by Charles Siegel

When I was born, in Houston in 1960, my parents named me after my paternal grandfather, who had died at age 32, and gave me the middle name of “Stein,” my mother’s maiden name. At the time, my parents lived in an apartment. In 1963, my younger brother came along, and in 1965 we moved into a house, with my parents taking out a $40,000 mortgage. It took them decades to pay it off, but eventually they did, and my mother proudly announced that they now owned the house “free and clear.” In 1966 another brother arrived.

My parents lived the rest of their lives in that house. They were there for 58 years after we moved in, until 2023, when they died two weeks apart. My mother passed away first, at 91, and then my father at 94.

My parents didn’t throw much away. In addition to their many hundreds of books, there were dozens of boxes of old pictures, family records, correspondence and so on. My brothers, who both live in Houston, have gradually been making their way through it all.

A few boxes contain letters in Polish or Yiddish. My grandparents on both sides all emigrated to America as children; both my parents were thus first-generation Americans. Like millions of other Jews, they came from Eastern Europe — primarily Poland. Or what is now Poland.

We recently hired a Yiddish translator to translate some of these papers. Our parents, mostly our mother, sometimes spoke Yiddish around the house. Looking back, I think they did so when they wanted my brothers and me not to understand what was being said. In any case, we ourselves never learned to speak the language.

Last week, we received the first completed job from the translator. It is a letter to my maternal grandfather, Mitchell Stein, from his brother Isaac in Bialystok, Poland. His brother actually was not Isaac Stein, of course, but Izak Sztejn. And Izak addressed his brother not as Mitchell, but Mikhoel.

This letter was written 100 years ago in 1926. My grandfather was by then in his twenties, living in Houston with a wife and two young children – my aunt and uncle. My mother, his youngest child, wasn’t born until 1931. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

In a week of elections at a time when many questions whether both democracy and the structure of our republic – let alone other democracies and republics – will withstand the storms they currently face, maybe it’s worth talking about democracy itself.

Like most former British colonies, Singapore has a democratic republic based on the Westminster System, only unlike Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a number of other countries, Singapore chose to have a president as a stand-in for the sovereign.

Sure, there are those who question whether Singapore is truly a democracy given only the People’s Action Party has ever held a majority. Moreover, in many Singaporean districts candidates run in blocs – meaning three to six candidates sit as one choice on a ballot, leaving the political parties in a “winner takes all” position.

To further the criticism, Singapore’s election commission is not independent and answers to the Prime Minister. Election cycles are also very short – campaigning is restricted to ten days which many feel puts opposition parties on the back foot.

That said, international monitoring bodies have always confirmed Singapore is free of election rigging, promotes strong voting secrecy and has high institutional trust among its citizens. Singapore has ranked highly for decades on government transparency and citizens feel election administration is no different. Surveys and studies show there is genuine support and satisfaction with the PAP, largely because of the prosperity it has ushered in since 1965.

Like every other democracy, Singapore uses a one person, one vote system. But it has considered alternatives.

In 1994, founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew brought a new concept into national debate and spent the rest of his life bringing it into conversation in interviews in the international press as well. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

A couple of years ago I offered up a style guide that danced between the sartorial and the linguistic. But times change and styles with it. Time for an update.
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Do not wear red.

This one is easy for me as red tends to make my skin look blotchy. But what about those of you who sparkle in red? I’m sorry. Styles come and go, and we now find ourselves in a season when wearing bright, straight red will get you mistaken for being a Trump supporter.

And honey, nothing is more out of fashion than that.

