by Samir Chopra

Read more »

Wovoka (named Jack Wilson in English), a Northern Paiute, dreamed
he was taken to the spirit world and saw all Native Americans being
taken up into the sky and the Earth opening up to swallow all Whites
and to revert back to its natural state. He claimed that he was shown
that by dancing the round-dance continuously, the dream would become
a reality and the participants would enjoy the new Earth. This was also
called Ghost Dance.

Ghost Dancing

I was ghost dancing a dream
I am ghost dancing a dream

I'm a dancing ghost,
a lone ghost dancing
between surf and horizon
from where sun sets to
when it rises

a ghost whose dance is familiar,
so familiar it reminds me
of one I did not know
but whose breath was mine,
and whose skin
but who, now dancing
in this skin, breathing,
is less unfamiliar than that ghost
who danced on tenderfeet, tripping
(but not the light fantastic,
just a young klutz who looked up
while dancing close to an edge
being, dreaming)

dancing on a brink
like a will-be ghost

……….. dancing
……….. dancing
still….. dancing

ghost . dancing
………..
.

Jim Culleny
8/25/17

by Carl Pierer

Sometimes, speech achieves something. Sometimes even, speech is necessary to do something. For instance, in the now famous example, somebody is getting married by uttering "I do." Austin's theory distinguishes three aspects to such utterances. First, what is being said: the locution. Secondly, what effect it has (on, for example, the hearer): the perlocution (or perlocutionary force or act). Thirdly, what is being done in saying so: the illocution (or illocutionary force or act). Austin's main interest lay with the last, the most subtle and difficult one.

He gives a rough-and-ready marker: "in saying" for the illocutionary act and "by saying" for the perlocutionary act: In saying "I do", she was marrying. By saying "I do", she upset her mother. The right context for the utterance ensures that it in saying "I do", she was indeed marrying, that it achieved its illocutionary act. That she also upset her mother by saying so is an effect the utterance produced in the hearer, its perlocutionary act.

These acts are, of course related: one person urges another: "Read the book" and the second person reads the book. The illocution here is the urging. The same locution may have a different illuction: the first person could have advised or ordered the second.

Austin argues that illocutionary force is institutionalised, that is, in order to achieve the act, it has to obey certain felicity conditions: in the above example, it is the context (the priest's question in the setting of the marriage ceremony, for instance) of her uttering "I do" that ensures that she is marrying.

This is the background in the philosophy of language that Langton develops in a much regarded article published at the height of the feminist debate surrounding the prohibition of pornography. The aim, of that article is not, at least not primarily, to argue for the prohibition, but rather to show that the claim that pornography subordinates makes good sense. In a second part of this article, not discussed her, she also argues that pornography silences women.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

Does anyone have any good eclipse stories?

My 2017 expedition had its start in a conversation about supernova.

"Wouldn't it be amazing to look up one night and see a supernova as bright as the full moon?" I said to him.

An astronomer, he looked worried and began mumbling about how hard it is to predict something like that. No one can say when a star will explode, after all. But then, he brightened up and asked,

"Maybe it's not exactly a supernova, but what would you say about a total eclipse of the sun?"

Hmmm, I thought. That did sound rather intriguing. So, I began reading everything I could get my hands on about totality. And the more I read, the more excited I became. For totality is much more dramatic than a supernova. Day becomes night? And as the stars and planets become visible in mid-day, people can easily become overwhelmed by it all. Some are terrified; while others become utterly beguiled by what they see unfolding in front of their astonished eyes. There are those sparkling beads that shine out like laser beams as the light of the sun comes streaming through the valleys of the moon's surface. And what about the famed diamond ring that encircles the moon as it comes seemingly to rest for a moment in front of the sun. Then there is the corona–something most people will never have the chance to see in their lifetimes if they don't experience a total eclipse of the sun. Reading, I realized that there are few natural phenomena that have the power to awe people like this.

