by Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis

Golberg and Meis

David V. Johnson recently wrote an essay for 3 Quarks Daily titled “A Refutation of the Undergraduate Atheists.” In the essay, he accuses the New Atheists of making a simplistic and ultimately unfalsifiable claim—namely, that “humanity would be better off without religion.” It is, as Johnson points out, rather difficult to prove this kind of broad counterfactual. The New Atheists (or the Undergraduate Atheists, as Johnson calls them, including the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris) “claim to know something that cannot, in fact, be known and must be accepted on faith.”

Interestingly, Johnson is himself an atheist. But he wonders whether humanity might actually be better off with religion, even if there is no God and religion has no basis in truth. “Consider,” Johnson writes, “the tremendous boon in happiness for all of them in knowing, in the way a believer knows, that their lives and the universe are imbued with meaning, that there is a cosmic destiny in which they play a part, that they do not suffer in vain, that their death is not final but merely a transition to a better existence. This mental state is, I submit, so important to human happiness that people are willing to suffer and die for it, and do so gladly.”

Though they disagree about the purpose of religion, as atheists, Johnson and the New Atheists come from roughly the same position. They are non-believers looking out upon the vast sea of believing human beings and trying to figure out whether these false beliefs are detrimental or beneficial. In playing with the idea that false beliefs could be beneficial, Johnson brings up the work of Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), the Spanish writer whose essays and novels made him one of the most important thinkers of his time, though he isn’t read so widely today.

Johnson discusses one story in particular, “San Manuel Bueno, Martyr.” It is a powerful story, beautifully written. It is about a village priest who secretly harbors many doubts about his faith. But he throws himself into his work as a priest. The priest does such good work with the people that a young atheist from the city (Lazaro), who comes back to the village to “enlighten” the villagers, ends up becoming an “unbelieving” Catholic, just like San Manuel. Here’s how Johnson explains the story:

Like Lazaro, San Manuel doesn't believe the articles of faith. (“I believe in one God, the Father and Almighty, Creator of heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen …”) What he believes in, rather, is administering to the needs of the villagers, in putting on such a convincing performance of dedication to Christ that they all believe he is a saint and have their faith in the Church and in life everlasting sustained. Lazaro's “conversion,” then, is one consistent with atheism. He becomes a lay-minister of sorts under San Manuel and eventually dies a Catholic.

The moral of the story, according to Johnson: Religion is false, but the people need it because it makes them happy. The only problem with this reading of the story is that Unamuno thought no such thing. Unamuno was, in fact, contemptuous of the idea of “blind faith.” But Unamuno was also a practicing Christian when he wrote the story. There’s something funny going on here, you might think. In a sense, you’d be right.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

There are some questions we just can't shake; the nature of space and time, or the identity of the building blocks of the universe; they pester us until we answer them, and then, as if on cue, the Universe proceeds to demonstrate the inadequacy of our proposed solutions. One such question, the asking and answering of which has spurred on the progress of science for millennia, is that of the vacuum. Almost universally, the human race seems to find the concept of complete emptiness fascinating. We have fantasized about this gaping void and spoken of it often, in science, philosophy and folklore, but while in principle it is possible to postulate a complete void – the physical equivalent of the mathematical concept of zero – in practice, this perfect nothingness eludes us.

The argument can be traced back at least to (circa) 500 B.C, when Parmenides declared that a vacuum – i.e. a region of space completely devoid of matter – simply could not exist. The Greek natural philosophers debated this possibility for decades, some declaring the void to be indispensable, others finding it repugnant, until a hundred or so years later, Aristotle issued the now famous dictum ‘horror vacui', or, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum'.

Two thousand years later, when experimental science had advanced sufficiently for abstract ideas to be put to the test, the vacuum was duly investigated. Scientists like Galileo, Pascal, von Guericke and Boyle devised mechanisms to pump the air out of glass vessels, creating vacua in order that their properties could be studied, and some rather striking demonstrations ensued. There were, for instance, the Magdeburg hemispheres designed by von Guericke in 1656.

These large copper hemispheres were joined together their rims sealed with grease, and the air within pumped out so that a vacuum was created within. The hemispheres could then no longer be pulled apart, even by thirty horses, until a valve was opened and air let back in. The incredible strength with which the metal globe clung together was attributable to atmospheric pressure; in other words, the ‘weight' of air – a force we feel all the time and yet are insensible of, because in most situations, the push and pull balances each other out. A vessel devoid of air, however, exerts no outward force – it only feels the air outside bearing down on it from all sides, holding it in an invisible vice.

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by Matt McKenna

The 2014 Academy Award nominees have yet to be announced, but it is a safe bet that Peter Segal's Grudge Match won't be taking home any hardware this year. And that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has seen the film since it isn't very good. However, there are films that are bad by accident, and then there are films that are bad by design. Grudge Match is among the latter set. Why would a filmmaker go through the trouble of purposefully creating a movie they know will be universally panned by critics in addition to not making its money back? In the case of Grudge Match, it was utterly critical for the jokes to fall flat, the plot to be predictable, and the boxing sequences to languish in order for the film to express its critique of polarized partisan politics in the United States. Through both its content and its form, Grudge Match dissects the deleterious relationship between politics, the media, and a credulous population.

