Montage In What’s Your 10 years and recently began touring: Harrison Problem? he stops Greenbaum’s What Just Happened? It combines New Yorkers on the street and the rhythm of stand-up—a laugh every 10 invites them into or 20 seconds—with the suspense of a magic his roving “office” show, weaving in original tricks that connect for some comedic to the jokes. The show bears out a conviction talk therapy. Greenbaum often preaches when he speaks battle-tested jokes at magic conventions: tricks, like stand-up is about Roy Sulli- jokes, should start with an idea. “Comedians van, a park ranger come up with an idea first, and then figure who set the world out a funny way to say it,” he says. “In magic, record for surviv- a lot of people go out and buy a trick and just ing the most light- jam it into their act.” But if magic is an art ning strikes: seven form—and Greenbaum believes it is—then times, between 1942 its practitioners, he says, should strive for on joke structure. But it’s also the fact that and 1977. Greenbaum ambles around inside originality and self-expression, should be his jokes—observational, narrative, some- the joke for several minutes, building digres- willing to push the envelope in ways that times playfully political—often arise, he says, sions, unearthing absurdities, detonating lit- feel political or personal. “When I give lec- from a feeling of love. “For a lot of comedi- tle moments of surprise, before finding his tures on magic, I always encourage people ans, the motivating emotion is anger, but for way back for the final flourish. to break stuff. ‘Just break stuff and see what me it’s more like, ‘Isn’t this amazing? Isn’t His favorite project right now is a comedy- happens. You’ll figure out how to put it back this insane? Let me show you.’” One of his magic show he’s been developing for the past together.’” After all, it’s magic.

COURTESY OF HARRISON GREENBAUM’S WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? “A Melodic Being” Singer Ali Sethi finds his voice in classical Pakistani music. by lydialyle gibson

he drums are calling out audience, tradi- your name,” Ali Sethi ’06 tional boundar- exhorted the gyrating audi- ies among wor- “Tence in Sanders Theatre, as shippers—class, he and his bandmates wound toward the caste, gender, ge- climax of the night’s final number, a song ography—break with roots stretching back to the medieval down. period in what is now . Some listen- Something similar seems to happen with Ali Sethi brings the Sanders Theatre ers were already on their feet, and a handful Sethi’s music: boundaries fall away—be- crowd to its feet during a concert last spring. His Harvard mentor, Ali Asani of students were dancing on stage. Behind tween past and present, earthly and tran- (right, in suit and tie), joined him on stage. Sethi, the tabla player’s fingers flew across scendent, between art and religion and poli- the drums, pounding out a rhythm that was tics. “We are many and we are one,” he says. media orchestral work co-created by Pulit- intricate, ecstatic, irresistible. A singer classically trained in Pakistani tra- zer Prize-winning composer , Ph.D. It was the headlining concert at Har- ditional music, whose voice can shift from ’06, about human migration and the flight of vard’s ArtsFirst Festival last May, and the plaintive to raw to warmly intimate, Sethi refugees. And for the past several months, song, “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar,” is a (pronounced say-tee) has become a star in he has collaborated with Grammy-winning South Asian favorite, with a melody com- (and, increasingly, beyond) Pakistan. Since musician and producer Noah Georgeson on posed in the 1960s and lyrics drawn from a 2012, when he appeared on the soundtrack an album, to be released by summer 2020, thirteenth-century poem honoring the Sufi for the filmThe Reluctant Fundamentalist (di- that combines classical South Asian music

saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. The work is of- rected by ’79), he has toured in- with his own songwriting. JAKE BELCHER/COURTESY OF THE OFFICE FOR THE HARVARD ARTS AT ten performed at Qalandar’s shrine in south- ternationally and become a regular presence Born and raised in , Pakistan, he eastern Pakistan, where pilgrims commune on Coke Studio, Pakistan’s popular live-music is the son of dissident journalists; his fa- with the divine by taking part in dhamal, a television show. This past April he made his ther has been jailed repeatedly, and in 2011 whirling, pounding, trancelike dance. Inside debut at Carnegie Hall as one of three so- the family fled the country for more than the song’s feverish rhythms, Sethi told the loists in Where We Lost Our Shadows, a multi- a year after receiving death threats. Sethi

