by Bill Murray

2022 is alive, a babe come hale and hollering to join its sisters 2020 and 2021, siblings bound by pandemic. Everybody stood to see off 2022’s older sister 2021, like we all did 2020 before her. Out with the old. Quickly, please.

2022 debuts with a striking resemblance to her sisters, just more evolved. So that by now some Americans signal their freedom by avoiding vaccination while others seek freedom by staying indoors. Meanwhile Europeans ban each other, for a moment there the whole world tried to put southern Africans out of mind entirely, and every country tortures its airlines. Hi ho the derry-o a quarantining we will go.

The Die Welt UK correspondent lamented that should she visit her homeland this holiday, she couldn’t even test her way free. Test your way free.

Consider the world in which 2022 will make her mark. Look east from Kyiv and please find Russia issuing un-agree-to-able demands and backing them with the rattling of 100,000 human sabres. It would be utterly incredible if Putin were to start a land war in Europe. But those who claim knowledge of his inner thoughts cite a deep, consistent grievance. Indeed they find it in the public record, in his 5000 word ‘Ukraine is not a real country’ article back last summer.

As far back as 2008, at a NATO-Russia Council meeting in Bucharest, Putin declared to W. Bush, “George, do you realize that Ukraine is not even a state? What is Ukraine? Part of its territory is Eastern Europe but the greater part is a gift from us!” Read more »

The massif named Plose towers over the east side of Brixen, South Tyrol, as seen from my window in Franzensfeste. Photo taken in the early morning a couple of weeks ago.

by Bill Benzon

I don’t remember just how I first became interested in jazz as a child growing up in Western Pennsylvania in the 1950s. There was always music in the house, but it was mostly classical music, often on big old 78s. My father had a particular affinity for Beethoven.

Walt Disney is part of the story. Not Uncle Walt himself, but a Dixieland jazz band, The Firehouse Five Plus Two, consisting of personnel from his animation studio. They’d show up regularly on “The Mickey Mouse Club” TV program back in the 1950s, and I’m sure I heard them there. Here’s a clip where they play “Muskrat Ramble”:

I have no recollection of having seen any particular performance of theirs, but I could well have heard them play this one.

Dixieland, as you may know, is a style closely based on traditional New Orleans jazz from the first quarter of the 20th century. It was enjoying a resurgence, perhaps in part as a reaction to bebop, and was sweeping college campuses. But me and my friends knew nothing of that. We just knew that we liked this music.

One of those friends, David Leffler, actually his mother, introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I was down the street visiting David late one afternoon when somehow or other his mother asked whether or not I’d heard Louis Armstrong. I’d never heard of him. She put a record on and I listened. I don’t remember what it was. All I remember is that it sounded a bit thin. But – and here’s the thing – I remembered it.

When my father joined a record club – you know, one of those deals where you could by records and they’d be mailed to you – I was allowed a selection in the first buy. I read through the little pamphlet and picked something called A Rare Batch of Satch. Again, lots of tinny sound. And a lot of what I would come to recognize as standard repertoire: “Basin Street Blues,” “High Society,” “St. James Infirmary” (which I loved), “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” (Armstrong’s theme song), and others. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

At my ISI office there were several good economists. Apart from TN, there was B.S. Minhas, Kirit Parikh, Suresh Tendulkar, Sanjit Bose (my friend from MIT days), V.K. Chetty, Dipankar Dasgupta, and others. Of these in many ways the most colorful character was Minhas. A shaved un-turbaned Sikh, he used to tell us about his growing up in a poor farmer family in a Punjab village, where he was the first in his family to go to school. He went to Stanford for doctorate, before returning to India. He relished, a bit too much, his role as the man who spoke the blunt truth to everyone including politicians, policy-makers and academics. He illustrated his Punjabi style by telling the Bengalis that he had heard that in Bengal when a man had a tiff with his wife, he’d go without food rather than eat the food his wife had cooked; he said at home he did quite the opposite: “I go to the fridge, take out my food and eat it; then if I am still upset, I go to the fridge again and take out my wife’s food and eat it all up—serves her right!”

At ISI Bose, Dasgupta and Chetty were theorists; Minhas, TN, Parikh and Tendulkar did multi-sector planning models as well as quantitative studies of particular sectors like agriculture, water, energy, etc. TN, as probably India’s most versatile economist ever, did both theory and empirical quantitative work. (He and I started editing a new journal on Quantitative Economics, which later became the journal of Indian Econometric Society). To my great benefit, TN was also most knowledgeable about Indian data.

