by Tim Sommers

Perseverance, the fifth NASA/JPL rover to land successfully on Mars, is currently looking for life there. What if it finds it?

The discovery of life on Mars would provide evidence that life is ubiquitous and likely to arise spontaneously under moderately favorable circumstances. It would be evidence that life everywhere is very similar – or, alternatively, very different – and give us more reason to suspect that there is life elsewhere in our own solar system. It could even suggest that we – you and I – are Martians. What evidence of life on Mars will not do, despite what some have argued, is make it more probable that human beings will go extinct. That last suggestion, proffered by Nick Bostrom and echoed by others, is (to use a technical, philosophical term) bonkers. So, I will leave it for last.

Perseverance is not just looking for life. It’s exploring the potential habitability of Mars for future missions, collecting samples that may be returned to Earth later, collecting instrument data, and taking spectacular photographs. I am excited about it as I have been excited about every mission since Viking 1 in 1976. (Excited, that is, once I recovered from my initial disappointment that there didn’t seem to be any dinosaurs on Mars. Don’t judge me. I was eleven years old.) But occasionally when I share my excitement with others, usually in the form of photographs, I get a dispiriting response. “It’s just a bunch of rocks,” more than one person has said to be. Either way, it’s still fascinating to me. But, well, maybe, it’s not just rocks. Maybe there is life on Mars.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am not going to distinguish between definitive evidence of past life and current, you know, actual life. Of course, it’s more exciting if there is actual respirating and metabolizing going on there right now. Fossils of extinct life are, well, still just rocks. But we are much more likely to find evidence of past life than anything living. To see why consider the question, why can’t we just see that there is or isn’t life on Mars? It looks pretty dead. Whereas a probe to Earth would detect life from orbit. Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

Over recent times, many books have been published with the aim of writing women into history and crediting them for the achievements they have made to the benefit of humanity more broadly. Janice P. Nimura’s The Doctors Blackwell is in that genre of women’s history and she effectively narrates the biographies of the first two remarkable women to study and practice medicine in the United States: Elizabeth Blackwell and her younger sister, Emily.

In this modern world where the sky is literally the limit for women should they have the ambition, determination and the opportunity, it is sometimes difficult to think of them being stifled in such a way as to constrain their potential, yet that has been the plight of women throughout history, and indeed remains the situation for many women across the globe. Gender has been a crucial factor in defining the lives of women, probably exacting a terrible toll of lifelong intellectual frustration and stifling ambition for many of them. As Nimura’s book reveals, Elizabeth Blackwell, a ‘solitary, bookish, uncompromising high-minded’ young woman was one such woman, until she found her way into medicine. Read more »

Maxim D. Shrayer talks to Cynthia L. Haven about her new book, The Man Who Brought Brodsky into English: Conversations with George L. Kline

Cynthia, let me begin by asking you to describe your path to the book—a double path that led you to Joseph Brodsky and to George L. Kline.

I studied with Joseph Brodsky at the University of Michigan—his first port of call in the U.S. It was psychological and aesthetic jolt, like sticking your finger into a light socket. And yes, we memorized hundreds of lines of poetry in his classes.

For many of us, Brodsky’s Selected Poems in 1973 was a radical reorganization of what poetry can be and mean in our times. However, I didn’t connect with the book’s translator, George Kline, until after I published Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2002. George and I stayed connected with Christmas cards and occasional phone calls. But we’d never actually met face to face—so I had no real sense of his age, until in late 2012, when he mentioned that he was almost 92.

George was a champion for Joseph Brodsky and his poetry—many people know that, but many don’t know that he was also a wise and kindly supporter of poets, Slavic scholars, and translators everywhere. He had never given a full account of his collaboration with the Russian-born Nobel poet, however, and I realized time was running out. So we began recording conversations.

His health was failing, and our talks became shorter and more infrequent. Towards the end, he urged me to augment our interviews with his articles, correspondence, and papers, reconstructing a portrait of his collaboration with Brodsky. George died in 2014. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

Philosophy of science, in its early days, dedicated itself to justifying the ways of Science to Man. One might think this was a strange task to set for itself, for it is not as if in the early and middle 20th century there was widespread doubt about the validity of science. True, science had become deeply weird, with Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics. And true, there was irrationalism aplenty, culminating in two world wars and the invention of TV dinners. But societies around the world generally did not hold science in ill repute. If anything, technologically advanced cultures celebrated better imaginary futures through the steady march of scientific progress.