Read more »

by Richard King

Of all the flags seen at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month – the Gadsden, the Confederate, the National Socialist – none so caught the media's attention as the one raised in its immediate aftermath. Responding to the far-right rally, and to the atrocity committed by one of the protestors, the Cheeto Jesus equivocated. There was, he said, blame on "many sides" – a claim he reiterated a few days later in an impromptu press conference at Trump Tower in New York. Indeed he went further, describing as "fine people" many of the protestors who'd attended the march and more than implying that their central grievance, the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, was based on solid reasoning. Even by Trump's standards this was a shock, and rival politicians and mainstream media wasted no time in denouncing his comments. In his response to the violence in Virginia, they said, the president had revealed his "true colours".

Personally I doubt Trump has any true colours. He is too chaotic an individual to have a consistent ideology, save for the usual dog-eat-dog shtick that passes for wisdom at the big end of town. But there's no doubt he represents something in the minds of the millions of Americans who voted for him, and the question of what that is is crucial. One doesn't need to have read Sun Tzu to know that in order to defeat an enemy it is first necessary to understand it, and at the moment we are presented with very different interpretations of the reasons for Trump's ascendancy and the rise of rightwing populism more generally. To a great extent these interpretations reflect broader ideological frameworks. These, too, need to be named and delineated before liberals and leftists can begin to construct a coherent platform from which to fight back against right-wing populism in the US and beyond.

In what follows I want to offer an overview of what I take to be the two main analyses, and suggest, not only that both are limited, but also that the simplistic opposition of the two is based on a false antithesis. As tempting as such posturing is at present, crude characterisations of Trump's constituency as reflexively racist, economically neglected, or just plain dumb do nobody any good. God knows, I'm not proposing to Unite the Left, or suggesting that "the left" can be united. But I do think a more granular analysis of this question has the potential to instil a bit of solidarity in the shadow of this ongoing calamity. So, with your indulgence comrades…

Read more »

by Justin E. H. Smith

Carmen Giménez Smith & Steph Burt

Photos by Evan Lavender-Smith & Jessica Bennett

On August 7, The Nation announced the appointment of Steph Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith as its new poetry editors. Beginning in the Fall, they will be soliciting and commissioning a wide range of American and international poetry, and will begin accepting submissions on September 15.

Steph Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University, and the author of several books of poetry and criticism, including The Poem Is You (Harvard University Press, 2016).

Carmen Giménez Smith is Professor of English at Virginia Tech, a CantoMundo fellow, and the author of a memoir and four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award.

On August 15, Carmen and Steph joined Justin E. H. Smith by Skype to talk about their work to come at The Nation, and about poetry in America.

* * *

Justin E. H. Smith: What is poetry doing in The Nation? Does it fit within a unified mission that the magazine has, or is it something more like a breath of fresh air that one can take while absorbing all the difficult news? How do you see it?

Steph Burt: That's a good question. There are a couple of answers I'd want to give to that. The first is that different poems do different things. Carmen and I are only going to print poems we like a lot. But we're not going to like them all for the same reasons. I assume that you like more than one kind of food and my guess is that you listen to more than one kind of music, and that you like different foods and different kinds of music for different reasons. This is sort of the argument of the book about how to read poetry that I'm working on now, so we're talking about that at the same time as we're talking about poetry at The Nation. Different poems do different things. We might print a poem that is a breath of fresh air and a break from thinking abut the struggle against white supremacy; and then we might print a poem whose subtle, careful way of examining language and history shows us how complicated the roots of the problem of white supremacy are; and then we might print a third poem that is a turning-it-up-to-eleven, articulate expression of the need to stay outraged. Those are three good kinds of poem. Three poems in one issue might be a bit much, though if they're short we could do that. Take another urgent problem of politics and culture that The Nation frequently addresses: we might print a poem about the delights of a fruit orchard; we might then print another poem that is a very cold, scientific look at how the earth has changed; and we might print another poem whose emotional undercurrent is, Holy cow! Miami's going to be underwater really soon. Those are three poems that all address the same urgent issue, that's a political issue, but in three different ways, one of which might seem non-political if you're looking at it in a certain way. It is true that in some sense everything is political. It is true in another sense that if the only question you ask about something in your life is, How can I address this as a matter of public policy? Or, How can I address this as a community activist? that's not a life, as someone who is concerned with public policy and with communities, that I want anyone in my community to have to live. So poetry in general can speak to what we need to do together, and it can speak to the lives and the experiences that it is the job of politics to make possible.