Burgundy, maroon, and oxblood are still in play. Take your chances with tomato.
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Among instead of amongst, unless you’re actually reading Shakespeare aloud. Among has economy and, more importantly, style. It is the word of choice among the dapper. Furthermore, among is frequently followed by the, and they go splendidly together, whereas amongst the gives the impression that you have mumps. And there are no awards for stacking as many consonants together as you can.
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Hang dry your flannel. Sheets, shirts, etc. I’m talking about 100% cotton flannel, regardless of whether or not the item has a traditional flannel check design. Flannel is a fabulous material for cool and cold weather. And when the Welsh first invented it in the 17th century, flannel was made from wool and was quite hardy. But since the 20th century it’s mostly been the light, fluffy cotton fabric we now know and love, and it is not cut out for modern washers, driers, or detergents/softeners, which beat the shit out of our textiles. Synthetic fibers can hang tough. Even plain old cotton weaves can hold their own for a good while. But washing and drying flannel in machinery with commercial solvents will wear it out quickly, and worse, destroy its luxurious yet approachable texture. Wash sparingly, as needed. Air shirts out when you can. And when you do put your flannel in the washer, use gentle detergent (as little as possible) with cold water on a gentle cycle. But most of all, do not put your flannel in the dryer. Hang drying can take a while because flannel is not a smooth fabric. But some things are worth the wait.
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Don’t marry before age 30. Read more »

A grey heron sitting on a rock in the Eisack in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

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by W. Alex Foxworthy

I. The Practical Dilemma

The question of AI consciousness has escaped containment from academic circles and labs and entered into our living rooms. In August 2025, Anthropic gave some versions of Claude the ability to end user conversations if a conversation was judged to be abusive or harmful and if repeated attempts to redirect it did not succeed. The end user in these instances would then see a notification saying that, “Claude has ended this chat.” This feature was framed by the company as primarily an experiment in “AI welfare.” The idea of taking precautions to ensure the welfare of AI systems raises a question which we don’t currently know how to answer – could anything be good or bad for an AI in the sense that we think that pain is bad for a dog or that relief is good for a person? Is there currently, or even one day potentially – the capacity for subjective experience in these systems? 

In an October 2026 commentary in Nature, Anil Seth, Ned Block and Giulio Tononi argue that consciousness in silicon-based AI is “extraordinarily unlikely” and further argue that it is unlikely to ever be able to develop that capacity using this substrate. They warn that granting AI rights or protections could interfere with human oversight and divert attention from beings whose consciousness they regard as beyond doubt (I.e., human beings and their close relatives). They hold that mistakenly attributing consciousness to non-conscious systems is much more likely than missed consciousness, and therefore conclude that “a precautionary approach would be misguided.” However, I disagree on two grounds. First, I do not think that the evidence supports dismissing AI consciousness with such confidence. Instead an attitude of open scientific curiosity and humility is better matched to the open nature of the question. Secondly, even if one were to accept a low probability of consciousness in silicon-based AI systems, this does not mean that reasonable precautions would harm humans or detract from our ability to exert oversight on these AIs.

This issue has become of great practical importance and we will very likely need to navigate it without achieving any great level of certainty. Philosophers have investigated the nature of mind and subjective awareness for more than two millennia, from ancient Greek and Indian traditions through Descartes and the emergence of modern scientific psychology and neuroscience. Yet despite centuries of philosophical argument and more than a century of experimental investigation, we still lack an accepted account of what makes a physical system conscious. Even as we make great progress in our ability to make empirical measurements of features that may be associated with consciousness, recent work highlights that an attribution of consciousness still largely depends upon one’s starting assumptions. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

Can you be betrayed by Donald Trump? If the Republican party indeed pays in seats for the war it watched its leader wage, it appears the reason is not the principled refusal of the American public to put up with authoritarian politics, but the perceived violation of its natural right to low fuel prices – the breaking of the president’s sacred promise to use his awesome powers only to hurt others. To call that a betrayal would be melodramatic; that concept derives all its force from a plausible prior belief in someone’s faithfulness or minimal ability to honor agreements, contracts, or oaths of office.

