Can Love Last? A (mostly) encouraging story about the fate of romance over time

by Gary Borjesson

Note: Since it is February, and since the world can surely use more love, I offer this as a little Valentine’s gift, dedicated to romantic love. Its inspiration is Stephen Mitchell’s book, Can Love Last? This is not a book review but an invitation to reflect on romantic love, with Mitchell as our guide.

The urn with the lovers that inspired John Keats’ famous poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, which beautifully captures the split between wanting and having.

In my early twenties I fell in love with a woman who couldn’t color inside the lines. Brilliant, sensitive, and adventurous, but unreliable, addicted, and self-destructive. Around that time I was also in love with an amazing woman who was healthier and more reliable, if also (like me) less dangerously exciting. I felt conflicted: Should I embrace a more romantic and adventurous life, or choose something safer and more sustainable? My gut told me that choosing adventure in this case would end in heartbreak and bad habits. My heart was split between wanting safety and wanting danger. My head didn’t know what to think.

Many of us face a similar bind, whether to choose safety or adventure. Whether to plan ahead or live more spontaneously and passionately. Whether to hit the open road or put down roots. In his fascinating and wise book, Can Love Last? the fate of romance over time, psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell addresses this bind, and offers a way through. The way begins by recognizing that romantic love is actually constituted through the tension between “the ordinary and transcendent, safety and adventure, the familiar and the novel, that runs through human experience.”

So, how do we make true love? In Mitchell’s grand vision, it’s not about siding with passion or security, it’s about about bringing them into the living conversation that is romantic love. In the final chapter of Can Love Last Mitchell sums up his argument

deeper more authentic commitments in love entail not a devotion to stasis but a dedication to process in the face of uncertainty. Genuine passion, in contrast to its degraded forms, is not split off from a longing for security and predictability, but is in a continual dialectical relationship with that longing.

Mitchell’s way of putting it would have appealed to my 22-year-old self, who would soon be going off to grad school in philosophy. Back then, however, I didn’t have the maturity or self-awareness to put this wisdom into practice—even if I could have appreciated the theory. Nevertheless, for those who want to make love that lasts, Mitchell’s book offers insight and inspiration. Many practical suggestions can also be gleaned. Read more »

The Voices In My Head

by Barry Goldman

Following the news makes me feel sick. Not following the news makes me feel guilty. This conflict has been going on in my head for years, but recently it has become painfully acute. I don’t make any progress, I just go round and round. I’ve given the voices in my head the names of the two imaginary friends I had when I was a toddler, and I’ve transcribed some of their dialogue below.

Bearky:                   If we don’t stay informed and keep up with the outrages and stay engaged, the theo-plutocrats win.

Berry-Derry:       Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown. They already won. They control the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court. They own Twitter and Facebook and the Washington Post and the LA Times and Fox and talk radio. Whether you follow the news or not makes no difference at all except that it makes you miserable. How does your being miserable help anything?

Bearky:                  It doesn’t help, exactly. But it makes it help possible. If I don’t stay engaged, if I check out and just keep bees – because I’m a rich old man and I can – then help is not even possible. They want me to give up and let them control everything. If I retreat into my own protective bubble and just read novels, they can do whatever they want.

Berry-Derry:       And if you don’t? If you read every Substack and every blog post and email, and listen to every podcast, what difference will that make?

Bearky:                  I don’t know. But I do know it’s important to resist evil. And I know, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Berry-Derry:       Yeah, right. But as far as the actual world is concerned, watching internet commentators and reading blog posts IS doing nothing. It’s sitting quietly in front of a screen. It doesn’t DO anything. You want to know what the enemy wants? He wants you to sit in front of your screen being mad at the world until you get tired and go to bed.

Bearky:                  So what do you think we should do, go to protest marches and demonstrations? I hate everything about protest marches.