Carmen Giménez Smith: I think poetry has always had a role in social-justice movements, and I think rhetorically that there is a way in which theoretical approaches and descriptions, and reportage-based work is vital to changing the world. But I also think that there's a kind of new world-building, a kind of optimistic possibility that gets expressed in art that sometimes can't get expressed in journalism. I also think, again rhetorically –and I think of all writing as having a rhetorical purpose–, that art can say a lot of things and have a tone that cannot be expressed in journalism. So my goal as an editor is to bring works that complement the rigorous journalistic work in the same pages, that add nuance to it, that deepen it, that humanize it. That's how I imagine the curatorial work that Steph and I will be doing for The Nation. I wouldn't necessarily dichotomize poetry into political and apolitical, because in some countries merely expressing the gaze is transgressive, writing a poem is transgressive. I think that having the liberty to look into the world and describe it in itself can be a highly transgressive mode. Having subjectivity isn't a guarantee, no one is guaranteed a subjectivity, and so any kind of expression in art, I think, is implicitly resistant. It's not the way we talk, it's not the way we think, yet we're still moved to be in the world in that way. So I do think that there's a kind of political charge in every expression of poetry, whether it's about just the changing of the seasons or, whether it's about the change of seasons representing the coming of the apocalypse. Which it sure feels like these days.

Read more »

by Paul North

With the previous post I began a new series, cognominated "Reports from an Academy." The reports are pure fiction. Imagine, if you would, a middle-aged professor of literature at an elite institution, call it Nevahwen University. Each month, worrying that it will all be over soon, a slipshod, unsystematic professor still in his good years, or so they tell him, pens a bulletin to the outside, without much hope anybody will receive it. Nevahwen is the school's name as well as its motto. Will the conflict between understanding the world and becoming successful in the world finally be decided in favor of understanding? This is the professor's eternal question. He asks: when? Wen? In a cynical mood, his answer is: Nevah. Nevahwen. Postcards from the front lines of a battle over the future—at the clash site of two generations, two or more economic classes, and in the midst of these conflicts, tiptoeing along a schism between the value of understanding and the value of success—postcards from the schism, these reports portray experiences that may be hard for those at home to fathom. Take them as proof the professor is still alive. Take them as recognitions of failure or declarations of hope. Take them as you will.

Charlatans, Failures, and Frauds

These three undesirables have one thing in common, they don't live up to expectations. What seems full of promise turns out to be empty. The product is different than you anticipated, worse than you wanted; promises turn out to be either fast talk, impotence, or lies. Charlatans, failures, and frauds: we want none of them in this Academy. Or, more precisely, we accept a certain amount of failure, but only if it is limited in scope, and it is really only tolerable if failure points the way to success. We must always learn from our mistakes. We must always learn from our mistakes.

Today I report on a point of indistinction. There is a point, hard to reach, even harder to recognize, when the three—charlatan, failure, fraud—become virtually indistinguishable. At this dicey point, someone presents an experiment, a historical thesis, a speculative proposal and neither you nor anyone else can tell whether the hypothesis is trumped up, whether the scientist or researcher has talked themselves into something they will later repudiate and regret, whether the world is simply not as they say and the thesis is flat wrong, or whether they are lying to themselves and as a consequence to others. It is a moment of high dubiousness. Then again, it is also a moment of possibility, where something unexpected could happen. We are not accusing our colleagues in the profession of anything. In fact, they show the utmost in professionalism, thoroughness of research, methodological rigor, and integrity. Yet there used to be a type…

Read more »

by Michael Liss

I don't want to talk about affirmative action. It's a messy, horrible topic.

