by Derek Neal

I read the opening of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and immediately thought of Camus’ The Stranger. Here is how Handke begins:

The Sunday edition of the Kärntner Volkszeitung carried the following item under “Local News”: “In the village of A. (G township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.”

My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks….

In The Stranger, Camus also begins with the notice of a mother’s death by way of print media:

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

One gets the feeling from Handke that after Camus, one can only write of a mother’s death in the shadow of Camus, that one either follows Camus or rebels against him, yet his presence is always there, undeniable. This goes in the opposite direction as well. When I read Handke’s account of his mother’s death, it led me to reconsider the beguiling opening of Camus’ novel. On some readings, Meursault has seemed indifferent to me at the beginning of The Stranger—how could someone not know whether such an important event happened this day or the day before? Yet reading Handke makes me see things differently. In Handke’s account, I see the decision to depersonalize the story as a way of coping with a terrible reality; relaying the information from the newspaper is not heartless, but the only way to dull the horror of an inexplicable event. It takes something boundless and sets limits on it, creating an official account upon which all can agree. Meursault’s decision to tell the reader about the telegram is similar. He begins by recounting his own version of events and is immediately destabilized; his inability to remember if the death occurred one day or another is not indifference but a loss of lucidity as he is overwhelmed. He then takes comfort in the objective, totalizing nature of the telegram, only to question it again after (“That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”) This is the conflict of The Stranger which plays out over the course of the novel—the meaningless, impersonal, social world represented by the telegram versus Meursault’s own subjective experience of reality, which goes beyond the limits of language. Read more »

Fourteenth way of looking at a blackbird? Photo taken last week in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Thomas R. Wells

Many environmentalists find the climate change policy problem baffling. The core mechanism of how certain molecules create a greenhouse warming effect on the earth is extremely clear (and has been known for over a century). Evidence that human activities are releasing greenhouse gases in dangerously disruptive quantities is also very clear and well-established, as is the obvious conclusion that humanity has to stop doing this. Moreover, the economic costs of transforming the global economy to run on non climate-destabilising energy sources, while substantial, are quite affordable.

Of course there are myriad important sub-questions to investigate about climate change, the answers to which are still contested by the relevant expert groups of scientists (like how all the extra heat being absorbed by the world is distributed geographically, and its precise impact on different weather systems). However, basically, the science is clear. Moreover, more or less all the world’s governments accept the scientific definition of the problem and the solution. And yet the solution remains unimplemented.

So, why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about a huge problem? Read more »

by Philip Graham

A conversation between Christine Sneed and Philip Graham

Since 2010 Christine Sneed, winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (among other awards), has published six acclaimed books: the story collections Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry, The Virginity of Famous Men, and Direct Sunlight, and the novels Little Known Facts, Paris, He Said, and Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos. With each new book Sneed has expanded her impressive range of vision, combining cultural insight with the everyday strangeness of her fictional characters.

Having explored in her novels the subtle and not-so-subtle mechanics of craft and inspiration in the art world, or the corrosive effects of Hollywood fame on an actor and his family, Sneed has recently set her sights on the contradictions of American capitalism. Please Be Advised is a deliciously droll novel (told entirely through the surprisingly illuminating lens of interoffice memos) that takes the reader on a journey through successive rings of corporate hell.

Philip Graham: Pleased Be Advised stunned me when I first began reading it—the novel is a wild and hilarious romp that’s entirely presented through the office memos of a struggling company named Quest Industries, which makes “collapsable office products” of dubious utility. Your earlier work, both short stories and novels, are quieter, even contemplative, and incisive in their paring away of your characters’ illusions and presentations of self. Those memos of Please Be Advised are laugh-out-loud funny on nearly every page. And yet, as I read further, I remembered that your earlier novels also made use of various documents to arrive at a deeper level: an artist’s sketchbook, a secret diary, obituaries, a character’s attempted memoir.