So perhaps the more accurate view is that many philosophers were swept up in the science craze along with so many others, and one way philosophers can demonstrate their excitement for something is by providing book-length justifications for it. Thus did it transpire that philosophers inclined toward logical empiricism tried to show how laws of nature were in fact based on nothing more than sense perceptions and logic — neither of which could anyone dispute. Perceptions P1, P2, … Pn, when conjoined with other perceptions and carefully indexed with respect to time, and then validly generalized into a universal proposition through some logical apparatus, lead indubitably to the conclusion that “undisturbed bodies maintain constant velocities” — you know, that sort of thing.

Alas, the justifications never quite worked. Philosophers are very clever, especially when it comes to exploiting logical loopholes with surprising counterexamples. And so were introduced, alongside the venerable problem of induction, new problems like the raven paradox, the grue problem, and other hijackings of the justifications provided for science. Rescue attempts were made, only to prompt new mutations of the initial problems. It began to look as if logic and sense perceptions may not be quite enough to establish the full rationality of science. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I have joked, mostly to myself, that if I ever wrote a memoir, it would be entitled “Never Gone Nowhere, Never Done Nothing: The Mike O’Brien story”. Such a lifestyle stands in near-total contraposition to that of Belén Fernández, at least in its status quo ante March 2020. Prior to that, she tells us, she had never spent more than a few months in the same place since leaving college. An American who goes to great lengths to avoid ever setting foot in America, she had arrived in Mexico on March 13 with the intention of setting off to yet another destination a few days later. Covid, of course, had other plans.

Her slim but dense (though never plodding) book, “Checkpoint Zipolite”, is a tale of forced stillness that stops her globe-trotting life in its tracks. The titular locale is, we are told, Mexico’s only clothing-optional beach, and carries the ominous and purportedly well-deserved nick-name of “Playa de la muerte“. Of course, mortality stalks around every corner in the age of Covid, so the “Beach of Death” might be as good a place as any to ride out a shelter-in-place-order. From my snowy Canadian suburb, it sounds downright idyllic.

The book is essentially a travel diary, woven through with frequent socio-political rants, personal reflections and historical factoids. There is a buzzing, over-active and effusive character to her life, her mind, and her writing, and when one outlet is blocked, it spills out through another. The repressed desire to travel is apparent in the daily minutiae (buying buckets, searching for yerba mate suppliers, negotiating space-sharing agreements with domestic insects) that serve as jumping-off points for recollections and rhetorical flights that span centuries and continents. Fernández’s life of incessant travel and political observation has provided ample material for weaving such connections, and though these digressions are conspicuous for their ubiquity, they don’t feel over-played. I could imagine many of the cited facts and events being replaced by equally poignant and entertaining substitutions from among Fernández’s own rich supply. Read more »

Pi —(Pi day, one day late…)

pi is perfection with a loose end
3 point 1 four and so on
without pattern or closure

the precision of a mandala
drawn by a drunk on three martinis
not describing wholeness merely
but thinking odd numbers
spouting them while rambling home
disheveled, irrational, unseemly
as the similar square root of 2
at the point of life and infinity
.

Jim Culleny
3/14/15

Sughra Raza. Crowing! Rwanda 2016.

Digital photograph.

by Brooks Riley

by Peter Wells

One of humanity’s greatest problems is that everyone thinks they are right. We are aware, of course, that we might be wrong, because we know that on certain issues we have changed our minds, and therefore must have been wrong at least once.  Nonetheless, at any given moment, we believe that we are right. The contrary would be ridiculous. We can say, if we wish, ‘I believe in the nuclear deterrent, but I might be wrong,’ but we can’t possibly say, ‘I believe in the nuclear deterrent, and I am wrong.’

Our beliefs on specific issues are part of a pattern of interconnected opinions, which we believe to be consistent, and they are related to the beliefs of members of our community, particularly our friends and colleagues. This tendency for our attitudes to be reinforced by our community has been exacerbated in recent years by social media. On the whole, we meet disappointingly few people who disagree with us, and this reduces the possibility that we might be persuaded to reconsider our views, to modify them or to compromise – which means we have fewer opportunities to grow in maturity and understanding.

In his essay ‘Trinity and Pluralism,’ Rowan Williams has an arresting observation about what people should do about the beliefs they hold – how they should regard them, and what they should do when they encounter people who hold different beliefs. He writes, of course as a Christian, but I wonder if the suggestions he makes can be applied to people of different persuasions. He proposes that

The Christian does not ask how he or she knows that the Christian religion is exclusively and universally true; he or she simply works on the basis of the ‘christic’ vision for the human good, engaging with adherents of other traditions without anxiety, defensiveness or proselytism, claiming neither an ‘exclusivist’ perspective invalidating others, nor an ‘inclusivist’ absorption of other perspectives into his or her own, nor yet a ‘pluralist’ meta-theory, locating all traditions on a single map and relativizing their concrete life.