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage arrived at Harvard in September 2002, ex- “There was this wanting to have a narrative sor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic religion and actly a year after 9/11. “Everywhere I went, that fit”—about his home and culture, and cultures Ali Asani. For the first time, Sethi people were kind of cagey about Muslims,” himself—“and not quite having recourse learned about the role the arts had always he recalls. “Like, ‘Ooh, what do Muslims to one.” played in Muslims’ understanding of their really believe?’” Even as he felt pressure to He found it in a class on Islamic culture faith. He learned that Islam was not only explain, a part of him was searching, too: in contemporary societies, taught by profes- politics and theology but what Asani called

texts, historical images, and her own Choosing College: How to Make Bet- riveting portraits of their beauty ter Learning Decisions Throughout Off the Shelf may help readers appreciate their Your Life, by Michael B. Horn, M.B.A. ’06, Recent books with Harvard connections biological importance, too. and Bob Moesta (Jossey-Bass, $25). An education strategist and innovation consul- The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A tant of the Clayton Christensen “disrup- Democracy and Imperialism: Irving Noble but Flawed Ideal, by Martha C. tion” school (the professor provides a Babbitt and Warlike Democracies, by Nussbaum, Ph.D. ’75, RI ’81 (Harvard, foreword), Horn and co-author Moesta William S. Smith (University of Michigan, $27.95). It is a long way from philosophical offer a consultant-like approach to figuring $70). Harvard, widely known as a liberal discourse on Cicero, the Stoics, Adam out whether to go to college and if so, why, bastion, was not always and is not only so. Smith, and their successors to “America and then, how applicants might attend Smith, managing director of Catholic Uni- First” as a campaign-rally slogan. That makes their “best school.” The book’s chief value versity’s Center for the Study of States- the distinguished University of phi- may be its operating assumption that its manship, plumbs the political thought of losopher’s engagement with the ideas of readers are not confined to the tiny minor- Babbitt, Harvard’s long-serving compara- world citizenship and universal human dig- ity of 18-year-olds seeking admission to tive-literature scholar. In assessing “the nity—and their practical limits in a material highly selective liberal-arts colleges and ambiguity of imperialism in democra- life—timely and urgent, if not light reading. universities. cies”—and Babbitt’s link between that problem and his essential understanding The Education of an Idealist, by Sa- The Empowered University, by Free- that (in Smith’s phrase) “the quality most mantha Power, Lindh professor of the man A. Hrabowski III, LL.D. ’10, Philip J. required for a successful political order is practice of global leadership and public Rous, and Peter H. Henderson, M.P.P. ’84 high moral character in leaders”—the au- policy and Zabel professor of practice in (Johns Hopkins, $34.95). The flip side of thor performs the dual service of rehabili- human rights (Dey Street Books, $29.99). college choice is what choices colleges tating an important idea undergirding The human-rights scholar-activist (author make. Here the president, provost, and genuinely conservative thought, and dem- of A Problem from Hell, on America and senior advisor to the president of the Uni- onstrating its unmistakable application to genocide, reviewed in September-Octo- versity of Maryland, Baltimore County, twenty-first-century America. ber 2002) was schooled in diplomatic reflect on how theytransformed a run-of- practicalities as National Security Council the-mill local institution into a nationally The Curious World of Seaweed, by leader for multilateral affairs and human acclaimed powerhouse, distinguished for Josie Iselin ’84 (Heyday, $35). The author- rights, and then as ambassador to the UN, educating minority and disadvantaged stu- artist, who has made readers really look at in the Obama administration. Her memoir dents in STEM disciplines. The spirit of beach stones and seashells, here goes to details that work (historians will hash out chapter 12, “Looking in the Mirror,” seems town on seaweeds and kelps. The helpful controversies like those arising from U.S. useful generally—for educators, but also intervention in Libya), over- for trustees, civic leaders, and others. laid with her personal pri- orities (IVF and creating a Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music family with husband Cass in America from the Great War Sunstein, Walmsley Univer- through the Cold War, by Jonathan sity Professor, profiled in Rosenberg, Ph.D. ’97 (W.W. Norton, “The Legal Olympian,” $39.95). The Juilliard-trained author, now January-February 2015). A a twentieth-century U.S. historian at useful reminder of the role Hunter and the Graduate Center of of diplomacy—and of the CUNY, has composed a breathtaking ex- challenges faced by those ploration of the intersection of interna- who conduct it. tional relations and classical music, from the patriotic dismissal of German music Sublime seaweed: nature during World War I to the embrace of photographer Josie Iselin’s cyanotype of Pikea Shostakovich during the Nazi siege of Len-