Berry-Derry:       Well, it’s a collective action problem, right? If everybody does it, if there’s a general strike and it shuts down the country for a few weeks, the government has to respond. But if it’s just a few thousand hippies marching around chanting slogans, no one cares. The government can ignore them or arrest them as it sees fit. Read more »

Friday, February 7, 2025

Inside the CIA’s Decades-Long Climate “Spy” Campaign

by Rachel Santarsiero

For decades, the Central Intelligence Agency—an organization best known for its espionage and secret missions—has been spying on climate change. Well, maybe not spying. Not at first, at least.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA conducted a top-secret US program using satellite imagery to capture images of Soviet military installations. The program, codenamed CORONA, dramatically improved U.S. knowledge of Soviet and other nations’ capabilities and activities, and allowed the U.S. to catalog Soviet air defense and anti-ballistic missile sites, nuclear weapons related facilities, submarine bases, IRBM sites, airbases—as well as Chinese and other national military facilities. In total, the CORONA mission, along with sister programs ARGON and LANYARD, yielded almost a million images of the Soviet Union and other areas of the world.

While these satellites were capturing images of Soviet bases, however, they were unknowingly spying on something else: climate change.

Because satellites typically orbit on north-south paths, their sensors can capture the vast majority of the Earth’s surface as the planet turns over the course of a 24 hour period, cataloging sweeping Arctic and Antarctic images. Over the twelve years that CORONA was in operation, the satellite captured approximately 850,000 static images of retreating polar ice, ecosystems’ extent and structures, species’ populations and habitats, and human pressures on the environment.

Due to their highly classified nature, these images weren’t readily available for public and scientific use. In the early 1990s At the urging of first Senator and then Vice President Al Gore for the CIA and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to consider releasing environmental information gleaned from classified data, the CIA established the Environmental Task Force (ETF) to review the classified reconnaissance CORONA satellite imagery and determine whether or not “classified information could help on particular scientific questions.” According to a 1996 speech by former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch, the ETF found that data collected by the Intelligence Community (IC) could fill critical gaps for the environmental science community and could be studied outside of the spy community without revealing “sources and methods.” Read more »

Women in Jazz: Sheila Jordan, Age 96, Drops a New Album

by Dick Edelstein

A message from Spotify on my phone this morning announced that jazz singer Sheila Jordan had just dropped a track from her forthcoming album. A musician of very long experience among the inner circle of bebop jazz stars—iconic players, most of whom are no longer with us—she is an iconic figure herself, still playing and recording regularly with outstanding musicians. You may wonder why she is not better known.

It’s complicated. Although few women have made a big reputation in jazz, we can think of several well-known vocalists who earned enduring reputations, such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday. Like Jordan, they all launched their careers in the mid-20th century. Perhaps because of extreme poverty in her early life and the need for a steady income after the birth of her daughter in 1955, Jordan kept her day job until she was nearly 60, combining her work in an advertising agency with her career as a singer, recording artist and teacher. In one interview, she makes the point that it was easier for her to sing what she wanted if she did not have to rely on her income as an artist.

In 1962, after a decade of intense involvement in the New York bebop scene, Jordan recorded her first album on the renowned Blue Note label, a great recording in the original version and the remastered 1995 release. She did not record again under her own name until 1977 but since then has recorded over thirty albums and has appeared as a featured vocalist on dozens more, working with distinguished musicians like saxophonist Archie Shepp, trumpeter Don Cherry, and avant-garde vocalist Carla Bley. Jordan’s close association with the avant-garde partly accounts for her relative obscurity since the audience for this sub-genre is pretty small in comparison to its artistic allure. Read more »

Life After Tinder: What I Learned From 10 Years Of Online Dating

by Eric Schenck

My 2024 ends with a ceremony of sorts. On December 31st, I’m sitting in a hotel in Salt Lake City an hour before midnight. I’m looking at my phone and I have it opened to Tinder. 

For almost a decade, I’ve used the dating app off and on. There are hundreds of matches. Some I’ve talked to. Most I haven’t.

I’ve deactivated Tinder before. But this time I’m going to really give it a go and erase my account. I try to go through each profile. My plan is to manually delete each one. That will force me to give each match just a little bit of my time, if only a few seconds. 

This doesn’t last. Five minutes into it I figure: 

What’s the point?

Trying to give some kind of attention to hundreds of people I’ve never met is absurd. It’s also disrespectful to myself. If time is what life is made out of, I am, quite literally, handing it over to people that will never mean anything to me.

Fuck that. 

I delete my account, erase the app from my phone, and get ready to watch New Years fireworks from my hotel window.

