Original illustration © Jia Sung

“Don’t eat pigs,” she said. “So I can kiss you, if we meet again.” That was how she said it, in Mandarin. Pigs, not pork. The line went dead. I was out of calling-card credits again.

We’d met a year earlier, in 2002, at the Shanghai Municipal Physical Sports School. She was fourteen, I was fifteen. She played soccer, I played softball. She was a Uighur Muslim who’d never heard of metropolitan Singapore, I was a Straits Chinese atheist who didn’t know pastoral Xinjiang existed.

A soccer coach, trawling rural northwestern China for athletic girls from underprivileged backgrounds, lied to their parents: If your daughter trains hard, she might be selected for the 2008 Beijing Olympics! In truth, the girls were only ever intended as a minority Xinjiang team for his majority Han Chinese girls to spar against in Shanghai. My Singaporean all-girls softball team was visiting their facility for a training trip. We were from a tiny Southeast Asian city-state that desalinated its seawater and had the highest number of millionaires per capita.

Mandarin was the only common tongue we had between us, but unlike for the Han Chinese, it was the first language for neither of us. We spoke slangy Singlish; the Uighurs spoke Turkic Uighur. When the Uighur girls began singing a traditional folk song to a clapped beat, it was clearly a cultural performance rather than a social invitation, but I took my chances. I’d never once used Mandarin this way as I walked up to the girl with the palest, longest, thinnest fingers I’d ever seen and said, “Want to dance?”

She laughed shyly, pushing me toward their captain.

Nuoerguli, the captain, was seventeen. She played goalie. Her short hair was curly on top, like Justin Timberlake’s. Their coach gave them mandatory crew cuts when they arrived, for hygiene, and confiscated their passports, for safekeeping. The girl watched me dance with her captain, hiding her smile in the upturned neck of her zippered windbreaker.

I asked Nuoerguli about her.

Her jersey number was 12. She played forward. Her name was Maidina. Read More

Cute baby boy playing with mobile phone in the park, digital technologies in the hands of a child. Portrait of toddler with smartphone

A baby’s first word seems as if it ought to be universally fascinating. Laden with the promise of a new life, a first word is a new person’s first expression of self, even if it’s just to label the dog, ask for food, or say hi. First words are more than cute; they’re existentially profound. They represent the threshold where noise becomes signal, the moment that interiority breaks its confines to greet the outside world.

And yet, for much of history, infant language wasn’t regarded as worthy of attention, and in many contemporary cultures it still isn’t. All babies, across time and space, transition from babbling to language at about twelve months of age, in spoken languages as well as signed ones, but not all parents and caregivers pay attention to that transition. That supposedly irresistible thing we call a “baby’s first word” is a romanticized milestone, shaped by social and economic circumstances, and it is surprisingly recent. The natural state of first words is to be disregarded, misheard, or entirely overlooked. Doting over them isn’t perverse—it’s just a modern, underappreciated luxury.

I was inspired to attempt a cultural history of “first words” by Germanist Karl Guthke, who wrote a definitive book about last words in the early nineties. He saw them as artifacts of each era’s conception of death. “There are styles of dying,” he noted, “so are there corresponding styles and fashions of last words?” In an aside, he dismissed first words, arguing they couldn’t tell us much about individual lives. They belong, he wrote, “with anecdotes of childhood, whose biographical value is inversely proportionate to their charm.” He had been musing on 1988 U.S. presidential candidate Michael Dukakis whose reputation as a cold fish technocrat seemed to have been predicted by his alleged first words, in Greek: monos mou, or “all by myself.” Read More

© Riko Best – stock.adobe.com

When I was twenty, a man broke into my bedroom in the middle of the night. He’d busted the dead bolt of the house, where I was alone inside. Asleep. The doorknob clicked; I stirred. A yellow glow pooled into the dark of my room. By the light of the hallway, this stranger saw me in my underwear. They were leopard print. He was the first man to see me that way. All I could see of him was a silhouette.

His shadow: hazy, rough. It sighed. Said, “Oh.”

He shut the door, and then I heard nothing. It was 2001. I had no phone, no computer, no fire escape. Petrified, I waited the four hours until dawn to open the door and found that he had gone. All he left behind was a broken dead bolt and a trail of muddy footprints turned red by North Carolina clay.

By midmorning, a police officer arrived and asked me to describe the man. Tall, short. Fat, thin. Old, young. I told him I couldn’t see more than a shadow. My glasses were out of reach. The light had stunned me.

Surely, the officer said, I could remember something—I could, perhaps, draw his silhouette.

