by Tim Sommers

What’s the greatest prediction of all time?

By “greatest,” I mean something like how big a deal the thing predicted is multiplied by how accurate the prediction was.  I would love to hear other proposals in the comments, but mine is Andy Warhol’s prediction that, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”

It was made somewhere around 1968. Not only were there no social media and no internet at the time, but computers were barely even a thing. Could you have looked around at celebrity culture in 1968 and predicted Instagram and Twitter and influencers?

Yes, I know. Many doubt that Warhol said this. Wikipedia, for example, baldly asserts that this quote is “misattributed” to Warhol, while the Smithsonian Magazine more judiciously reports that he “probably never said” that. But I don’t think the evidence that they cite really confirms their skepticism. The Smithsonian Magazine, for example, reports that art critic Blake Gopnik (never even mentioned as one of the suspects in the Wikipedia article) claimed credit for the quote, and then they take it as confirmation of Gopnik’s story that later on Gopnik also said that he (Gopnik) heard Warhol say that he (Warhol) never said that. It’s like Wittgenstein’s example of someone trying to confirm what’s in the newspaper by buying a second copy of the same newspaper. Yoko Ono, John Lennon, and David Bowie all credit the quote to Warhol. That’s good enough for me.

On the other hand, maybe the fact that it’s hard to figure out to whom to attribute the quote, works better for our subject. Which is this. ‘If the medium is the message,’ as media theorist Marshall Mcluhan said, ‘what is the message of the internet as a medium?’ (Mcluhan, despite being an academic, became so widely recognize, largely for that line, that he did a cameo as himself in Annie Hall.)

My philosophy training forces me to begin by saying that I think Mcluhan should have said, ‘The medium of any particular media technology is itself also itself a kind of message in addition to the particular messages merely conveyed by that medium…” (Or something like that.)

Anyway, what is the message of the internet as a medium? The techno Utopian message of the internet, according to early enthusiasts, is that, “Information wants to be free.” Unfortunately, that’s wrong. The real message of the internet is, “All information is equal.” Read more »

Sughra Raza. Early Winter Shapes, January 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Dwight Furrow

If we are to believe the most prominent of the writers we now lump under the category of “existentialism,” human suffering in the modern world is rooted in nihilism. But I wonder whether this is the best lens through which to view human suffering.

According to existentialism, as the role of God in modern life receded to be replaced by a secular, scientifically-informed view of reality, the resulting loss of a transcendent moral framework has left us bereft of moral guidance leading to anxiety and anguish. The smallness of human concerns in a vast, uncaring universe engenders a sense that life is inherently meaningless and absurd. There seems to be no ultimate purpose in life. Thus, our individual intentions are without foundation.

As Camus wrote:

The absurd is born in this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. (From the Myth of Sisyphus)

And so, for Camus, human suffering is like the toils of Sisyphus condemned to endlessly roll the boulder up the mountain only to have it roll down again—life is a series of meaningless tasks and then you die.

Sartre, for his part, argued that the demise of a theistic world view means we must now confront the incontrovertible fact of human freedom—no state of affairs can cause us to act in one way rather than another. Furthermore, there are no values that have a claim on us prior to our choosing them. Instead, at each moment, we make a choice about the significance of facts and our relation to them. If life is to be meaningful, we must invent that meaning for ourselves. We are thus “condemned” to be free and must take full responsibility for our actions and the meaning we attribute to them. Read more »

by Eric Bies

Jules Verne sent Lidenbrock and Axel over—to crawl down the throat of a dormant volcano.

W. H. Auden visited between wars and found the place wanting for souvenirs. “Of course,” he wrote, “one can always bring home little bits of lava for one’s friends—I saw the Manchester school-teachers doing this at the Great Geysir—but I am afraid I have the wrong sort of friends.”

William Morris went twice: once in 1871, again in 1873. To what purpose he did, his daughter, May, elucidates in her introduction to the Journals he kept during those journeys:

not to shoot their moors and fish their rivers but to make pilgrimage to the homes of Gunnar and Njal, to muse on the Hill of Laws, to thread his way round the historic steads on the Western firths, to penetrate the desert heaths where their outlaws had lived…. The whole land teems with the story of the past—mostly unmarked by sign or stone but written in men’s minds and hearts.

