by Michael Liss

My dad was a pharmacist. He had an old-fashioned store (including an actual soda fountain and stools) and some of the old-fashioned tools of the trade: scales and eye-droppers, spatulas and ointment bases, graded flasks and beakers, amphorae, and his mortar and pestle.

Pharmacy was a bit more of an art in those days and doctors often wrote prescriptions that had a little eye of newt in them. This could make Dad cranky, as they took time and counterspace, but I suspect that, secretly, he liked doing them. He would bring out the mortar and pestle (sometimes with a Remington’s Practice of Pharmacy), and, for all intents and purposes, he could have been an herbalist for a Pharaoh, so old was the tradition of combining exotic ingredients and using time and pressure until the desired potency and texture was achieved.

I have been thinking about that mortar and pestle the last few weeks. They remind me of how just the simplest set of tools, coupled with accumulated knowledge and craftsmanship, can produce something useful and even essential. And, they make me wonder whether, in this insane age, where ignorance and even falsehoods are celebrated and experience scorned, there is anything at all they still have to teach.

Last month, I attended the 16th annual conference of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society. The topic was “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Trump: Jobs, Wages, Trade, Growth, Health and Satisfaction.” The organizers made a real effort to include views from across the spectrum, although it’s fair to say a majority were not Trump supporters. Nevertheless, the overall tone was cautious and analytical, rather than hypercritical. These are serious people (including three Nobel Prize winners), all literate and classically trained, and all share a deep understanding of the laws of economics, and a vast knowledge of data and historical trends.

There is no way I can do justice to a day of such intense sobriety, so I’m going to take a shortcut. Trump is not like anyone in their collective experience. Read more »

Justicia

fickle thing with scales

she’s blind sometimes, but often
lifts her blindfold just enough
to appraise a man’s cache of melanin,
holes in shoes, shuffle in gate,
accent, religious state and what he owns
of cars and houses: she aligns her scales
with power’s weight under which she
also slouches

in this ruse, Justicia,
with a wink beneath her blinders,
tips her scales with sleight of hand
as covertly as she’s able
to hide the fixes of her minders
financed under tables

Jim
10/11/18

by Anitra Pavlico

I have been a practicing Stoic for a few years now, with lulls here and there. Stoicism provides a compelling framework for living in a purposeful and ethical way. The question in my mind is, is it perhaps a little too compelling? In other words, not much fun?

One obvious response is that a philosophy of life is not supposed to be fun. It is supposed to give us tools for how to approach living, how to structure our thoughts and goals. Any enjoyment of life may proceed if it does not entail harm to others or ourselves, but it is not an explicit concern of a philosophy whether we enjoy life or not. In fact, it seems pleasure is more likely to conflict with one’s particular philosophy or creed than conform to it or peacefully coexist with it. Or maybe that is just what my experience with Stoicism leads me to think. I have started to realize that perhaps Stoicism is not for me–at least, not all of the time. Maybe on the weekends, I can take a mental vacation from Stoicism and switch camps to Epicureanism.

* * *

Epicureanism and Stoicism at first glance appear to be as different from one another as two philosophies can be. For the ancient Stoics, virtue was the supreme goal of life; Epicureanism, meanwhile, holds that the aim of life is pleasure.

Stoicism’s main focus on virtue, or aretê, is a noble goal, one that envisions us maximizing our wisdom, our fortitude, our generosity toward fellow humans, and the temperance of our desires. It can give an idle mind a direction and impetus. To pursue virtue, there are certain mental tricks we keep in mind, such as that there are some things that are under our control and other things that are not. We should concentrate on the former, which includes our thoughts, words, and deeds. To everything else, we should be indifferent–including pleasure. Read more »

by R. Passov

Tony: “Yeezy dropped.”                 

Big Tony: “Naw…For Real.”

“Yeah for real. But I’m not going there. Mass produced. For real, thirty-thousand in just New York alone.”

“For real?”

“I’m telling you. That’s how they did it.”

Tony gives me the rundown.

“Sometimes, Nike drops four or five pairs in one day, five in a week. A shoe like Jordans, every two to three weeks. Sometimes they drop a pair from ten years ago.” Tony tells me he’s set to get notified 15 minutes in advance of a drop. His credit card is stored. If he wants the shoe, it’s his.

I ask how many shoes he has and what he thinks they’re worth. “Just the ones that don’t fit in my closet I’d say is $20 to $30 thousand right there. With the shoes in boxes, $100 grand.”

How do you know? “If I want to see what their worth I go to Flight Club NYC. Online or their store in the City. Folks come all the way from London to buy the $20k Yeezy’s.” Read more »

by Bill Murray

Hyvä asiakkaamme,
Ethän käytä huoneiston takkaa.
Se on tällä hetkellä epäkunnossa
Ja savuttaa sisään.

Dear customer,
Please don’t use the fireplace. It is for the moment out of order and the smoke comes into the apartment.