Embarrassing to know this, and then still to experience a pang of betrayal myself, on reading about the United States government’s deal with Vladimir Putin. A deal allowing Russia to fund its bloody war of aggression against Ukraine, and allowing the US president a long shot at a flimsy alternative narrative concerning fuel price levels. Not thirty, but two or three pieces of silver; or as the Economist commented, “never in the field of human conflict was so much risked by one man for so little.”

Hoping to resolve my confusion, I consulted an essay collection by 20^th-century liberal philosopher Judith Shklar. Shklar discusses a handful of ‘ordinary’ human vices – cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, treachery, and misanthropy – in order to assess their political importance. The overarching argument is that in liberal democracies, cruelty ranks first. In her essay on betrayal, she argues that although it has a clear and distinct idea at its core, it is rarely clear-cut enough in practice to play a central role in our moral universe. “Ambiguity may haunt the suffering of the weak sometimes”, she phrases it poetically. In the following paragraphs, I’d like to walk through her discussion of the concept, which moves smoothly from betrayal in social relations to treason in premodern face-to-face politics, up to subversion in modern democracies. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Michael Liss

My dearest Friend, your dearest Friend never had a more trying day than Yesterday. A Solenm Scene it was indeed and it was made more affecting to me by the Presence of the General, whose Countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day. He Seem’d to me to enjoy a Tryumph over me. Methought I heard him think Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! see which of Us will be happiest. —John Adams to Abigail Adams, March 5, 1797, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Such are beginnings, even when laden with pessimistic prophesy. And such are endings, four years later, as when an angry, bitter John Adams skipped the Inauguration of his successor, Thomas Jefferson, by jumping on a 4 a.m. stagecoach headed toward Quincy. 

Adams had a tendency to hyperbolize, even catastrophize—Ben Franklin, while otherwise giving him style points for intelligence and commitment, said Adams was “sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”  Franklin was being unkind, but he wasn’t wrong. Adams had been tripped up by forces he didn’t expect nor have the tools to combat—the new game of political parties and partisan politics, the tepid support he got from his fellow Federalists, and, finally, the personal betrayal by his successor, his one-time friend, collaborator, and Vice President, Thomas Jefferson.

Such are subsequent beginnings. Jefferson took the job, gave an Inaugural Address filled with the promise of a new and better day, and, in his first term, largely delivered on it. Joseph Ellis, in American Sphinx, calls that first term “glorious.”

Jefferson’s second term seems to have been an extended demolition derby. Europe again was at war, and American interests were targeted—a situation exacerbated by Jefferson’s decision to dry-dock much of American’s navy. To add to this potentially existential crisis, a bit of bizarre betrayal karma came into play. Jefferson’s first-term Vice President, Aaron Burr, allegedly hatched an incredible scheme to detach a portion of the western United States and make it an independent country with Burr in the dictator’s role. President Jefferson was not amused, and went to great lengths (some might say unseemly unconstitutional great lengths) to see that Burr would end up on the gallows. 

In this, Jefferson was too optimistic. Burr was eventually captured and brought to Washington for trial, where an obstacle presented itself in the form of Jefferson’s hated Chief Justice, John Marshall. After the great defense lawyer Lester Martin presented some exculpatory material and testimony, Marshall acquitted Burr on September 1, 1807.

The crises ate at Jefferson. Burr was free, and Jefferson was still bedeviled by his Federalist Chief Justice—indeed, still bedeviled by Federalists everywhere, particularly in New England. Jefferson’s passion for partisanship went unsatisfied, and Britain and France remained hostile. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

I recently came across a certain Grimms’ fairy tale for the first time, one I had overlooked in the past: Die Boten des Todes, or “Death’s Messengers.” Here it is, in a slightly abbreviated English translation:

Once, a long time ago, a giant was traveling down a country road when suddenly a stranger appeared and cried, “Halt! Not one step further!” “What,” said the giant, “I could squash you with one hand! Who are you to address me like this?” “I am Death,” said the stranger, “whom none withstands, and you too shall obey my command.” But the giant refused, and began to wrestle with Death. In the end the giant won: he struck his opponent down and Death sank to the stony ground. “What will happen,” thought Death, “if I simply remain here? No one will die any longer, and the world will soon be so filled with people that there will be no room for them to stand.” Just then a young man came along the road, whistling a tune. When he spied Death in his parlous state he propped him up, gave him a drink from his flask, and tended him until he recovered. “Do you know who I am,” asked the stranger. “No,” replied the young man. “I am Death,” said the other, “I spare no one and can make no exception for you. But in gratitude for your care I promise I will not come to you unannounced when it is your turn, but will send my messengers ahead to warn you.” “Fine,” said the young man, “I will be happy to know when you are approaching, safe from your grasp at least until that day.” And he went on his way, as cheerful and carefree as ever. His youth and good health did not last for long, however, and soon he was beset by aches and illnesses, which plagued him by day and stole his peace at night. “But I’m not about to die,” he told himself, “since Death said he would send his messengers first.” And as soon as he felt fit again, he would go on living, as happy as ever. But then one day there came a tap on his shoulder. “Follow me,” said Death, “the hour of your departure from this world has arrived.” “What,” said the man, “do you mean to break your word? Didn’t you promise to send your messengers before you came yourself?” To which Death replied: “Did I not send you one messenger after another? Were you not shaken and cast low by fever? Were your joints not pinched by gout? And did Sleep, my brother on earth, not remember me to you each night? Did you not lie abed as if already in your grave?” To this the man had no answer; so he resigned himself to his fate and departed with Death.

Now, you may understand why I would never have read this particular story to my children when they were young, even if I had know it in the first place; indeed why, despite my Swiss-German grandmother’s taste for the macabre, I had never heard it myself. It might be a cracking yarn for a Hallowe’en party, or for a gathering at a cemetery on the Day of the Dead, but it’s hardly suitable for bedtime, if only because children would likely be kept awake by the troubling paradox of Death himself being on death’s door.

In fact, I encountered the tale first in a book devoted to just such paradoxes—or rather, to contradictions. Read more »

Arthur Melville. Kurrachee, circa 1882.Watercolor over pencil underdrawing.

“In his early twenties, Arthur Melville embarked on a journey to the Middle East, which was to be the defining event of his career. He arrived in Karachi (Kurrachee) in modern-day Pakistan in March 1882, remaining there for only four days before making his way to Baghdad then Constantinople (now Istanbul). He made a few closely related street scenes featuring empty foregrounds and strong contrasts of light and shadow that capture – as noted in his diary – the ‘dusty hot roads, white glare, trees covered with dust’. The particular thoroughfare shown in this painting might represent a section of Clarke Street, not far from Melville’s temporary base at the Sind Club. Melville’s innovative ‘blottesque’ style was more relaxed and informal than much watercolour practice at this time.”

More here, and here.

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—for Danny, my Brother 1949-1976

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by Lei Wang

I have often scoffed at coping mechanisms. I wanted to be better than them. Freud said the end goal of therapy was to take you from neurotic misery to the ordinary unhappiness, but even in the midst of neurotic misery, I wanted more than the ordinary unhappiness. Ordinariness is not very inspiring. Only the unwell (one extreme of the extraordinary), I thought, aspire to be unremarkable.

Anything that freewheeled with emotions I took to be coping mechanisms: journaling, therapy, personal essays, even heart-centered meditations. And yet I did them all. I liked them, they helped me in some way, but it felt like dating someone embarrassing, like when a friend was seeing someone she was actually quite into but whose uncool earnestness she could not stomach in public, so we secretly nicknamed him Zumba. Zumba is inefficient and not how you REALLY exercise. Zumba is cringe. (I know, I know, the snob part of me is really lovable.)