CYANOTYPE JOSIE BY ISELIN californica ingrad and the politics of Van Cliburn’s

62 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage “heart-mind knowledge”: that before it was grown up with in a new light— (love ies and advertisements and jingles on the codified into scripture, the religion had be- poems) and (devotional songs) radio—“just a part of our cultural DNA”— gun as an aesthetic tradition that sought handed down by the Sufis, Islamic mys- but they’d always seemed separate from re- “to explain God through beauty.” The class tics whose practice emphasizes pluralism, ligion, and lesser; now he understood they unlocked something in Sethi. tolerance, and an inward search for the di- were neither. He began to see the old folksongs he’d vine. He’d heard them embedded in mov- He abandoned his planned economics fo- apotheosis in Moscow during the Cold War. Capturing the cosmos: a Original, and bracing­ly written. comet reported in 1527, from the Augsburg Book of Miracles, by an Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged unknown artist the Literary Cold War, by Duncan White, lecturer on history and literature calls, in the context of (Custom House/Morrow, $32.50). As her research, “the confi- sweeping in scope and ambition as Danger- dence to believe in a dif- ous Melodies, but in the different medium ferent future.” of literature. As capitalism and communism vied for hearts and minds, and their spies The Age of Living Ma- engaged one another, friendships and enmi- chines, by Susan Hock- ties changed and metastasized, from field (W.W. Norton, George Orwell and Stephen Spender to $26.95). MIT’s president

Richard Wright, John le Carré, and Václav emerita, a neuroscientist COURTESY OF THE GEORGE ABRAMS COLLECTION Havel: a worldwide engagement of politics with many Harvard ties, is a clear guide to those earlier paradigms—and reformulat- and prose. the emerging synthesis of biology and en- ing them might help in addressing mental gineering, resulting in entirely new tech- ailments today. The Confounding Island, by Orlando nologies, with promise for fighting cancer, Patterson, Cowles professor of sociology feeding an ever-hungrier (and -hotter) Dispossessed, by Noell Stout, Ph.D. ’08 (Harvard, $35). The preeminent sociolo- world, and so on. (University of California, $29.95 paper). gist (profiled in “The Caribbean Zola,” The author, associate professor of an- November-December 2014) here returns Cosmos: The Art and Science of the thropology at NYU, dug into the housing to “Jamaica and the postcolonial predica- Universe, by Roberta J.M. Olson and Jay foreclosures that ravaged the Sacramen- ment”: the subtitle, and his birthplace. M. Pasachoff ’63, Ph.D. ’69 (Reaktion to Valley (and much of the country) in the Democratic but mired in poverty, religious Books/University of Chicago, $49.95). wake of the 2008 Great Recession. Loan but plagued by violence, lifted up by its Wheaton College art historian emerita servicers, call-center representatives, indigenous music, the Connecticut-sized Olson and Williams College professor of and homeowners themselves became en- island becomes a lens for Patterson to ex- astronomy Pasachoff join strengths felici- meshed in a toxic bureaucracy, trans- amine globalization, development, pov- tously in a large-format tour and celebra- forming a financial contract into a moral erty, and postcolonial politics in ways that tion of images of the cosmos, from ancient relationship that colors the lives and resonate far beyond a place whose inhab- and fine art through scientific illustrations views of millions of Americans still. Her itants say (in creole), “We are little but so to the (literally) out-of-this-world observa- account of the “administrative violence” mighty.” tions made by the Hubble Space Telescope homeowners encountered, instead of and other modern instruments. debt relief, is an imaginative, informative The Cigarette: A Political History, by use of anthropology. Sarah Milov ’07 (Harvard, $35). The author, How the Brain Lost Its Mind, by Allan assistant professor of history at the Univer- H. Ropper, professor of neurology, and All Blood Runs Red, by Phil Keith ’68 sity of Virginia (tobacco country!), rereads Brian David Burrell (Penguin Random and Tom Clavin (Hanover Square Press, the narrative of smoking, from early farm- House, $27). With medical constructs for $27.99). A brisk life of Eugene Bullard, a er-government promotion of the habit and understanding mental illness now very slave’s son who made his way from Georgia product, through the rise of activist citizen much contested (see “Misguided Mind Fix- to Europe; rose in boxing as the “Black nonsmokers who waged a fight for clean ers,” May-June, page 73), the authors re- Sparrow”; enlisted in the French Foreign air. It is more than tempting to draw analo- examine the nineteenth-century’s simul- Legion and became the first African-Amer- gies from this careful analysis of interest- taneous experience of neurosyphilis (very ican fighter pilot during World War I; mas- group politics to such contemporary chal- much organic) and of epilepsy-like hysteria tered the Paris club scene; served as an lenges as, say, controlling greenhouse-gas (with no bodily cause). The contending Allied spy in the next world war; and found emissions to secure the larger atmosphere narratives of psychoanalysis and of psycho- his way back to the United States and the and the life it blankets on Earth—what she pharmacology, they suggest, trace to civil-rights movement.

