by Joseph Shieber

Given the multiple cataclysms that the United States has experienced within the last three or four months, it might seem puzzling that one of the most hotly discussed topics recently has been that of free speech and whether it is under threat by the bugbear of cancel culture. What could be objectionable about open debate? What is there even to discuss about the importance of free speech?

Apparently, a great deal. A recent Cato Institute poll, for example, found that “Nearly two-thirds—62%—of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”

Furthermore, within the past few weeks alone, the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss announced her resignation by means of a fiery letter to Arthur Sulzburger, claiming that she was subjected to a hostile work environment because she championed open debate. Within hours, Andrew Sullivan announced his departure from New York Magazine on twitter.

Prior to the resignations by Weiss and Sullivan, the previous controversy around free speech was sparked by the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, in which more than one hundred prominent intellectuals and writers pledged a commitment to open debate in a statement larded with vague platitudes. Read more »

Sughra Raza. City Lights, Central Park, NY. 2015.

Digital photograph, acrylic on canvas.

by Jackson Arn

Writing seriously about comedy is a thankless challenge. Only an idiot, or somebody who’s used to thankless challenges because he’s a freelance critic, would bother. The risks are high, the rewards low. Overanalyze your subject and you’ll kill it. Treat it too indulgently and you’re left with a jumble of second-hand bits. Clearly, jokes say something important about the society that laughs at them, but woe to the writer who takes them too literally or too earnestly. They are, after all, jokes.

Sometimes, comedy changes so profoundly that it’s worth risking some kind of grand, straight-faced interpretation. And mainstream American comedy has changed profoundly in the last thirty-ish years. It’s gotten thinner, lighter, you could almost say healthier. The style of humor that nourished America for decades has dried up—it’s still possible to find it if you know what to look for, but it’s become the exception where it used to be the rule. To put it another way: comedy has been drained of chicken fat. Where did it go?

If my subject is chicken fat, I have to start with Mad Magazine. No humor source—not SNL, not Carson, not Lenny Bruce—had as much influence on America in the back half of the 20th century. This is impossible to prove, and almost certainly true. Mad was founded in 1952 and lasted until 2019, when it announced it would stop printing new material. At its peak it had two million subscribers. It made its reputation poking fun at McCarthy and Khrushchev and lasted long enough to take on Trump and Putin. Read more »

by Robyn Repko Waller

My professional expertise as a philosopher concerns questions of free will. Sometimes the question is whether determinism threatens our free will. Sometimes the question is whether science speaks against our having free will. And sometimes the question is how others’ influence on our lives limits our control and responsibly. Often the discussion centers on thought experiments about sci-fi manipulators, studies of the neural events that lead to our actions, or logical entailments of the laws of nature. But we don’t need these experiments and metaphysical claims to see a quandary of free will at the intersection of all three staring us in the face: how do we — and ought we — as agents navigate a COVID-19 world? Let me explain.

Recently I read an article in which an anti-mask protestor held up a sign stating “Is it about the virus or is it about control?”

Regardless of one’s stance on masks, the sign vociferously speaks to the phenomenology of control in COVID times. Now one interpretation of the sign is, of course, that government mandates have restricted citizens’ activity and required masks in some jurisdictions; and this individual might be claiming, then, that government mandates are a matter of state control firstly and public health perhaps only secondarily at best. Or perhaps the protestor is stating that the debated right to not wear masks is an issue of individual liberty, and not a rejection of the statistics of COVID-19. While I personally do not take either of these views of the recent government mandates, the expressed experience of agency of this individual, who felt an encroachment on his control, stood out as intriguing. What is it like to be an agent, a person of personal and civic freedom, during COVID? Read more »

by Jochen Szangolies

J Richard Gott and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

J Richard Gott, now an astrophysicist famous for the notion that the universe might have created itself by reaching back through time, visited the Berlin Wall in 1969, while an undergraduate at Harvard. There, he made the following prediction (paraphrased):

The Wall will stand for at least 2 and 2/3 years more, but no longer than 24 years.

On November 9, 1989, a rough twenty years later, his prediction came to fruition, and the Wall came down, precipitating the reunification of East and West Germany.

How did Gott arrive at this prediction? Did he have some special insight into the sociopolitical climate of the times? Was he so convinced of the inherent flaws of Soviet communist ideology that he could confidently predict its downfall? Or did he merely note a structural weakness in the construction itself?

The answer is, of course: none of the above. For his prediction, Gott needed only one single point of data: how long the Wall has stood so far. At the time of his visit, the Wall had existed for about eight years—construction having begun on August 13, 1961, two months after GDR council chairman Walter Ulbricht’s emphatic declaration that ‘nobody has the intention of building a wall’ (“Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten”).

