Behavioral Economist Keith Chen is interested in how people make financial decisions. Last year, he started wondering if people whose native languages make fewer distinctions between the future and present might think differently about the future.

In Chinese, for example, there is no future tense. There are many ways for conveying the future, but you don’t do it through tense. In the movie Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon for example, a young female fighter beats up several men, and then warns them she’ll be back the next day.

“Tomorrow,” she says, “ I will uproot Wudan Mountain”

Except that in Chinese she doesn’t say “will” What she says literally translates to “Tomorrow, I uproot Wudan Mountain.” The word tomorrow indicates the future. The Chinese language doesn’t more than that.

So, is there any significance to that?

Chen says yes, but it’s subtle. In some languages, he says people are “slightly nudged every time [they] speak, to think about the future as something viscerally different from the present.” In Chinese, he says, that doesn’t take place. The present and future are the same.

Chen has concluded that having a separate verb tense for your future self might make your future self a little harder to relate to.

He knows it’s “kind of a crazy hypothesis, it’s a little bit out there.”

The flip side of this idea is that speakers who use the same verbs for the present and future might be a little better at thinking about the future– and maybe even better at saving for the future.

This is pretty controversial territory.

A lot us might feel like the way we use words affects our thoughts. Some bilingual speakers believe they think differently from language to the next.

But most linguists don’t buy this idea that we language we speak determines how we think.

Chen, however, persisted in his research.

He divided up world languages by whether they distinguish much between present and future tense.
He then compared speakers of those languages based on savings statistics.

He found “huge differences.”

For example, he found that people who speak languages requiring a separate future tense— English, Arabic, Greek, the Romance languages— are far worse at saving money than people whose languages don’t really distinguish between the future and the present, like Chinese, German, Japanese, or Norwegian.

After factoring in people’s education levels, their incomes, religious preferences, Chen found that the different-verbs-for-present-and-future people, were 30 percent less likely to have saved money in any given year.

By the time they reach retirement, these people will have saved on average more than $200,000 less than speakers of languages with no future tense.

Some linguists aren’t buying Chen’s conclusions.

John McWhorter, author of What Language Is (And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be), doubts whether verb tense and savings habits have much, if anything, in common.

Author John McWhorter (Photo: Audrey Quinn)

For example, he says Chen placed Russian in the wrong category.

Still, McWhorter says he’d love to be proven wrong: “If somebody really could prove it…I would even be open to finding that my skepticism about the language-is-thought hypothesis is unfounded.”

Chen insists he did go into his research with a healthy amount of skepticism.

But he says all the data points to his conclusion: “I haven’t been able to find a counter-example in the world yet.”

Some experts say there is a 90 percent chance Greece could default on its debts and there is speculation about whether the country could return to its former currency, the drachma.

The Dutch have called for the banishment of countries which continually break the rules and German politicians have criticized Greece’s approach to the shared economy.

The BBC’s Malcolm Brabant reports.

As the leader of Europe’s biggest economy, Merkel has taken the lead on efforts to contain the continent’s debt crisis.

The German court’s decision effectively gave the go-ahead to Germany’s participation in the EU’s ongoing, multi-billion dollar Greek bailout plan.

But Chief Justice Andreas Vosskuhle advised a close reading of the ruling.

“The tenor of this decision is extremely tight,” said Vosskuhle. “It should not be misinterpreted as a ‘blank check’ for more rescue packages.”

Last year, Germany ponied up nearly a quarter of the initial bailout money for Greece — more than $100 billion.

But now, if any other European country needs a bailout in the future, the German parliament will have to approve the country’s expenditures.

David Marsh, the author of a book on the Euro called “The Battle for the New Global Currency,” says the German decision will make life difficult for other countries that might seek bailouts.

But outside pressure, he says, may be what holds the currency union together going forward.

“It’s not the end of the Euro, because you see the Chinese government, and the Japanese central bank, and all sorts of finance ministries all over the world, particularly in Asia; want the Euro to continue as an alternative to the dollar,” Marsh said.

They don’t want to be left alone with the outrageous irresponsibility of the US system. So, they badly need an alternative.

For its part, the European Union has talked a lot of late about making the financial union even stronger, of further centralizing monetary and fiscal policy. The Euro’s not just a currency, they say, but a strong symbol of political union as well.

Roger Bootle, managing director of Capital Economics in London, calls the Eurozone “monetary union lite.”

Further centralization might work, Bootle says, but says the words of politicians are cheap.

“What really matters is the economic and financial fundamentals,” Bootle said. “I think the UK, and much of the world, would be better placed if the Euro were to break up. Indeed, it’s the only way I can the European economy moving forward onto a new growth path. Out with all of it. And start afresh.”

Breaking up, though, is hard to do given the amount of time and energy that went into creating the Eurozone. One way or the other, some say the United States should be paying close attention.

Frederic Mishkin teaches at Columbia Business School in New York. He says that the crisis in Europe could be what tips a stagnant US economy and jobs market into full blown recession.

“The potential biggest problem for the US economy is what’s going on in Europe,” Mishkin said. “And it’s not clear whether they can solve this problem … and if the financial and banking system blows up in Europe, then we have a much, much bigger problem.”

Meanwhile, Italy and Spain — two more nations that many say are on the verge of needing bailouts — are still trying to get their financial houses in order.

Spanish senators are trying to approve a measure that would cap future budget deficits. Italy is trying to push through new austerity measures.

In both nations, the moves have drawn angry protests on the streets.

He told me that prior to the Japan match with Germany last weekend, Japan’s coach showed the team video in the locker room. It wasn’t because of Germany’s offensive ploys. It was frightening footage from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, post-tsunami, post-meltdown.

Nakano said, after the viewing, the team was in tears, and apparently so motivated that they were able to take the win from favored Germany, clinched by number 18 Karina Maruyama in the 108th minute of play.

This wasn’t the only Fukushima connection to the Women’s World Cup. Maruyama herself used to work for TEPCO. In fact, she worked at the Fukushima plant from 2005-2009. Here’s what Reuters reported this week:

A substitute on the Japanese women’s national soccer team who led her country to its first ever World Cup semi-final appearance counts among her supporters workers battling to bring under control the world’s worst nuclear crisis in 25 years.