“You don’t understand,” I answered. “He saw me, but I couldn’t see him.”

This, more than anything else, is what still haunts me: All I have are questions about that night. He has all the clarity. Read More

Left: Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with Bouquet of Violets, 1872; Right: photo of Berthe Morisot

“It’s annoying they’re not men,” Édouard Manet wrote to fellow artist Henri Fantin-Latour, after meeting Berthe and Edma Morisot, two sisters from the Parisian upper crust who were promising painters. He found them “charming” and feared that because they were women, their accomplishments would inevitably go to waste. Manet thought the Morisot sisters should “further the cause of painting by marrying académiciens,” members of the jury who selected which works to display at the Académie des Beaux-Arts’s annual salon. The possibility that the Morisots might actually become artists did not seem to occur to him. Manet envisioned the Morisot sisters might make their mark in the annals of art as counselors to men in power—by influencing their tastes and sympathies, and convincing them of the worth of outsider artists (such as Manet himself).

Edma gave up her practice when she married in 1869. The next year Berthe destroyed the entirety of her own oeuvre and fell into a creative fallow period. She considered giving up painting for good. But though Berthe shared the same background as her sister, something allowed her to pick up the brush again. Perhaps it was in part a freedom born of being single. “People repeat ceaselessly that woman is born to love but that’s what’s hardest for her,” she wrote. “It’s the poets who’ve written the women lovers and ever since we’ve been playing Juliet for ourselves.” She did eventually get married (to Manet’s younger brother, Eugène), but waited until the age of thirty-thirty, when women were more likely to be widowed than plan a wedding. Read More

Robert William Buss, Dickens’s Dream, 1875, watercolor. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It must be Thanksgiving or some such holiday, because I have shown up at my brother’s house to find Mother and Father waiting. Mother stands in the front hall bearing her old smile of greeting, overlaid now with a touch of anxiety because, I realize, she doesn’t remember my name. “Lewis is here!” I call out, as if such announcements were our custom. I don’t want to embarrass her. “Lewis is here!”

*

Sometime in the twenties in Berlin, a certain Dr. Kurt Lewin noticed that the waiters were very good at remembering the particulars of his restaurant bill—until the bill was paid. Soon settled, soon forgotten. Lewin wondered if he hadn’t stumbled upon a fact of mental life, that the finished task drops into oblivion more easily than the unfinished.

In 1927, a colleague of Lewin’s, Bluma Zeigarnik, designed a study that appeared to show that Lewin had observed a specific example of the general case, now called the Zeigarnik effect. “Unfinished tasks are remembered approximately twice as well as completed ones,” she concluded. That was her finding with adults; with children, the effect was stronger: not only did they remember tasks they’d been forced to leave unfinished but “not infrequently they would beg to continue the interrupted tasks even two or three days after the experiment was over.” Read More

In 1939, as the buildup to war in Europe intensified, a brilliant French mathematician named André Weil made a plan to emigrate to the U.S. He was thirty-three and didn’t want to serve in the army; his life’s purpose was math, he felt, not soldiering. His escape turned out to be more difficult than he anticipated, in part because, as he would write in his memoir, “the Americans, who so warmly welcome those who do not need them, are much less hospitable to those who happen to be at their mercy”—as we’ve gone on to prove repeatedly since then.

He was vacationing in Finland when the war broke out, and he tried to lay low in Helsinki but was arrested and returned to France, where he sat in jail during the spring of 1940, awaiting trial for desertion. While there, he took some consolation from the fact that jail allowed him to work undisturbed, as well as to read novels and write letters, in particular letters to his sister, Simone Weil, who was also remarkably talented, a philosopher and spiritual thinker.

Though her brother’s incarceration infuriated her, Simone saw an opportunity. His work in advanced mathematics was to her, as it would be to most of us, esoteric. Since you have some spare time on your hands, she wrote to him, why don’t you explain to me exactly what it is you do?

There wouldn’t be any point, he replied. Trying to explain my work to a non-mathematician, he wrote, would be like trying to explain a symphony to someone who can’t hear. Later he would rely on another metaphor, calling math “art in a hard material.”

Mathematics is an artistic endeavor, his words suggest. Yet Simone was skeptical. What kind of art? What is the material? Even poets have language, but your work seems to rely on sheer abstraction, she wrote her brother.

That math is an art, that one of its signature qualities is its beauty—these are ideas that continue to be articulated by mathematicians, even as non-mathematicians may wonder, as Simone did, what that could possibly mean. I myself become wary when a mathematician or scientist speaks about the beauty of her discipline, since it can seem vague and high-handed, if not wrong.

Read More