by Jim Hanas

Any sufficiently advanced technology might be indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke said, but even small advances–if well-placed–can seem miraculous. I remember the first time I took an Uber, after years of fumbling in the backs of yellow cabs with balled up bills and misplaced credit cards. The driver stopped at my destination. “What happens now?” I asked. His answer surprised and delighted me. “You get out,” he said.

Thirty years ago a website appeared that, in the early days of “the graphical portion of the Internet”–as the New York Times then faithfully called the World Wide Web upon first occurrence–seemed like such a miracle. I am speaking, of course, of the Oracle of Bacon, the site inspired by the parlor game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” The story of the Oracle, which is maintained to this day, is–in many ways–the history of the consumer Internet in brief. It features a meme, virality, consumer delight, and unintended consequences–but more on those later.

The Oracle is based on a game invented by college students in 1994. An early message board thread titled “Kevin Bacon is the Center of the Universe” challenged readers to find the shortest path between Kevin Bacon and other  actors via chains of movies they had appeared in together. The post reported that the game’s initial prompt had “received 80 responses in just over a week” (!) at the University of Virginia, though it was three students at Albright College in Pennsylvania that codified the game–and its benchmark–under the name “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” after the 1993 movie based on the John Guare play of the same name. A book followed in 1996, and–were it not for the contemporaneous explosion of the World Wide Web–the story might have ended there. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

Several years ago I was the moderator of a bar association debate between John Eastman, then dean of Chapman University School of  Law, and a dean of another law school. The topic was the Constitution and religion. At one point Eastman argued that the promotion of religious teachings in public school classrooms was backed by the US Constitution. In doing so he appealed to the audience: didn’t they all have the Ten Commandments posted in their classrooms when growing up? Most looked puzzled or shook their heads. No one nodded or said yes. Eastman appeared to have failed to convince anyone of his novel take on the Constitution.

Eastman since has resigned as dean of Chapman Law School and has faced criminal charges and disbarment proceedings regarding his role as a lawyer in the attempted overthrow of the 2020  presidential election that Trump lost. California State Bar judges have recommended Eastman be permanently disbarred, a recommendation that is now  pending before the California Supreme Court. But one of Eastman’s  constitutional views that once seemed far-fetched may very well be upheld by one court and ultimately the Supreme Court. The Fifth Circuit US Court of Appeals  in January heard oral arguments on challenges to statutes in Texas and Louisiana that require displaying the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in their respective states. By some accounts  the oral argument by the challengers was not well received.

Many think it is likely the Fifth Circuit will uphold the constitutionality of the Texas or the Louisiana statute, or both, and that ultimately the matter could be taken up by the Supreme Court. Several  Supreme Court justices could  be very receptive to their constitutionality despite a 1980 Supreme Court precedent finding mandatory classroom displays of the Ten Commandments unconstitutional. If the Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court upholds their constitutionality, almost certainly it will be based on an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution. Read more »

by Lei Wang

My trick for falling asleep is pretending I actually have to get up to do something else. 

I imagine that the alarm has just rung, the obligation must be borne—any moment now, I must leave the cocoon to pack for my early flight or send urgent essay feedback—but I am deliciously malingering in bed.

I fall asleep while distracting myself from feeling the need to fall asleep, instead treating sleep as a rebellious act. This psychology is also how I have experienced the best writing in my life on silent meditation retreats where I snuck in contraband notebooks—writing as a forbidden act—and the best meditation and naps at writing residencies where I’m afraid the secret residency police will catch me not writing.

The only other trick I have for falling asleep is fully accepting the awakeness. But they are actually just one trick, the trick of not trying to do the thing I think I am supposed to be doing. This is also the secret to meditation, by the way, and sex. One of my favorite meditations, via Adyashanti, is the No Idea meditation: how would you meditate, how would you write or love or charm someone, if you had no idea what you were supposed to be doing? And thus couldn’t fail?

Once, forgetting my own tricks and trying very hard to be sexy to someone, I was accidentally funny in a way I have always wanted to be, but maybe only to myself. I made witticism after witticism, nervous joke after joke. Puns leapt into my head one after the other, while I completely left my body. I did not seduce the intended.