Not surprising, perhaps — some are former colleagues from when Karina Maruyama herself worked at Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), the operator of the nuclear plant crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

The 28-year-old Maruyama has become a national heroine after coming off the bench to score an extra-time winner against the heavily favoured defending champion Germany on Saturday …

What I’d like to know is: Will the Japanese women again watch Fukushima video before the match against the United States on Sunday? And if so, will it have the same effect?

The issue with most of these laws is that they are ineffective (here is a map of English Only legislation in the United States). Many are symbolic only: they don’t specify how and when English must be used. Some do get specific. In Arizona and Oklahoma, for example, you can’t take a driving test in a foreign language. But even then it’s not clear how much English Only laws affect linguistic behaviour.

There’s a long-established pattern of English acquisition among immigrants and their children. The first generation often speaks little or no English. The second generation, born in the United States, is bilingual, but often more proficent at English than the home language. The third generation is usually monolingual English, unable to communicate with their immigrant grandparent. People like language writer Robert Lane Greene, interviewed in my story, believe that pattern is again playing itself out.

Still, that hasn’t stopped Tea Partiers from bumper-sticking their love of English and fear of (mainly) Spanish from Florida and Texas all the way to Wasilla, AK. This video has more than 14 million hits on YouTube, and the duo have performed it numerous times at Tea Party events.

Also in the pod this week, a conversation with Aya Watanabe, who has spent much of the past month translating earthquake-related tweets from Japanese to English.

It’s part of a project started by Japanese blogger Gen Taguchi to collect tweets that may give succor and inspire Japanese people in the face of this tragedy. Volunteers have translated tweets into at least 17 different languages.

In English, many of the tweets have more than the 140-characters maximum permitted by Twitter. That’s partly because a single Japanese character conveys more information than a single letter in the Roman alphabet. It’s also because Watanabe has sometimes added contextual details (eg ” on Kyushu Island, a thousand miles south of Tohoku”).

Below are some of Aya Watanabe’s favorite tweets, starting with the two that inspired her to start translating them into English.

At a jammed crossing
I was driving home after the quakes. Streets were extremely jammed and at many crossings only one car could cross the street per green light. At a spaghetti crossing, all traffic was paralyzed for more than 5 min. All drivers, I encountered, waiting to cross streets were calm, giving way to others. All thru my 10 hr driving, I didn’t hear any honking except those showing gratitude to others. Of course this travel was scary but also heart warming. This experience made me like Japan all the more.

At Tokyo Disneyland
They distributed sweets that are part of their merchandise. High school girls with heavy makeup took away more candies than they would possibly eat and that raised my eyebrows. Later, I saw those girls giving the candies to kids at evacuation areas. Families with kids had limited mobility and couldn’t get to where the candies were distributed. Go girls!

My mother’s foot warmer
Mom goes, “Oh! My little foot warmer got away!” My sister goes, “No I did not! ;D” And Mom goes, “Oh, there you are :) :) ” … Mom and sister were sharing a futon during a blackout and Mom was searching for my sis’s warm feet. Cute mom :) :)

A little knight
I was walking behind a mother with a little boy and a baby in a carriage. The mother said to her young boy, “What if another earthquake hits? Scary, isn’t it?” The kindergarten boy said, “No worries, Mom. I will do THIS!” Then the boy bent over the baby in the carriage to protect his young sibling. What a little knight in a shiny armor. My heart felt warm.

Disgraceful
A teenage boy walked into a drugstore, a package of toilet paper in hand. He said, “My parent hoarded and bought two packages yesterday. How disgraceful. I would like to return one.” –My friend who works for the drugstore was impressed to hear a word “disgraceful” from a high school boy. We have bright future ahead in this country.

Packing for a move
When I was packing for my move, my mother handed me a flashlight and survival food she had kept for the family, saying “Take these and don’t buy new ones. There are people who really need them now. Us? We are fine. We have family and neighbors. We can help each other if a disaster strikes our area. You will be living by yourself, a stranger in a strange land. You have all the reasons to be anxious about your new life. No need to be anxious about us, your family.” I felt so proud to be my mother’s daughter, to be part of this family.

Mom’s Pep Talk
Called my Mom to let her know I survived the quakes. She lives in Kagoshima, on Kyushu Island, a thousand miles south of Tohoku. Thought she was worried about me and wanted to calm her down. Instead of tears, what I got from her was a pep talk. “Know, with all your heart, the meaning of your being where you are, at this timing and age in your life. Do the best you can to serve others.” Mother, I am proud to be your son. I will live through all this.

In the podcast, I also mention an interview on the Big Show with Tik Root, a Middlebury College student. Root was arrested in Syria where he was studying Arabic. He was detained for 15 days, suspected of being a foreign agent provocateur in Syria’s pro-democracy protests. Here’s the interview.

Finally in the pod, we hear from Egypt about an instantly popular news satire show whose host is being compared to Jon Stewart. Below is a translation of a clip from the show

TALAT ZAKARIYA: You must have heard what’s happening in Tahrir Square.

BASSEM YOUSSEF : No! What? What?

T: Drums and horns and dancing…girls…and boys…and drugs…and full sexual relations.

Y (on the phone to someone): Didn’t I tell you we need to go to Tahrir Square? Dude, they’re saying there’s music and women and sex, and we’re sitting here? … Sorry, sorry.

Y: Mr. Talaat, is there a video that proves what you’re saying?

[Belly-dancing video]

Y: Sorry, clearly we got the video mixed up. We’ll fix it. Mr. Talaat, sorry, go ahead, tell us what else is happening in Tahrir Square?

T: What happening right in Tahrir Square is a carnival.

[Carnival clip]

T: There’s a band..there’s a one act play..all of it against the president..there are snacks and drinks and sodas and tea.

Y: I’ve finally learned what’s happening in Midan Tahrir. Out of solidarity with the eminent Mr. Talat Zakariya, I’m going to show you the proof.