Real life is calling. Read more »

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Handke and Camus on a Mother’s Death

by Derek Neal

I read the opening of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and immediately thought of Camus’ The Stranger. Here is how Handke begins:

The Sunday edition of the Kärntner Volkszeitung carried the following item under “Local News”: “In the village of A. (G township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.”

My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks….

In The Stranger, Camus also begins with the notice of a mother’s death by way of print media:

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

One gets the feeling from Handke that after Camus, one can only write of a mother’s death in the shadow of Camus, that one either follows Camus or rebels against him, yet his presence is always there, undeniable. This goes in the opposite direction as well. When I read Handke’s account of his mother’s death, it led me to reconsider the beguiling opening of Camus’ novel. On some readings, Meursault has seemed indifferent to me at the beginning of The Stranger—how could someone not know whether such an important event happened this day or the day before? Yet reading Handke makes me see things differently. In Handke’s account, I see the decision to depersonalize the story as a way of coping with a terrible reality; relaying the information from the newspaper is not heartless, but the only way to dull the horror of an inexplicable event. It takes something boundless and sets limits on it, creating an official account upon which all can agree. Meursault’s decision to tell the reader about the telegram is similar. He begins by recounting his own version of events and is immediately destabilized; his inability to remember if the death occurred one day or another is not indifference but a loss of lucidity as he is overwhelmed. He then takes comfort in the objective, totalizing nature of the telegram, only to question it again after (“That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”) This is the conflict of The Stranger which plays out over the course of the novel—the meaningless, impersonal, social world represented by the telegram versus Meursault’s own subjective experience of reality, which goes beyond the limits of language. Read more »

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part Two—The Memoir Continues

by Barbara Fischkin

The place where I learned the most about diversity, equity and inclusion was not at my liberal summer camp in New York’s Catskills mountains—but at a pig farm in northern Kansas. To be fair, if it wasn’t for camp, I never would have pitched a tent under the big sky of the Jensby farm.

A dining hall at a Web-Met Camp
A dining hall at a Wel-Met Camp.

I was there because, as my last chapter noted, Wel-Met, my summer sleep away camp, had a free-range philosophy. Campers planned their own activities, hiked into the woods for sleepovers and—when older—lived in tents rather than bunks. This was a preparation for the next step: Cross-country camping trips. Wel-Met ran six of these each summer and in the 1960s they all stopped at the farm of Clarence and Florence Jensby. The Jensbys welcomed all with open arms—campers and returning counselors alike. (I arrived three times). On the surface, we could not have been more different. Or in today’s lingo, more diverse. Most of us were Jewish New Yorkers. The Jensbys were Christian midwesterners.

It did not matter. With great panache, the Jensbys introduced us to their operation and their pigs who, well, smelled like pigs. This came as a surprise to the city slickers. Mrs. Jensby demonstrated, with schoolteacher-like skills, how to prepare a live chicken for dinner. Trip after trip, year after year, she showed city kids how she would break the chicken’s neck, pluck the feathers, yank out the guts and prepare it for cooking. Some campers were horrified. I saw her humanity. I saw her as a farmer who worked quickly to minimize suffering. Today, when I view pictures of chickens raised in crowded coops, not free-range—or hormone or antibiotic free—I think of how Mrs. Jensby did it better.

I also have a memory of Mrs. Jensby dressed up, wearing her good shoes and leaving the farm—perhaps for church. I wondered how she did this without stepping on any animal droppings. I wondered how she had transformed herself so quickly from farm wife in a blood-stained apron to a “proper” lady. A lifelong lesson: there is more to a person than you see at first. Read more »

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

The Climate Change Policy Problem

by Thomas R. Wells

Many environmentalists find the climate change policy problem baffling. The core mechanism of how certain molecules create a greenhouse warming effect on the earth is extremely clear (and has been known for over a century). Evidence that human activities are releasing greenhouse gases in dangerously disruptive quantities is also very clear and well-established, as is the obvious conclusion that humanity has to stop doing this. Moreover, the economic costs of transforming the global economy to run on non climate-destabilising energy sources, while substantial, are quite affordable.

Of course there are myriad important sub-questions to investigate about climate change, the answers to which are still contested by the relevant expert groups of scientists (like how all the extra heat being absorbed by the world is distributed geographically, and its precise impact on different weather systems). However, basically, the science is clear. Moreover, more or less all the world’s governments accept the scientific definition of the problem and the solution. And yet the solution remains unimplemented.