I just don't want to talk about it. But earlier this month, the New York Times reported on a new Jeff Sessions initiative to hire political appointees for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division for "investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination." By "intentional race-based discrimination," the AG means race-based discrimination against races other than African Americans or Latinos.

And I don't want to go there. Republicans, largely speaking off the record, see this as a win for Sessions personally, as it pleases Trump at a time where Trump-pleasing might be important for Sessions. And it's a win for the GOP, where affirmative action is broadly unpopular not only among party members, but also with more moderate suburban middle and upper middle class voters who approach the college application period with dread.

I'm still not going to going to be sucked in. Sessions' motives and whatever political calculations they reflect are irrelevant. The historical record on the systematic exclusion of minorities is an irrefutable disgrace, but, when it comes to remedies, particularly their legality, reasonable people can disagree. Either affirmative action is Constitutionally permissible, or it isn't, and the Supreme Court gets to make that decision. To be technical, there's no such thing as affirmative action—it's been banned by the Supreme Court since the Regents vs Bakke decision in 1978. What has been permitted, although narrowed by an increasingly conservative Court (see last year's 4-to-3 decision in Fisher v. University of Texas) is that universities can continue using race as one of multiple factors in their admissions decisions. This is what Sessions is targeting. He really isn't talking about pure merit—he's fine with the 21 other herbs and spices that are the alchemy of determining an incoming Freshman—but race will be out, and he's prepared to use the considerable power, and budget, of the DOJ to make sure it stays out.

What's next? It's not hard to predict that a lot of people who are enthusiastic about Sessions' goal will be end up being both disturbed and disappointed. Until the Supreme Court rules, he can't just snap his fingers and erase any and all considerations of race in the process. And, even if he were given an unlimited budget to pursue this, he wouldn't be able to investigate hundreds of colleges. The best he can do in the short term is to mount a few selective prosecutions of those he sees as excessively friendly to minority applications, and, by extension, hope to intimidate/influence the rest into altering their stated policies.

But here's his real problem (and it's the problem of applicants who expect to benefit from the new policy): The existence of a stated "pro-minority" process is easy to prove. Demonstrating the adverse impact of it on an individual basis as means of achieving redress might be much more difficult. To do that, to find out who really benefited and who was "wronged," he's going to need a lot of personal and granular data on every applicant, not just minorities, and then try to reverse engineer the admissions calculus, substituting his own views of who is worthy for the judgment of the school.

Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

Watch this video. No, I mean, right now, go and watch this video, I’ll wait. Even if you don’t agree with all of it, even if you think it’s unnecessary scaremongering, you should still find it thought provoking and at least a little scary (most people find it terrifying), and if you don't, then you’re really not paying attention. If you can’t be bothered to watch it, the basic premise is that we are very very quickly, far quicker than most of us realize, moving towards a world with so much automation that “Humans need not apply” for most jobs. That we are moving towards a very near-term future where humans, like horses in the past, aren’t just unemployed, they’re unemployable.

Bill Gates famously wrote, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction." It might be tempting to brush off predictions of a future without human work. And indeed, today, the likelihood of such a future does depends who you ask; the US government says not to worry (and this was before the current science denying administration), the UK government is less convinced.

By some predictions, more than half the human race could be unemployed, and more importantly unemployable, by as early as 2045. Uber recently bought Otto, an autonomous truck company. In October 2016 they made their first delivery, 50,000 beers. In the US alone there are 3.5 million truck drivers. That’s a lot of jobs and a lot of people to find additional employment for, but it’s not half the human race by any standards – even though transportation is the largest employment category in the world. Nevertheless, maybe it’s just, as the UK Science and Technology Committee says, that “Human beings must develop new skills to compete in a world where artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent”. This is hardly a new problem; the 19th century Luddites were a group of English workers who destroyed machinery, particularly in the mills, because they feared it would take their livelihood away from them. They were right, it did, but those weren’t great jobs. Mill work was strenuous, poorly paid labor that often led to chronic, sometimes fatal illnesses. The industrial revolution eventually significantly increased the standard of living for the general population.