Christine Sneed: Hybrid forms have long been of interest to me as both a reader and a writer. When I started writing seriously in the early 1990s, it was poetry, not fiction, that I was attempting to put on the page. I did try to write a few short stories too, but it was clear I wasn’t ready—as with acting, the artifice must not be visible in fiction-writing, and everything I initially wrote was awkward and mannered. The compression and playfulness of a poem seemed both a challenge and an invitation. The short lines I was working with and the sensory imagery and concrete detail helped me focus on language, and as I got a little older and read more widely, I started to write fiction with more confidence. This was after earning my MFA in poetry. By that time, I had a better sense of how to create a character that seemed real and was not simply my surrogate.

The playfulness of hybrid and found forms like the memo or the resume or diary entry offer a chance for me to return, I suppose, to the compression of a poem. When I was writing Please Be Advised, it was great fun to begin every new memo, and to write in a different character’s voice. It was a bit like writing comedic prose poetry. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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Sughra Raza. Self Portrait, Kigali, January 17, 2016.

Digital photograph.

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by Malcolm Murray

As someone who thinks about AI day-in and day-out, it is always fascinating to see which events in the AI space break out of the AI bubble and into the attention of the wider public. ChatGPT in November 2022 was of course one. The podcast-creating ability of Google’s NotebookLM almost got there, but didn’t quite reach the “getting-texts-from-grandma” level of virality. But this week, with DeepSeek’s launch of its R1 model, we had another event at the ChatGPT level that again resulted in questioning texts from spouses and colleagues.

There have already been a thousand takes on this and I apologize in advance if you’re already sick of the subject. However, I hope this piece can give you what Brad DeLong calls Value Above Replacement, since it shows where the myriad takes fit in the current broader narratives. I also shine a light on the “Model T” aspect, that I feel has been somewhat overlooked.

First, there is the geopolitical take, or what we can more formally call the delta between US and China. This is why Marc Andreessen and others referred to DeepSeek as a “Sputnik moment”. The long-standing assumption was that China was 1-2 years behind the U.S. in developing AI models. This assumption shattered this week; it turns out China is only a few months behind. This also relates to the long-cherished view in the U.S. of China being solely a fast follower, only able to copy the U.S., which the DeepSeek engineers put an end to by pioneering some very smart machine learning techniques, such as greater efficiencies from better use of Mixture of Experts (MOE) and Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA). So it makes sense that this would be a shock to many Americans. However, the Sputnik analogy per se doesn’t fully make sense. Given all the focus the U.S. already has on AI and the huge investments it is already making, it is unclear how this “Sputnik moment” would change things. Trump, Altman and co just announced $500 billion in funding for Stargate, so what are they going to do as a DeepSeek response, announce another $500 billion? That seems a bit hard given that most of the money in the Stargate announcement was already committed years ago and the rest of it might be vapor dollars that do not actually exist. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

In the past decade, we have witnessed the fallout from the largely unrestricted spread of bullshit on the internet. People have died or have become seriously ill as result of following bad medical advice that they heard on social media. A recent Healthline study found that, among those who had started a new wellness trend in the past year, 52% of them discovered the trend in question on social media. The same survey found that only 37% of participants viewed their doctor as their most trusted source of medical information. There is a concerning new trend of children self-diagnosing mental disorders, and sometimes even developing symptoms of those disorders that they did not previously exhibit in response to watching the videos. The spread of conspiracy theories on social media has led to people falling deep into rabbit holes, often losing their most valued relationships with friends and family members as a result. People sometimes develop racist, sexist, and xenophobic attitudes toward people they have never met on the basis of internet bullshit. We are staring down the barrel of even fewer restrictions on bullshit in light of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that his platforms would no longer include fact checking of questionable posts. The White House has also announced that it will open press briefings up to “new media”—podcasters, YouTube personalities, and social media influencers who need not have any formal training in journalism or commitment to codes of conduct that govern ethical behavior in the field.