T: Drums and horns..

[Crowds singing the national anthem]

Y: So ill-bred. People singing in Midan Tahrir.

T: Full sexual relations…

[Protesters fighting police]

Y: You’re right. It was an orgy…Anything else to add, Mr. Talat?

T: And who knows how many Muslim Brothers, and God knows what else, there…

Y: What, with the music and the girls and the drugs and the sex? What kind of Muslim Brothers, dude?

Mr. Talaat, concentrate for a moment–are you sure of what you’re saying?

T: And I take full responsibility.

Y: So when we write the history of the revolution… There was music and dance, girls and boys, drugs and sex, and Muslim Brothers. They had a carnival, they ate snacks and this lead to the fall of the regime.

Y: Mr. Talaat, is there anything else you’d like to add– anything else bothering you?

T: “Depart”: What does that mean? What does it mean to simple people?

[Video of Wael Ghonim and friends]

“Depart” means get out of here! What don’t you understand?

Y: I hope we answered the question.

 

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Photos: Sage Ross, Wikimedia Commons

As soon as I saw the new book by Robert Lane Greene You Are What You Speak, I know he and needed to speak. Not just because we both speak Danish (we didn’t even talk about that). It’s mainly because the book takes on so many of the same issues that I do in The World in Words podcast. It’s like the pod on steroids, done with proper research.

Underlying You Are What You Speak is a love of the relative chaos of language. We can’t predict, let alone control how language evolves, Greene argues, so why try? Well, it seems we can’t help ourselves.

Sometimes it’s governments that issue linguistic admonishments: France and Turkey have been especially active. Sometimes it’s individual armchair stylists: Cicero (“At some point…I relinquished to the people the custom of speaking, I reserved the knowledge [of correct grammar and pronunciation] to myself”); Strunk and White (“Do not join independent choices by a comma”); and Lynn Truss (“Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”). Of that lot, Turkey’s switch from Arabic to Roman script appears to have been the most successful. In France, the Académie française is admired but largely ignored. And most of the armchair stylists lose out to common usage. The more free, open and democratic a society is, the less it is likely to follow anyone else’s language rules.

Here in the United States, the Tea Party has embraced the English Only movement. This video, uploaded in 2007, has more than 14 million hits on YouTube, and the musicians have performed it at numerous Tea Party events:

This is just one way in which language is bound up in identity. Another is via the power of our mother tongue: how much does our first language set and restrict how we think, and how we perceive the world? Think of all those people who write in a second or third language.Lijia Zhang, who grew up in China, but writes in English, is convinced that her English self is different from her Chinese self. For one thing, Zhang says, she’s ruder in Chinese (the Big Show’s science podcaster Rhitu Chatterjee says the same of her native Bengali self).

Not only does English have words that don’t exist in Chinese, says Zhang. Also, writing in English frees her to say things that in her native tongue are taboo. She recalls a time in the 1980s when she met a young Chinese man “who I rather fancied.” She said to him, in English, “you look cool.” It was somehow OK to say that in English; had she said it in Chinese, it would have meant instant rejection and humiliation.

Now, that may have as much to do with memory and custom as it does with the instrinsic nature of English vs. Chinese. The words in Chinese were available to Zhang. They were just freighted with expectation and fear. In English, Zhang could be irresonsible, and blame it on the language.

Greene deals with this question of language and personality by citing a number of recent studies, some of which we’ve talked about in previous pods (here and here). In linguistic circles, the pendulum has swung back and forth between those who believe that language shapes thought, and those who argue that thought forms language.

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The Weekend, by Bernhard Schlink. Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside. Pantheon; 215 pages; $24.95

Reviewed by Christopher M. Ohge

Following in the footsteps of the mega-bestselling The Reader (1995), Bernhard Schlink‘s novel, The Weekend, offers another portrait of contemporary German guilt, ethical exploration, and erotic compulsion. The sister of recently-pardoned terrorist arranges a get-together in her country home with the hope that Jörg will re-engage in the “social contract” amid the tranquil setting with former friends and comrades. The obligatory revelations and confessions follow, enlivened by some clever plot twists and asides that occasionally make the book engaging. Still, the artlessness of Schlink’s prose (at least in Shaun Whiteside’s translation) flattens the story’s characters and potentially fascinating debates about action and inaction in today’s Germany.

In terms of history, the novel will be somewhat opaque, at least for some American readers. To appreciate the moral intricacy of Schlink’s story, one has to be more familiar with the political turmoil resulting from the terrorists actions of the leftist Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in 1970s West Germany.

Born during the non-violent student protests of the 1960s, the RAF became a political target of the German authorities by initially staging protests, then bombing right-wing or capitalist institutions, and eventually assassinating government officials. In an effort to crush the RAF, the country’s much-beloved President Willy Brandt passed anti-terrorist legislation that, for a time, trampled on the civil liberties of West German citizens. To combat these (perceived) authoritarian measures, the RAF escalated the violence in its succeeding iterations. In all, it is a complicated, fascinating story of power politics in the age of terrorism (sound familiar?).

Thus Schlink’s novel has fascinating history and issues to deal with, and the book begins with promising discussions about Jörg and the past among the weekenders. They belong to a generation whose parents “conformed and shirked resistance.” So, to counter the passivity that led to the rise of the Nazis, revolutionaries like Jörg and his comrades believe they were forced to fight a state that was becoming authoritarian (the RAF’s standard justification for violence).

Schlink wants to convey the powerful guilt that the German people still feel after World War II, how they are still rightly disturbed by displays of nationalism and religiosity under the banners of truth and justice. While one of the visitors, Karin the bishop, suggests danger in the relativistic idea that “Time and time again in history truths have been imposed successfully—right truths as well as wrong ones,” the narrator makes it seem as if “there are as many truths as people freely living their lives.” This illustrates how the lack of a coherent national purpose complicates the actions driven by lofty proclamations of idealism.

Author Bernhard Schlink -- His novel is fascinated by the power of resignation.