Armed with this knowledge, Gott estimated that the Wall would stand between one third and three times that time longer. For this, he needed to appeal to two further assumptions—the Copernican Principle, and the Principle of Indifference. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Raji Jayaraman

Audio Version

As a young and idealistic 21-year-old, I spent a year in India working with my hero, Jean Drèze. This was the mid-nineties. There were many idols to choose from. Nelson Mandela was universally worshipped. Even Bill Clinton had a following. Cool kids were building altars to Kurt Cobain, who had recently died by suicide. I suppose it says something about my social acumen that my hero was a pyjama-kurta clad Belgian who had renounced worldly possessions and lived in a Delhi slum. I say he “was” my hero not because he no longer is, but because he is no longer Belgian. He is the only European I know who has wanted, and successfully obtained, Indian citizenship. I’m Indian, but I think I can say without any self-loathing that only someone who is utterly committed to the cause would do that. He is often described as an economist activist. The oxymoron speaks for itself.

In order to afford one square meal a day and avoid having to room with Jean in his basti, I got a day job in the World Bank’s Delhi office. Bretton Woods Institutions, for all their post-modern capitalist swagger, have a strangely missionary zeal in their quest to save the world’s poor. Their employees—including my parents who worked for the UN for decades—regularly go “on mission” to developing countries, and they say that with a completely straight face. In the first month I was there, we had our first mission from Washington which, after a debriefing and reception in Delhi, was going to head to “the field”—a turn of phrase that rhymes with “mission” in all but rhyme.

Over the last few decades, numerous Indian states and cities in the field have been re-christened, mostly because the British romped around the planet mispronouncing names and then spelling them accordingly. I’ve spent a long time trying to decide whether their misspellings are a mark of a. carelessness, b. arrogance, or c. disrespect. My best guess is d. all of the above. Take the names of Indian indentured labourers to the Caribbean, for instance. V.S. Naipaul is clearly just an anglicization of Naipal because as his grandfather was being herded off the boat, the guy in the safari suit and sola topee at the bottom of the gang plank repeated, “Nai-Paul” when grandpa said “Naipal”, because….Well, because “Pal” isn’t a name and “Paul” is, and that just made more sense to write down in a name ledger. Correct answer: d. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

The French scientist Pierre Curie, in the new film Radioactive, is impressed by a colleague’s paper on the magnetic properties of steel. It’s an apt reflection of his attraction to that steely colleague herself, the Polish-born Maria Sklodowska.

They become labmates, chisel through four tons of rock pitch over four years, and discover radium and polonium. In the process, they fall in love and fall ill from their glowing, deadly new atomic treasures.

Radioactive is a hybrid of traditional prestige-film grand biopic and quasi-psychedelic time travel. That peculiar combination — occasionally refreshing, more often distracting — speaks to the production’s parentage. Producer Paul Webster has to his credit decades of award-crowned major pictures like The English Patient and Atonement. This film is adapted by Jack Thorne from a graphic novel by Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout, and it is directed by the graphic novelist turned animated-film director Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis). 

The result is a handsome, elaborate production, designed by Michael Carlin with cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle, that chafes at the constrictions of its predominantly linear storytelling and finite historical elbow room. But reminding viewers that the Curies played both Prometheus and Pandora to the wonders and horrors of the atomic age feels unnecessary and vaguely patronizing.  Read more »

Water lilies on a trout pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol, in July of 2020.

by Eric Miller

1.

On occasion, a long epoch of concord with a favouring breeze may seem to grace us: inspiration in the sense that birds must relish it. What a divine—almost avian—thing it was for us, the hotel kitchen staff, to pack cheesecake, kiwifruit and champagne into our rucksacks, to tighten the straps that secured these dainties on our shoulders, and to climb right from the back exit with its tubs of lard to the stark summit of a Rocky Mountain in Alberta.

We felt we flew or, to speak more precisely, scudded upward. I wore shorts and a clean undershirt and sneakers with no socks, my colleagues wore nothing more substantial, and we scaled the steep flank of the darkling peak as though, like magpies, we half hopped, half sailed, never shaking off an appearance of indolence in spite of the winged celerity of our ascent. We might have kicked altitude away beneath our flexing feet, bubbling giddily like divers whom ebullience, in shimmering snorts of submerged laughter, expedites to the water’s surface.

After night fell, a thunderstorm broke out well below us in the valley. We were dry. We watched the lightning flash and fret; it resembled the dome and tassels of a jellyfish aglow in a cove. The spectacle of electrical unrest promoted our repose. When one couple began to thrash in a single sleeping bag, they rejoiced us, intimately clustered on that narrow summit, with the audible excess of their droll yet solemn ecstasy. The sounds they made as they scaled in duet the scarp of their pleasure amounted to musical improvisation, disclosure rather than presumption of form: a gasping flag or panting plume to mark—to augment—the height of the mountain and our happiness. Making instruments of each other, musicians of each other, they performed for and they warmed us. Sonorous fire! Read more »