So, why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about a huge problem? Read more »

Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos

by Philip Graham

A conversation between Christine Sneed and Philip Graham

Since 2010 Christine Sneed, winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (among other awards), has published six acclaimed books: the story collections Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry, The Virginity of Famous Men, and Direct Sunlight, and the novels Little Known Facts, Paris, He Said, and Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos. With each new book Sneed has expanded her impressive range of vision, combining cultural insight with the everyday strangeness of her fictional characters.

Having explored in her novels the subtle and not-so-subtle mechanics of craft and inspiration in the art world, or the corrosive effects of Hollywood fame on an actor and his family, Sneed has recently set her sights on the contradictions of American capitalism. Please Be Advised is a deliciously droll novel (told entirely through the surprisingly illuminating lens of interoffice memos) that takes the reader on a journey through successive rings of corporate hell.

Philip Graham: Pleased Be Advised stunned me when I first began reading it—the novel is a wild and hilarious romp that’s entirely presented through the office memos of a struggling company named Quest Industries, which makes “collapsable office products” of dubious utility. Your earlier work, both short stories and novels, are quieter, even contemplative, and incisive in their paring away of your characters’ illusions and presentations of self. Those memos of Please Be Advised are laugh-out-loud funny on nearly every page. And yet, as I read further, I remembered that your earlier novels also made use of various documents to arrive at a deeper level: an artist’s sketchbook, a secret diary, obituaries, a character’s attempted memoir.

Christine Sneed: Hybrid forms have long been of interest to me as both a reader and a writer. When I started writing seriously in the early 1990s, it was poetry, not fiction, that I was attempting to put on the page. I did try to write a few short stories too, but it was clear I wasn’t ready—as with acting, the artifice must not be visible in fiction-writing, and everything I initially wrote was awkward and mannered. The compression and playfulness of a poem seemed both a challenge and an invitation. The short lines I was working with and the sensory imagery and concrete detail helped me focus on language, and as I got a little older and read more widely, I started to write fiction with more confidence. This was after earning my MFA in poetry. By that time, I had a better sense of how to create a character that seemed real and was not simply my surrogate.

The playfulness of hybrid and found forms like the memo or the resume or diary entry offer a chance for me to return, I suppose, to the compression of a poem. When I was writing Please Be Advised, it was great fun to begin every new memo, and to write in a different character’s voice. It was a bit like writing comedic prose poetry. Read more »

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Your Doctor Is Like Shakespeare (And That’s A Problem)

by Kyle Munkittrick

When I think about AI, I think about poor Queen Elizabeth.

Imagine being her: you have access to Shakespeare — in his prime! You get to see a private showing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the height of the players’ skill and the Bard’s craft. And then… that’s it. You’ve hit the entertainment ceiling for the month. Bored? Your other options include plays by not Shakespeare, your jester, and watching animals fight to the death.

Shakespeare and his audiences were limited not by his genius but by physics. One stage, one performance, one audience at a time. Even at their peak his plays probably reached fewer people in his entire lifetime than a mediocre TikTok does before lunch.

Today we have an embarrassment of entertainment. I’m not saying Dune – Part 2 or Succession or Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour are the same as Shakespeare, but I am going to make the bold claim that they are, in fact, better than bear-baiting. My second, and perhaps bolder claim, is that AI is going to let ‘knowledge workers’ scale like entertainers can today.

Consider this tweet from Amanda Askell, the “philosopher & ethicist trying to make AI be good at Anthropic AI”:

If you can have a single AI employee, you can have thousands of AI employees. And yet the mental model for human-level AI assistants is often “I have a personal helper” rather than “I am now the CEO of a relatively large company”.

