by Usha Alexander

[This is the third in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

At the beginning of our story—paraphrased from an origin story remembered by a Cree elder—two figures are walking along the clouds. They’ve been walking long and far. Looking down through the spaces between the clouds, they spy a beautiful, green landscape, rich and inviting. They long to go down to this land, but they don’t know how to get down from the clouds. So the two keep walking. When at last they see a speck on the horizon, in the far distance, they walk toward it. The speck grows, looming larger than they are as they get nearer. When the two look up at it, it looks back down at them—it’s Great Spider.

The people tell Great Spider how much they wish to climb down from the clouds and inhabit the land below, and they ask him for his help. So Great Spider begins to weave a web. He weaves and weaves and weaves, until he’s woven a boat. The two climb into the boat with Great Spider’s web still attached, and Great Spider lowers it down from the clouds. Despite his care, the boat rocks and sways precariously. After a long and harrowing downward journey, the boat ends up stuck in the top of a huge tree.

Now the Earth is almost within reach, but the people don’t know how to get down from the top of the tree. Below them they can see Caribou and other animals walking around. They call out for help, but none of the animals is able to help them. Finally, they ask Fisher-weasel, who scampers up the tree and carries each of them safely to the ground. Once they’re on the ground, Brother Bear befriends the people and teaches them everything they need to know as they make their way in this world. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

The most charitable, forward-looking take on the science wars of the 90s is Stephen Jay Gould’s, in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox (2003), a delightful book about dichotomies between the sciences and humanities. His diagnosis is primarily that scientists have taken too literally or too seriously some fashionable nonsense, and overreacted; and if everybody can just calm down already, things will be alright and both sides could “break bread together” (108). Gould saw the science wars themselves as a marginal and slightly comical skirmish, almost a mere misunderstanding. “Some of my colleagues”, he said,

“have become legitimately disturbed by a few truly silly and extreme statements from the ‘relativist’ camp, largely made by poseurs rather than genuine scholars, and have mistaken these infrequent sound bites of pure nonsense for the center of a serious and useful critique. Then, falsely believing that the entire field of ‘science studies’ has launched a crazed attack upon science and the concept of truth itself, they fight back by searching out the rare inane statements of a few irresponsible relativists […] and then presenting a polemic defense of science, ultimately helpful to no one”. (99)

Gould saw an example of such “windmill-bashing” in P.R. Gross and N. Levitt’s Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1994). He also saw it in Alan Sokal’s famous hoax: a brilliant and funny parody, which Gould thought did not really prove much beyond the laziness of the editors that he hoodwinked.

I thought a lot of these 1990s events when I bumped into their 21^st-century descendants: first, the ‘Sokal squared’ hoax two years ago, which insisted on taking all the fun out of Sokal’s joke by multiplying it twentyfold. And now Cynical Theories, the equivalent of Higher Superstition, in which two of the same three authors aim their lance at what they perceive to be the heart of intellectual evil: postmodernism. Postmodernism denies reality and universal truth, and thinks that all categories and concepts are therefore functions of group power. These core postmodern motifs have developed (like a “fast-evolving virus”) into actionable left-wing ideas, in the form of a proliferation of cynical, pessimistic and anti-enlightened theories in fields such as gender studies and queer studies. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Light As a Feather. Boston, Sept 2020.

Digital photograph.

by David Oates

In my preceding post, I reflected on the  poetry of the eighth-century Chinese master Tu Fu, which has nourished me for decades (in translation, of course). Tu Fu found a way to place himself both inside and outside the whirling political disorder of his times. I drew strength from the quiet inwardness he captured even in unquiet times. I have taken it as my model.

Yet Tu Fu lived under an entrenched monarchy. There was no hope of influencing or reforming it. So he maintained a joyous, half-brokenhearted inwardness instead. But the stance of  “inward exile” (as Russian poets and dissidents named it during the Soviet regime) – isn’t it more problematic when you’re living in an actual (if deeply compromised) democracy?

Isn’t more required of me – more courage, more participation? Especially when the struggle for democracy is playing out so vividly and courageously in my own town of Portland, Oregon, just a half-hour stroll downtown from my house. Why am I not showing up?

* * *

I always think of Henry David Thoreau when I get to this point in the meditation. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck,

then it’s probably a duck.