Emily Dickinson writes:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

These circuitous truths apply to ourselves as well as to others—we must sometimes hide our own truths from ourselves, in order to live them. As every Joan Didion fan knows, this applies to writing. Read more »

I decided to use this week’s photograph to recommend a book rather than post a visually interesting image as I usually try to do. So here’s a low-resolution self-portrait by webcam showing a book which I have found to be an extremely clear-headed discussion of a lot of issues swirling around in the anxiety induced by the presence of the machine intelligences now among us. No doubt I have a somewhat biased view since the author, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, confirms some of my own independent thinking about these issues but I think many people, especially those who are unsure of the relationship between how machine learning works and how our brains work, will find it profitable to go through the detailed explanations provided here. It is not “light” reading by any means but certainly rewards attentive study. You can find more information about the book here and about the author here. And I highly recommend that you read it.

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by Nils Peterson

I

I’ve been a singer with others most of my life, choruses, choirs, chorales, madrigal groups, barbershop quartets, duets. I love singing, still try to do a little each day, warm up with the computer, doing exercises for voices over 50. In my case, it should be way over 50.

At my senior citizens residence we have a karaoke session about once a month. The guide flashes on the TV screen. You’ve got a mike, the words and accompaniment, and what voice you have left. I specialize in old ballads, the Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett kinds of songs. My most ambitious vocal was trying to sing like Robert Goulet with “If Ever I Should Leave You” from Camelot. I find karaoke fun. The young people who work at my place do too and join us in performing. The reason I’m writing this is I haven’t known any of the songs, not a one, that the young people have chosen to sing. Not sure if they’ve known any of mine.

But I’ve tried to keep up a bit with popular music. I religiously watch the television show The Voice (a show in which young singers compete against each other) trying to keep up not only with what is being sung, but how it’s being sung. It’s clear there is no place for baritones anymore except in country music. The head voice, what used to be called falsetto, is the dominant male instrument. And yes, that often can make a glorious sound. The words seem to be fairly irrelevant which is a good thing since I usually can’t quite make them out. Yet, I am fond of the show and all of those bright young people showing off by singing.

I too like to show off by singing. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Tim Sommers

At one point in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (401 BCE), the chorus offers this bit of wisdom: “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light, the next best is to go whence he came as soon as possible.”

This particular way of putting it is usually traced back to Silenus (700 BCE). However, the view was not an aberration among the Ancient Greeks. Three hundred years later, Aristotle mentions it as a well-known and popular enough view to be the jumping-off point from which to examine alternatives. Plutarch and Herodotus treat it, not as startling pessimistic, but as mainstream.

In the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer said that “Human life must be some kind of mistake.” And implied that “If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone” the human race would not continue to exist.

Contemporary South African philosopher David Benatar agrees. “Coming into existence,” he argues, “is always a serious harm.” And “It would be better to never have been.”

The view that it is morally wrong to bring new people into existence is called antinatalism. General pessimism about life, on the other hand, including ourselves and the lives of people who already exists, tends to be based on empirical claims about the proportion of pleasure to pain in a life. There is no in-principle reason to be sure ahead of time that a life won’t be worth living. Certainly, all the contemporary antinatalists I know of avoid extending the claim that it’s wrong to bring new life into existence to advocating suicide. To be clear, antinatilists do not encourage suicide or think that this view implies anyone should commit suicide.

Suicide may sometimes be justified; for example, to avoid death by torture or a terminal and excruciating illness. And surely there is some connection between the question ‘What if anything gives our lives enough meaning to be worth living?’ and ‘Should we bring new lives into existence?’

In any case, I want to talk about Benatar because he seems to have come up with a new argument to defend antinatalism. A new argument in a debate thousands of years old is worth looking at – even one as depressing as this. Read more »

by Robert Jensen

Wes Jackson’s career demonstrates that sometimes the race goes not to the swift but to the unconventional, that the battle can be won not only by the strong but by the stubborn. Straight-A students don’t always lead the way.

Jackson, one of the last half-century’s most innovative thinkers about regenerative agriculture, has won a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant.” He also received the Right Livelihood Award, often called the “alternative Nobel Prize,” in addition to dozens of other awards from various philanthropic, academic and agricultural organizations. Life Magazine tagged him one of the “100 Important Americans of the 20th Century.”

But mention any of those accolades to Jackson—who was one of the first people to use the term “sustainable agriculture” in print—and he likely will tell the story of almost getting a D in a botany course and describe himself as a misfit.

Not the top of his class

Jackson’s education started in a two-room school near his family’s farm in North Topeka, Kansas, where classes met for only eight months because students were needed for planting and harvest. He was an uneven student whose classroom performance varied depending on the quality of the teacher and his interests at the moment. He went to nearby Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina, focusing as much on football and track as on academics. “I wasn’t what you would call a top student,” Jackson said. “I had a lot of Cs and Bs, an A here and there, but also my share of Ds.” Read more »

Jacob Lawrence. Migration Series (Panel 52).