The prediction of Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers is that "AI will grow the economy instead of take jobs away. While some jobs may disappear, AI will create new jobs and consumer demand for new products and services”. But while there may be some truth to that, this isn’t like the Victorian industrial revolution, this is different, both in scale and in the kinds of jobs that are already being automated.

Read more »

by Dave Maier

Previous installments: pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3

A few months back I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper, the first time I had ever done that, and they printed it. A number of legislators in my state had held a news conference announcing their plan to legalize, regulate, and tax the sale and use of marijuana in New Jersey. Unfortunately for them, our state’s governor, Chris Christie, has made it perfectly clear that he would veto any such bill, so that plan is on hold for now. (There is a gubernatorial election this year to replace the term-limited and in any case unprecedentedly unpopular Christie, and the highly favored Democratic candidate, one Phil Murphy, has indicated his support for legalization.) As the reporter noted, the legislators had made a big deal about how much tax revenue this plan would raise, and had suggested that this might be part of a solution to the state’s pension crisis. Governor Christie had of course rejected the idea, citing his belief that marijuana is a “gateway drug”, that supporters of legalization are “just stupid liberals who think that everything is okay” and that, especially during an opioid crisis, such tax revenue would amount to “blood money.”

In my letter (they don’t allow you much space, so I had to be brief) I agreed with the Governor that if marijuana really is as bad as he believes, then we might very well be better off spurning the tax money that legalization would raise; but I also pointed him, and everyone else, to the online resources on the subject available at, for example, the Marijuana Policy Project (the paper doesn’t allow web addresses in their letters, but here I can link) – in particular, the careful refutation available there of the “gateway” theory (a theory which, one might note, even the DEA no longer endorses). I concluded with a plea that, given that this issue will (thanks to Murphy’s endorsement of the idea) be an important one in the fall campaign, we should all do our homework in order to show other states “how we do public policy in the Garden State.”

Alas, my plea has fallen on deaf ears. In the past couple of weeks, there have been in the Bergen Record two op-eds and a number of letters on the issue, none of which (even the sensible ones) show any evidence of a whole lot of homework-doing.

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

In 1889 a young Paiute Indian named Wovoka fell ill with a fever and, in his delirium, visited heaven. While there he talked with God and saw that all the Indians who had died were now young and happy doing the things they had done before the White Man had come upon them. News of the new messiah spread rapidly among the remnants of the Indian tribes. If they danced the right dances, sang the right songs, and wore their consecrated Ghost Shirts, not only would they be immune to the White Man’s bullets, but their loved ones would return to them, the White Man would vanish from the face of the earth, and the buffalo would once again be plentiful. Their fervor and belief were not rewarded and the Ghost Dance, as this last wave of revivals came to be known, soon passed into history.

That, however, is not the Ghost Dancing that concerns me. I mention it only to provide some comparative perspective. Anthropologists and historians have told that story hundreds if not thousands of times. It is the story of a people’s last desperate attempt to retain symbolic control over their world. Such revivals occur when a way of life has become impossible, for whatever reason, but the people themselves continue to live. In desperation they resort to magic to remake the world in terms they understand.

The Ghost Dancing that concerns me is not that of Stone Age people displaced and conquered by iron-mongering and coal-burning industrialists. My concern is the Ghost Dancing that has become a major force in contemporary American cultural and political life. Widespread belief in the impending Rapture – when all good Christians will be taken to heaven and all unbelievers consigned to hell – is the most obvious manifestation of the contemporary Ghost Dance. But it is hardly the only manifestation. Refusal to accept evidence of global warning is another symptom, as was the refusal to attend to ground intelligence in conducting the war and reconstruction in Iraq.