Over the course of two days in early September, the Trump administration quietly formalized its commitment to the ideology of white supremacy within the context of schooling and public education. In two separate but parallel moves, both of which would have made Senator Joe McCarthy proud, Trump announced that the Department of Education (DOE) would investigate public schools to determine if they were using the Pulitzer-Prize winning curriculum, The New York Times’ “1619 Project” while also decreeing that federal employees would no longer receive professional development education about white privilege from the perspective of Critical Race Theory (CRT).[1] If the DOE discovers that schools are using the 1619 Project, Trump has promised, regardless of whether he has the authority to do so, to defund those schools. In spite of the enormous support the 1619 Project has received from educators, intellectuals, and many (but not all) historians, Trump has declared the curriculum “un-American” and a form of anti-American propaganda.[2] The 1619 Project’s goal “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year [thereby placing] the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country” could only be considered “un-American” by those refusing to acknowledge the historical record: The culture and ideology of white supremacy was foundational and fundamental to the Nation’s birth and history. There is nothing more American than the ideology of white supremacy and Trump’s attempt to declare the 1619 Project “un-American” shows that it is not going away without a fight. With Trump as white supremacist cheerleader, America’s historic connection to the culture and ideology of white supremacy is front and center for the world to see. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

For the staff of Flussbad Oberer Letten

On a warm evening in late August I was basking by the Limmat, the river that runs through downtown Zurich, alongside substantially fewer than the 400 permitted in the public bathing area in the past several weeks: school holidays had just ended and work had begun to pick up again, so the crowd of bathers that had recently thronged the city’s riverside and lakeshore beach sites was diminished. Many of my companions had the dazed appearance of people lately freed from the fluorescent confines of the office – as had I – and were blinking warily in the natural light as they prepared for a dip in the pleasantly cool stream.

Three acquaintances, each from a separate area of my life – a client from my freelancing days, a former neighbor, and a waiter from a favorite restaurant – all stopped by, one after the other, to greet me where I reclined on my towel, paperback at the ready, resting my eyes on the soothing vista of parkland and wooden boardwalk across the river. Each of them rejoiced briefly in the pleasures of outdoor semi-nudity in the middle of a busy city, before cautioning me that it would rain the next day:

“Morn chunnts go schiffä.”

The remark is stylized, virtually a cliché, and I have heard it on various occasions, typically as summer draws to a close, since I moved to Switzerland over two decades ago. It has never been entirely clear to me in what spirit it is offered: conspiratorial – upbraiding – mocking? Am I to feel ashamed of the challenge to the weather gods (a certain Petrus is charged with meteorology in Germanic-Christian syncretic folklore) implicitly issued by my brazenly bare limbs? Is it an expression of sympathetic embarrassment – what is known in German as Fremdschämen or “vicarious shame”, AKA cringeworthiness – at the spectacle of me whistling in the dark, closing my eyes to the encroachment of frost on my balmy idyll? Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

I’ve telecommuted from home for many years now. Before COVID-19, I would rarely turn my camera on when I was on video chats. And if I did, I’d make sure to put makeup on and look somewhat professional and put together from at least the waist up. But since lockdown started in March, I now turn my camera on for almost every video call and I don’t bother to put makeup on or to change my clothes from whatever ratty t-shirt I happen to be wearing. And I don’t care. I sit in my armchair au natural, secure in the knowledge that everyone I’m on calls with is likely dressed casually and taking the call from some room in their home. We’ve seen each other badly in need of haircuts. Then, in some cases, with bad haircuts that we did ourselves or let family members do to us. And we’ve grown familiar with each other’s living spaces, pets, and sometimes family members. I know the view outside of one colleague’s window, the clock on the wall behind another and I always admire the piece of art behind my colleague in Austin. Except for the occasional vacation house rental for a week or two, we’ve all been working out of our homes, living a more lockdown, limited version of the work-life we lived before. It made sense to stay put while lockdown was at its peak. But as it eases up, at least in some places, and while its clear that office life isn’t going back to normal anytime soon, is there a different, new way to live and work? Read more »

by Philip Graham

I had never before wandered through Tower Records in downtown Chicago, yet it felt familiar. Why not? Every store in the corporate chain was a similar gleaming cathedral of CD and vinyl excess, multistoried with escalators and elevators, and brimfuls of such a wide selection that, once you entered, you’d find it near impossible not to discover something to love. The behemoth in New York on 66^th and Broadway had always been a favorite of mine, the outlet where I’d found the music of Madredeus, that great Portuguese fado-chamber ensemble; the world-electronica of Banco de Gaia’s Last Train to Lhasa; and Vanessa Daou’s masterpiece, Zipless, her slick brooding songs set to poems by Erica Jong.