Without TN’s guiding hand at the beginning I’d have felt completely out of my depth in the data world. These were days when data were stored in boxes of computer punch-cards. Data storage was often in awful condition—I used to jokingly ask how we could be sure that some of the data in the form of holes in the punch-cards were not made by the insects that infested the store rooms. Read more »

Temporal Christmas

the verge of something new—
solstice, sunrise, a comet coming through,
sometimes it seems that angels tend,
stars align, low meets high—-
even ass and oxen gain a sense
that mutual otherness has been pretense,
a tale begins that glorifies the plain,
low things are magnified:
a snowball rolls through time,
gathers rituals, books, saints,
gains velocity, and multitudes believe
God’s entangled now, today–
homeless, streetwise, poor,
an ordinary human’s deified, yet
ultimately is turned away

Jim Culleny
12/24/17

by Adele A Wilby

In today’s political world where liberal democracy is purported to have triumphed and ‘the end of history’ is supposed to be with us, many people might be content to rest on their laurels that fascism has been confined to the dustbin of political history, and at most its supporters on the fringe of contemporary politics. Not so however, for Paul Mason. For him ‘fascism is back’ and poses a real threat to democracies. Indeed, so convinced is he of his argument that fascism is emerging as a force to be reckoned with, his recent book How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance is a call to arms for greater understanding of its modern manifestations, and to resist its influence in politics.

An award-winning writer, Mason has many books to his credit. He is also a broadcaster and filmmaker and his reporting on events during the Greek debt crisis in 2015 while working as the Economics Editor for Channel 4 for several years, are memorable. But Mason is also one of those human beings who matches his intellectual work with political activism. He has been a relentless political activist with decades of resistance to fascism behind him that gives him the edge over the topic he takes on in the book: he has been exposed to the phenomenon and is familiar with fascism in political activist terms. Read more »

Review of Fernando Castrillon and Thomas Marchevsky (eds) Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics, and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021)

by Claire Chambers

In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the first-person narrator Saleem Sinai invites readers to imagine themselves in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality.

This is a figurative way of talking about history’s distortions, or the difficulties of exploring contemporary events given the incomplete view afforded by a nearby vantage point. 

Such a confusing closeness to dramatic and discombobulating scenes is discussed in some detail by both the editors of Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy, as well as by Rocco Ronchi, an Italian philosopher and one of the contributors to the volume. In his essay ‘The Virtues of the Virus’, Ronchi observes: ‘We are too close to the Covid-19 event to be able to catch a glimpse of the future it bears. Our fear is human, and this makes us unreliable witnesses’. Meanwhile, in ‘Introduction: Of Pestilence, Chaos, and Time’, editors Fernando Castrillon and Thomas Marchevsky praise their authors’ boldness for investing in the risky business of writing about the coronavirus pandemic even while ‘knowing full well that they might be ridiculed or even dismissed outright for what at a later date could be read as ill-informed, judgmental, or simply short-sighted’. These are salient warnings for those of us who also wish to make a modest intervention into public debate on the current fast-moving and time-sensitive situation. Read more »

Dorothea Tanning. Notes for An Apocalypse, 1978.

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

by David Oates

Once again, wilted evergreen trees are appearing on city streets on trash day, with remorseful hints of tinsel and that gritty feeling of morning-after. And we are reminded that the mightiest of all our mongrel holidays has once again had its way with us.

Though Christmas is of course the master-holiday of the (mostly) (or at least somewhat) Christian West, it has long showcased the curious persistence of non-Christian and pre-Christian ways. Christmas trees and mistletoe ­­­­are holdovers from the forest-worshipping northern Europeans. There’s literally nothing Christian about them. When we welcome “Yuletide” we’re unwittingly celebrating a pagan festival –Yule from the Anglo-Saxon iul or giul ( and behind that from the Old Norse jol)  having been the winter solstice celebration of Druids and Vikings which our Christmas has, um, replaced. Or continued.

So the way we celebrate Christmas offers a fine meditation on the empty fantasy of purity, which plays almost no role in history as actually lived. Heathen traditions and pagan symbols: we just can’t quit you! It’s been on my mind lately because, on some rather more serious fronts of the culture wars, the Judeo-Christian Tradition has once again been trotted out to do battle, like some creaky, rusty old Crusader not allowed to go to a decent rest. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Facing immanent death, his friends and followers inconsolable, Socrates, according to Plato, attempted to console them.

He called fear of death “the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown,” adding that “no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”

In other words, (i) death should only be feared if it is known to be bad; (ii) no one knows that death is bad; therefore, (iii) death should not be feared. The problem with (i), of course, is that some of our greatest fears, of the dark, for example, are fears about the unknown. Maybe, we should be afraid because we don’t know.

But Epicurus argued. “[D]eath is nothing to us, since everything good and bad lies in sensation, and death is to be deprived of sensation… [W]hen we are, death is not, and when death is present, then we are not.” So, (i) after we die, we no longer exist (or have sensations); (ii) Nothing is bad without being bad for someone who exists (and has sensations). Therefore, (iii) nothing can be bad for us after we die. Of course, (i) depends on already believing that we cease to exist at death, which seems obvious to me, but clearly a lot of people disagree.

