by Timothy Don

Speak the word “discovery” and familiar images of explorers, scientists, ships, and treasure chests come to mind. To look into the visual record of “discovery” over the past 50,000 years, however, is to witness the concept expand, swell, and overwhelm the imagination. There is a wonder that arises in the wake of one’s research with the realization that the deeper and closer one looks, the wider, richer, and more capacious the topic at hand becomes. Consider the egg.

A simple egg. The familiarity of its shape is unnerving, even disarming. Hovering there, alone in space, it has the weight of a moon or a planet. A red planet. A symbol of discovery in its expansive, exploratory sense: to discover is to reach out into space, to land on the moon, to plan for Mars. But…this object is not Mars. It is an egg. It is an ostrich egg, more than 5,000 years old, from the predynastic period of Northern Upper Egypt, dug out of a tomb. Mars remains undiscovered. This is an artifact from an era now lost to us, uncovered by a forgotten Egyptologist from the 19th century. It belongs to the past. This is an actual discovery. And it is wonderful. It is pure potential. It has been discovered, but it remains uncracked. Full of mystery, this old egg from the past, it fills you with wonder. At that moment a gestalt switch gets thrown, and one realizes that discovery’s arrow points not only forward and outward to unexplored planets, but backward and inward to things lost, buried, and forgotten. To discover a thing is also to discover the past, and the act of discovery is about the recovery of the past just as much as it is about the probing of the future. And so a planet (symbol of the undiscovered future) becomes an artifact (material expression of the discovered past), and the artifact (the egg) becomes a mystery, a wonder, a promise. To be an egg is to promise discovery. Every egg, from this one (c. 3400bc) to the one you opened into a frying pan this morning, contains and shelters something utterly familiar and utterly unique, something waiting for you to find it. Every egg is a discovery.

There are certain artists who seem to have something to say about everything and whose work as a result appears regularly in the pages of the journal at which I serve as visual curator. Hieronymus Bosch is one. Caravaggio is another. Paul Klee and William Kentridge make the list. The genius of these artists (and many others) makes their work ever-contemporary, as immediate and compelling today as it was when they made it. The density of their work allows it to absorb the assault of time, so that its meaning can shift and apply itself to any period without diluting the purity of its original conception and execution. Read more »

Little Miracles 2:

—Cloudmaker

you, generator of clouds,
are indispensable. you
fling them up as if
they were mere vapor
your creativity is unsurpassed
much like cloud yourself
you may be dark or bright
free and light or stretched
like a cowl under stars,
in daylight white grey saffron
pink

at night you draw curtains
cross a moon
but you are not mere vapor
as you stride
and dance with wind
waving arms to fan the air
you cool it down to give
us drink

Jim Culleny
8/2/18

Drawing, Cloudmaker
Jim C. 1997

by Jonathan Kujawa

Despite what he may wish, the President of the United States is not a king. We have Congress to act as a check and to ensure the varied opinions of the citizens are represented [1]. In principle, a representative democracy is straight-forward: the voters vote, select their representatives, and the legislature gets down to the business of running the country.

The devil, of course, is in details. The framers of the Constitution had knock-down, drag-out fights over basic questions like: does the legislature represent individual citizens or the states? On one side you had those who saw the new country as a joining together of independent, co-equal states. William Patterson of New Jersey compared a large state having more votes than a small one, to the idea “that a rich individual citizen should have more votes than an indigent one”. Those on the other side took the view if this is to be a true common enterprise, then every voter should be treated equally regardless of where they happened to reside. In what can only be a coincidence, a founder’s position on the issue almost invariably matched whether they came from a large state or a small one.

They finally agreed the Senate would have two representatives from each state, regardless of size, while the House of Representatives would have its members allocated to the states according to their population. Even this reasonable compromise nearly failed. Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

The second edition of our Why We Argue (And How We Should) is set to be released this month. The new edition is an update of the previous 2014 edition, and in particular, it is occasioned by the argumentative events leading up to and subsequent to the 2016 US Presidential election. New forms of fallacy needed to be diagnosed, and different strategies for their correction had to be posed. But we also saw that another element of a book on critical thinking and politics was necessary, one that has been all-too-often left out: a program for argument-repair. We looked at strategies for finding out what arguers are trying to say, what motivates them, and how to address not just the things argued, but the things that drive us to argue. We think that very often, repairing an argument requires repairing the culture of argument.

One reason why arguments go so badly is because the disagreement and interplay between us, our interlocutors, and our onlooking audiences starts off as fraught. And so, further exchange often makes things worse instead of better. We call this phenomenon argument escalation. Again, we’ve all seen it happen — a difference of opinion about some small matter grows into an argument, an argument becomes a verbal fight, and the verbal fight becomes a fight involving more than merely words. And it’s worse when there are onlookers who will judge us and our performances. Half of the time, we want to stop it all and say, “We are all grownups here . . . can’t we just calm down?” But were one to say this, the interlocutor is liable to respond, “Are you calling me a child, then? And don’t tell me to calm down!” How can we repair arguments without further escalating them? Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Do You Own Yourself?

