Can we date revolutions in the history of literature and music?

The Stone and the Shell

Humanists know the subjects we study are complex. So on the rare occasions when we describe them with numbers at all, we tend to proceed cautiously. Maybe too cautiously. Distant readers have spent a lot of time, for instance, just convincing colleagues that it might be okay to use numbers for exploratory purposes.

But the pace of this conversation is not entirely up to us. Outsiders to our disciplines may rush in where we fear to tread, forcing us to confront questions we haven’t faced squarely.

For instance, can we use numbers to identify historical periods when music or literature changed especially rapidly or slowly? Humanists have often used qualitative methods to make that sort of argument. At least since the nineteenth century, our narratives have described periods of stasis separated by paradigm shifts and revolutionary ruptures. For scientists, this raises an obvious, tempting question: why not actually measure rates…

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Dynamite and Prayers

HeideBlog

Dynamite and Prayers is the title of photographer Max Becherer’s stunning new book.

Although the subject is the emerald miners of Afghanistan, Max’s storytelling transports us to a sweeping landscape few of us can even imagine — and unveils the true cost of war.

I’ve had the privilege of working with many world-class photographers, but Max is one of only two I know personally who have chosen to focus on war. He’s captured some of the most famous images of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan — his C.V. is full of names like Baghdad and Fallujah — and in the process he’s repeatedly risked his life.

A war photographer’s work is obviously taxing: While everyone around you is trying to either kill or survive, your job is to watch and record. Over time, it can take a toll on your humanity.

But in Max’s case, exposure to war…

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Depression is a Trip

The Art of Wabi-Sabi (or Things You Will Learn Later in your Life)

Black coffee and cigarettes

You are 37 when you first fall in love – properly, passionately, the way you dreamed of when you scribbled furiously in your teenage notebooks and that has eluded you until precisely this moment in a dusty Cairo hotel. It is not love at first sight and there is no Hollywood meet-cute, but there is a touching of souls, as Joni Mitchell once sang, that reverberates long after you meet him.

Months later, you leave everything you know and traverse continents to go back to him and a new life in the city he has bequeathed you. Over the next three years, you learn that Great Loves can be irrational and painful, full of terrible highs and soaring lows, that passion is overrated, and it is never good, as someone once told you, to love another person more than you love yourself. One day, you wake up and realise that…

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Why Aziz Ansari Has Destroyed My Chances, And Why He Is So So Important:

Arnab Chanda

Throughout my life, even though we’ve never met, Aziz Ansari has consistently beaten me to the punch. It’s becoming a theme. A sometimes very annoying theme. Although, for various reasons I’ll discuss below, I do believe he has been the most important Indian Comedy Actor in the past 10 years.

In his new series on Netflix, Master of None, Aziz Ansari says “There can only be two,” referring to the idea that there can only ever be 2 Indians in one show at any point, max. Studio Executives and Networks are afraid to put any more than that, and they’re afraid most of the time, to even put one on.

I remember when I started doing stand-up in New York City in 2003, and after watching me, a fellow comic asked me “Oh, do you know Aziz Ansari? He’s an young Indian stand up as well.” Aziz was another…

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