For that matter, belief that the so-called Singularity is at hand – when computers will surpass humans in intelligence – is Ghost Dancing as well. This type of Ghost Dancing may seem rather geekish and harmless, for there aren’t all that many of these particular believers. Belief in the Singularity, however, is close kin to continued belief in the feasibility of an effective anti-missile defense systems, in the Pentagon’s desire to develop a highly robotized military where the machines do the riskiest jobs, and in a more general belief that technology will fix everything.

Contemporary American Ghost Dancing has not, of course, been occasioned by colonialism or conquest. The modern American way of life has not been destroyed by external enemies. America has become and still remains the strongest nation on earth. Our vulnerability has subtler sources.

Read more »

by Jessica Collins

This is an attempt to recapture a feeling of queasiness I felt in my early teens, when I was already captivated by mathematics, but didn't yet know much about mathematics. It's an attempt to recapture that feeling of queasiness and then to resolve it in a way that it might have found resolution at the time, had I been asked the right questions.

Puzzle

I'm going to proceed somewhat indirectly and begin with a rather cute little geometrical problem. If you've got a few minutes to spare I encourage you to spend that time with pencil and paper trying to solve this puzzle before proceeding to read the rest of this piece, in which I'll describe three different ways of solving it. Here is the problem:

What is the sum of the three angles that the x-axis makes with the lines joining the origin to the points (1,1), (2,1), and (3,1) respectively?

The three angles are those shown in the following diagrams:

The first angle α is obviously 45°. If you know some trigonometry you'll recall that given a right triangle one of whose other angles is θ, the tangent of the angle θ, tan(θ) for short, is the ratio of the length of the side of the triangle opposite the angle θ to the length of the side adjacent to the angle. Thus we can see from the diagram above that β, the angle that the line joining the origin to the point (2,1) makes with the x-axis, is the angle whose tangent is 1/2, and that the angle γ is the angle whose tangent is 1/3.

This means you could use the arctan or inverse tan (tan^-1) function of a scientific calculator to find the answer to the question above. The question was asking in effect:

What is: tan^-1(1) + tan^-1(1/2) + tan^-1(1/3) ?

If you do this on a calculator, you'll find that the three values are:

α = 45°
β = 26.565051177077989 . . . °
γ = 18.434948822922011 . . . °

and that these three angles sum exactly to 90°, which was not immediately obvious, at least for me, from looking at the diagram.

But, without recourse to the calculator, can you explain why this is so? Can you find a simple proof that α + β + γ = 90°? We may restate the problem:

Show that the three angles the x-axis make with the points (1,1), (1,2), and (1,3) respectively sum to a right angle.

This is the point at which you might pause for a few minutes with pencil and paper before proceeding to read what follows.

Read more »

Learn That First

I've wondered if dawn is like birth
and dusk like death
and if we're given these metaphors
to pique our curiosity
as if to say nothing in this world
is real. You are so naive,
you think this is a dream?

Yes, these are shadows.
Socrates said as much in the agora
trying to spread some light
but this is always difficult among men.
Men prefer to grasp at shades.

Child, this is not a dream,
that is misapprehension—
what Socrates suggests is that
life shelters in shadows
in this desert
…………… learn that first
.

Jim Culleny
8/11/17.

by Jalees Rehman

The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov is best known for his studies on classical conditioning showing that dogs repeatedly presented with a combination of food and a sound would subsequently salivate upon hearing the sound alone, in anticipation of the meal. The combination of the two stimuli – food and sound – over time "conditioned" the dogs' brains to link these two stimuli. A variation of this experiment was performed on human subjects by Ellson and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1941. In Ellson's study, 40 subjects were "conditioned" over time by hearing a sound and seeing a light. Ellson later on exposed the subjects to only the light, yet 32 of 40 subjects claimed to have also heard the sound. Ellson concluded that such conditioning could lead to hallucinations – the hearing of sounds which, objectively speaking, are not present.