Quickly, however, it becomes clear that former comrades-in-arms have bought into the conventional thinking. Most, despite their reluctance in seeing Jörg, use the opportunity to sort out old scores with him. Worse, Jörg’s defense comes off as unimpressive and rather insipid. Ultimately, Schlink admires the former revolutionaries for slogging through the mechanisms—also aptly called, “small successes”—of daily bourgeois life. In the end, when the weekenders bail water out of the cellar, their “spectacle of collaboration” trumps the revolutionary proselytizing.

The awkwardness of Schlink’s writing compounds the story’s lack of intellectual and dramatic tension. The rain is always “rustling” in this book: there’s the “rustle of the rain,” “the rain rustled,” and so on—sometimes twice in the span of two pages, and a couple of instances in the same paragraph. Schlink even creates water-logged romance: “Ulrich held his wife in his arms until the rustle of the rain reached their hearts. Then they too made love.” Rustling love?

The leftists attending The Weekend are also cliches. Marko, the lone archetypal radical in the house, spouts uninspiring rhetoric about “the revolution,” including rants about joining “forces with our Muslim comrades” to “fight the system.” It may be an example of Schlink’s ironic jab at the far Left, but Ilse’s jottings in her notebook about her novel-in-progress about a German terrorist and 9/11 are cringe-worthy: “It had been emotional, emotional and gooey. Now Jan felt as if he and the woman were dancing a perfect dance in bright, cold light. What purity of pleasure, and again: what rush of freedom!”

Schlink’s most interesting observations are on the nature of German resignation to the way things are. One character posits that “we live in exile. What we were and wanted to remain and were perhaps destined to become, we lose. Instead we find something else.” The problem is that his figures have no counterculture juice left in them, except for Marko, who is an emotionally overwrought half-wit. Jörg should have been a flawed pillar of rebellion, but he comes off as a failed father battered by defeat.

Thus the novel is a sedate testament to giving up by giving in. Jörg is reconciled to his exile from idealism, like everyone else. And while The Weekend underscores the continuing tensions between Ossies and Wessies, the novel ends just as it began — disinterested in political solutions, reconciled to living in a society raising generations that are content to be disenchanted, guilt-ridden, and terrorized by specters of the past.

Peter Filkins

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Jenny Erpenbeck's new book Visitation explores decades of German history.

Visitation, by Jenny Erpenbeck. Translation from the German by Susan Bernofsky, 151 pages, New Directions, $14.95

Reviewed by Christopher M. Ohge

That Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel, Visitation, is ambitious is unmistakable, for it is undeniably difficult and precisely crafted. Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot, who suggested that in such a difficult world we should appreciate and study difficult literature, I think it a moot point as to whether the novel ultimately succeeds in its being difficult.

Is it difficult for difficulty’s sake?  Or is the challenge created for an artistic purpose? After finishing this novel I have to admit my own ambivalence, not based on, admittedly, the book’s philosophical import, but because of the way it reads.

Better described as a series of vignettes, the novel initially plays at the edge of chaos, which makes it very hard to follow early on. This is not a book to read quickly for an entertaining plot, nor is it one to appreciate for its initial lucidity. Yet the frustration is often counterbalanced by a glimpse into the author’s pensive vision of history and nationhood. As we move through Visitation‘s multiple perspectives, captivating moments, examples of poetic prose, provide a cathartic payoff to slogging through the initial confusion.

Erpenbeck’s view of history is part of an intellectual tradition evoked by Samuel Johnson’s pithy line—“patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”—as well as that of German intellectuals who warned about the dangers of nationalism, from Goethe’s assertion “Patriotism ruins history” to Nietzsche’s condemnation of Wagner.

Jenny Erpenbeck -- She supplies a pensive vision of history and nationhood.

Germany’s citizens are sensitive to overt displays of national pride reinforced today by memories of nationalism-gone-wrong during the two World Wars. Keeping this caution in mind, Erpenbeck presents two inescapable verities: people—their dwellings, and the regimes that rule over them—come and go; nature transforms but remains. The title (Heimsuchung) also suggests some uneasiness; in German it also means “infestation” or “plague” upon something. What exactly is being visited upon, and is the visitation connoting an infestation?

Set at what one character aptly calls “this one particular bit of earth located not terribly far from Berlin” in a single modest house located on a lake in the Brandenburg woods (note: to the east of Berlin). An intriguing prologue about how the lake was formed over tens of thousands of years from glaciers provides a prehistoric frame for the main story, which begins sometime in the early 20th century and follows generations of dwellers in the house who experience major changes from Nazi Germany to the end of the GDR. Each chapter jumps back and forth through time, focusing on a particular perspective, individual or collective, such as a single person (like The Gardener) or a small family (Wealthy Farmer and his Children).

The premise is promising, but the first third of the book seems like erratic, abstract episodes with underdeveloped characters about whom we care very little. Paragraphs jump from vague descriptions of banal activities and social mores to even vaguer commentaries on non-events. At the Architect and his wife’s dinner parties “they all laugh and laugh, another beer, another glass of wine, oh yes, not for me, thank you, maybe just a glass of seltzer. In this way the architect and his wife pass the time on many evenings both for themselves and for their guests.”

Either Erpenbeck is guilty of ostentatiously obscure writing, or the translator, Susan Bernofsky, has done the prose some disservice. For example, the long strings of relative clauses (correct in German, but simply a run-on sentence in English) in this paragraph. They not only reflect brazenly strange writing, but also the translator’s decision to keep the German grammar: “Locks the toolshed, the golden spoon lure he once fished with dangling from the key, … rinses his hands in the bathroom, two hours from now he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn to West Berlin, his fingernails still rimmed black with dirt, he draws the crank…” The use of repetition to weave the pieces of the story together also becomes stylistically self-defeating: “the chief mogul, who was really the chief consul.” What is the use of being told the same thing twice?

Yet, if you wade through what seems like the intentionally clunky prose of the first third, then you will discover the author connects the diffuse images and characters. You become intrigued by the erratic nature of the prose and some of the narrative begins to make sense.