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage

Sethi performs on Coke Studio, a popular live-music TV show in Pakistan that he says “gives young people something to hold onto” amid religious and political strife.

a transgender person,” Sethi says. “They’re all residents of Lahore, people who embody the multiple interpretations of this poet- ry and music.” Three days after the video was released on YouTube last February, an unexpected skirmish flared up between Pakistan and , and the two countries seemed briefly on the verge of war. The vid- eo’s comment section flooded with listen- ers writing from each side of the border, preaching peace and togetherness, praising the song’s message of love. “It became kind of an anthem,” Sethi says. “It felt genuinely miraculous.” A similar spirit animates a concert series that Sethi and Asani present together in cities around the world, “The Covenant of

COURTESY OF ALI SETHI AND COKE STUDIO Love”—from a Quranic phrase describing cus and began pursuing music and creative Sung in Hindi, it takes its refrain from a God’s relationship with humanity. Sethi and writing, concentrating in Sanskrit and In- by Saiffudin Saif: “This moonlit night his band perform songs by legendary Sufi dian studies (and shortly after graduating, has been a long time coming / The words poets, while Asani, seated onstage, explains published a well-received, semi-autobio- I want to say have been a long time com- their history and symbolism. This was the graphical novel, The Wish Maker, about poli- ing.” “The implication is of something half- show Sethi brought to Sanders last spring, tics and family in Pakistan). He acquired a veiled, half-visible,” says Sethi, who added and before the musicians played “Dama Dam harmonium and during summers in Lahore his own lyrics gesturing toward an un- Mast Qalandar,” Asani told the audience began apprenticing under classical singers specified union, and set the song to a soft, about a 2017 suicide bombing at the shrine Ustad Naseeruddin Saami and Farida Kha- slow melody adapted from two ragas. The that killed 90 worshippers. “But the next num, embarking on the rigorous art of sing- music video shows a spectral, ruined train day, people were back, dancing,” he said, a ing ragas, a complicated structure for melod- station and a collection of stranded pas- testament to poetry’s power to give courage ic improvisation in which shifting notes can sengers who gradually warm to each other and spiritual solace. And then he invited stu- sound almost molten. “The music is never across differences in age, religion, ethnicity, dents to their own version of dhamal. “If the fixed,” he says. “Araga is almost like a me- sexual identity, and walks of life. “There’s spirit moves you, just dance.” lodic being. You have to breathe life into it, and every rendition, every performance, may be different.” In traditional music, he has found room for musical experimentation and an ave- Forgive, but Don’t Forget nue for his own “language of dissent.” Sufi songs, in particular, lend themselves to …and don’t always forgive multiple interpretations; the same verses, by lincoln caplan Sethi says, may be read as the story of a love affair, or a heartbroken letter to an unjust society, or a dialogue with the divine. For he first person President Don- that they had committed a crime. In the 2016 centuries, Sufi poets have dealt with top- ald Trump pardoned, in August elections, Arpaio lost his race for a seventh ics like gender identity, sexuality, cultural 2017, was Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He term in Maricopa County, Arizona, appar- difference, and political strife. “The poems T was infamous for being brutal to ently because the county no longer wanted are so extremely inclusive,” he says. “And undocumented immigrants and others in his a sheriff who engaged in what the Justice the appetite for Sufi music in Pakistan al- shameful jails, and cheered on by neo-Nazis. Department called “unconstitutional po- lows people like me to get away with a lot The month before, a federal judge had found licing.” But in the presidential election, Ar- of potentially subversive stuff through the Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt, which paio helped push the metaphors of Sufi poetry—these beautiful, carried a jail sentence of up to six months, county and the state When Should Law Forgive? deliberate ambiguities.” for “flagrant disregard” of a court order. He for Trump, who ad- by Martha Minow “Chandni Raat,” a single from his forth- had refused to stop harassing and arrest- vanced his own an- (W.W. Norton, $27.95) coming album, illustrates what he means. ing Latinos without any basis for suspicion ti-immigrant cru-

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746