Let’s unpack what Williams is saying. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I heard a discussion about animal ethics recently, and the concept of “full moral standing” came up. The presumption was that we humans, certainly most of us and maybe even all of us, enjoyed this full moral standing, and the ethical quandary to be sorted was whether any other beings did as well. This is a common standpoint from which to philosophize about the rights and recognition due to our fellow earthlings: the view from the top. It is still quite common to assume that we are alone there. I suppose that this is a very sensible assumption, given the available data. Old modern myths, unfounded by anything except ignorance, arrogance and a deliberate withholding of curiosity about others’ experiences, denied animals any basis of consideration at all; no sensation, no consciousness, no “there” there at all. Increasing accumulation of knowledge, and decreasing self-delusion about the propriety of our collective abuse of nature, has lent more credibility to arguments for the moral enfranchisement of animals.

But facts only get you so far. When I was a wild and crazy youth, I pursued graduate philosophy studies and read a lot of works on sovereignty and the legitimacy of political power. One of the main take-aways of thousands of pages of obscure theory was the importance of make-believe. Not as a substitute for facts and logic, but rather as an accompanying dimension of thought. Even if humans are, in fact, completely determined in their behaviour by the laws of physics, the task of accurately predicting what billions of us will do decades hence is beyond our faculties. If we were simple enough to be predicted, we would be too simple to do the predicting. So, if we want to tell stories of what our collective future will look like, we have to make them up. The alternative is to be silent, and we are not the sort of apes to do that. Read more »

I shot this slow-motion video in January of 2017 in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

Dear Rafiq,

I just received your new book of poems, “My Mother’s Scribe,” and was delighted to learn your mother’s name is Maryam.

My maternal grandmother was named Maryam. My mother (Araxie, ten-years old) last saw her and her 3 younger brothers in Urfa on the Death March in 1915. They were in bad shape. Presumed dead. Her father, Giragos, my maternal grandfather, was killed in their village before the Death March began. My paternal grandfather, Barsam, was killed in a massacre in 1895, when my father was born. Araxie ended up in an orphanage in Aleppo where she was from 1915-1921, when she went to Beirut, where she met and married my father.

By ship to France and another ship to New York where they lived for the next many decades ­­at 521 E. 87th St, between York and East End. Father had a grocery store; we lived three flights up in a railroad flat. My father, Bedros, 80-years-old, was hit by a car at 87th and First Ave, just a block and a half from their apartment, in late January 1975. It was a Saturday. The car was driven by (I later learned) a Turkish doctor!

My father had escaped from the Turks in 1912 when he was 17. He reached New York in 1914. Some of his fellow Villagers—he was from Nibishi in Palu district, were already in New York. One of them was his brother-in-law, Kevork Garabedian. His wife, my father’s sister, Anna, was still in the “old country.” Bedros would not see her again until 1921 when they, including Araxie, all met in Beirut. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

One of the most highly publicized philosophy papers of the 2000s was a paper that was actually written almost two decades earlier. Harry Frankfurt’s paper “On Bullshit” was first published in 1986, but some astute editor at Princeton University Press, noting its aptness for the George W. Bush era, reprinted the paper as a slim book.

The effect was electric. Frankfurt’s essay appeared in January of 2005 and was on the New York Times bestseller list for almost half of the year. Among Frankfurt’s many media appearances was a notable interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart about the book’s subject matter and its unexpected success (success so surprising that the Daily Show also interviewed a representative of Princeton University Press to discuss it).

According to Frankfurt’s discussion, “bullshit” refers to intentionally misleading communication in which “the bullshitter hides … that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. … the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.” Read more »

9-Lived Cat

where?

where are you,
……….. on the willow-hung swing
……….. in a field of golden grass?
where,
……….. in the hemlock
……….. straddling the limb at top
……….. hands sticky with sap?
are you
……….. sitting on the well-house step
……….. with the lake at your back
……….. remembering a future of
……….. yes! or collapse?
are you
……….. on the topmost deck above the bridge
……….. gripping the cable-rail fast
……….. exhilarated at how the bow’s pitch feels
……….. spearing a new wave’s gut
……….. as green water breaks over steel
……….. and you feel on your face
……….. the meaning of. Splash! ?
where,
……….. among zucchini
……….. grubbing for those green and fat
……….. or off on a high in a twelve-string cage
……….. trying to strum the truth in that?

where, where?
……….. still tumbling up a shaft
……….. like a 9-lived cat
……….. ?

Jim Culleny
6/18/18