by Jonathan Kujawa

“Odd,” agreed Reg. “I’ve certainly never come across any irreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field. Have you spoken to any spatial geometricians?” —Douglas Adams, “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”

It turns out mathematicians are well-adapted to working from home in the covid-19 pandemic. We don’t need research labs or access to original texts for our research, and teaching math over video chat is infinitely easier than art, music, literature, foreign languages, or practically any other subject. That said, mathematicians get cabin fever, too.

Recently, Anne and I have been talking about rearranging our offices here at home. In the past, they doubled as guest bedrooms and storage for exercise equipment and homeless plants. Which is fine if you’re using them for weekend afternoons and the occasional work-from-home day. But it’s six months in and time for our house to better match the present and foreseeable future.

Our first idea was to replace a guest bed in one office with a couch. Setting aside the difficulty of choosing a new couch sight unseen during a pandemic, there was the more practical problem of choosing one which could actually fit into our house. Read more »

“(Swifts) feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air. They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can’t really land on the ground.” —Researcher Susanne Åkesson

Swift

I’ve been airborne since
Augustus set the footings of the Roman Peace
—in that alone I flew two hundred years
without alighting once. My forebear’s bodies
so studied the inclinations of drafts
they bequeathed me wings and means
to defy grounded predators
whose craft is stealth and might
while mine is lift and flight

angels I’ve known were met
in conclaves of clouds real as the dust
of parched whirlwinds,
but high and sweet and wet

free in fog we’ve bet
that a universe of soil and stone
may last —perhaps

but still, that of blood and bone,
ligaments, limbs, and breath
will be snapped short as the short straw
in the short-sighted lottery
of man-alone
.
Jim Culleny
10/30/16

by Paul Orlando

With the election on Tuesday, I expect readers will be more distracted than normal so this is a short post. Today I wanted to tell you about how I caught up with a friend of mine last week.

That is, I recently had lunch with a good friend of mine who told me he’s a Trump supporter. At the start of our lunch he even showed me the Facebook post where he publicly stated he was voting for Trump (he didn’t last time).

But you’re probably curious about that lunch. Simple, but more than delicious. Pasta with wild boar ragu. Excellent cheeses. Perfect wines to go with the meal.

Also, a very enjoyable conversation about books and history. I imagine that many of you would have enjoyed it too. But maybe not.

To trigger craziness in others all I needed to mention was the word Trump.

Here are some of the shorter responses people (also friends) gave in response.

“Did you barf during or after the meal?” Funny, but didn’t I say the lunch was delicious?

“Ewwww….” What, the lunch or the person?

“I hope you wore a mask.” While eating?

The reactions of those otherwise thoughtful people troubled me. No one asked anything about my friend, his decision, or who he was. They already knew everything they needed to know. I’m sure they would be surprised to know that he’s an immigrant, non-white, and a PhD.

The single dimension of my critical friends’ reactions bothered me because I know they’ve never had such a lunch.

It’s natural for people to have different opinions. I believe we all want an election outcome process that is fair, perceived as fair, and with conclusive results. Then hopefully we can learn that the divisions were never so wide and even how public opinion has been steered in new directions.

Regardless of election outcome, may I recommend that you at least have a friend with different views than yours?

by Paul Braterman

This short book deserves the widest possible readership. The author, Paul Nurse, shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the control of the process of cell division, and is currently Director of the Francis Crick Institute in London, and among other things is Chief Scientific Advisor for the European Commission. Here he gives a marvellously lucid exposition of highly complex subject matter, in a way that makes difficult ideas accessible to non-expert, while I believe that even the expert will gain from the clarity of overall perspective, as well as from the many illustrations of the scientific process in action, drawn from the author’s own career and elsewhere. I do have some criticisms, but will reserve these for later.

I was privileged to hear Sir Paul lecture to Glasgow’s Royal Philosophical Society on the central concepts of biology, and the present book is an exposition and enlargement of the concepts in that lecture. The “five steps” are the cell, genes, evolution, life as chemistry, and life as an information-handling system. After a short but important and highly topical chapter on “Changing the world”, the book concludes with a return to the central question. What is life? What is it about life that gives rise to its wonderful diversity and effectiveness, given that living things are built out of the same atoms as all other material objects, obeying the same laws of physics and chemistry? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Varun Gauri

The realist case for the Democrats to expand the Supreme Court, and more generally to reform and modernize the federal judiciary, should they have the opportunity, can be stated simply: What is the point of unilateral disarmament? For several decades, Republicans have weaponized the judicial branch by appointing a large number of ideologically vetted judges, some with less than stellar qualifications. As Bouie puts it, Republicans “blockaded”  the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, filibustering Obama’s nominees and labeling routine efforts to fill vacancies as “court packing.” They barricaded Merrick Garland’s path to the Supreme Court. Defying precedent, they planted Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court two weeks before a presidential election. Republican arguments questioning mail-in voting and limiting the franchise in the current election amount to a “fight in a much longer war.”

