The Failure of History: Kushner's <i>Homebody/Kabul </i>and the Apocalyptic Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tony Kushner insists that he altered none of the dialogue in Homebody/Kabul (which premiered in December 2001 at New York Theatre Workshop) to accommodate the events of September 11, 2001. It is, apparently, pure serendipity that the play takes place in Afghanistan and explores some of the more horrific aspects of life under the Taliban regime. In denying any particular prescience concerning the September tragedy, Kushner asserts only that "the broad outline of serious trouble ahead was so abundant and easy of access that even a playwright could avail himself of it" Certainly, when the woman known only as the Homebody refers to "the knowing what was known before the more that has since become known" it is a painful irony, and when Mahala, an embittered and desperate Afghan woman, angrily denounces the American policy of toleration toward the Afghan regime, it is chillingly prophetic. "You love the Taliban so much," she says to Priscilla Ceiling, whom she mistakenly believes to be American, "bring them to New York! Well, don't worry, they 're coming to New York! Americans!".
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".