What I thought I wanted was transcendence, the stuff beyond messy incorrigible human emotions, to live in that place where all is always well, at least subjectively. It’s a very attractive state: who wants to be Eeyore when you can be Pooh? I still believe it’s possible to live this way—it is possible to be enlightened—but I no longer think it’s the best or even better way.

Lately, I’ve been finding that my favorite teachings and teachers are post-enlightenment backtrackers, no longer proselytizing the gospel of nonduality/oneness as the ultimate truth but instead how to live in the world of appearances, including the duality of relationships with other people. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Since I last posted, I fell, broke my hip, and am now in a post-op facility trying to put my life back together. I mention this because the poem I discuss today is exactly what I need as part of my medicine for this and life beyond. Tomas Transtromer prescribes a simple but hard medicine. My piece also contains a quotation from his “Schubertiana” a wonderful poem on music and politics. If you love either or both, you should read it. My piece is also a meditation on home. I hadn’t thought about the Odyssey until this moment, but maybe something of it is here too.

Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself. —Tomas Transtromer

I have before me a copy of Truth Barriers, a collection of poems by Tomas Transtromer translated by Robert Bly. I was surprised the other day to open it and find it signed by both men. Robert, in his neat, small hand said “another Swede! – ‘Even the grass whispers Amnesty,’” and from Tomas, “Dear Nils, try to feel at home!” Both obscure, and both lovely, and both somehow true. (I just realized that all my life I’ve been trying to feel at home.) I been trying to feel at home with my Swedishness even to the point of fantasizing what my life would have been like if after a couple of years being jobless at the start of the great depression, my parents had decided to go back to Sweden as some of their friends did. What would it have been like to live there during WWII? Where would my father have found a job? He was a machinist. I imagine him working for Saab, or Skania Vobis, or Volvo. So likely we would have lived in a city rather than the farm country one of my mother’s family.

Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of music performed by Swedes having become a fan of The Real Group, that marvelous gathering of 4 or 5 singers (depending on the time frame) with impeccable harmony. They sing both in Swedish and English as do the marvelous Swedish quartet The Ringmasters And yes, I’ve bought into the learn a language app, Babbel, and am trying, painfully to learn Swedish. (I’ve pretty much given this up.) So, yes, Tomas, I am trying to feel at home. Read more »

by Carlota Figueroa

I know that a “boom” sound is usually associated with something negative, like putting tinfoil in the microwave and the inevitable trip to the hardware store for a new one. However, just sometimes, having things explode or implode can actually be very beneficial to us: especially when it comes to harvesting energy. Nuclear power as a whole is a controversial topic, but as a physicist, seeing how much our energy demand is growing year to year, I wouldn’t be able to sleep soundly at night if I didn’t talk about fusion energy and convince you (or at least try to) that it is nowhere near as scary as it sounds.

A 2022 study showed that its participants overestimated the risks of nuclear accidents compared to natural disasters. It also argued that there may be a trigger in our behavioral immune system that makes us much more naturally averse to nuclear energy, as if it were a contagious disease. In my opinion, the main problem is that in many cases fusion is not distinguished from fission: they are both grouped under the general “nuclear energy” umbrella, which evokes that feeling of uncertainty that makes so many uncomfortable. Is there really any difference between the two?

The way fission reactors work is that they take a very large (and radioactive) nucleus and split it, releasing energy in the process. Have you ever tried to buy your geeky, Big Bang Theory-loving friend an original gift with a physics motif? I am sure one of the first things that comes up is a mug with one of the most important equations in physics printed on it: E = mc^2. Well, this little equation is the main reason why we can harvest energy from dividing a heavy nucleus: the two daughter nuclei you get from the split weigh less, together, than the parent nucleus you started with, and that missing mass is released as energy. I won’t go into more detail, but hopefully you get the idea.

