by Richard Passov

Our uniform was a shirt tucked into jeans. Sandi stretched the smallest size over well-proportioned breasts, her black bra peeking through a run of buttons. Mine hung long in the sleeves and fell over my waist.

I was trying to work my way through college in the kitchen of a teaching hospital on the campus where the ARPANET, precursor to the internet, was sending single word messages between the five nodes across the country capable of receiving messages. I was also trying to stay away from drugs. But when Sandi, in tight jeans, smiled over her shoulder, I chose to follow.

“You cool, right?” she asked.

We went through the seating area, out the front door, around to the right, into a curve in the architecture where some thoughtful gardener had planted the rose bushes that Sandi used as a shield. “Here,” she said, after taking a hit from a joint.

The dope tasted like street dirt I had undercut in South Central. A soft weight came over me. My host brought her palms together then shimmied to silent music.

When she stopped and looked past me, I turned to see a young black man with a small head wearing a ribbed wife beater over beady muscles. His colors, stuffed into a back pocket, crept around his leg.

“Hey Pea,” she said walking to him. “You know I like it when you come see me while I working.” Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

The gap between the gravity of climate change and the average person’s ability to mitigate the crisis is utterly dispiriting. If individual action is required, we feel powerless because it defies logic that using a gallon of hot water plus soap to prepare a mayonnaise jar for the recycling bin will save the planet. If government action is required, we feel powerless because most governments are either falling short, or in the case of the United States, actively denying that there is a problem. It is enough to cause climate-change burnout.

I recently attended a talk given by the head of a local environmental group on the connection between people’s diets, especially the consumption of animal products, and climate change. The current situation is irrational when you consider sheer numbers. In the relatively near future, considering the planet is projected to hold 10 billion people by 2050, it won’t be a question of whether we can continue to eat this way, but to what degree we will have to cut back on animal products. At this time almost half of Earth’s land surface is occupied by the industrial livestock system. Cows, chickens, and their ilk require a huge amount of food and a surprising amount of water when you factor in cleaning their dwellings and disinfecting equipment. Instead of feeding humans directly, we feed a large portion of what we grow to animals to fatten them up. Immense amounts of water and fertilizer are used to grow grain to feed animals. Twenty billion food animals certainly do eat and drink a lot, and make a huge mess besides. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Sometime in 1993 Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, known as IZ to his many fans, calls his producer at 2AM and sets up a recording session ASAP. He records a handful of tunes, just his voice and ukulele, one tune after the other, all single takes, and goes home. One of those takes was a medley that inserted “What a Wonderful World” into “Over the Rainbow.” The medley was issued on Kamakawiwo’ole’s 1993 CD, Facing Future. In 1998 the medley was on the soundtrack of Meet Joe Black. In 2005 Facing Future went platinum (1 million or more units sold), the first Hawaiian album to do so. (Record label site for Kamakawiwo’ole.)

In this post I want to take a look at that medley and its subsequent history. The two songs in the medley are standards – a term of art in discussing pop music of the Big Band era and more recent music of that kind. Judy Garland recorded “Rainbow” for The Wizard of Oz at the height of the big band era, 1938. It became an instant hit and has been recorded hundreds of times. Armstrong recorded “Wonderful” in 1967, when big bands had been thoroughly eclipsed by rock and roll. It became a hit in the UK, but not in the USA. Armstrong’s recording got a second chance when it was used on the soundtrack of Good Morning, Vietnam in 1987. Though not the first, Kamakawiwo’ole’s cover of the song was one of the earliest.

Read more »

by Bill Murray

In the middle of the night of March 24, 1992, a pressure seal failed in the number three unit of the Leningradskaya Nuclear Power Plant at Sosnoviy Bor, Russia, releasing radioactive gases. With a friend, I had train tickets from Tallinn, in newly independent Estonia, to St. Petersburg the next day. That would take us within twenty kilometers of the plant. The legacy of Soviet management at Chernobyl a few years before set up a fraught decision whether or not to take the train.