One particular moment, which is indeed one of the first indicators of better prose to come, involves the first appearance of “The Girl.” This chapter illustrates how each paragraph in each chapter presents a different point in time. The randomness begins to assume order as we learn that this girl is Doris, the niece of Ludwig (the cloth manufacturer from an earlier chapter). It becomes clear that she is in a Nazi-occupied ghetto, where she is alone, hiding, and facing starvation.

It is here that Erpenbeck evokes the philosophical underpinning of the novel:

“None of the people who once knew who she was knows any longer that she is here. This is what makes the transition so insignificant. Step by step she has made her way to this place, almost to the end, in other words, her path must have a beginning, and at the point of this beginning she must have been separated from life by as insignificant a distance as now separates her from death.”

The emphasis on the insignificance of transience—and transition—underlies Visitation, which here powerfully conveys the purgatorial nature of many of its characters, who feel removed from life and death because those who knew them are either strangers, or are dead (a fact echoed when the narrator says toward the end that “Now, a lifetime too late, she is on her own”).

Capturing ordinary experience so eloquently, and glossing over quickly moments of death, even gruesome ones associated with the Holocaust, Erpenbeck exhibits a pastoral quality—not “elegiac,” as the blurb on the back cover would have it, but more akin to the modernist pastoral in Virginia Woolf’s novels (To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts in particular).

Rather than a family or whatever cluster of domestic relations, the house ends up being the story’s main character, and nature the prime mover. Accordingly, the house, the lake, and the woods are given the most descriptive passages.

Also, images concerning memory and ritual recur throughout the book, with a complexity that makes you want to re-read in order to retrace the treatments of, say, the ritual coin-collecting during a wedding procession, or the colored windows in the house overlooking the lake. Much of what seems odd at first eventually becomes clear in hindsight as the assortment of images eventually culminates in poignant scenes involving rape, murder, suicide, mental illness, political tumult, genocide, and foreign invasion.

The concluding infiltration targets the rotting house, which is summarily demolished after the “illegitimate owner” takes over the property. History seems to end once the house is torn down. Survival is found in the value of scattered bits of narrative centered on a speck of earth, where “Happiness grows out of disorder, just as infinity grows out of the finite lake.”

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. First there was the controversy over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan. Then came the furor over a Florida pastor’s plan to burn a Koran on September 11^th.  Well, here’s the latest controversy about Islam and free speech. Today, a German media organization awarded a Danish cartoonist a prize.  And yes, it is that Danish cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard. In 2005, a Danish newspaper published his cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The most provocative image portrayed Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. As you may recall, protests and riots broke out in parts of the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Dozens died in Nigeria. Danish diplomatic offices in Damascus and Beirut were torched. Since 2005 Westergaard has received numerous death threats. Today at an international media conference outside Berlin, the award committee praised what it called Westergaard’s “unbending engagement for freedom of the press and freedom of opinion, and for his courage to defend these democratic values despite threats of death and violence.” On hand today to honor the cartoonist was German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

SPEAKING GERMAN

WERMAN: In her speech she called the plans of a Florida pastor to burn the Koran on the anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, “abhorrent” and “simply wrong.” After receiving the award, 75-year-old Kurt Westergaard told reporters that he considered himself just a “simple cartoonist” but that the Internet has given his most controversial work a life of its own.

KURT WESTERGAARD:  Maybe they will try to kill me once and have success. But anyway the cartoon they cannot kill. It is invincible.

WERMAN:  Westergaard’s comments to a German newspaper today revealed a bit more of himself and his views on Islam. “In my eyes you cannot compare Islam with Christianity,” he said. “It is not a nice religion and in many ways is reactionary.” But Westergaard went on to say that he will “stand up for people having the right to practice this religion.”

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Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist Translated and edited by Peter Wortsman. Archipelago Books. 283 pages, $15.

Reviewed by Christopher M. Ohge

Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) remains intriguing to many literati because in many ways he out-romanticized the German Romantics. Having committed a ritual Selbstmord with a friend’s cancer-stricken wife, this literary bad boy has been fodder for book-chatters interested in the artistic suicide case, as well as the prevalence in his works of mental instability, sex, and violence. Nevertheless, he epitomized the Sturm und Drang of younger Goethe’s Werther—and, one could argue, took those sentiments further by living hard and rootless, offending polite society with his works, and leaving many of his peers scratching their heads—including Goethe and Schiller. Though underappreciated in his lifetime, Kleist’s work became essential to Freud’s formulating the death drive, Thomas Mann’s intricate storytelling, and Kafka’s obsessive characters.

Peter Wortsman’s translation of Kleist’s prose comes as a gift to fans of German literary history. The edition is decidedly minimalist from an editorial point of view, providing (aside from the prose) only some scattered contextual footnotes and a concise afterword by Wortsman (a memorable line, on Kleist: “a man at once more brilliantly adept at the practice of his art and more painfully inept at the business of living”). Wortsman preserves much of Kleist’s difficult sentence structures and punctuation, and succeeds at modernizing Kleist’s sometimes antiquarian prose (although bits like “any Tom, Dick, or Harry,” or “footloose and fancy free” seem forced; and the repeated use of the legalistic construction—“he believed that said situation could not be resolved”—comes off finicky). The selection is streamlined, yet carefully balanced, thus giving readers all of Kleist’s necessary lunacy and narrative brilliance nicely packed into 273 pages.

Of the four short stories in the collection, “The Earthquake in Chile,” and “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo” stand out, both for their doomed characters and poignant themes on the inscrutability of the will and the world. “The Earthquake in Chile” takes place during the 1647 earthquake in Santiago. It begins with a tutor named Jeronimo Rugero, who, having been incarcerated for falling in love with his pupil, Josephe, planned to hang himself in his cell. After the earthquake strikes, he is free to move hurriedly through the ruins and finds Josephe. In their ensuing idyll, she calls the earthquake an “act of deliverance”—in which sense? Ostensibly, it is Jeronimo’s “liberation” from prison, yet it is also in the sense of Kleist’s foreshadowing how the idyll is illusion, and how at the end the two lovers will be set free from evil. Here the evil is manifested in what Nietzsche called the flies in the marketplace, a “satanic rabble” led by a Dominican priest who, trying to interpret divine will, encourages them to dispatch any symbols of earthquake-causing godlessness.