But back to Plato. He had a better argument than “we don’t know”. Here it is. (i) Death is either like a peaceful, dreamless sleep, which is a good thing; (ii) Or death involves joining a permanent community of heroes and philosophers, which is also a good thing. Therefore, “Whichever of these it is, death is a good thing.” Now, the “permanent community of heroes and philosophers” bit is very culturally specific, so let’s adjust (ii). Replace the “permanent community of heroes and philosophers” with whatever you think the after life is like. Or we might just say that if death is more than a peaceful sleep, it involves something new and, hopefully, interesting, or at least not terrible. But this has a problem similar to the one that bedeviled Socrates’ first argument. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Water flowing over rocks in the river Eisack last week as it makes its way through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by John Allen Paulos

Covid has given rise to a variety of counterintuitive mathematical outcomes. A good example is this recent headline (link below): One third of those hospitalized in Massachusetts are vaccinated. Anti-vaxxers have seized on this and similar such factually accurate headlines to bolster their positions. They, and others as well, interpret them as evidence that the vaccine isn’t that effective or perhaps hardly works at all since even states with very high vaccination rates seem to have many breakthrough infections that lead to hospitalization. Contrary to intuition, however, such truthful headlines actually indicate that the vaccine is very effective. I could cite common cognitive biases, Bayes’ theorem, graphs, tables, and formulas to explain this, but a metaphor involving fruit may be more convincing and more palatable.

Let’s assume we have a very large casserole pan full of cherries and a small bowl of grapes. Say there are 500 cherries in the huge pan and 50 grapes in the small bowl. Further assume that the cherries alone have been treated with a substance that very substantially reduces spoilage and that nevertheless 3 of them are spoiled, as are 7 of the untreated grapes. Now for the perhaps obvious punchline, let’s identify these 550 fruit with people in a highly vaccinated state, the cherries with the vaccinated people, the grapes with the unvaccinated people, and the spoiled 10 pieces of fruit with those who are hospitalized. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Growing up in India I knew how hierarchical and status-oriented Indian society was, but the city of New Delhi took it to a bureaucratic extreme. I was told that in those days, if you gave out your Government quarters address, people would immediately know your approximate salary scale. The city’s residential pattern, inherited from the colonial rulers, was highly structured. If you are a top Secretary in a Ministry, your assigned quarters will be a large bungalow with acres of gardens in prize real estate in the city center, often a short distance from your office which you traverse in a chauffeur-driven official car. But if you are a lowly clerk or an orderly/peon in the same office building, you’ll come in a crowded bus from many miles away often outside the city.

Since I used to go to office by bus (until a colleague started giving me a ride in his car), I also noticed a peculiar pattern in the plying of Delhi state buses, compared to the buses I was familiar in Kolkata. You are waiting at a bus stop along with dozens of other people of different age groups and different amounts of baggage with them, and you’ll see bus after bus skipping your stop, particularly if they don’t have to unload any passengers at that stop. (Economists, of course, will point out that the bus driver and conductor on fixed pay have no incentive to take more passengers). And if the bus does have someone getting off at that stop, it will stop some distance away, and by the time all the waiting passengers with their baggages run to reach there, the bus is likely to have sped off. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

A man rides an empty suit. The suit tells others what to think of the man, though it would not fit him. The man does not control the suit, but merely takes a ride upon it, come what may.

In his twenties, Franz Kafka composed a long story, “Description of a Struggle”, which remains one of his most enigmatic works. It follows a dream-like logic from a party, to a stroll through Prague, to an encounter with “a monstrously fat man” being borne in a litter by four naked men, to a supplicant once known by the fat man who prayed by bashing his own head against the stone floor of a church, to a final scene on a mountaintop, where a stabbing takes place, though it does not seem to be very consequential. The end. 

Max Brod thought it was a work of genius, though John Updike thought it was adolescent posturing. (¿Por qué no los dos?) Like all of Kafka’s works, it shows up on your doorstep like a locked desk that you are sure contains something you need, but the key is locked inside it; and when you finally bash the desk open, you find your own corpse with a toe tag reading “GUILTY OF BREAKING THE DESK”. Maybe some of the strange imagery Kafka himself could neither explain nor control, maybe some of it spoke of his own secrets, maybe all of it is an existential parable. 

One thing is for sure: the story shatters in every way. We might expect a story with a beginning, middle, and end: nope. We might expect some clarity about just whose story it is: nope. We might expect facts to stay fixed, or people to inhabit their own bodies: nope. We might expect some thread of consistency, conversations that make even minimal sense, words of wisdom that do not culminate in irrelevant banalities. Nope, nope, nope. That the work is offered as a story, and even as a description, is an exaggeration. It’s something, all right, and we may try to read it as a story, but the damned thing will not cooperate. It keeps falling apart the more we try to hold it together, like a human life, come to think of it. Read more »