Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title. We listened Thursday night to the frightful catalogue of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to fathom, that in some ways, it’s all still sinking in. The House Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time hearing was not about Trump as a bloviating buffoon who stumbled into the presidency. It was about Trump as a callous monster, and many will come away convinced that he should be criminally charged and put in jail. Lock him up!

The hearing drove home the fact that Trump was deadly serious about overthrowing the government. If his onetime lap dog Mike Pence was strung up on the gallows outside the Capitol for refusing to help Trump hold onto his office illegitimately, Trump said, so be it. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he remarked that day, chillingly, noting that his vice president “deserves it.”

Alice Crary in Boston Review:

By Michaelmas Term 1939, mere weeks after the United Kingdom had declared war on Nazi Germany, Oxford University had begun a change that would wholly transform it by the academic year’s end. Men ages twenty and twenty-one, save conscientious objectors and those deemed physically unfit, were being called up, and many others just a bit older volunteered to serve. Women had been able to matriculate and take degrees at the university since 1920, but members of the then all-male Congregation had voted to restrict the number of women to fewer than a quarter of the overall student population. Things changed rapidly after the onset of war. The proportion of women shot up, and, in many classes, there were newly as many women as men.

Among the women who experienced these novel conditions were several who did courses in philosophy and went on to strikingly successful intellectual careers. Elizabeth Anscombe, noted philosopher and Catholic moral thinker who would go on occupy the chair in philosophy that Ludwig Wittgenstein had held at Cambridge, started a course in Greats—roughly, classics and philosophy—in 1937, as did Jean Austin (neé Coutts), who would marry philosopher J. L. Austin and later have a long teaching career at Oxford.

More here.

Lance Taylor over at INET:

More here.

Robert Paul Wolff over at his website [h/t: Leonard Benardo]:

Several days ago, I received from Raymond Geuss a copy of his new book, Not Thinking like a Liberal, which has just been published by Harvard. It is an intense, complex, deeply interior account of his philosophical development first as a boy in a Catholic private school and then as an undergraduate and graduate student at Columbia University.  Geuss, as I am sure you all know, is a distinguished philosopher now retired from Cambridge University, the author of a number of books.

Geuss and I come from backgrounds so different from one another that it is hard to believe we could ever inhabit the same world and yet, for a span of time in the 1960s and a little bit beyond, our lives intersected on the seventh floor of Philosophy Hall at Columbia University.  Geuss arrived at Columbia as a 16-year-old freshman in 1963, graduated summa cum laude, and earned his doctorate in the philosophy department in 1971. I joined the philosophy department as an associate professor in 1964 and resigned my professorship to go to the University of Massachusetts in 1971. Both of us took the year 1967 – 68 off from Columbia, I to teach at Rutgers while continuing to live across the street from the Columbia campus and he to spend the year in Germany.

More here.

From NPR:

1982 isn’t your typical war film.

It’s a love story set during growing tensions in the Middle East, when Israel invaded Lebanon 40 years ago. Lebanese filmmaker Oualid Mouaness, inspired by his own memories, wrote the script and directed the film.

He was 10 years old, attending an idyllic school in the Beirut suburbs, when the war changed life as he knew it. “I do remember everything being so beautiful and everything sort of changing,” Mouaness tells Morning Edition.

“I remember that afternoon when the dogfights were going on in the sky. That’s when my brother who was younger than me just completely lost it and started yelling at us to go inside because he thought the airplanes were going to fall on us,” he says. The invasion happened against the backdrop of a city divided, between a mostly Muslim West Beirut and a predominately Christian East Beirut. Mouaness bases 1982 at a school much like the one he attended. The film is set in the mountains of Lebanon and the school is picturesque. It’s religiously mixed, the kids switch seamlessly from Arabic to English to French and they’re not yet indoctrinated into the adult world of religious and ideological divides.

More here.

Philip Ball in The Guardian:

How do you spot an optimistic pig? This isn’t the setup for a punchline; the question is genuine, and in the answer lies much that is revealing about our attitudes to other minds – to minds, that is, that are not human. If the notion of an optimistic (or for that matter a pessimistic) pig sounds vaguely comical, it is because we scarcely know how to think about other minds except in relation to our own.

