by Nicola Sayers

Clickety clack, clickety clack. All aboard the twilight train, a Scottish man with a deep voice announces over the sound of a train heading off into the night. This story is the only one on the Moshi app that I can happily listen to over and over as I wait for my kids to fall asleep. I lie on the floor of their bedroom and think of Before Sunrise, a movie that takes place mostly in Vienna but whose defining image is of the opening, the eroticism of the young couple’s meeting on the train; I think of the sweeping, freighted snowy train journey of Dr Zhivago; I think of Anna Karenina, standing defiantly on the train platform, and of her eventual death. I think, too, of the apartment in Chicago that I so miss, of the view, and the sound, of the L-train clattering loudly past the window at five minute intervals. And I think of a train journey I once took across Europe. 

That they would use the sound of a train for a children’s bedtime story is unsurprising. It is repetitive, soporific. But to me, lying there, it is enlivening, as though I might myself just hop on board the twilight train and be transported right on out of here: away from this room, this moment, this world. 

*

It was the end of  the Christmas holidays a few years ago, and I was due to fly back from Stockholm to London, a flight I have taken dozens of times. The familiarity of this particular journey usually alleviates the mild fear of flying I sometimes suffer. Waiting at the gate I felt completely relaxed, and I boarded happily. But after boarding and sitting down in my seat for a few minutes I was hit, for whatever reason, by a paralysing fear. This was not something that I could breathe through; I had to get off the plane. So I sheepishly exited back down the jetway, watched by many curious eyes as I took refuge behind my escort, the flight attendant, like a celebrity might behind their bodyguard, or a criminal behind their captor. Cast back into the waiting area and left to my own devices, I uploaded a series of badly designed apps and began to plot an alternative route home from Arlanda airport to Oxford, England. 

The story of my two day journey home across Europe is, I confess, an uneventful one. If it has anything to offer it is simply in the account of the minutes and hours that make up such a journey, and of the very particular ways in which travelling long distances by train today alters your sense of space and time.  Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

My books are arranged more or less the way a library keeps its books, by subject and/or author, although I don’t use call numbers. I also have various piles of current and up-next and someday-soon reading. In addition, I have a loose set of idiosyncratic categories that guide my choice of what to read right now, out of several books I’m reading at any given time. I choose books for occasions the way more sociable people choose wines to complement their menus.

Books To Read With A Meal

I read while I’m eating, even though I’ve been told it’s a bad habit. I prefer not to read grisly books during a meal: no noir, nothing about the digestive system or skin diseases (eyeball diseases, brain diseases…really, nothing medical), no travel books of the sort where terrible accidents are likely. I think I tried to read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air with a meal and couldn’t.

It’s best if I read something that doesn’t make me cry while I’m eating, although that’s difficult these days because so many things make me cry. (My sister died this summer. Also…you know, everything.)

It’s even harder to tell when something you’re reading is going to make you laugh. I was reading a novel by Barbara Pym in a restaurant once and found something so hilarious that I had to set the book down and stop eating for several minutes while I laughed. Every time I thought I was finished laughing, I’d pick up the book, and there was the funny bit again to set me off. I can’t remember what was so funny, but I’m smiling as I type this. Thank you, Barbara Pym. Read more »

Deana Lawson. (title and date not found).

More here, here, and here.

by Mike O’Brien

I’ve been reading some articles about dehumanization lately, mostly by the popular philosopher (I doubt he would object to that characterization), David Livingstone Smith. I had already spent some time in that domain, given the preponderance of politics in my early post-secondary studies and the looming questions of how humanity’s greatest intramural atrocities came to pass. The vast post-WW2 literature on racial ideology is, of course, very much called for; the Holocaust was a singular event that begs to be understood and prevented from reoccurring. But moral imperatives, useful as they are in spurring action, tend to muck things up when the work turns to matters of descriptive accuracy and conceptual clarity. I’ve witnessed some very silly and non-helpful things said in my own preferred sandbox of animal ethics, which would never have been expressed save for the driving impetus of moral compulsion. The more desperate the moral situation, the more tolerant I tend to be of moralizing intrusions into descriptive questions. I draw the line at philosophers muddling philosophical discussions with other philosophers, the one situation in which one ought to dispense with ordinary moral manners and state the case as one sees it, as terrible as it may be.