Askell is correct (she very often is, especially when you disagree with her). “I am going to be a CEO” is the mental model we should have, but it isn’t the mental model most of us have. Our mental models for human-level AI don’t quite work. There are lots of very practical predictions out there about what scaled intelligence means. I aim to make weirder ones. Read more »

What Was So Great About America Again?

by Kevin Lively

The re-election of Donald Trump has prompted a spectrum of reactions among those who are . . . unenthusiastic . . . at this outcome. One common reaction I’ve observed among progressive friends and those who enthusiastically rather than grudgingly vote Democrat is confusion. Many reactions are understandable: dread about the implications for climate change, concern for the human rights of undocumented migrants in the US, or a low-grade panic over the fact that the Supreme Court has literally vested the office with immunity against legal persecution for assassinations, although apparently Obama’s assassinations of US citizens get a pass. Confusion, however, is only explicable as a consequence of a media ecosystem which rarely manages to coherently discuss many of the serious issues in American society, and crucially the role of policy choices by the government under both Democratic and Republican leadership which either failed to address or directly exacerbated these problems.

As any very stable genius glancing at a red hat in public can tell you, the appeal which won Mr. Trump his first democratic victory is ultimately rooted in nostalgia. But nostalgia for what exactly? Was American really greater in the past than it is now? And if so what changed and why?

Well this is a layered question. There is of course the obvious fact that for a non-negligible share of Trump voters this nostalgia is rooted in a time before the Civil Rights Act extended de jure if not de facto equal rights to non-white, non-christian, non-heteronormative non-men. If nothing else one can look at the day one rescinding of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs across the federal government and its contractors as an appeasement to that crowd. However, while this discrimination is indisputably a crucial aspect of American society and will continue to severely negatively affect human rights in the US, it is also not the only reason for Trump’s election. This in evidence from the increases Trump made among non-white voters, although the total numbers are still biased towards white men.

For the moment however, I do not want focus specifically on the very important issue of racism and discrimination, and instead look to other causes for support for Trump, although the USA being what it is, it will still permeate the discussion. Let’s start with the short term. Assuming there was a modicum of greatness in Trump’s first term we can look to an April 2024 New York Times / Sienna poll for what voters remembered about 2017-2021. Read more »

Monday, February 3, 2025

DeepSeek is Not a Sputnik moment, It is a Model T Moment

by Malcolm Murray

As someone who thinks about AI day-in and day-out, it is always fascinating to see which events in the AI space break out of the AI bubble and into the attention of the wider public. ChatGPT in November 2022 was of course one. The podcast-creating ability of Google’s NotebookLM almost got there, but didn’t quite reach the “getting-texts-from-grandma” level of virality. But this week, with DeepSeek’s launch of its R1 model, we had another event at the ChatGPT level that again resulted in questioning texts from spouses and colleagues.

There have already been a thousand takes on this and I apologize in advance if you’re already sick of the subject. However, I hope this piece can give you what Brad DeLong calls Value Above Replacement, since it shows where the myriad takes fit in the current broader narratives. I also shine a light on the “Model T” aspect, that I feel has been somewhat overlooked.

First, there is the geopolitical take, or what we can more formally call the delta between US and China. This is why Marc Andreessen and others referred to DeepSeek as a “Sputnik moment”. The long-standing assumption was that China was 1-2 years behind the U.S. in developing AI models. This assumption shattered this week; it turns out China is only a few months behind. This also relates to the long-cherished view in the U.S. of China being solely a fast follower, only able to copy the U.S., which the DeepSeek engineers put an end to by pioneering some very smart machine learning techniques, such as greater efficiencies from better use of Mixture of Experts (MOE) and Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA). So it makes sense that this would be a shock to many Americans. However, the Sputnik analogy per se doesn’t fully make sense. Given all the focus the U.S. already has on AI and the huge investments it is already making, it is unclear how this “Sputnik moment” would change things. Trump, Altman and co just announced $500 billion in funding for Stargate, so what are they going to do as a DeepSeek response, announce another $500 billion? That seems a bit hard given that most of the money in the Stargate announcement was already committed years ago and the rest of it might be vapor dollars that do not actually exist. Read more »

Adrift in a Sea of Bullshit

by Rachel Robison-Greene

In the past decade, we have witnessed the fallout from the largely unrestricted spread of bullshit on the internet. People have died or have become seriously ill as result of following bad medical advice that they heard on social media. A recent Healthline study found that, among those who had started a new wellness trend in the past year, 52% of them discovered the trend in question on social media. The same survey found that only 37% of participants viewed their doctor as their most trusted source of medical information. There is a concerning new trend of children self-diagnosing mental disorders, and sometimes even developing symptoms of those disorders that they did not previously exhibit in response to watching the videos. The spread of conspiracy theories on social media has led to people falling deep into rabbit holes, often losing their most valued relationships with friends and family members as a result. People sometimes develop racist, sexist, and xenophobic attitudes toward people they have never met on the basis of internet bullshit. We are staring down the barrel of even fewer restrictions on bullshit in light of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that his platforms would no longer include fact checking of questionable posts. The White House has also announced that it will open press briefings up to “new media”—podcasters, YouTube personalities, and social media influencers who need not have any formal training in journalism or commitment to codes of conduct that govern ethical behavior in the field.