Here is how you spot an optimistic pig: you train the pig to associate a particular sound – a note played on a glockenspiel, say – with a treat, such as an apple. When the note sounds, an apple falls through a hatch so the pig can eat it. But another sound – a dog-clicker, say – signals nothing so nice. If the pig approaches the hatch on hearing the clicker, all it gets is a plastic bag rustled in its face.

What happens now if the pig hears neither of these sounds, but instead a squeak from a dog toy? An optimistic pig might think there’s a chance that this, too, signals delivery of an apple. A pessimistic pig figures it will just get the plastic bag treatment. But what makes a pig optimistic? In 2010, researchers at Newcastle University showed that pigs reared in a pleasant, stimulating environment, with room to roam, plenty of straw, and “pig toys” to explore, show the optimistic response to the squeak significantly more often than pigs raised in a small, bleak, boring enclosure. In other words, if you want an optimistic pig, you must treat it not as pork but as a being with a mind, deserving the resources for a cognitively rich life.

More here.

Thinking Thought

“Oh, soul,” I sometimes—often—still say when I’m trying to convince
………. my inner self of something.
“Oh, soul,” I say still, “there’s so much to be done, don’t want to stop
………. to rest now, not already.
“Oh, soul,” I say, “the implications of the task are clear, why procras-
………. tinate why whine?”
All the while I know my struggle has to do with mind being only some-
………. times subject to will,
that other portion of itself which manages to stay so recalcitrantly, ob-
………. stinately impotent.
“Oh, soul, come into my field of want, my realm of act, be attentive to
………. my computations and predictions.”
But as usual soul resists, as usual soul retires, as usual soul’s old act of
………. dissipation and removal.
Oh, the furious illusive unities of want, the frail, false fusions of dis-
………. cursive chains of hope.

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994

Over the last four years, Thomas wrote almost fifty essays for 3QD which you can see here. He will be much missed. Here is an obituary from Haaretz:

O’Dwyer had a great sense of humor, his wife Michal said, describing him as a vast “store of knowledge” and “Google before there was Google.”

“When we first started going out, one time on a date we were going to meet at my place and we decided we’d do a poetry reading so I prepared my poetry books and all he had in his hands was his bottle of wine,” she recalled.

Asked where his books were, he replied, “Who says you need a book to do a poetry reading,” and proceeded to recite poems by heart, she said. “He didn’t need a book. He made me laugh so much, so that’s when I fell for him.”

More here.

Timothy Brennan in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In 1990, at the Humanities Research Institute at University of California at Irvine, I found myself sitting next to Jacques Derrida at a lecture given by Ernesto Laclau. The topic was Antonio Gramsci. At the end of the talk, of which I understood frustratingly little, Derrida asked a question that took about 20 minutes to formulate. Laclau’s response was of equal length. This mattered, because the event was the only one open to the public (it was to be followed by an invitation-only seminar). Graduate students and professors packed the lecture hall and, like Laclau himself, deferentially hung on Derrida’s every word. But they never had time to speak. The episode struck me as symbolic of the reverence deconstruction commanded at the height of its influence — and also of the hierarchies, buoyed by awestruck puzzlement, upon which it rested.

At a private reception the next day, I approached Derrida to press him on his comments, for his intervention at Laclau’s lecture had, as far as I could tell, nothing to do with Gramsci. As I cited studies and quoted passages to support my point, Derrida looked up at me with quizzical eyes and a faint, perhaps condescending, smile. I was aware that my questions violated academic politesse, since to press the philosopher on issues about which he seemed ill-informed was impertinent. The underlying “joke” (which I also got, although I pretended not to) meant knowing that what Gramsci actually wrote, or why, hardly mattered — at least here.

Now, 30 years down the road, it is surprisingly hard to remember why Derrida’s “deconstruction” — a theory of reading with the unlikely catchphrase “the metaphysics of presence” — swept all before it in English departments of the American heartland, prompted Newsweek to warn of its dramatic and destructive power, and moved prominent scholars like Ruth Marcus to denounce its “semi-intelligible attacks” on reason and truth.

More here.

Silas Laycock at The Conversation:

People mainly notice the Moon looking bigger and closer when it is full and near the horizon. This is because your mind judges how big or small an object like the Moon is by comparing it with other, familiar things.

Imagine you are standing outside close to your house. Your house will look big, and if the Moon rises next to it, the Moon will look normal. If you look at a house from far away, though, the house looks very small.