But the Chicago store could have been proud of its own promising immensity.

I was hanging out with the writer and book critic John Blades—we were two fellow music lovers on a Tower Records hunt on an idle afternoon. But John also wanted to show me this particular store because it served as the setting for one of the most powerful chapters in a novel manuscript he’d recently completed and shown me. In a way, this outing was like a return to the scene of a crime. Read more »

Video of unidentified blue spider on the tennis court in Vahrn, South Tyrol, made in September of 2020.

by Michael Liss

We are not dead yet. Battered a little, yes. Frustrated, anxious, wondering about our jobs, our neighborhoods, our schools, absolutely. Definitely not dead. 

It doesn’t mean we aren’t wounded. Last week, an open letter from the Partnership for New York City called on Mayor Bill de Blasio, in very diplomatic but clear terms, to restore essential services, clean up the City, and get it back to work. You can read the full text here, but the most interesting thing about it is the signatories, a variety of luminaries from business, real estate interests, top law firms, investment banking, etc., who, in the aggregate, probably control more assets than the combined GDP of all the countries in Western Europe. 

Vested interests aside, these folks are also largely right. De Blasio has become something of a punching bag because of his outsized personal ambitions as compared to his minimalist accomplishments, but the truth is, even without COVID, the Mayor’s job is an incredibly tough gig. We have an aging infrastructure, rely heavily on mass transit, are incredibly diverse ethnically and socio-economically, and have many neighborhoods where the incomprehensibly rich live cheek to jowl with the inexcusably poor. The school system alone is a stupendous challenge. In healthier times, 1.1 million kids, one in every 300 Americans, sit at a desk in a New York City classroom.  

With COVID, we are back on our heels. If I were de Blasio, I’d look at my shattered outside ambitions, focus my last 16 months in office on addressing some of the City’s real needs, and find an opportunity to refurbish my image. 163 signers of the Partnership’s letter are 163 sources of cash, managerial expertise, and other resources that could be applied to our present crisis. Ask them, and they will show up—not just out of civic duty, but also because it’s good business. They might also pressure a pol or two in Washington, including some well-placed ones who currently make a sport out of hating us. Just a suggestion, Mr. Mayor. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

https://youtu.be/Pgmoz4f8LA4

The idea has been around for awhile. Rodolfo Llinás had the idea in the mid-2000s; you can see him in the astonishing video above (c. 04:45 ff.). Christof Koch has recently speculated about it in Nature [2]. But Elon Musk is by far the most visible proponent of direct brain-to-brain thought transfer. While he said nothing about it in the recent demonstration of the technology his Neuralink company is developing [3], he has mentioned the idea in recent conversation with Joe Rogan [4] and in a long article by Tim Urban [5].

There are two problems with this idea. We don’t know how to build the necessary technology. Such technology would require millions upon millions of connections (100s if not 1000s of times the number hairs on a head) between two brains, connections that have to go into the brains without shredding them to itsy-bitsy smithereens. However challenging the technology problem is, that isn’t the deepest problem. The deeper problem is one of fundamental principle. The idea of physical thought transfer between brains as so poorly defined that it is difficult to impossible to evaluate. At the moment it is a nonsense idea, one of those ideas that isn’t even wrong.

The principle is easy to understand. I explain that in the next section, using Koch as an example. If you find that convincing then you can skip the rest, perhaps sip some nice tea, or some scotch, whatever suits your fancy. If you’re still curious, I can offer you a look inside a simple nervous system and an account of how Musk misunderstands the nature of linguistic communication. I conclude with some thoughts about dreams of the future. Read more »

by Bill Murray

In last month’s column we sailed from Walvis Bay, Namibia, to St. Helena Island, 1800 miles from Angola, 1200 from Brazil, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. This month we continue north to Ascension Island.

When the Brits exiled Napoleon to St. Helena in 1815 they denied the emperor newspapers, subjected him to curfew, and guarded him with 125 men during the day and 72 at night. So intent were they to avoid a second imperial escape that sailing down, they garrisoned Ascension Island on the way, better to defend St. Helena.

Napoleon died six years later. With the Suez Canal fifty years in the future, the Admiralty hung on to Ascension as a sea base and it serves now as an airbase shared with the Americans, who built the island’s Wideawake airfield to move troops in WWII.

