a surprising degree – driving our behavior.

Is disgust just a metaphor?
As Chapman notes, we often employ notions of disgust when describing social violations, claiming that such behaviors make us “sick” or leave “a bad taste” in our mouths. And in certain cases this makes some sense. Popular “moral” issues like abortion and sodomy may include elements of physical contamination, so it’s possible that this is what people are responding to when they describe these practices as disgusting.

But we also use these terms to describe moral violations that don’t involve physical contaminants – transgressions like dishonesty and theft. (As Adam Anderson, another of the study’s authors, points out, a Google search for “Blagojevich and disgust” yields around 49,000 hits. “Madoff and disgust” yields around 658,000.) Are we actually expressing disgust – the kind that is inspired by cockroaches and flatulence –in these instances? Or are these invocations simply metaphorical?

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On “the sequencing of the mathematical genome”

Mathematics is funnier than it gets credit for, and the best laugh I ever had about math involved a friend in college and a course so intimidating he almost quit his mathematics major after hearing the name. “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” it was called, a title that betrayed a martinet attitude. Whereas your average multivariable calc class was flabby and slack-ass, here you’d finally get some goddamn discipline, boy. You will throw up.

Word around the chalkboard was that every homework problem in “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach” required six sheets of paper, because you wrote out every nitpicky step and made every assumption explicit, no matter how obvious—not even arithmetic was taken for granted. For some reason I got endless delight terrorizing Mark by pointing out all the horrid, spindly-legged theorems in other books he would have to dissect in “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” predicting the logic would drive him actually mad. Every time I mentioned the class, I used its full draconian title, “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” and fear of it drove him to the brink both of hyperventilation and of dropping his major, which probably would have meant him dropping out of college.

Mark was spared by an administrative overhaul of the department, so he never took the class. For my part, I’d almost forgotten the whole incident until I came across a curious bundle of papers in a recent issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society—four treaties on the future of mathematical proofs, and specifically on how computers were going to take over a large burden of the work in mathematical proofs. However unpromising that topic sounds, it soon had my thoughts dilating like a marijuana smoker’s thoughts into all sorts of wild conjectures, because it turns out (1) “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach” was flabby and slack-ass compared to what’s coming in formal mathematics, and (2) the idea of mathematical beauty might soon be extinct.

First, a few lines of history (cribbed from the papers, natch): The first great revolution in math came from Pythagoras, Euclid, and the rest of the Greeks, who introduced the concept of proofs. You saw examples of this in your high-school geometry class. Next, in the 1800s, came the next big thing, rigor. Oddly, rigor in math is most easily recognized as a feeling—the scrotum-shrinking embarrassment that even people really, really good at college math feel upon realizing that some people are way the hell smarter. Namely, people who do original work in rigorous mathematics.

The next and latest revolution in math was the subject of the NAMS papers—formalization. Formalization means tracing math back to fundamental axioms, the kind of migrainous set theory that takes pages to explicate just why two is the successor of one. It turns out there’s currently a movement in mathematics—and the authors of the quartet of papers claim that not even most mathematicians realize at, or at least don’t admit it—but there’s a movement to make all mathematical proofs fully formal. To basically take a six-page homework problem from “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach” and apply even more destructive methods to every single line of that problem, expanding the amount of rigor geometrically if not exponentially.

Why? Because when you tease apart every atom of every line, you can actually convert very hard mathematical concepts into a series of very simple steps. The steps might seem stunted and overly obvious and useless, but they lo and behold add up to something in the end. It’s like someone explaining how a car engine works by starting with the theory of bolts screwing onto threads and going into incredibly arcane detail about it, and then repeating that nut-and-bolt explanation every time you came across another screw. You’d get pissed off, but you’d also probably understand how a car engine worked if he continued to break everything down to concepts that simple. That’s formal mathematics. And once you’ve checked all the ticky-tack steps between lines of a proof, you can be pretty darn sure it’s correct. One paper’s author called this “the sequencing of the mathematical genome.”

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By Maniza Naqvi

I focus hard on being polite to him. I don’t want to give myself away.

I ingratiate myself with every sentence and every gesture. I reach out and touch his arm, replenish the wine in his glass. He is visiting from Belgrade.