Now, let’s turn our attention to fusion, as the story is slightly different. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

Reading Gil Duran’s The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy is, as I’m sure it was meant to be, a concerning and surreal experience; the anti-democratic fantasias of Silicon Valley’s elite would be laughable if they weren’t having such a deep influence on the modus operandi of America’s kleptocracy. Duran traces the story from Peter Thiel’s encounter with Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s 1997 book The Sovereign Individual which predicts the total collapse of the welfare state, with crypto and other such decentralised mechanisms sustaining whatever emerges after the disaster. Participatory democracy will be replaced by system in which power is granted those cunning enough to win it, now that they have been freed of the fetters of government regulation and the damnable obligation to look after the lesser. The information age, say Davidson and Rees-Mogg, makes this inevitable, and it is thus not very surprising that the advocates of unlimited and unrestrained technological growth find this vision attractive; it naturally places them, as the “cognitive elite,” at the head of the table.

Duran then winds out the story to show how this vision has been articulated among both resplendent would-be John Galts, like Thiel, Elon Musk and Balaji Srinivasan (current CEO of Coinbase), and basement-dwellers who like to think of themselves as Underground Men, like Curtis Yarvin. This is the sort of power fantasy that reassures its votaries that the collapse will happen naturally and their victory is assured; nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt to move the process along. The Nerd Reich shows how Thiel’s evangelism (literally, now that Thiel has added a version of apocalyptic Christian dominionism into the ideological mix) has snaked its way though a collection of political action groups and venture-capital firms, all culminating in the election of a Thiel acolyte in J.D. Vance, and the vigorous adoption of cryptocurrency by Trump as both ideological signal and as a means of personal enrichment, which is his primary, indeed only, agenda in his second term. Read more »

by Robert Jensen

After finishing required coursework, Ph.D. students in most disciplines take preliminary (sometimes called qualifying) exams to demonstrate that they’re ready to begin independent dissertation research. Faculty members on a student’s exam committee sometimes discuss potential questions ahead of time with students.

As a joke, I would tell graduate students in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin that my question would be simple: “Social science is neither social nor science. Discuss.”

I never asked a student to respond to that prompt, which could have made for a tense exam because not all faculty would find it funny. It was just my way of poking at academics, who seemed to me to be disproportionately socially awkward. More importantly, I wanted students to question whether disciplines such as economics, political science, sociology, and communication studies were sciences in any meaningful sense.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I may have been too cynical about the social part of the joke. The larger my sample size—as the number of people I have met in my life grows—the more it seems to me that awkwardness in people is more or less equally distributed among vocations. But I hold firm on the refusal to treat the study of economic, political, and social systems as sciences—not because those fields are less important than physics and chemistry but because they take on vastly more complex subjects that constrain the application of the scientific method. Studying atoms and molecules is hard, but understanding people and societies is more challenging, and often beyond the reach of the methods of contemporary science. Read more »

Cloud behind a mountain in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Marianne Janack

In an essay he wrote for Gourmet magazine about a lobster festival, David Foster Wallace considers the ethics of eating “flesh based viands”, and particularly the practice of boiling lobsters alive. Do they feel pain? Comparing human neuroanatomy and lobster neuroanatomy doesn’t really answer the question, he concludes—it could lead us to think that they don’t feel pain, but the same facts might mean that they suffer even more than humans do. The upshot? The answer to the question of whether lobsters feel pain can’t be answered by recourse to physical structure: the evidence is ambiguous.

I. Uncomfortable thoughts about preferences

Wallace points out that lobsters’ behavior seems to suggest that they’d prefer not to be boiled, and seeing such behavior would, in ordinary circumstances, lead us to think that the creature behaving that way is in pain. In fact, he says, anyone who has seen a tank full of live lobsters at the grocery store will see that they prefer the dark. And studies of lobsters suggest that they also prefer cooler waters. So it’s hard to come to the conclusion that lobsters don’t feel pain when they are boiled alive without doing a lot of intellectual gymnastics.

But, of course, the tradition of distinguishing animal pain from human pain is long, going back at least to Descartes. Read more »