In the summer of 1627, a decade after the death of Shakespeare, a trio of ships appeared off the southern coast of Vestmannaeyjar. The people of the island—the Einars, Helgis, Gudrids, and Sigrúns—assisted by nearly eighteen hours of sunlight, kept their eyes fixed on the horizon for close to an entire day, during which they convened and debated; they watched and waited, weighing their options. In the end, they threw up a meager bulwark of stone and went to bed.

The following day, just when it seemed they could stand the menacing presence no longer, the ships dispatched a fleet of boats: then the boats disgorged a mass of men ashore—pirates—who descended on the town with spears drawn. Those who were quick on their feet managed to flee over hills and down through the caves that dotted the erupted landscape. The rest were captured or killed. Among the former was a man in his sixties, the Reverend Olafur Egilsson, who was taken together with his wife and children. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Ethan Seavey

“Sometimes, before I take a piss, I spit into the toilet as a sacrifice to a false idol.”

The priest nods. He’s heard this one before. He was somewhere else before. Now he’s a resident of the confessional inside the attic of the home inside my head. 

“I’m gravely concerned about coyotes, how easily they’re conquering the foxes, and the wolves, and how they’ll soon fill every niche humans have left in their wake. But I do nothing about it.”

He pulls his face closer to the wood surrounding the meshy grate, and inhales. The confessional’s distinct smell, that of a cedar box baking in the moist heat of an Illinois summer, hangs in the air, as thick as the tension between listener and listened to. 

“Once, I had this dream—I was driving a car down the road, and then I just opened the door and stepped outside, leaving the car running, in drive. I watched it run 15 feet forward, running head-on into another car.”

Dreams are not sins.

“But I remember feeling no remorse.”

Before my family home was our home, it was a convent, and before that, it was a farmhouse. It hasn’t seen many renovations. I’ve spent years learning which of the aged floorboards creak, which doors squeak, and which of the fireplaces actually provide heat. My father tells guests that the original electric fireplace used to be a symbol of wealth. (A technological marvel! Who wants to sit around the standstill flames of the retro-future?)

Now they’re just tacky. Read more »

The morning sun melting snow and ice on the branches into drops of glittering water, bejeweling this tree outside my window.

by Claire Chambers

In my last blog post I wrote about starting to learn the Hindi language during the pandemic. I embarked on this linguistic journey partly from a sense I didn’t fit into my own culture – or, equally, that English culture wasn’t the right fit for me. The sociologist Edward Shils wrote in 1961 about pre-Second World War visitors returning to their South Asian lands after a long time in Britain only to feel a ‘lostness at home and homesickness for a foreign country’. This is something I can recognize, albeit in the opposite direction. 

As I became an intermediate learner, it felt as though my progress was glacially slow. In the early stage, every new word is a milestone. Yet once a solid linguistic framework already exists, forward momentum may be hard to discern. The learner can no longer see the yardsticks measuring progress as easily as they could at the outset. 

The beginner may have a blithe innocence about the size of their task. However, the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. I read somewhere, on the Berlitz website perhaps, that it takes five years to learn a language. It depends on what you mean by learn. Almost three years in by now, I would question that cheery five-year prognosis. I am caught in the middle of a process that feels never-ending. Read more »

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

For the last several years, elected Republicans, full of anti-trans zeal, have challenged their opponents to define the word “woman.” They aren’t really curious. They’re setting a rhetorical trap. They’re taking a word that seems to have a simple meaning, because the majority of people who identify as women resemble each other in some ways, then refusing to consider any of the people who don’t.

Lexicographers—the people who put together the dictionaries—care more about words than most of us. Of late, they’ve noticed how their beloved definitions have been abused by conservatives, and now a few have struck back. On December 13, the Cambridge Dictionary broadened their definitions of “man” and “woman” to include people who identify as either.

The original definition of “woman”: an adult female human being.

The new addition to the definition: an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.

Losing their gotcha question infuriated conservatives. Fox News howled that “this change was met with pushback from many, who argued that redefining society’s categorization of gender and sex is harmful and inaccurate.” Dan McLaughlin, a senior writer at National Review called the change Orwellian: “1984 wasn’t supposed to be a how-to manual,” he tweeted.

Unfortunately for conservatives, they’re wrong. That is precisely how dictionaries are supposed to work. Dictionaries have always been political documents. For that, we have a Founding Father to thank. Read more »