Ascension provided the middle link in an airbridge for the United Kingdom’s 1982 Falkland Islands campaign. During that conflict Ascension came alive like never before or since, as the UK Ministry of Defense ran a frenetic schedule of flights between the Brize-Norton air base near Oxford, England, and the RAF’s Mount Pleasant airport near Stanley, in the Falklands. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

In Democracy in America (1848), Alexis de Tocqueville concluded from his travels in the United States that “The particular and predominating fact peculiar to” this democratic age “is equality of conditions, and the chief passion which stirs men at such times is the love of this same equality.”  Indeed, “The gradual progress of equality,” he wrote, “is something fated. The main features of this progress are the following: it is universal and permanent, it is daily passing beyond human control, and every event and every man helps it along….”

If this is at all accurate, it seems fair to say that our conditions, and our ambitions, regarding human equality, are much diminished. But I want to draw attention to just one specific point de Tocqueville highlights.

Equality, the relevant kind of equality for him, is “equality of conditions”. It’s not abstract moral equality or equality limited to political decision making or equality of opportunity or (as contemporary philosophers say) equality in the distribution of some underlying abstraction like utility, access to advantage, or primary goods. Democracy, and the democratic spirit, called on and depended on, for de Tocqueville, a certain level of real, actual, surface-level equality. The love of equality, that he is both drawn to and repelled by – with “a kind of religious dread” – is just ordinary equality, not some philosophical surrogate.

If you ask someone at a random about equality or inequality in the United States today, they will very likely assume you mean economic inequality. This is partly because economic inequality has gotten more attention recently, but it is mostly because, if you ask people to think about whether the conditions of their life are equal or unequal to the conditions of others’ lives, the first thing many will think about is money.

Yet, at the precise moment Thomas Piketty’s groundbreaking work on economic inequality was drawing new attention to the shocking level of economic inequality that characterizes our new gilded age, philosopher Harry Frankfurt thought it imperative to insist that “Insofar as economic inequality is undesirable…this is not because it is as such morally objectionable. As such, it is not morally objectionable.” Rather, he said, “from a moral point of view economic inequality does not matter very much”.

Unfortunately, many other philosophers writing about economic inequality also deny that it is bad in and of itself. Instead, they insist that substantial economic inequalities are bad because, and where, they have bad effects.

I believe this view is a mistake. Read more »

by Varun Gauri

Covfefe.

Alternative facts.

Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

“The line of ‘Make America great again,’ the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody’s using it, they are all loving it. I don’t know, I guess I should copyright it, maybe I have copyrighted it.”

The style and rhetoric of the Trump era appears to be historically unique, the result of the narrow and unexpected electoral victory of a man who honed his skills performing as a reality TV idiot savant. But I believe that the rhetorical style of Trumpism — nonsense, incoherence, giving truth the middle finger— will outlast Trump.

When people say that Trumpism will outlive Trump, they usually refer to the political economy. Typically, they mean that trade shocks and the integration of China into the World Trade Organization caused unemployment and anger in the American heartland that has not yet been adequately addressed, that rising levels of immigration and the coming emergence of America as a majority-minority nation evoke nostalgia and a politics of resentment, or that the political alliance between plutocrats and populists has proven durable. All that may be true. But I think that it is not only the structural forces that are likely to endure, but also the trappings of Trumpism, what we think of as its ephemera — the circus atmosphere, the sensation that up is down, the experience of having fallen through the looking glass. Read more »

Harold Newton. Untitled, 1960s.

Oil on Masonite board.

“In 1955, 19-year-old African American artist Harold Newton was convinced by A. E. Backus, a prominent Florida landscape artist, to create paintings of landscapes rather than religious scenes.^[6] Newton sold his landscapes from the trunk of his car because art galleries in South Florida refused to represent African Americans.^[7] The following year, 14-year-old Alfred Hair began taking formal art lessons from Backus and, after three years, also began selling landscape paintings. Newton and Hair inspired a loose-knit group of African American artists to follow their leads. Newton is recognized by fellow artists for his technical inspiration while Hair is the considered the leader and catalyst “who set the tone for the group through the 1960s.”^[6][8] They attracted a group of a “young, energetic” artists who painted large quantities of brilliantly colorful impressionistic landscapes that they each sold from their cars.^[6] In 1970, the group lost its charismatic leader when Hair was killed in a barroom brawl at age 29 and the prodigious output of the movement’s artists began to wane.” (Wikipedia)

More here, here and here.