Now wait a minute. We might need that fireplace in Lapland in December. Just now it’s three degrees (-16C) outside. The nice lady couldn’t be more sympathetic, but they just manage the place. Fixing the fireplace requires funding that can’t be organized until we are gone.

She promises we’ll stay warm thanks to a magnificent heater, a sauna and the eteinen, one of those icebox-sized northern anterooms that separate the outside from the living area. I have fun with the translation, though. I imagine that fool Ethän has busted the damned fireplace again.

• • •

Welcome to Saariselkä, Finland, where it’s dark in the morning, briefly dusk, then dark again for the rest of the day. The sun never aspires to the horizon. Fifty miles up the road Finland, Norway and Russia meet at the top of Europe.

But look around. It’s entirely possible to live inside the Arctic Circle. It takes a little more bundling up and all, and you need a plan before you go outside. No idle standing around out there.

There are even advantages. Trailing your groceries after you on a sled, a pulkka, is easier than carrying them. There’s a word for the way you walk: köpöttää. It means taking tiny steps the way you do to keep your balance on an icy sidewalk.

Plus, other humans live here, too, and they seem to get along just fine. Infrastructure’s good, transport in big, heavy, late model SUVs, a community of 2600 people, all of them attractive, all of whom look just like each other.

I imagined “selling time shares in Lapland” was a punch line, but it’s an actual thing. A jammed-full Airbus delivered us from Helsinki, one of three flights every day to Rovaniemi. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Zeal Greenberg is one of the most amazing men I’ve ever worked with. I emphasize “worked with”.

I’ve discussed Disney’s Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 over dinner with Steve Martin. I took Malcolm Forbes’s photo with one of his fans, who then took a photo of me and Forbes. He and his motorcycle club, the Capitalist Tools, were at the Americade rally in Lake George on July 4th weekend. And I once told Sheldon Glashow (physics Nobel 1979) I thought that physicists’ search for a “theory of everything” was ill-conceived and a bit hubristic – I didn’t see that their theory of everything would help much with the problems that most interested me. Unfortunately the meeting we were attending started before I was able to explain myself and, alas, we didn’t get back together afterward.

I didn’t WORK with these folks.

Met them, chatted with them, but I never collaborated with them on a common project. I worked closely with Zeal for years early in the millennium.

I’m tempted to say that you couldn’t imagine a stranger and more unlikely pair. But that’s not true. Of course you could. But still… I’m a Ph. D. and rather Old School WASP in my sense of self-presentation. Zeal never went to college, started out as a schmatta salesman, and lives and breathes sales and marketing. But we had a common desire, to change the world. I was happy to help him pursue his vision. Read more »

by Evert Cilliers aka Evert Eden

It was the most riveting TV of the 21st century.

And why?

Because we saw two American faces under the greatest strain.

Something you only see acted out in the final moments of some grand fictional drama. Something Eugene O’Neill might’ve written.

But here it was for real: an actual live event starring two actual live humans.

How do you think you would have acted under such trying circumstances? Who do you think showed most clearly that admirable Hemingway quality of “grace under pressure”?

Let’s explore.

There was the face of the woman.

Doctor Christine Blasey Ford.

Polite, modest, personable, reasonable, soft-spoken, civic-minded, rational, scientific (“hippocampus”).

And so female: accommodating, seemingly fragile but steely, and terribly anxious to please.

“Collegial” as she put it. And doing her best to be, in her own words, “more helpful.”

She was other-directed: how can I help you? Read more »

by Gerald Dworkin

Three years ago I posted on this site “California Dying” about my experience in working for an assisted-dying bill in that state. That bill passed and while it has been involved in litigation by its opponents on a tactical issue of whether it was  the right type of issue for a special session of the legislature, it is anticipated that it will survive intact. Since I have a residence in California I am eligible for such assistance should I need it.

Since I live the other six months in Illinois I am now working to achieve a similar result in that state. Medical Aid in dying is now legal in California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Vermont, Hawaii and DC. It is legal In Montana in the sense that physicians are immunized from prosecution as long as they have patient consent but there is no regulatory system in place. It is the law in all of Canada.

Another important development is that a number of state medical societies are shifting from the AMA’s stated opposition to assisted dying, to a neutral position.

In 2015 the California Medical Association shifted to a neutral position.

“CMA has removed policy that outright objects to physicians aiding terminally ill patients in end of life options. We believe it is up to the individual physician and their patient to decide voluntarily whether the End of Life Option Act is something in which they want to engage.” Read more »

by Timothy Don

One of life’s great and illicit pleasures is spying on others. Put it on the list with smoking, gossiping, flirting with a stranger, ordering a cocktail at noon, calling in sick to lie abed for the day—all those small and tasty morsels we surreptitiously nibble when no one is looking that satisfy hidden and obscure appetites. Who does not remember creeping around as a child, poking into the corners of mother’s closet, uncovering brother’s stash of candy, cracking sister’s diary, the thrill of anticipation while easing open father’s desk drawer, the jolt of discovering a secret that someone we know has secreted away? Almost from the moment we realize how strange and foreign others are, especially those to whom we live in closest proximity, we peek and we prod and we dig. We spy on them. We know we shouldn’t, it’s wrong to sneak around, to rifle through papers, to examine dirty laundry, but…let’s take a peek. A small peek. Just a quick peek. It is an undeniable and delicious indulgence to do so.