Why should we allow this to happen? Should we continue to allow social media influencers to say whatever they want on their platforms? Should we do something to stop the AI powered bots that serve no purpose but to generate chaos from entering and participating in the marketplace of ideas? Belief formation is a social practice and we have social obligations. Shouldn’t we put into place some guardrails to ensure that the practice is healthy for our communities and our children? The public figures who suggest that we ought not to provide any flags on misinformation or context for out of place content ask the rhetorical question “who are we to say what’s true?”. Such a question suggests that there is no reliable process we can use to discern truth from falsity or good faith discourse from bullshit.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives the concept of bullshit a serious treatment in his famous essay On Bullshit. He argues that liars and truth tellers are playing the same game from different sides. Bullshitters are doing something else altogether. They simply don’t care whether what they are saying is true or false. They have an indifference to truth and may have even embraced the conclusion that there is no such thing as truth. Read more »

“lacrimae rerum, “ (the tears of things)
…………………………………….. —Virgil

Everything Cries

Steel’s tears are rust,
trees weep tears of falling leaves,
clouds weep and mourn their loss
sacrificing their billows to the earth as rain,
the earth weeps its carbon into sky,
the sun weeps its energy into earth
and will die someday of the loss,
even stones weep, sobbing their very selves
by force of wind and rain into talus slopes and sand,
their hard tears roll down a mountain’s breast,
on cool mornings rivers weep their mists into atmosphere
joining sun’s tears in a symphony of sight,
the shifting colors of tears,
and my eyes well up,
a spontaneous flood comes and joins
with all the salty tears of things

Jim Culleny
10/8/22

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by Eric Feigenbaum

Like the Montagues and Capulets, the owners of Zam Zam and Victory restaurants – adjacent to one another on Singapore’s North Bridge Road – have been at war for roughly a century. A one-time partnership turned bad led to two families operating restaurants with almost identical menus to operate in parallel.

The fare is simple involving various kinds of roti prata and murtabak – a Malaya-originated dish of giant pratas filled with seasoned chicken, egg and onion – and sometimes other fillings, served with a bowl of curry sauce for dipping. These “greasy spoon” specialties are often served 24 hours a day and are a common “after the bars close” foods.

Channel News Asia – Singapore’s equivalent to CNN –  reported on the judicial proceedings around a mid-2015 crime:

The owner of Zam Zam, 49-year-old Zackeer Abbass Khan, conspired with several others to have Victory restaurant supervisor Liakath Ali Mohamed Ibrahim slashed and scarred.

He had instructed business associate and long-time friend Anwer Ambiya Kadir Maideen, 50, to procure an attack on the victim, offering money to get the job done.

Anwer then hired secret society member Joshua Navindran Surainthiran to slash the victim’s face with a knife on Aug 26, 2015.

The victim was left with a permanent scar, and Joshua was sentenced to six-and-a-half years’ jail and six strokes of the cane in 2016 for several charges in relation to the case.

On March 6, 2020 District Judge Mathew Joseph found both Zackeer and Anwer guilty of conspiring to voluntarily cause grievous hurt.

“Business rivalry is a common occurrence,” Judge Mathew said. “It’s part of everyday commerce and it is to be taken in its stride. In the case of Victory and Zam Zam restaurants, both are household names in Singapore,” the judge said, adding that their rivalry has spanned almost 100 years. “This is not surprising as murtabak is a very popular and tasty food item eaten at all times of the day and night in Singapore.”

On Monday May 11, 2020 Judge Mathew sentenced Zackeer to six years in jail and six strokes of the cane.

In California, a crime like Zackeer’s would likely get three years in prison if charged as a felony and not pled down. That said, it can also be charged as a misdemeanor in which case a year in county jail and $10,000 fine are the ceiling of the sentence that might be imposed. Under no circumstance would corporal punishment be imposed.

