A Giant Phallus Under the Full Moon
Be the Change You Want to See
Thinking With Machines
I am feeling a sense of accomplishment and relief because I’ve finished writing my new book! It’s called Thinking With Machines, and is coming out this Fall. My near-death experience on April 15 of last year, which I analyze more fully in the book, really lit a fire in me. I’m pleased with how the book turned out and I’ll send you the link when the book is ready to pre-order.
My Most Recent Guest
When you write a book, it’s a feat, but you’re in a different league when a Pulitzer prize winner writes a book about you! My most recent guest on Brave New World was Deogratias Niyizonkiza, known as Deo, who is the subject of Tracy Kidder’s book, Strength in What Remains, a New York Times bestseller. I’ve been a big fan of Tracy Kidder ever since I read his 1981 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Soul of a New Machine. It chronicles the technical and management challenges in designing and implementing a next-generation machine under tremendous time pressure.
I can see why Kidder would write about Deo. It’s quite a story. Deo literally fled for his life from a hospital in Burundi where he was an intern, and arrived in New York practically penniless, not able to speak a word of English, knowing no one, delivered groceries for fifteen dollars a day, and slept in Central Park.
Deo had the good fortune of getting into Columbia University a few years later, but he didn’t study something like Computer Science or Business to get a job. Instead, he chose to study Philosophy “in order to understand what had happened to me” as he put it. He decided to “be the change you want to see,” as Mahatma Gandhi exhorts us all to do. Deo is the founder and CEO of Village Health Works, a grassroots non-profit organization providing compassionate, quality health care to the most vulnerable community members in rural Burundi, East Africa. He is now expanding his vision to the rest of Africa.
Here’s the link to our conversation, so check it out:
And please help by contributing generously to Village Health Works.
Rituals and Truth
I’m not religious, but I celebrate an annual family ritual every summer in Kashmir, rain or shine. The tradition started in 1836, when one of my ancestors found a gigantic stone phallus – a symbol of the Hindu deity Shiva – at the bottom of the Jhelum river that runs through the valley of Kashmir. He decided to build a “Shiva temple,” in which he installed the relic, and ever since, the family congregates at that temple on a specific full moon to honor our ancestors. It’s a very special feeling to know that family members have been coming to that spot every year for almost two hundred years. If only that ancestor could see the wonderful tradition that he started. On a clear day, you can see the majestic snow-capped mountains that surround Kashmir.
I’ve wondered how long the tradition will last. The culture of Kashmir has been decimated by the Islamic urgency that took hold in the 1980s. Kashmir was predominantly Hindu and Buddhist until the 14th century, when Islam became dominant. But Kashmiri Islam had a major Sufi influence, of peaceful coexistence with the minority of “Kashmiri Pandits,” as they are referred to in the Valley. Unfortunately, the Hindu minority were terrorized out of the valley in January of 1990 by religious extremists who set out to bring a more stringent form of Wahabi Islam to Kashmir. Money flowed in from Saudi Arabia to build mosques and religious schools. Cinema halls were shut down and Kashmir became a monoculture and unsafe. The extremists started killing innocent civilians and tourists.
The senseless killing continues. Just a few weeks ago, on April 22, 2025, five armed terrorists killed 25 tourists and a local Muslim pony operator (who tried to wrestle a gun from one of the attackers) near the picturesque village of Pahalgam, where I hiked extensively in my youth. The terrorists ordered the victims to lower their pants to make sure they weren’t killing one of their own before shooting them in front of their wives.
And yet, this time I see a sliver of hope. Previous attacks on tourists didn’t evoke any sympathy for the victims from the local population. But following the Pahalgam massacre, Muslims in Kashmir’s capital city of Srinagar held a vigil protesting the killing. A YouTube video by a Kashmiri Muslim woman, Arshia Malik, who has been speaking out about the harms of the insurgency to Kashmiris for some time, is getting some attention. In an article published almost ten years ago about the repressive control that the hijab represents, she questions whether women who wear the hijab are exercising freedom of choice or capitulating out of fear of retribution. She concludes with this larger observation of how the left-leaning bias of the media in western democracies might be complicit in empowering conservative theology:
I am still unable to understand the desperate desire in the Western democratic Left to appease and coddle the most regressive aspects of the conservative Muslim right.
It made me think about the root cause of the Kashmir problem and its connection to something Deo said during our conversation when I asked him about the cause of the rupture in his country that made him flee for his life. Deo remarked that evil happens in many places in similar ways, typically because of selfish elites who manage to divide and conquer. I would add religious extremists as another dangerous and exploitable element to that list. I sometimes joke that organized religion is like cryptocurrency. They both require the bigger fool.