In 1646, the Leveller leader, Richard Overton became the first person in the English-speaking world to assert that we own ourselves. “To every Individuall in nature, is given an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any,” he wrote, “for every one as he is himselfe, so he has a selfe propriety, else he could not be himself.”

We might question the claim that without owning ourselves we couldn’t be ourselves. After all, we don’t need ownership, or property law, to explain why my beliefs are mine or why my actions are mine.

But it’s easy to appreciate the political strategy behind Overton’s use of self-ownership – once you hear it.

The Levellars, so-named originally by opponents for supposedly having leveled hedges during the enclosure riots, were the egalitarians of the English Civil War preaching that sovereignty was founded on consent and that the franchise and property ownership should be extended to all men. Overton was responding to the argument that only men of property should be allowed to vote, when he wrote that all men are men of property, because all men have property in themselves.

Do they, though? It sounds plausible. But do you own yourself?

Actually, that’s an easy one. Ownership is a legal notion. In no legal system in the world do you own yourself. (About as close as you can come to a legal precedent, in American law, that might be interpreted as supporting self-ownership has to do with copyright: celebrities do, at least to some extent, own the use of their image for commercial purposes.)

But even if you don’t own yourself, maybe, you should. Read more »

by Amanda Beth Peery

In the service area
where a handful of the families of New Jersey
have pulled off the highway,
the trees are surprising me
with their thickness—
the edge of a secret
or rather forgotten forest
running beside the turnpike.
A small animal occasionally waits,
then breaks
from the velvet shadowed elms.
They press the delicate imprints of leaves
against the broiling sky
as a storm tentatively begins
and one dark-eyed girl, bored with her parents
watches the rain start by the food machines
and swings her arms in loose arcs
like the trees that are now swaying
in the rain and in the wind.
She is just as foreign to me
as these particular trees.
I will never see any of them again.

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The most stunning memory of Swat valley that remains with me since my first visit as a child is the euphoria of the headstrong Darya e Swat, the luxuriously frothy river, like fresh milk churning and churning joyfully. That, and the first time I heard the pristine and full silence of wilderness, meandering along languorous brooks and spotting the smallest wild flowers I had ever seen. Like any child, scale impressed me: the mountains were the highest, the river the fastest, the silence of the trails the deepest I had yet experienced. If there was anything subtle I may have observed, the awe of scale and novelty eclipsed it completely.

On my visit to Swat this year, I tried to recapture that spirit of childhood, trying to set the senses free as well as refining them with the subtlety that was beyond the capacity of my younger self, wrestling furiously against the disquiet and frustration Swat evokes due to recent political events. It struck me that subtlety still eludes the perception of Swat as far as the global psyche goes, dominated as it is by narratives of scale: the most unsafe place in the world, the worst place for women and education, home of the youngest person to receive the Nobel prize, etc. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Niall Chithelen

A number of scenes in Eugene Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We (1921) echo moments from Alexander Bogdanov’s utopian Red Star (1908). Bogdanov was a Bolshevik when he wrote Red Star (he was expelled from the party some years before the Russian Revolution), and his “red star” was a socialist, wonderfully technocratic Mars whose residents are preparing to export revolution back to Earth. Zamyatin, also once an Old Bolshevik, wrote in the disturbing aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and his We takes place on a future Earth, ruled over by the United State. It is possible to read We as a response to Red Star and its intellectual moment, with Zamyatin flipping Bogdanov’s Bolshevik idealism to reflect the fright of Bolshevik reality. Bogdanov sought a sort of Communist technocracy, and Zamyatin sensed its enormity, feared it. But, while the two books do offer different political conclusions, the authors seem to share an important belief in humanity and its imperfections, as they provide rather similar answers to a fundamental question of their genre: what kind of freedom do we really need? Read more »

by Nickolas Calabrese

The subject of digital art is unclear. Work that was new five years ago can look ancient now because of the constant changes in technologies. The term “digital art” itself is an umbrella term that applies to a variety of names for art that is produced with the aid of a computer including, but is not limited to, “new media art”, “net art”, and “post internet art” (for a fuller linear history of the various terms that denote art made with or assisted by computers, see Christine Paul’s terrific introduction to A Companion to Digital Art reader, which she edited). The decision to use “digital art” is twofold. First, some of the alternatives only denote a temporal category while not actually referring to the form (new media can only be “new” for a brief period; it makes little sense for a “post internet” when it hasn’t significantly evolved from “net art”; put more brusquely, in the words of critic Brian Droitcour in Art in America magazine “most people I know think “Post-Internet” is embarrassing to say out loud”); and second, because I regularly teach an undergraduate visual arts course at NYU named Digital Art (a title I did not choose).

The upshot of digital art’s classification is that it might not actually exist as a category. Read more »