Casein tempera on hardboard.

“…

Spring, 1968. All my students were black, and I wasn’t. Jacob Lawrence, who was teaching a course down the hall from me at Pratt Institute, was a famous artist and a real teacher; I wasn’t either of those things.

When I introduced myself as a third-year undergrad at Pratt and told him about the Life Drawing class I was offering, Mr. Lawrence smiled. I explained that the college was providing a free model and drawing lessons for low-income adults in the area as part of a program I had helped initiate. “Drawing from a live model is important,” he said.

This highly accomplished man, older and far wiser than me, represented a different kind of model. When I asked if he’d say a few words to my class, his smile broadened. Not surprisingly, he made a big hit that evening, and every evening session thereafter, spending almost as much time in my classroom as he did in his. His eye and mind and storytelling skills were always spot-on. Though I remember him as being too kind to say anything too critical about anyone’s work, my students and I learned a great deal.

…

Lawrence’s series of 60 small, unpretentious panels illustrate the journey of the approximately six million African Americans who migrated from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West in the first half of the 20th century. The dream before them: to secure better opportunities for their families and themselves. They would leave segregation and Jim Crow behind. In Lawrence’s paintings, people work, walk, wait, and die. They gather at train stations, school blackboards, and voting machines, as well as in courts, jails, and funerals. At MoMA, I felt the tensions of the arduous exodus he had heard and read about since he was a child. I felt the artist’s great big ambition to tell a great big story in a way that would allow 8- and 80-year-olds alike to understand and experience it. I felt a peoples’ desperation. I felt Black History in my gut.

The Migration Series (1940-41) was originally shown the year it was completed (under the title Migration of the Negro) at the prestigious Downtown Gallery in New York, marking the first time a New York gallery represented an African American artist. Another first: When MoMA bought half the series (all the even-numbered panels; the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. bought all the odd numbers), Jacob Lawrence became the first African American to have work included in the Modern’s permanent collection.

From: “Mud Above Sky Below: Love and Death in Jacob Lawrence’s ‘Migration Series'”.

Barry Nemett, July 18, 2015.

More here and here.

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by Sherman J. Clark

We do not need philosophers to tell us that human beings matter. Various versions of that conviction is already at work everywhere we look. A sense that people are worthwhile shapes our law, which punishes cruelty and demands equal treatment. It animates our medicine, which labors to preserve lives that might seem, by some external measure, not worth the cost. It structures our families, where we care for the very young and the very old without calculating returns. It haunts our politics, where arguments about justice presuppose that citizens possess a standing that power must respect. But what does it mean to say human beings are worthwhile? And why might it be worthwhile to ask what me mean when we say we matter?

When we speak of dignity, worth, or the respect owed to persons, we are not engaging in idle abstraction. These concepts do real work. They justify constraints on what the powerful may do to the vulnerable. They ground claims to equality that might otherwise seem like mere sentiment. They explain both our moral outrage when persons are degraded and our moral hesitation when we are tempted to treat others as mere instruments.

It is true, then, that we do not need philosophy to tell us that human beings have value. But it is equally true that we are remarkably adept at forgetting this in our actions. We affirm, often sincerely, that all human lives matter, while behaving as though some lives matter far more than others—some kinds of suffering are urgent while others are tolerable, some deaths tragic while others barely register. The conviction is present, but it is unevenly applied, easily displaced by fear, convenience, habit, or interest.

One reason to reflect on the nature and source of human worth, then, is not to discover that worth exists, but to see more clearly how our practices fall short of what we already claim to believe. Thinking about dignity is a way of making our commitments explicit, of exposing the quiet hierarchies we smuggle into our moral lives while insisting, in the abstract, on equality. Philosophy here does not supply a new value; it sharpens our awareness of how badly we sometimes honor the one we already profess.

There is another reason to think carefully about human worth. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Not long ago I wrote for 3 Quarks Daily about R. K. Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets. In Narayan’s 1962 novel, a young man comes home to India from studies in the United States of America with an apparently preposterous ambition. Now back in South Asia, he wants to manufacture ‘story-writing machines’ like those that, in this text, already exist in the USA. His father Jagan is horrified; to him, authorship is sacred and human. Furthermore, to this ageing Gandhian, the writing machines sound like just another instance of American ‘Coca-colonization’. Jagan contrasts the machines’ fluent but bloodless writing with what he genders (and ages) as the ‘granny’ oral storyteller of Indian village life.