Why should we allow this to happen? Should we continue to allow social media influencers to say whatever they want on their platforms? Should we do something to stop the AI powered bots that serve no purpose but to generate chaos from entering and participating in the marketplace of ideas? Belief formation is a social practice and we have social obligations. Shouldn’t we put into place some guardrails to ensure that the practice is healthy for our communities and our children? The public figures who suggest that we ought not to provide any flags on misinformation or context for out of place content ask the rhetorical question “who are we to say what’s true?”. Such a question suggests that there is no reliable process we can use to discern truth from falsity or good faith discourse from bullshit.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives the concept of bullshit a serious treatment in his famous essay On Bullshit. He argues that liars and truth tellers are playing the same game from different sides. Bullshitters are doing something else altogether. They simply don’t care whether what they are saying is true or false. They have an indifference to truth and may have even embraced the conclusion that there is no such thing as truth. Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

“lacrimae rerum, “ (the tears of things)
…………………………………….. —Virgil

Everything Cries

Steel’s tears are rust,
trees weep tears of falling leaves,
clouds weep and mourn their loss
sacrificing their billows to the earth as rain,
the earth weeps its carbon into sky,
the sun weeps its energy into earth
and will die someday of the loss,
even stones weep, sobbing their very selves
by force of wind and rain into talus slopes and sand,
their hard tears roll down a mountain’s breast,
on cool mornings rivers weep their mists into atmosphere
joining sun’s tears in a symphony of sight,
the shifting colors of tears,
and my eyes well up,
a spontaneous flood comes and joins
with all the salty tears of things

Jim Culleny
10/8/22

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Sunday, February 2, 2025

Artists Wrestling With Things & Faces

by Mark R. DeLong

Six columns of small, thumbnail-like images of fantastical creatures, many of them bearing some resemblance to common items like cups, teapots, or bells. The images stack ten-high, making 60 individual images in the grid. The pictured work is a woodprint, so the colors are bold, and not bled into one another.
From the MFA Boston. See the enlarged image on their website: https://collections.mfa.org/objects/190862

We humans grasp and use things. We dwell among things. We devise new things. As a result of being so pervasive and common in experience, things qua things are practically invisible to us. For the most part, we tend to see them as things outside of us, not as something “inside” of us or capable of manipulating us even as we manipulate them. But deeper thought helps us see the relationship more complexly. The complex relationship of things and humans isn’t just the province of philosophers; it’s also for artists and poets to explore in works that amuse and, in some cases, horrify.

Folklore and old stories mark out some of the points of the relationship of things and humans. The lore of medieval Japanese Tsukumogami delight, as comically violent as they are, because they explore a world in which things acquire an identity—an energetic and human-like identity. The old Shinto versions tell of forsaken tools and utensils that become “ensouled” and take revenge on humans for throwing them away so carelessly. Things and humans become adversaries in the story, at times even deadly ones; yet, in order to sanctify the story for religious teaching, the ensouled old tools eventually achieve enlightenment.

The narrative follows a path of separation and estrangement finally redeemed. In the end, things ensouled and divinely blessed—attributes that traditionally only apply to humans—blur the distinctions of thing and human. All things (human, too) are united in enlightment, a signal of the animism that Shinto monks injected into old Japanese folk tales to make the stories into homilies.

Another narrative arc exploring things and humans in effect goes in the opposite direction. Rather than moving from degrading rejection and estrangement as in stories of the Tsukumogami, such stories depict the merger of things and humans (or, at least, personifications). They are inseparable, and identities dissolve into the things that, quite literally “make them up.” In the end, trying to discard a thing also diminishes the identity.