Once Jeronimo and Josephe encounter the mob in the church, a series of misunderstandings leads to a gruesome scene. Jeronimo and Josephe end up dead, and Don Fernando, “that godly hero” who single-handedly extinguishes the mob, still loses his son. For Don Fernando, “it almost seemed to him as though he ought to be happy.” A not-so-certain deliverance for him, because in Kleist’s world of epistemological uncertainty, heroic acts do not always lead to liberation.

“The Betrothal in Santiago” is another story of tragic amour which is set during the 1803 Haitian slave revolt. In the house of the revolt leader, Congo Hoango (“a dreadful old Negro”), his mistress Babekan and her daughter Toni lead a desperate French soldier into their home. This particular stranger seems involved in a routine set-up until it becomes clear that Toni has fallen in love with him. And though one may feel instances of apparent racism similar to other slave revolt tales (Melville’s story “Benito Cereno” comes to mind), at the end, the tragic murder-suicide conclusion reminds one of Othello—except for Kleist there is no self-laudatory speech for the murderer, the soldier merely ends his life after having little to say.

Translator Peter Wortsman

The superficial skimmer of pages may have the most difficult time figuring out “The Marquise of O…”, the well-crafted novella in which shifting perspectives complicate a “mysterious pregnancy” story. But this Cervantes-inspired whodunit lacks the narrative pace of the other novella, “Michael Kohlhaas,” which concerns a horse trader of the same name whose “sense of justice turned him into a thief and a murderer” after a country squire called Wenzel von Tronka (referred to as a—or the—Junker) requisitions Kohlhaas’s horses and abuses one of his stable hands.

Enraged by the injustice done to him, and seeing a “world in such monstrous disorder,” Kohlhaas wages war through the country, and determines to exact revenge on the Junker without regard to the costs (and it is part of Kleist’s genius that we are uncertain who the real criminal is). Politically, justice is moot because Kohlhaas continues to lose his legal appeals on account of the Junker’s connections, and, ultimately, Kohlhaas represents a rabid metaphysical rebel in a world where justice may not exist.

Given the rampant dissolution in Kleist’s tales, it is initially surprising to read “On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking,” a lucid philosophical treatise on the importance of “a certain excitement of the mind” in formulating one’s ideas. Sounds simple enough; but in fact, this essay harkens back to Plato’s Symposium, showing the value of thinking out loud, forming opinions and testing them with others, as well as, in a sense, recollecting what we already know through dialogue—“For it is not we who know, but rather a certain state of mind in us that knows.”

Kleist suggests it “is something else altogether when the intellect is done thinking through a thought before bursting into speech. For then it is obliged to dwell on the mere expression of that thought.” One can also be fairly certain Kleist would stand against our current test-based no-child-left-behind zeitgeist when he says “There is perhaps no worse occasion than a school examination to put one’s best foot forward … the examiners themselves must also undergo a perilous appraisal of their own intellectual capacity.”

The final piece of the collection, “On the Theater of Marionettes,” is a rumination about perception, suggesting the darker the mind’s reflection, the more grace radiates. Kleist once said in a letter to his publisher that his stories should be considered Moralische Erzählungen (moral tales). Kleist was a great moralist, as many often are when confronted with how terribly humans act toward each other, and how there seems to be little retribution except from violence, whether toward others or oneself. Human being, mechanical figure, and puppet-master—this was Kleist’s dynamic; how do we judge ourselves?

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Christopher M. Ohge is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University’s Editorial Institute.

• Germans approve euro rescue plan
• World markets left at whim of euro on bailout fears

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman. This is The World.  A bit of relief for investors today, stock rebounded on Wall Street after a shaky start this morning.  But overall it’s been an anxious ride on the world’s stock markets this week.  Much of the anxiety is tied to the euro.  Its value has been declining lately, and that’s making many Europeans nervous.  But should it make Americans nervous?  How connected is the U.S. economy to the Eurozone?  We’ve asked David Blanchflower to help sort this out for us.  He’s an economist at Dartmouth College and used to be with the equivalent of the Fed in the U.K., the Bank of England.  Professor Blanchflower, all this bad news about the euro and the U.S. sells plenty of stuff to this part of the world from cheeseburgers to jet aircraft.  Should Americans be worried about euro slippage?

DAVID BLANCHFLOWER:  Well I think they should be.  Obviously we’ve seen over the last week or so the degree of uncertainty in the markets has risen.  Everyone’s worried that there is contagion in the air.  Things that start in Greece can move.  And the reason they think that is obviously things have happened in U.S. sub-primes move to Dubai and to Iceland and to German banks.  So obviously there’s a concern that what happens in Europe does extend.  And I think the way to think of this is this crisis that started in 2008 still has legs, is far from over, and is the greatest financial crisis in 100 years, so we should expect it to be more news and mostly bad news.

WERMAN: Now I evoked cheeseburgers and jet aircraft as the things that the U.S. sells to Europe, but what are some of the other ways that the Eurozone is connected to the U.S. economy?

BLANCHFLOWER: Part of the reason that we’re thinking this way that there are global capital markets.  Banks trade with one another, they are not separate.  So what we’ve seen over the last few days, yes there was a rescue package on Monday, but banks stocks around the world have still continued to slip so we’ve seen German banks and French banks and British banks being impacted.  The U.S. stock market has obviously shown some volatility.  And what we’ve seen as well is that commodity prices, oil prices have all been impacted by the worries that are in Europe and particularly the worry that European growth is going to be much less than people think.  And if European growth is lower, that means your exports are much lower than they would have been and so there is this thing really, which is that everybody is in this together.

WERMAN: European governments are meeting in Brussels.  There have been some dustups between governments about how the euro crisis is being handled, but what is Europe doing as a whole though to address the euro and stop it slipping?