Yet here we are in 2026, and this machine isn’t just a twentieth-century satire – it is fast becoming the very air that we breathe in our research and our imaginative endeavours. Being disembodied it may not be able to replace oral storytellers easily, but many other kinds of writers, artists, and creatives are worried about robots taking over their jobs. Generative artificial intelligence entails similar questions about tradition, modernity, global north and global south, colonialism and gender to those Narayan was pondering more than sixty years ago. I will consider all of these questions in this blog post and the sequel(s) which I envision, although I won’t head in a linear trajectory but will instead zigzag. From the outset it needs to be said I am a conflicted doubter in all this, and thus haven’t been able to resolve the conflict. What single individual could?

Anyway, I’ve been following the heated debate on generative AI, and I find myself not only conflicted but in two minds – a for and against I’ll try to sketch in these linked posts. Neither am I sold on the hype, nor am I rejecting the technology out of hand. But I’m fascinated and alarmed by what AI is doing to us. By ‘us’, I mean people who are creative writers, arts and humanities professionals, or simply trying to survive on a combative, burning planet. In other words, what is the impact of the story-writing machines, and how can human beings adapt or resist? Read more »

“What the earliest scriptural-literary texts do is attempt
to find a language to come to terms with the contingency
of being.” —Amit Chaudhuri; Storytelling & Forgetfullness
________________________________________

A Skeptic on Stories of Whoknowswhat?

A story’s a trip through landscapes of malleable things,
or characters bent by other characters, shoehorned into imaginations
or pulled as a potter does a pot, drawing up water and clay,
the stuff of earth, forming it into free-standing somethings
into which we place or pitch our day’s most pressing dreams,
new bouquets set upon tables in rooms we inhabit among stars

A story is a universe skewed by future disharmonies no matter
how religiously we arrange their notes on staffs to create harmonies
appropriate to the moments of the day they were first sung, parcels
of hopelessness and hope, foresights, recollections, Jenga game blocks
assembled or razed as our needs see fit to salve a wound, raise a god, or
to twist instants into forms convenient to the top-dogs of an age, or
shaped sometimes into the tales of losers, yarns whose top billing
among surviving texts skewed by coincidence, or a thing even more
mysterious which bends the arc of future tales in the peculiar direction ofwhoknowswhat?

Jim Culleny
9/22/19,  rev: 2/14/2026

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by Katalin Balog

Winners and losers

It might seem that the idea that one should remain indifferent to success is for losers. Yes, it is my own professional and personal setbacks that all of a sudden so sharpened my insights into the downsides of success. But actually, I am not new to this idea. I am not a virtuoso of failure and decay like Emil Cioran, but I come from a part of the world, East-Central Europe, where there is a venerable tradition of looking with suspicion at the ambition to succeed, to be a winner at life. The tradition, vaguely defined as it is, stretches from Russia through East-Central Europe to Germany and north to Scandinavia. In this tradition, we venerate martyrs and hopeless causes, the heroic individual who dares ignore received opinion, whereas our Western counterparts celebrate achievement and lionize winners.

The collapse of the Hungarian regime in 1989 – and, ironically, the rise of one of today’s most successful strivers, Viktor Orbán – started with the ceremonial reburial of five of the martyrs of the 1956 revolution against communism. Hundreds of thousands showed up for the reburial in Budapest, and millions more watched it on television. During the revolution, the Soviet army invaded the country and put down any resistance, installing a puppet government that went on to rule the country for another 30 years. The Prime Minister of the revolution and four of his closest associates were executed in a special secret trial, their bodies dumped in an unmarked mass grave one early morning in June 1958. Their families learned of their deaths from the newspaper the next day. Hungarians’ collective psyche was very much attuned to these facts at the time of the reburial.  That being a hero might preclude success; that it might get you to suffer much indignity.