Grudge Match follows the time-tested Hollywood strategy of taking a genre film concept, casting the leads as older folks, and calling the whole thing a comedy (e.g. Space Cowboys, Last Vegas, Wild Hogs, etc). Specifically, Grudge Match belongs to the boxing film genre, the leads are played by 70-year-old Robert De Niro and 67-year-old Sylvester Stallone, and the film is littered with what appear to be jokes indicating the film is intended to be viewed as a comedy. Based solely on the description above, you can probably guess the film's plot: having grown old and pathetic, two retired rival boxers with convoluted, intertwined histories are lured into one last bout by a goofball promoter preying on each character's desperate need for pride and money.

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by Bill Benzon

Tracing things back to the beginning is always a bit arbitrary. There is always something that came before, and even before that. For example, just how is it that Charlie Keil, winner of the 22nd Annual Koizumi Fumio Prize for ethnomusicology, ended up playing tuba in front of the Vermont Statehouse in the Fall of 2012? I suppose it isn't much of a stretch to get from ethnomusicology to the tuba, as both have to do with music, but the Vermont Statehouse?

It's time we take a short tour through a long story. Just for sake of perspective, let's start the tour sometime in the late early 20th Century, with the band of John Philip Sousa, the March King. He was the highest paid member of that band, which had been touring America for years. His bass drummer during the 1920s was a man named August Helmecke. Helmecke was also the highest paid member of the band.

Why, you might ask, was the bass drummer the highest paid member of the band? Simple, really. He maintained the pulse. Without the pulse, the music had no life. Helmecke was the heart of the band.

And he was Charlie Keil's first percussion teacher. Helmecke gave group lessons on Saturday mornings at Darien High School in Connecticut in the late 1940s. Every Saturday morning he'd teach the kids to hold their arms high and then down stroke vigorously, getting the whole ar and trunk into the motion. And though it would be years before Charlie would know this, many of the jazz drummers he came to admire – Papa Jo Jones, Sid Catlett, Chick Webb and others – would go hear Sousa's band just so they could bear witness to Helmecke's mighty drumming.

That's the start. Charlie went on to learn the snare drum, orchestral percussion, and the traps set. And while he's played professionally from time to time, he ended up studying anthropology in graduate school at the University of Chicago. That's when he did a master's thesis that he published in 1966 as Urban Blues.

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by Eric Byrd

Actually there was only one, but his lectures contained such echoes – of Khodasevich, Nabokov, Brodsky – that in retrospect he seems the voice of, if not a “culture,” then at least a certain lineage of fierce and fastidious exiles who cut strange figures in the literary communities of Western Europe, and in the comedy of American campus manners. Alexander Dolinin's survey of Russian prose fiction was my first class at the University of Wisconsin. Outside: the crisp and glittery end of summer on an elm- and maple-wooded isthmus dividing two deep glacial lakes. Dolinin announced his standards in that first lecture; he was skeptical of group identity (“individual genius is all that counts”), and refused to teach verse in translation. For the next nine months I would be reading some Englished classic of Russian prose. We followed Dolinin from the faro tables and winter balls of Pushkin's Petersburg to the lustily scythed acres of Levin's estate; from the crowded Crimean pier where Chekhov's lady lost her lorgnette to the Arctic reveille of Denisovich and the zeks. The Oxford World and Penguin Classics provided only the silhouettes of Russian writers, and we were yawning undergrads in an early-morning elective, and Dolinin could not muse as he might have – but nonetheless he was able to model an intellectual sensuousness, an impassioned relation to tradition like nothing else I would encounter in the next four years.

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by Fausto Ribeiro

For years, amidst the cold and dirty cement, nothing had revealed itself to me, and I left so many hours, so many days go by in emptiness, without doing much about it. So when I finally felt the moist grass beneath my bare feet, a beam of pleasure climbed up my legs and landed at the back of my neck, tingling. The feeling almost subsided as I thought about the derision it would bring about were I to voice it, but it resisted in defiance when, with each slow step, I saw a bit more of the river: how could its color, in appearing among the tree leaves that separated it from me, be so beautiful? Hitherto, I understood that rivers were no more than paths for putrid waste, flanked by asphalt serpents over which gigantic metallic insects slouched creepingly, emitting their electric lights – red, yellow – and puffing ashes towards the sky; in the heart of such beasts lay anguished beings, encrusted, grabbing onto the wheel, honking, forcing themselves to ignore the imminence of cerebrovascular accidents. But not the Rhone: there I found myself, absurdly, in front of an idyllic valley where the waters ran quietly, and one could drink from them, and one could swim in them; small fallen branches were seen floating serenely, following their path towards the oneiric Mare Nostrum from the history books of my long gone childhood. And if under the sun its green glistened, by dawn the waters transubstantiated into pure methylene blue, and would then be confused in my memory with the swaying brushstrokes of a certain starry night, whose constellations shone magnificently, spreading as if by magic their light upon the river: divine images conceived by a sad soul, who had gone mad and died before anybody could be enraptured by his howls of utter beauty.

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