Monitoring stations in Finland detected higher than normal readings. The level of iodine-131 at Lovisa, Finland, just across the gulf, was 1,000 times higher than before the accident, according to the German Institute for Applied Ecology.

Russian authorities reported the accident in the media, and I think they felt self-satisfied for doing it, but Russian credibility had burned down with Chernobyl’s reactor 4. Any more, people thought the Soviets, as Seymour Hersh said about Henry Kissinger, lied like other people breathe. And as usual, solid information was hard to come by.

A news agency in St. Petersburg reported increased radiation, and the Swedish news reported panic in St. Petersburg. A lady in Tallinn that day told me her mother had called from St. Petersburg and they were closing the schools and sending children home to stay indoors. The Finnish Prime Minister fussed that seven hours passed before the Russians told him. It was frightening.

No one believed the plant spokesman when he said on TV, hey (big Soviet smile), no problem. No one trusted the Russians. Read more »

by Timothy Don

I met Rene Magritte a few weeks ago at the Starline Social Club in Oakland. A surprisingly jolly fellow, it turns out he’s working these days as a pedicab driver in San Francisco. Surrealism isn’t my jam, but when he offered me a pickup the next morning at the BART and mushrooms and tickets for two to the retrospective of his work at SFMoMA, well—I had to accept.

There are many things one could say about the SFMoMA. It’s massive, it’s powerful, and it’s complicated. I have a sneaking suspicion that it operates as a kind of Leviathan in the Bay Area that sucks aesthetic energy into its great maw, gobbling up the local, less well-endowed swimmers and forcing an evacuation of the surrounding area that threatens to leave the gallery and studio scene like a bleached-out coral reef bereft of any but the largest predators. The regular reports of artists fleeing the Bay Area and moving to Los Angeles would seem to bear this out, as would the wriggling, lamprey-like presence of a Gagosian outpost since 2016 across the street.

That said, the collection SFMoMA contains is nothing short of incredible. Bracketing for the time being the delicious irony of the Fisher holdings—one of the world’s most extensive collections of post-war and contemporary art, a collection of some of the most sublime works of 20^th century art, built from a fortune made by erasing the distinction between high and low culture (The Gap), valued at well over a billion dollars—visiting SFMoMA is an eye-widening, jaw-dropping experience. It has everything, all of it, and it is informed by a profound and generous curatorial intelligence. Each visit promises new understandings, a renewed interest in old favorites (“Here’s a room full of Paul Klee!”), and a reminder of what art and artists can do: the limitless reach of human creativity. It doesn’t engage in easy juxtapositions or cheap didactics. It just quietly and seductively invites you to join the conversation. There are some very smart people working there.

The Magritte exhibit was proof of that. It was exquisitely curated. But whether it was because I didn’t eat the mushrooms or because surrealism is a movement that appeared during the hour when the sun casts its shortest shadow, I found the curatorial effort behind the exhibit more compelling than the work itself. Sorry, but I was underwhelmed. Magritte (for my taste) is neither creepy enough, nor playful enough, nor philosophical enough to warrant bathing with. Spending that much time with that much of his work was a lesson in the limits of puns and dreams. There’s a reason that it appeals to children, and we are not living in child-like times. These are ugly, impoverished times. Wounded times. Magritte doesn’t help us negotiate them. So at the end of it, I went in search of some art that would explode in my face or deepen my emotions or fill me with awe. Give me some Kara Walker, please, or some William Kentridge. Like I said, SFMoMA has it all. Finally, I found myself looking at a bunch of paintings by Philip Guston. Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Popular political commentary from across the spectrum is replete with warnings social about “bubbles,” “silos,” and “echo chambers.” These are said to produce “closure,” “groupthink,” and an “alternate reality.” In turn, these forces result in the dysfunction of polarization, a condition where political officials and ordinary citizens are so deeply divided that there is no basis for compromise or even productive communication among them.