If Democrats don’t respond, given the opportunity, it sends the signal, in the words of Ocasio-Cortez, that Democrats “don’t have the stones to play hardball like they do.” A failure to act locks in Republican judges’ skepticism  of voting rights, making Democratic electoral victories harder and Democratic policy objectives — fighting climate change, redressing social and economic inequalities — that much less likely.

Why should Democrats refuse all constitutionally available options when the other side does not? Why act like a chump?

A frequently expressed response to this realist case, especially on the part of those who value the institution of the Supreme Court, is that a Democratic expansion of the Court would merely extend the escalating spiral of retaliation between the parties. As Laurence Tribe put it in 2019, “Obviously partisan Court-expansion to negate the votes of justices whose views a party detests and whose legitimacy the party doubts could trigger a tit-for-tat spiral that would endanger the Supreme Court’s vital role in stabilizing the national political and legal system.”

To speak to concerns like this, I want to argue that, in addition to the compelling realist case, there is an idealist case for expanding or reforming the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary more generally. By idealist, I mean a point of view that takes as its starting point that it is valuable for law to maintain its normatively binding power in our society. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

When I was a kid, I used to see this little sign everywhere (still see it occasionally): “No shoes. No shirt. No service.” It was on the door of every store, including the store down at the gas station. It used to make me laugh for some reason. Maybe, just the image of this shoeless, shirtless madman storming the store for more toilet paper.

I’ve been thinking about that sign a lot lately. I think of it every time I see a new video of some mask-less person trying to force their way into a Walmart. In my whole life, I have never once heard a single person suggest (much less argue) that “No shoes. No shirt. No service.” violated their freedom. How, in the midst of a global pandemic that’s killed over 225,000 Americans so far, can anyone think they are exempt from complying with the simplest, most effective way of fighting back against the virus – because, what? “freedom”?

Trump’s people are everywhere these days lecturing on us on their freedom not to wear a mask. One told the employees of a Montana coffee shop that in doing so they were “bending the knee to tyranny”. Here’s the more-or-less official Trump-world line on this from Vice President Mike Pence during the Vice-Presidential debate: “We’re about freedom and respecting the freedom of the American people.”

I agree with Michael Tomasky’s recent New York Times article: “It’s high time Democrats played some philosophical offense on the concept of ‘freedom.’” But even Tomasky doesn’t take it far enough. He talks about it as if it were a matter of conflicting rights or of Mill’s Harm Principle (“the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection”). But it goes deeper than that. Read more »

The river Eisack flowing fast through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in October of 2020.

by Thomas Larson

In 1874, Thomas Hardy married Emma Gifford, a woman who never let her novelist husband forget that she was born of a higher class than he, ever his superior in taste and breeding. After her death he got back at her—poetically—in a big way. And she—from the grave—at him.

The pair began a premarital affair, fervent and soulful, as romantic and intellectual companions; not long after, they were quarantined in thirty-eight years of a childless and mutually regrettable marriage. When Emma died of a bad heart and impacted gallstones (she wrote treacly poems, many published, and suffered from delusions of grandeur), Hardy at sixty-two composed a loose sequence of verse, “Poems of 1912-1913.” These twenty-one rhyming, pithy elegies, among the finest in English, conjure the ghost of his first wife as the means of grieving his loss in a fatalistic anti-theism that feels downright religious.

For Hardy, as Claire Tomlin writes in her biography, there are three Emma’s: “Sometimes she appears as a ghost, sometimes as the elderly woman who liked parties and hats; more often as the girl of long ago, wearing an ‘air-blue gown,’ or with her ‘bright hair flapping free.’” Hardy names her (“woman much missed”), recalls their slow-dissolving marriage (“scars of the old flame”), owns up to their mutual failures (“things were not lastly as firstly well / with us”), and measures her apparitional lingering, postmortem, in places where she shadows him (“how you call to me, call to me, / Saying that you are not as you were”). He resurrects her girlish form, the woman he began courting long ago, (“fair-eyed and white shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed”). Read more »

by Katie Poore

“The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here.”

So begins Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations, one of the most haunting and beautiful novels I have read in years. I picked this book up on a whim, mostly because it has been categorized as “eco-fiction” by publishers and reviewers, a new sort of climate change novel. It’s a designation that I can’t resist, and so I drove to my local bookstore the day of its release to snatch a copy.

Locating the words for this book feels difficult; it is the most affecting story I have read this year, or perhaps ever, packing a great deal into its relatively slim 254 pages. It is McConaghy’s first foray into the world of adult fiction; based in Australia, she is the author of several young adult novels, and Migrations is the first of her works to be published in the U.S. And how lucky we are, I can’t help thinking, to receive a gift like this.

Migrations is certainly eco-fiction, but this categorization falls woefully short of accessing the heart of this beast. Migrations is really a multi-pronged love story: between man and woman, woman and sea, sea and sailor, woman and animal, human and earth. It is also, paradoxically, a story of profound loneliness. Read more »