The pleasure of spying is an erotic one, and not because it is prohibited or because the secrets one learns are sexual in nature. Recall that pornographic sex becomes boring the moment it has penetrated the last crevice, fleshed out the last secret, and left nothing to the imagination. There is no writer that will put you to sleep faster than the Marquis de Sade. Trust me. Spying, like knowledge, is erotic, precisely because it is always unfulfilled. One never actually gains the knowledge that would satisfy the appetite that seeks it. The pleasure lies in the expectation of discovery, not the thing discovered. How quickly one finds that, having reached over the wall and plucked a secret from someone else’s garden, the secret begins to wither and dry, to lose its luster and allure.

Spying, intelligence gathering, learning, gaining knowledge—these are not only synonymous acts. The charge they deliver is the same, and it is erotic. This is why the popular imagination so willingly and uncritically associates Commander James Bond, secret agent, with beautiful and accommodating women, even though we know that most spies are probably flabby, paper-shuffling, number-crunching geeks. Bond is a spy, so he knows things, and his job is to learn more things, and that’s what’s sexy about him. The job itself is sexy because the job is never finished; there is always another secret to be discovered, a mission to be undertaken. It’s not about the running and the jumping and the fighting, the fast cars, the good suits and the fancy gadgets. It’s not the tools that get the girls. It’s the trade.

The artist takes part in this trade too. Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Democracy is many things: a form of constitutional republic, a system of government, a procedure for collective decision, a method for electing public officials, a collection of processes by which conflicts among competing preferences are domesticated, a means for creating social stability, and so on. But underneath all of these common ways of understanding democracy lies a commitment to the distinctively moral ideal of collective self-government among political equals. And this commitment to the political equality of citizens is what explains the familiar mechanisms of democratic government. Our elections, representative bodies, constitution, and system of law and rights of redress are intended to preserve individual political equality in the midst of large-scale government. Absent the presumption of political equality, much of what goes on in a democracy would be difficult to explain. Why else would we bother with the institutional inefficiency, the collective irrationality, and the noise of democracy, but for the commitment to the idea that government must be of, for, and by the People, understood as political equals?

To be clear, the democrat’s commitment to the political equality of the citizens does not amount to the idea that all citizens are the same, or equally good and admirable, or equal in every respect. Political equality is the commitment to the idea that in politics, no one is another’s subordinate. Put differently, among political equals, all political power is accountable to those over whom it is exercised. Accordingly, although in a democracy there are laws and rules of other kinds that all citizens are obligated to obey, no one is ever reduced to being a mere subject of legislation. In a democracy, even when a law has been produced by impeccably democratic processes, citizens who nonetheless oppose it may still enact various forms of protest, critique, and resistance. Under certain conditions, citizens may also be permitted to engage in civil disobedience. Once again, the democratic thought is that where citizens have rights to object, oppose, and criticize exercises of political power under conditions where government is accountable to its citizens, they retain their status as political equals even while being subject to the law. In this way, democracy is commonly thought to be the only viable response to the moral problem of reconciling the political power with the fundamental equality of those over whom power is exercised. Read more »

by Lexi Lerner

Like twins, light and heat are born from the same flame. Each has an attractive and destructive force. For light, it’s illumination and blindness. For heat, warmth and burning.

What you experience when you approach a flame is a matter of proximity and duration. How long will you keep your eyes there, keep your hand there? To be a guest in this house means to know your place.

Yet like moths, we cannot help but be drawn in. It sounds hedonistic, but oftentimes it’s sacrificial, to throw ourselves so passionately at what can enlighten or smite us.

Perhaps self-indulgence and self-sacrifice are of the same coin. Perhaps we transgress what nature warns us because it’s what our nature instructs us to do. Maybe we dream of limitlessness, to benefit ourselves or others. The sun spots, the burn blisters, melanoma down the line – mere slaps on the wrist, limitations of our anatomy. We need not be bound by that! We watch Icarus drown – even chide him while he’s sinking – and continue to play with fire.

It’s an endearing foolishness. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer established what we call today the porcupine dilemma: we want to huddle closely in winter, but can’t because of our quills.

It’s frankly a miracle that on an interpersonal level we still attempt to fan each other’s inner flames, even with the risk of getting singed. Or that we cuddle at night when there’s nails and fists and teeth and kitchen knives and drawer guns and just the right words to end each other in a heartbeat. But that’s the point, isn’t it? That all that is possible… and yet we still. It wouldn’t be worth it if it weren’t really worth it. Read more »