The illusion comes from the fact that the Moon is so far away that no matter where you are on Earth, the Moon always looks the same size. It is actually the things your mind compares the Moon with – a house, a mountain or anything else – that look bigger or smaller depending on how far away from them you are. So when the Moon rises next to a distant house or a faraway mountain, the Moon looks enormous.

More here.

Rhoda Feng in The Hedgehog Review:

Ever since the notion of the “Anthropocene” was proposed by two scientists, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen and marine scientist Eugene Stoermer, in a newsletter article published in 2000 by the International Council for Science, this label for the current geological epoch has led two distinct but related lives. Considered the successor to the Holocene Epoch, the Anthropocene is characterized by human harm to the earth system, including global warming and ocean acidification, the dissemination of synthetic chemicals, the redistribution of life forms across the planet, and a prospective sixth mass extinction event. In one life, the Anthropocene has been a lightning rod for questions of political economy and power. In its other, it has served as a useful scientific heuristic, assimilating mountains of measurements and calculations.

In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, University of Chicago historian and theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty provides an expansive, but hardly exhaustive, overview of the Anthropocene, focusing on how historians, in particular, have grappled with the conditions of a world under physical duress. As humans have become a “geological force” in this new epoch and the earth has itself become an archive, with human behavior imprinted in the fossil record and ice caps, we are at the cusp of a new understanding of the agency of humankind and other terrestrial beings.

More here.

Guatemala: 1964

..—for Loren Crabtree

The Maya-Quechua Indians plodding to market on feet
…. as flat and tough as toads were semi-starving
but we managed to notice only their brilliant weaving
…. and implacable, picturesque aloofness.
The only people who would talk to us were the village
…. alcoholic, who sold his soul for aguardiente,
and the Bahia nurse, Jenny, middle-aged, English-
…. Nicaraguan, the sole medicine for eighty miles,
who lord knows why befriended us, put us up, even took
…. us in her jeep into the mountains,
where a child, if I remember, needed penicillin, and
…. where the groups of dark, idling men
who since have risen and been crushed noted us with
…. something disconcertingly beyond suspicion.
Good Jenny: it took this long to understand she wasn’t
…. just forgiving us our ferocious innocence.

by. C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994

David Mikics in Tablet:

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin in Vox:

Financial literacy — the ability to understand how money works in your life — is considered the secret to taking control of your finances. Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, but information alone doesn’t lead to transformation. In putting financial literacy above all else, many in the personal finance industry have decided that repeating the same facts about how much money folks should have in their emergency savings account will, somehow, change people’s money habits. This approach doesn’t account for our human side: the parts of us that crave connection, new experiences, and fitting in as members of our communities. Most of our decisions around money are emotional; no amount of nitty-gritty knowledge about interest rates will change that.

As a financial therapist, I’ve seen spending behaviors driven by emotions and not logic time and time again. One young couple that came to see me was so caught up in having the “perfect” wedding that they put a large cash gift meant for a house down payment toward their wedding venue. Another client whose parents had saved for them to attend a state college debt-free confessed that they took out private student loans to finance a semester abroad; they’re now paying a hefty monthly bill. Another family put a pricey Disney trip on a zero percent interest credit card, telling themselves (and me) they’d pay it off before the interest rate skyrocketed, only to procrastinate on paying it down and owing nearly 22 percent in interest on their trip over several years.

These people weren’t doing anything “bad.” They were doing what most of us do: making money-related decisions based on feelings. In my work, I help people understand how their emotions are driving money decisions, assess if their money is going where they want it to go, practice financial self-compassion, and know when to ask for help. Here is what I tell them.

More here.

Will T. at The Believer:

Let’s consider where AI poetry is in 2022. Long after Racter’s 1984 debut, there are now scores of websites that use Natural Language Processing to turn words and phrases into poems with a single click of a button. There is even a tool that takes random images and creates haikus around them. You can upload an image of – say, a tree – and the tool will create a simple haiku based around it.

OpenAI, meanwhile, created a haiku bot called DaVinci. All users have to do is ask the bot to write a poem about a particular subject matter – such as clouds – and within less than 3 seconds, the bot will come up with an original, algorithmic haiku. Like, “a white fluffy cloud/ hangs in the sky/ soaring through the air.”

Over in the UK in 2021, experts trained a piece of AI to digest and learn over 500,000 lines of poetry until it came up with the line “a box of light that had been a tree.”

more here.