Recently, the Yale University psychiatrist Philip Corlett and his colleagues conducted a very interesting variation on this earlier study by asking whether some people are especially vulnerable to having auditory hallucinations induced by conditioning. The researchers recruited four groups of study subjects: 1) Fifteen patients with severe mental illnesses who also regularly heard voices (an auditory hallucination), 2) fifteen patients with severe mental illnesses who did not hear voices, 3) fifteen individuals without any evidence of mental illnesses who also claimed to hear voices and 4) fourteen healthy individuals who did not hear voices. Group 3 consisted of voice-hearing psychics ("clairaudient psychics") who identified themselves as such via their own websites, at psychic meetings, or referrals from other psychics. Another important innovation in Corlett's study was the inclusion of brain imaging studies on all subjects, thus allowing the researchers to study functional brain responses when exposing them to auditory and visual stimuli. The researchers then repeatedly exposed the study subjects to a checkerboard image and 1 kHz tone while they were lying in the brain scanner. The subjects were asked to press one button to indicate that they heard the tone, and a second button if they did not. They were also instructed to press down the button longer, the more confident they were in having heard the tone.

After conditioning the subjects, the researchers then intermittently began to show them images of the checkerboard without playing the tone. As expected, many subjects indicated having heard the tone even when it had not been played. However, patients with severe mental illness and a history of hearing voices (group 1) as well as healthy psychics with a history of hearing voices (group 3) were significantly more likely to wrongly indicate that they had heard the non-existing tone. Members of these two groups were also more confident that their hallucination was actually real, since they pressed down the button for longer. Healthy subjects and patients with mental illness who did not have a history of hearing voices were comparatively more correct in identifying whether or not the tone was present. Importantly, when the researchers repeatedly showed the image without the tone, voice-hearing, mentally ill patients were unable to "update" their beliefs when compared to the other groups, whereas the psychics gradually recognized that the tone was non-existent.

Read more »

by Brooks Riley

According to a biologist who studies the properties of dirt, a single teaspoon of the stuff contains more living organisms than there are people on earth. Not a particularly salient fact, but enough to launch the imagination toward other epic notions and distortions of scale: What if our whole world is just a tiny microcosm in someone else’s teaspoon out there in the ether, no more than a microbiome in the belly of a beast so vast it swallows whole universes from a teaspoon into its black hole of a maw, itself a spoonful in a nest of universes, like Russian nesting dolls, their own spoons poised over a bottomless bowl of Beta borscht along a belt of milky ways that go on forever?

Infinity doesn’t bear thinking. ‘Do I matter’ always leads to ‘do we matter’, and along this precarious train of thought the ‘we’ keeps getting bigger, from our person to our species to our planet to our solar system to our universe and beyond. Where does it all end? That we’ll never know doesn’t diminish the question. If there’s only one universe, what is outside of it? If it has boundaries, can it be a universe? These are secular thoughts leading to the contemplation of unimaginable insignificance, and are best left to astronomers or philosophers to figure out, if we survive that long.

The notion of scale has insinuated itself of late into my sleeping life as unpopulated dreams go in search of miniscule changes in a grid pattern, or the perfect word to correct an imperfect song, or a secret combination of colors out of a staggering number of variants. Sometimes I am scaled down to the size of Thumbelina, ready to crawl up the back of a peregrine falcon before takeoff.

Awake, I feared I was slouching toward early autism, which is how I imagined the early autumn stage of my life, or as Gustav Mahler so sublimely echoed Friedrich Rückert’s words: ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.’ Or ‘I am lost to the world’.

But that’s not entirely true. I’m more interested in the world than I’ve ever been, but from a safe distance. I may be ‘lost to the world’ but it isn’t lost to me.

Read more »