Singapore’s approach to criminal justice is one of its most controversial features – at least among its Western friends. Read more »

by Angela Starita

Beauty supply shops are a mostly extinct category of small business. My father owned one in Jersey City, NJ, and I’d think of him every time I went to one on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. It’s the right kind of street for a beauty supply store: a busy, rundown shopping area, with enough oId-timers who aren’t going to order their shampoo and wigs and curlers online. That store was owned by a handsome Korean man in his forties who, like my father, had no real relationship to the business—unsmiling and quiet, dressed in dark sweaters, and waiting behind the register. You could buy something or not. As far as he was concerned, his job was to stock the place, keep it open during the hours posted on the front door, and find a way to withstand overwhelming boredom.

In my father’s case, that lack of engagement led to spells of jumpy, all-in energy alternating with sour disdain. When he could no longer tolerate dedicating years of his life to the vicissitudes of hair trends, his solution—to chuck the store and start a farm—was part of a long, robust tradition, one that increasingly pervades current discourse: when life proves empty, turn to the land. It’s a notion filled with the promise of self-determination and meaning, and while I have my doubts, I fully understand, even applaud, the impulse. To leave his business, my father also needed a highly supportive spouse and serious confidence in his midlife physical stamina. In fact, he had both. What he didn’t have was a community for the farming he wanted to do, no pesticides and coupled crops. He started in 1975, a period when there was no shortage of books and magazines and communal farms advocating the same methods. But my dad was not a hippie nor much of a reader. Having immigrated to the United States in his mid-30’s after spending 10 years in the Italian navy, his psychic orientation faced World War II and Europe, not cooperative supermarkets and Vermont. Though he obsessively followed current national and international politics, he had only the vaguest awareness of anything countercultural. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

January 16 is the anniversary of the death of Margarete Susman (1872-1966), the German-born Jewish philosopher and poet who survived the Third Reich in Swiss refuge and is buried in Zurich. To mark the occasion this year, Martin Kudla, a lecturer in Jewish intellectual history in Germany, organized a performance of lyrical texts by Susman that had been set to music by various 20th-century composers, and which he had discovered doing archival work, sung by a mezzosoprano with piano accompaniment in a recital held at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

Kudla, whose current research focuses on the vicissitudes of German-Jewish émigrés in Switzerland, is one of the editors of a volume of essays on Susman’s work that appeared last year; the concert also served as the kickoff for a new scholarly project under his aegis: the planned publication of an annotated anthology of the poems by Susman presented that evening in Frankfurt, among others that have served as the inspiration for art songs, supplemented by facsimiles of the original sheet music of their settings and annotated with bibliographical, musicological, and literary-critical commentary.

Virtually all the texts chosen for such settings, by a wide range of mostly unknown artists, come from Susman’s 1901 volume Mein Land, when the philosopher was still quite young, still under the spell of the German 19th century, and still secure enough in the land of her birth to entitle a collection of verse, with romanticized patriotic pathos, “My Country”. And yet, even at this early stage, Susman was already marshaling the critical ideas that would be fully formulated in Das Wesen der modernen deutschen Lyrik (The nature of modern German poetry), her 1910 book-length essay on the construction of a lyrical self in modern poetry, and the role of that constructed self in a reciprocal fashioning of modernity. (My own contribution to Kudla’s 2024 collection—which began life here before being presented at the 2022 conference, in Munich and Zurich, whose proceedings furnished the material for the volume—attends in part to this complex in Susman’s later poetry.)

On the appointed evening for this newest performance of Susman’s work, in the lobby of the Goethe University’s administration building that would serve as a performance space, Kudla introduced the concert with an overview of Susman’s life and work—her birth and assimilated bourgeois upbringing in Hamburg; her struggle, against patriarchal bigotry, to be allowed to study philosophy; her interwar work in Frankfurt; her re-embracing of her Jewish heritage after the Shoah; and her long career and eventual death in Zurich—before turning the stage over to the musicians. Read more »

Partially frozen stream in the mountains of South Tyrol.

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