I won’t delve too much into the particulars of Livingstone-Smith’s take on dehumanization, as I’m not really reacting to his work so much as reacting to a general approach of which it is typical. Briefly, he has argued that dehumanization is one (but not the only) important way in which human beings are “othered” and thus made suitable, even deserving, objects of cruelty and destruction. The main philosophical point beyond this commonplace notion is that dehumanization is not a metaphor (Xs are like rats in such and such a respect) or rhetorical excess (Xs are a disease that infects our society!), but rather an earnest categorical shift whereby the dehumanizing imagination really does believe that X-type people are not human, despite evident similarities to the observer’s own type of people. Read more »

by Mark Harvey

Growing up in western Colorado, my baseball team traveled around the state playing against the tiny towns of Rifle, Grand Valley, Rangely, Delta, and Meeker. We had a good team and when I was playing, our coach was an ex-Houston Astros pitcher who brought real science and sophistication to our practices. Having an ex-pro coach our team was something that we probably didn’t appreciate enough but it definitely lifted our game. As teens, we found ourselves learning the same major league skills of run-downs, sacrifice bunts, adjusting infield depth and very complicated hand signals. The coach, Joe Arnold, had a consistently disapproving face, and paradoxically we had a strong desire to win his approval. The expression never changed, and we probably never fully won his approval, but we got quite good at executing major league strategy despite our ungainly adolescent bodies.

We needed the skills because our opponents in the tiny mining, ranching, and farming towns around western Colorado all seemed to be four to five years ahead of us in physical development, fearless, ruthless, hard-throwing kids. One time when an opposing team was warming up, I honestly wondered why one of the parents was on the field. Then I realized it wasn’t a parent, just a six-foot-two, seventeen-year-old with a five o’clock shadow at 2 p.m. on a hot Colorado afternoon.

That man-child (more man than child) was a pitcher in the town of Grand Valley. Grand Valley is now called Parachute, named after the creek that comes out of the mountains to its north. Grand Valley was a much better name for the town and I don’t know which public relations guru changed it. I don’t remember the name of that kid but I’ll call him Stan because if he wasn’t named Stan he must have been named Billy or Jimmy. He definitely wasn’t named River or Rowan and his parents definitely never felt a need to “validate” his feelings. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Early morning sky above the Eisacktal valley in the South Tyrol in October of 2021.

by David J. Lobina

And now, by popular demand – that is, on account of the few people who wrote in the comments section of last month’s post – here’s an expanded endnote 4, which in the alluded post was meant to answer one simple question but in the event did no such thing. Namely: What on earth has happened in Catalonia in the last ten or so years?[1]

It all started in Arenys de Munt, a town of about 9,000 people 40 kms north-east of Barcelona. I’m kidding, but only in part. In September 2009, Arenys de Munt held a referendum of independence, which according to the journalist Guillem Martínez, my guide in this post, was the first case of an explicitly secessionist vote in Catalonia in modern times, and the perspective that would dominate what is now known as the procés [“process”].[2] In fact, there were a number of such consultations in different areas of Catalonia between 2009 and 2011, all of which should be regarded as independentist exercises rather than independence referenda, as participation was generally low and support for independence unnaturally high – the turnout in a vote in Barcelona in 2011 was only 21%, with 90% of voters supporting independence. As mentioned last month, numerous official surveys of Catalans show that support for independence is not the majority opinion, though it has increased since 2007, when it was less than 20%, to the 34% of 2021 (see previous post).

These consultations from 2009-11 certainly showcase the process that has made the issue of independence part of mainstream political debate in Catalonia in the last 10 or so years, and which has turned Catalan nationalism into a secessionist movement, leaving behind the federalism that had been favoured since the early 19^th century (and which remains the option most people in Catalonia support, mind you). The origins of this change in outlook may be found in a variety of recent political developments, some of which were more removed from the day-to-day of citizens than what may be appear to be the case at first. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

There was another well-known economist who later claimed that he was my student at MIT, but for some reason I cannot remember him from those days: this was Larry Summers, later Treasury Secretary and Harvard President. Once I was invited to give a keynote lecture at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics at Islamabad, and on the day of my lecture they told me that Summers (then Vice President at the World Bank) was in town, and so they had invited him to be a discussant at my lecture. After my lecture, when Larry rose to speak he said, “I am going to be critical of Professor Bardhan for several reasons, one of them being personal: he may not remember, when I was a student in his class at MIT, he gave me the only B+ grade I have ever received in my life”. When it came to my turn to reply to his criticisms of my talk, I said, “I don’t remember giving him a B+ at MIT, but today after listening to him I can tell you that he has improved a little, his grade now is A-“, and then proceeded to explain why it was not an A. The Pakistani audience seemed to lap it up, particularly because until then everybody there was deferential to Larry.

Later when I asked Stan Fischer if Larry was my student, he told me that he might have taken my undergraduate class. The undergraduate classes were larger than graduate classes, and I do not remember many of those students (one very bright MIT undergraduate I do remember teaching was Hal Varian, who later became my colleague at Berkeley, and has been the Chief Economist at Google for some years). Read more »