BLANCHFLOWER: Well this is obviously an issue which is that there are member countries like the U.K. who are part of the European Union, but they’re not members of the euro.  David Cameron, the new British Prime Minister didn’t last a day or so is that the U.K. has no intention of joining the euro and it’s not for the U.K. to bail out countries that are part of the euro and that have caused those kinds of debt.

WERMAN: Now you’ve mentioned the contagion fears earlier.  How big is fear of further contagion in Europe and even beyond?

BLANCHFLOWER: Well I think there is a considerable fear.  Today is a good example.  This morning I was teaching my class on the financial crisis and when we went to class European markets were strongly down, expectation was that the U.S. markets would be down, and it was initially by 100 points or so, and then all of a sudden markets picked up.  You’re seeing volatility within days and between days.  So I just think that what’s happened is that there’s increased uncertainty about what’s going on and increased volatility predicts bad things usually.

WERMAN: I was kind of surprised to hear you say earlier, you were connecting the dots all the way back to the sub-prime mortgage crisis.  Do you see it in that kind of time horizon?  This started back in 2008 and we haven’t really let up since and the sliding euro today is a result of that?

BLANCHFLOWER: I absolutely do see that.  I think that we saw a crisis that started really sort of 2006 as the sub-prime market and the housing market here in the U.S. started to burst, but this is a great financial crisis, probably comparable to the start of the first world war and this crisis has extended and continued, so it’s impacted lots of different countries and so it really started in the U.S., went to the U.K., then to places like Iceland and Dubai and then to Greece.  But this is certainly not over because banks have to rebalance their balance sheets and we have to re-price risk.  We underpriced risk in the past and the price of risk is going to rise in the future and people have to adjust to that.

WERMAN: David Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth, thank you very much.

BLANCHFLOWER: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer. University of California Press, 392 pages, $39.95.

Reviewed by Monica Szurmuk

Almost a decade ago historian Natalie Zemon Davis wrote about the differences in the “hunger” to know about the past, positing a conflict between the descendants of those who had suffered a traumatic experience and the curiosity of the professional historian, who came to the same material with different questions. Aware of this emotional gap, historians and cultural critics have been grappling with finding ways to tell compelling stories that are true to the archive and the hard facts but also evoke the individual experiences of those who were part of the past. As a result, academics have been bringing their own empathic responses into their texts, telling stories that are not only true to their sources (in the case of history) but also interesting to read as literature. For many historians, spinning stories is as important as researching them.

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s monumental book “Ghosts of Home” is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search. In the process, Hirsch, a literary critic, and historian Spitzer stretch the limits of academic writing. This volume, along with their recent works “Family Frames” and “Hotel Bolivia,” have been explorations into embodied cultural history, cultural studies at its best. While most academic writing still relegates the personal to the acknowledgment page, Spitzer and Hirsch have been making their readers privy to some of their family history for over a decade.

We know that Hirsch and Spitzer are a married couple, children of European Jews who escaped the Holocaust, Spitzer’s in exile in Bolivia, Hirsch’s in Romanian Cernãuti. We already know some of their family history and have seen personal family photographs that acquire importance in the context of “Ghosts of Home.”. In this work, they bring the experience of previous research – Hirsch’s work on photography and memory; Spitzer’s on exile and memory and German culture – into material that both allows and requires a more personal involvement as well as thorough library and archival research.

The idea for “Ghosts of Home” came during a trip with Hirsch’s parents to Czernowitz, the city where they lived the first part of their lives, as children of emancipated Jews in the easternmost German-speaking metropolis of Europe. Lotte and Carl Hirsch guide their children through the city where they were born, a place where Jews had been awarded possibilities and status within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a political entity, Czernowitz ceased to exist in 1918, but it remained alive in the memories and the writings of the German-speaking Jews who called it home. After First World War, the city fell under Romanian authority, and after WWII under Soviet rule. It is now a part of modern day Ukraine but it is still holds different layers of history, languages, and memories, a place where in the words of Czernowitzian poet Paul Celan, people and books lived.

Cultural Studies at its best: Authors Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

“Ghosts of Home” reads with the poignancy of memoir, yet in a collective voice. Spitzer and Hirsch wrote the book together and their voices merge and mingle into each other. The overarching authorial voice is nuanced and reflective but also informed. The researchers embark on four different trips to the city: the first one with Hirsch’s parents in 1998, and the last one in 2008 for the celebration of Czernowitz’s six-hundredth anniversary. During one of the visits they also visit the region of Transnitria where Jews were deported during the Holocaust. The research on the Vapniarka camp is amazingly detailed and throws light on the special characteristics of the Holocaust in Romania, and on the distinctions between extermination and work camps.

An interesting tidbit in the book is the analysis of one of photographs of the Hirsches during the war. In one of them there is a spot on Carl Hirsch’s lapel that the writers think might be the Star of David that Jews were required to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe. Hirsch and Spitzer do extensive research on the use of the Star, interview different survivors, read memoirs, and keep enlarging the photograph until it is a blur, an approach reminiscent of the obsession of the translator-photographer in Julio Cortázar´s brilliant short story “Las babas del diablo.” The spot never reveals itself unequivocally to be a Star or not. The haunting ambiguity about the past – what was, what could have been — is present throughout the text. We all know that memory is selective, capricious, fastidious. Some elements are forever lost, while others endure and are passed on.

“Ghosts of Home” is a testimony to Czernowitz and its inhabitants, but also a homage all the Jews at the turn of the twentieth century who embraced modernity and civic life with ardor and passion in Europe and in the Americas. It shows the nuanced ways in which emancipation marked a generation, and defined its life, before, throughout, and after the Nazi terror. But it is also a book about buildings, about books, about the theatre, the opera, and political activism. It is a fascinating reconstruction of a place throughout the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on the power players who dominated it – from Austro-Hungarian Czernowitz to Romanian Cernauti, Soviet Chernovsty, and Chernivtsi in the Ukraine. Above all it is a book about home, family, and loss.

