It was 4am, and the inquisitive one was walking in the darkness and looking up at the stars. The inquisitive one had been inspired to do such a thing as a result of having just read the very short poem When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman. But then suddenly, while looking up at the stars, the inquisitive one fell into a hole!

“Help! HELP!” cried the inquisitive one.

Sadly, unlike Aesop’s fabled astronomer, the inquisitive one had small hope of anyone hearing these cries. You see, it was Black Friday. Everyone who usually made a habit of wandering around the outskirts of the city at 4am was, at that point, inside Wal-Buy, Best Mart, or JCNickel—either that, or waiting in line for the doors of those establishments to open. (The inquisitive one wasn’t sure which, having spent the previous few hours perusing poetry instead of store ads.)

Nonetheless, refusing to give up hope entirely, the inquisitive one kept hollering and calling out.

“Help! HELP!” cried the inquisitive one.

Luckily, a turkey, who was as usual boycotting everything having to do with the holiday season, heard the cries.

“Help you? After what you did yesterday to my cousin? Fat chance!” said the turkey, and paraded off.

“Oh no! Help! HELP!” cried the inquisitive one.

Luckily, a Libertarian Party member, who was exercising the freedom that comes of choosing not to jostle within crowds, heard the cries.

“Me, help? Help yourself!” said the Libertarian Party member, and chose to walk somewhere else.

“Oh no! Help! HELP!” cried the inquisitive one.

Luckily, a Republican, whose family budget did not allow for frivolous spending that season, heard the cries.

“I would call 911, but funding for that service has been cut, in order to balance the budget,” said the Republican, and stepped into a waiting limo.

“Oh no! Help! HELP!” cried the inquisitive one.

Luckily, a Green Party member, who was boycotting everything made of or wrapped in plastic, plus everything transported to a store by means of fossil fuels, heard the cries.

“This must be a sinkhole caused by bad environmental policies! Don’t worry, I’ll stage a hunger strike at the White House. We’ll have this problem solved within four years!” said the Green Party member, and pedaled off toward Washington.

“Oh no! Help! HELP!” cried the inquisitive one.

Luckily, a Democrat, who was waiting until Small Business Saturday to do the season’s shopping, heard the cries.

“I feel so bad for you! How could this have happened? Ahhhh!” said the Democrat, and collapsed into a fit of tears and wails that were so loud, and so long lasting, that the inquisitive one could not make any cries heard above the racket.

The inquisitive one had just about given up hope when dawn broke, the sun peeked out from where it had been hiding, and light spilled into the hole. Suddenly, the inquisitive one saw the solution. It was so obvious, though, that it would be heartless of me to write, in all bluntness, the details of the particular means of escape; and so, out of deference to the poor inquisitive one, who asked me to keep the whole thing as quiet as I could (without, that is, my giving up my profession entirely), I will merely note that our hero made it safely out of the hole.

It was then that the inquisitive one walked back home in the sunshine, thinking about the moral of the story.

So many of us spend so much time consuming media about national and international politics, and yet it’s often difficult to apply the abstract concepts and faraway events we hear and read about to the concrete details and local happenings of our personal lives.

But then, sometimes things get personal.

While browsing through my fave local indie bookstore, I noticed a pretty novel on display. Its cover had a pink-and-blue, rose-and-streamers-like pattern, overlaid with two circles indicating two awards won. I bent it open and read these two powerhouse opening sentences:

“Isma was going to miss her flight. The ticket wouldn’t be refunded, because the airline took no responsibility for passengers who arrived at the airport three hours ahead of the departure time and were escorted to an interrogation room.”

What a lovely use of language; and this loveliness continues throughout Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire. And what a beautiful opening setup for a novel about a British Muslim family torn apart by national and international affairs. Politics can’t get any more personal than finding oneself in an interrogation room. And this is only the first of a series of increasingly harrowing scenes in which politics crash into the lives of Shamsie’s characters.

In what ways have politics been personal for you?

Scientists do not work in a vacuum, even—I can’t help punning—physicists who experiment in a vacuum regularly.

It’s easy to imagine hard science as being unmarred by the messiness of the humanities, but scientists are only human. In his book about quantum physics in the twentieth century, What Is Real?, Adam Becker tells a historical saga about how politics, war, personalities, and philosophy has affected the ways in which prominent scientists lived, worked, and thought.

Thus the charismatic Danish physicist Niels Bohr influenced what physicists believed about the quantum world for decades, just by dint of personality and institutional position.

Thus Albert Einstein and many other physicists fled from Europe to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s due to the rise of the Nazis. As a result of World War II and its aftermath, the center of quantum physics shifted from Europe to the U.S. This change in location, culture, and political milieu affected physicists’ work in terms of available jobs, funding opportunities, politics and the blacklisting of communists, and in-vogue philosophies.

Thus a young physicist named Hugh Everett III came up with an extremely original idea—the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum physics—but devoted most of his life not to theory, but to worldly pursuits more fitting to the times.

Most of all, Becker illuminates how the “Copenhagen interpretation” went virtually unchallenged for decades (though Einstein was a notable dissenter) due to accidents of history and culture. He notes,

“All of science is vulnerable to human biases and to influences from all the other spheres of human endeavor—politics, history, culture, economics, art—that some of those biases spring from.”

It makes one wonder: what are today’s unseen biases, and how are they skewing our modern worldview?