As with the Tsukumogami, there’s also a good deal of art that illustrates the relationship. Read more »

Lessons From Singapore: Crime And Punishment

by Eric Feigenbaum

Like the Montagues and Capulets, the owners of Zam Zam and Victory restaurants – adjacent to one another on Singapore’s North Bridge Road – have been at war for roughly a century. A one-time partnership turned bad led to two families operating restaurants with almost identical menus to operate in parallel.

The fare is simple involving various kinds of roti prata and murtabak – a Malaya-originated dish of giant pratas filled with seasoned chicken, egg and onion – and sometimes other fillings, served with a bowl of curry sauce for dipping. These “greasy spoon” specialties are often served 24 hours a day and are a common “after the bars close” foods.

Channel News Asia – Singapore’s equivalent to CNN –  reported on the judicial proceedings around a mid-2015 crime:

The owner of Zam Zam, 49-year-old Zackeer Abbass Khan, conspired with several others to have Victory restaurant supervisor Liakath Ali Mohamed Ibrahim slashed and scarred.

He had instructed business associate and long-time friend Anwer Ambiya Kadir Maideen, 50, to procure an attack on the victim, offering money to get the job done.

Anwer then hired secret society member Joshua Navindran Surainthiran to slash the victim’s face with a knife on Aug 26, 2015.

The victim was left with a permanent scar, and Joshua was sentenced to six-and-a-half years’ jail and six strokes of the cane in 2016 for several charges in relation to the case.

On March 6, 2020 District Judge Mathew Joseph found both Zackeer and Anwer guilty of conspiring to voluntarily cause grievous hurt.

“Business rivalry is a common occurrence,” Judge Mathew said. “It’s part of everyday commerce and it is to be taken in its stride. In the case of Victory and Zam Zam restaurants, both are household names in Singapore,” the judge said, adding that their rivalry has spanned almost 100 years. “This is not surprising as murtabak is a very popular and tasty food item eaten at all times of the day and night in Singapore.”

On Monday May 11, 2020 Judge Mathew sentenced Zackeer to six years in jail and six strokes of the cane.

In California, a crime like Zackeer’s would likely get three years in prison if charged as a felony and not pled down. That said, it can also be charged as a misdemeanor in which case a year in county jail and $10,000 fine are the ceiling of the sentence that might be imposed. Under no circumstance would corporal punishment be imposed.

Singapore’s approach to criminal justice is one of its most controversial features – at least among its Western friends. Read more »

Friday, January 31, 2025

George Bailey on the Bridge

by David Kordahl
Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life," about to jump off the bridge.
In the fallow days of late December, I watched many holiday movies with my kids. The choices weren’t adventurous: Rudolph, Elf, The Polar Express. Between viewings of Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Home Alone 3, The Grinch played no fewer than eight times. My daughters capitalized on their parents’ exhaustion. Their baby brother had just come home from the hospital, and this was turning out better than we’d warned—less screaming, more TV.

But even on vacation there are limits. Instead of Home Alone 4, I insisted we watch an old gem, a movie I remembered fondly from childhood. Everyone loves It’s a Wonderful Life, I declared. It’s a real Christmas classic.

You can probably guess where this is going. Did my daughters (aged five and eight) love It’s a Wonderful Life? They tolerated it. But I felt amazed by what I saw, wrung out, on the verge of tears for the whole last hour.

It’s a Wonderful Life (which, as every appreciation notes three paragraphs in, you should really watch if you haven’t) is a fantasy about contingency. The story is wrapped in holiday gauze and told through intricate flashbacks, but at its heart is George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart in his everyman mode. By the film’s third act, George wants to jump off a bridge and end it all. To stop him, a guardian angel shows him how horrible his town, Bedford Falls, would be if he had never been born. This vision causes George to realize his mistake. He returns to the bridge and prays, “Please, God, I want to live again!” And—poof!—back to the real world. In the end, George reunites with his wife and children, surrounded by friends who have rallied to his aid.

Why does a movie like that work? The brief description sounds like inspirational bunk, and many appreciations—including a surprising number praising the film’s depiction of fractional reserve banking—fail to capture what’s most effective about it. For me, what makes the film work is that when George reaches the bridge, we’re there too. We understand why he wants to jump.

George Bailey’s life is not the life he wanted. Read more »