=====================================================

Mónica Szurmuk is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City. She is the author of “Mujeres en viaje: escritos y testimonios,” “Women in Argentina, Early Travel Narratives,” “Memoria y ciudadanía,” and co-editor of the “Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos.”

• The World in Words
• Mark Twain’s ‘The Awful German Language’
• From the BBC: Cool German

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MARCO WERMAN: Alles Liebe zum Valentinstag!  That’s Happy Valentine’s Day in German.  I know it doesn’t sound like it but it really is.  Writer Jen Percy has some experience of the language of love in German.

JEN PERCY: So I’ve been dating a man who’s third language is English, and we’ve been dating for three years, and he lives in Germany, but his family is from the Balkans.  And he lives in Germany because he had to leave during the Bosnian war when he was a teenager.  You know having a relationship with him I had to move between Germany, Bosnia and you know three different languages.

[GERMAN SONG]

JAN: You know when you speak another language there’s a period where you don’t feel self-conscious at all.  For example when you swear in another language initially it’s just a sound.  The sound isn’t yet connected to meaning.  So the word has to develop meaning over time.  And this was something that transferred over to I love you.  I didn’t know why I love you would be different.  I had said Te amo once to a man in Spain, just to see kind of how the words felt coming out of my mouth and he was very angry.  He said not to say it again unless I really understood it’s meaning and to be honest it didn’t actually mean anything when I said it, it was just sounds.  When we were in Germany sometimes I would mention the Midwest and he always liked to say this phrase, I was so in love with you there.  And of course, you know that’s not something you want someone to say to you because it suggests a lack of love at the current moment.  And later when I approached him about this he says oh no that’s not what it means at all, that’s just the direct translation and it sounds bad.  But actually it means sort of an outburst of love, a moment when you realize you’re falling in love again.  And that was sort of interesting because it’s something you know more beautiful than my own language offered.  Another thing that they have in German that we don’t have in English is that they have two forms of to love.  They have lieben, which is literally just to love, and verlieben, which is to fall in love.  And before you get to love you usually use the verb verlieben.  You say I’m falling in love with you.  But it’s interesting because with me he went straight to love.  And of course I didn’t even notice because I didn’t know we had that phase before hand.  He was actually surprised when I said I love you back, because we had both just skipped over that phrase.  Of course for me I had no idea that any of this was happening until a year later when he explained it to me.  I know that there are much more affectionate both in Germany and Bosnia than we are here, or at least outwardly.  For example in Germany when you’re writing an email you say lieba, for dear, and of course I thought that meant he was in love with everyone he was emailing for quite some time.  They also say kuss a lot because even with friends, guy friends all the time I never knew where the line was between, you know, friends and lovers.  Where was the line drawn in the language?  Before I would never really, he would tell me a direct translations and even if they were disturbing to me I wouldn’t really, I you’d know I’d just carry the words with me and sort of re-interpret it myself and this is when I would start to spiral into my own sort of imaginative world, and a lot of anxiety came out of that.  But now if he says something I don’t really understand what it means or you know if it means something that disturbs me then I’ll definitely ask.  I don’t kind of let it fester like I used to and let the words sort of, you know I used to ask my friends,  “what do you think this means?” and that’s not a good idea usually.

MARCO: Jen Percy is a writer living in Iowa City.  For more language stories check out our weekly podcast, World in Words.  You can find it at The World.org/language.  News headlines just ahead on P.R.I.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. General Motors had it all planned. The car maker was going to sell its European unit Opel. GM had a buyer lined up – a Canadian car parts firm called Magna. But now GM has abandoned the sale. A company spokesman says GM will revert to its original restructuring plan for Opel. Reactions have been mixed in Europe but not in one European country. Germany had offered big loans to secure the sale of Opel. Now that the deal’s fallen through the German’s are furious. Brett Neely reports from Berlin.

BRETT NEELY: The fate of Opel has been corporate Germany’s biggest soap opera. The German government lent the near-bankrupt company more than two billion dollars last spring. The idea was to keep Opel afloat until it found a new owner. Now that GM has spurred Magna’s overtures the German government also feels jilted.

RAINER BRUEDERLE: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

NEELY: In Berlin today German Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle said GM’s behavior was quote totally unacceptable and said GM was to blame for the deals collapse. The negotiations involving the government, Opel, and Magna have been going on and off since February. So why did GM back out now just weeks before the deal was due to be closed? In some ways says Coventry Business School professor David Bailey it’s not a surprise. With economies in Europe and the US recovering and GM out of bankruptcy things have changed since last spring.

DAVID BAILEY: Clearly GM thinks that their financial position is such that they can afford to restructure GM in Europe.

NEELY: Magna also wanted to take over Opel’s technology center in Ruesselsheim outside Frankfurt. Opel’s developing a new generation of small fuel efficient cars there – something that GM desperately needs says Bailey.

BAILEY: GM actually needs GM Europe to produce the small cars that it will have to sell in America in order to meet its environmental obligations.

NEELY: He says Magna had planned to take that technology and transfer it to its Russian partners and that might of squeezed GM out of a growing Russian car market. GM says it will need about 4.5 billion dollars to restructure Opel, far less than Magna needed. Bailey says GM might be able to come up with some of that money itself though it can’t use any of the money lent to it by the US government.

BAILEY: I also think that they will probably go to European governments, including the German government, and ask for financial assistance. So I think they will be back knocking on the door asking for support.

NEELY: Belgium, Britain, and Spain all have Opel plants and their government signaled today they’re willing to talk. Still Opel’s 25,000 German workers are upset by GM’s about face. Here’s what some of them at a factory in Bochum had to say today.

FIRST MAN: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: It’s not nice. I have no idea what else will be happening here in Bochum if Magna doesn’t take over. There are rumors that Opel in Bochum will be closed now. Let’s wait and see.

SECOND MAN: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: Anyone could have guessed that GM would keep Opel. I knew it.

NEELY: German unions are planning a protest strike tomorrow and they’re urging other Opel workers in Europe to join. The drama’s not likely to end soon. Like any soap opera stay tuned for the next episode. For The World I’m Brett Neely in Berlin.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.