That polarization is politically dysfunctional might seem obvious. Where polarization prevails, the ground for compromise recedes, and so politics becomes a series of standoffs and bottlenecks. Yet politics still needs to get done. Hence democracy devolves into a numbers game of modus vivendi truces and strained compromises, resembling nothing like self-government among social equals.

In order to know what to do about polarization, we need a more precise view of what it is. It is helpful to distinguish (as we have elsewhere) between two different kinds of polarization: political polarization and belief polarization. The former refers to various ways of measuring the distance between political rivals. This distance can be conceived in terms of policy and platform divides or else in terms of inter-party antipathy. But in either case, where political polarization prevails, the common ground among politically opposed parties falls out, resulting in political deadlock. The latter, belief polarization, refers to a phenomenon to which we are all subject by which interactions with like-minded others transforms us into more extreme versions of ourselves. Read more »

by Amanda Beth Peery

There’s a door behind her ear—or
really in the fold
where the ear meets the skull
where a down of short brown hairs
nestles up to her ear-cup, the door
sometimes burns
and she drags one long fingernail
deep along the crease like an animal
scratching itself with a claw
to quiet whoever it is
who lives there—
she’s pretty sure it’s a door
but it could be a wall.

* * *

Here you have the ear parade
the hearing party
the masquerade
of ears that meet by the waterfront
under the train bridge where the waves
are at their reckless loudest—all
cloaked in deep fur muffs
or decorated with a little pretty lace
hanging from a hat
or jeweled with a flesh-tone hearing aid
like a prehistoric statue.

by Tim Sommers

I recently rewatched “12 Angry Men” with The Philosophy Club at the University of Iowa as part of their “Owl of Minerva” film series. The 1957 film has the late, great Henry Fonda as the lone holdout on a jury ready to convict a poor, abused 18-year-old boy for allegedly stabbing his father to death. Over one long, tense evening (shown in something close to real-time), juror #8 – none of the jurors are identified by name, only number – forces the rest of the jury to methodically reexamined the evidence. It’s not a courtroom drama, it’s a jury-room drama in which only 3 of 1:36 minutes of running time take place outside the sweaty, claustrophobic jury room. The film is intense, moving, and effective. Afterwards, I made the following remarks.

The number of jurors – the “12”, as they are starkly described in the 2007 Russian remake of “12 Angry Men” – is not entirely random. We have the Marquis de Condorcet, at least in part, to thank for that number. Condorcet was a moderate democrat during the French Revolution. He advocated universal suffrage and was an early advocate of universal primary education. He went into hiding after voting against the death penalty for Louis XVI, but was captured and died in his cell nine months later. Ironically, his warders had lost track of who he was by the time he died and he was identified only by the copy of Horace’s “Epistles” he had been carrying when he was arrested.

Condorcet had studied juries and concluded that, under the right circumstance juries and, by extension voting, is an extremely effective procedure for getting right answers. This was a consequence of his famous “Jury Theorem”. I won’t rehearse the mathematics here. But on an issue with two alternatives, where the decision is made independently by each participant, where there is also an objectively right decision, and each decision-maker has a greater than 50% chance of making that right decision a group of 5 or more people have a high likelihood of making the correct decision, a group of 12 has a higher likelihood of giving the correct verdict, and a group of a 1000 or more is nearly certain – out to several decimal places certain – to make the right call. In other words, if we think of a jury as a kind of procedure to determine the truth of a question, the more the better, but 12 makes a solid, practicable number. Read more »

by Niall Chithelen

It’s getting colder now in Beijing, and I can’t help but feel for the clothing left outside to dry. They had to hang through the night and on through the weak sunrise, doing their best to catch the wind before the temperature drops again. How do they feel being out there for passers-by to see, all exposed, caught up in the dust and very small toxic particles?

I wonder if they catch cold when the temperature drops and they’re still damp. They might huddle together for warmth, but then they’d have to stay out longer, and no one wants that. Is it wrong to forget about them, or retrieve them late, only when it is convenient? Not for the fabric—which I have no idea about—but, you know, morally. They’ll survive, sure, but maybe they deserve better.