Those in the Hungarian Communist Party who made peace with Moscow and carried out the imprisonment and execution of thousands might have had their years of success. But members of the democratic opposition of the 1970s and 1980s, people whom the Western press liked to call “dissidents,” looked askance at this so-called success. I didn’t know anyone in Budapest at the time who wouldn’t have been disgusted by the suggestion that they should be caring about their ‘career’. Though an exaggeration, we believed that only the most craven opportunists were supposed to have a career. Most of my friends either didn’t have jobs because the regime deemed them unreliable or hostile, and so worked in the gig economy (as translators, research assistants, sometimes as pump attendants at gas stations, etc.) or had jobs, but their center of gravity lay elsewhere. Dissidents in Czechoslovakia had it worse; many of them ended up, upon the collapse of the regime in 1989, in the straight-from-prison-to-government pipeline. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

The recently passed American holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas are decidedly irreligious affairs in our starkly secular, two-person household. The tall tales and deeply rutted customs reduplicated and reenacted by the general population barely register with my spouse and me — except for the notion of ritual sacrifice. Every year we enact one sacrifice for each holiday, of our own free will (if such exists), even though it disturbs me a little. It feels at times as if I’m harrying myself rather than satisfying my curiosity for hands-on experience procuring food, but in the end there is something cleansing about it. I’m able to look squarely at the central fact of our existence as heterotrophs on Planet Earth: Life consumes life. Not just that, sentient lives must consume other sentient lives. The rest are just algae of one sort or another (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Ritual sacrifice. Nobody escapes this essential detail of life on the planet, but most simply farm out the detail out to someone else. They have to, for it is impossible for the N-and-a-half million citizens of a large eastern city to have poultry houses or pig pens in their backyards, just as it is impossible they should have neighbors who raise cattle from whom they can buy half a side of grass-fed beef. Because of the sheer magnitude of the human enterprise, we must have feedlots, which have become modern necessities. It follows that antibiotics are necessities as well (to stem mass animal plagues in addition to fortifying growth), and pesticides are necessities (to keep square miles of feed grain unmolested by arthropods), and genetically modified organisms are necessities (to outpace natural selection, which produces antagonists that happily exploit every weak spot in our domesticated stock, given the chance).

One reason why I engage in a hands-on sacrifice of a couple of turkeys every year is that it forces me to think about these issues, as overwhelming as they are. And after the holidays, when the mass slaughter of 46 million turkeys in the US is over, it looks less like thanks being given than appetites being indulged. But there is no way out of this feeding frenzy, not for any of us. . . . And so I rub my own face in it every fall. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

Nearly six years ago, I lost a good friend to cancer. It was tragedy compounded, because he had lost his wife to cancer a few years earlier. That left their two daughters, orphaned in their 20s. More recently, another good friend has been struck with the disease. I know others too, as I’m sure you do as well.

What’s clear to me by now is that this is a relentless disease, not often defeated. With my friend and his wife, both were first diagnosed all the way back in 2004, within months of each other, when their girls were under ten years old. Both went through treatment and lived several happy, fulfilling lives, raising their daughters. But then the disease struck back with menace and intensity, showing up unpredictably in different parts of their bodies. They fought hard, but the cancer finally won.

Wrenching times for them, the daughters and for all of us who knew them, yes. Through it all, and in the years since, I often found myself musing about what it all meant, or came down to. Every time my friend went through a particular procedure, he’d tell me something about what the chances were of its success. Though he knew, and I knew, that “success” was really a euphemism for his survival. It’s 75 percent if nothing else comes up, he’d say, or some other such number. Presumably he had been told so by his doctors. Whatever the number, it was invariably hard to hear. Because each time, it hammered home the full import of that word “survival”. Because each time, it made me conscious of how these odds are calculated at all: by accounting for the people the disease takes from us. One of every four gone? There’s your 75 percent figure. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Having invisible friends is not necessarily a bad thing. What matters is how you handle it. You could, like the engineer Emmanuel Swedenborg or the poet William Blake, spin whole theologies out of your visions. Or you could try and ignore your invisible companions, like the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, and hope they’ll go away (they won’t. Not for a while at least). Here we’ll see that the best thing to do is to learn to live with the darn things. That’s how Calvin Stowe, the husband of American author Harriet Beecher Stowe, handled his teeming world of invisible companions, setting an example of savoir faire from which we can all take heart.

For much of his young life, Calvin Stowe believed that the Bible sanctioned slavery. He was in a good position to know this, being among the most erudite biblical scholars of his day and able to read scripture in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin. He knew every square inch of holy writ the way a bored student knows the top of his desk. And as far as he could see the Bible was okay with human bondage. Then, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that required Northern citizens to help capture runaway slaves. Sickened by this mad injustice, Stowe flipped his beliefs, and where he once saw scripture justifying slavery, he now saw its opposite. In a letter to his wife, he wrote:

“Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”

Harriet, then a modestly successful author, responded by writing the powerful anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin – which whipped up sentiments leading to the American Civil War, played a key role in the abolition of slavery and indirectly led to the deaths of some 600,000 people. Read more »