I gush about how wonderful this town is. How friendly and warm everyone is in Sarajevo, how kind and welcoming they are to strangers.

He smiles and asks me, 'Could you please tell me where is that place in the world where you have been and people are not friendly? Is there such a place where people are not nice to foreigners?

I keep my voice friendly. I could tell him of a few places he knows well. But I don’t say that. I keep smiling and talking.

I make sure that I'm smiling and so I send a mental message to my eyes to make sure they are complying and smiling too. I must appear easy, someone he can trust.

I look for points of commonality

I want to show him how a Pakistani and a Muslim is completely sympathetic, friendly, likable.

And I notice that as I listen to him—I believe him—I see his narrative as worthy of sympathy and plausibility.

He is showing me how a Serb, a Christian, is completely friendly, likable.

He is trying so hard—I can see through his smoothness.

I seize on the opportunity when he speaks nostalgically about the wonderfulness of Yugoslavia and how the Serbians miss the good times.

I tell him that the Bosnians feel the same way about Tito and Yugoslavia.

His eyes flash, 'I don't need to be told that,' he says. 'We know that—us—we Yugoslavians know how each other feels.'

It's as though he is saying to me, the foreigner, that he is so done with this, our outsiders interpretations, our interlocutions on his peoples’ behalf—and our narratives of them and on their behalf. He is done with the foreigners’ narratives of the people of Yugoslavia as though these were the truth itself.

His anger touches me. I feel the same way when 'foreigners' speak and write about Pakistan, India and Islam.

I am determined to ignore his constant need to counter each praise or nice word said about Sarajevo or Bosnians. And the constant undermining of what happened in the war. What happened in the war? I suddenly realize that my understanding is based on what has been told to me by Bosnians in the Federation and in the RS who are Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Catholic. I don't have any understanding of how things are understood in Serbia. How they view the world. It seems as though he sees Serbia as a place that is pristine and its people innocent of any crime at all. If there are any crimes, in his view, then they have been committed as crimes that any oppressed group is likely to commit. And have been committed by a lesser quality of Serb—the ones that reside in Bosnia.

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Part One: Grapholectic Thought and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

by Daniel Rourke

“There are things,” Christoph Martin Wieland… contended, “which by their very nature are so dependent upon human caprice that they either exist or do not exist as soon as we desire that they should or should not exist.”

…We are, at the very least, reminded that seeing is a talent that needs to be cultivated, as John Berger saliently argued in his popular Ways of Seeing (1972) “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.”

John A. Mccarthy, Remapping Reality

From the Greco-Roman period onwards humans have perceived themselves at the centre of a grand circle:

• The circle is physical: a heliocentric vision of the cosmos, where the Earth travels around the sun.

• The circle is biological: an order of nature, perhaps orchestrated by a benign creator, where the animals and plants exist to satisfy the needs of mankind.

• And according to Sigmund Freud, in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, the circle is psychological: where a central engine of reason rules over the chaos of passion and emotion.

The history of science maintains that progress – should one be comfortable in using such a term – contracted these perceptual loops. Indeed it was Freud himself, (the modest pivot of his own solar-system) who suggested that through the Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian “revolutions” mankind had transcended these “three great discontinuities” of thought and, “[uttered a] call to introspection”.

If one were to speculate on the “great discontinuities” that followed, one might consider Albert Einstein’s relativistic model of space-time, or perhaps the work carried out by many “introspective” minds on quantum theory. Our position at the centre of the cosmos was offset by Copernicus; our position as a special kind of creature was demolished by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. From Freud we inherited the capacity to see beneath the freedom of the individual; from Einstein and quantum theory we learnt to mistrust the mechanistic clock of space and time. From all we learnt, as John Berger so succinctly put it, that “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.”

Of course my mini-history of scientific revolution should not be taken itself as a “truth”. I draw it as a parable of progress, as one silken thread leading back through time’s circular labyrinth to my very own Ariadne. What I do maintain though, is that all great moves in human thought have come at the expense of a perceptual circle. That, if science, sociology, economics – or any modern system of knowledge – is to move beyond the constraints of its circle it must first decentre the “single eye”.

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