Narragansett Evening Walk to Base Library

Two young men greeted a new crew member on a ship’s quarterdeck 60 years ago and, in a matter of weeks, by simple challenge, introduced this then 18 year-old who’d never really read a book through to the lives that can be found in them. —Thank you Anthony Gaeta and Edmund Budde for your life-altering input.

bay to my right (my rite of road and sea:
I hold to its shoulder, I sail, I walk the line)

the bay moved as I moved, but in retrograde
as if the way I moved had something to do
with the way the black bay moved, how it tracked,
how it perfectly matched my pace, but
slipping behind, opposed, relative
(Albert would have a formula or two
to spin about this if he were here)
behind too, over shoulder, my steel grey ship at pier,
transfigured in cloud of cool white light,
a spray from lamps on tall poles ashore
and aboard from lamps on mast and yards
among needles of antennae which gleamed
above its raked stack in electric cloud enmeshed
in photon aura, its edges feathered into night,
enveloped as it lay upon the shimmering skin of bay

from here, she’s as still as the thought from which she came:
upheld steel on water arrayed in light, heavy as weight,
sheer as a bubble, line of pier behind etched clean,
keen as a horizon knife

library ahead, behind
a ship at night

the bay to my right (as I said) slid dark
at the confluence of all nights,
the lights of low barracks and high offices
of the base ahead all aimed west, skipped off bay
each of its trillion tribulations jittering at lightspeed
fractured by bay’s breeze-moiled black surface
in splintered sight

ahead the books I aimed to read,
books I’d come to love since Tony & Ed
in the generosity of their own fresh enlightenment
had teamed to bring new tools to this greenhorn’s
stymied brain to spring its self-locked latch
to let some fresh air in crisp as this breeze
blowing ‘cross the bay from where to everywhere,
troubling Narragansett from then
to me here now

Jim Culleny
12/16/19

by Michael Abraham

I wake early—not with the dawn but not long after it—and I stare out the window at a little conglomeration of Brooklyn backyards, severed from one another by brick walls and dotted with deciduous trees holding out their last against autumn. I am all wrapped up with the man I am dating, here in his home, in his bed, in Clinton Hill. He jokes with me, makes fun of me for being up so early, since I am one for sleeping late and one who protests mightily should sleeping late prove not to be an option. But not this morning. This morning, something momentous is about to happen, something about which I have thought many times, thought of as a far distant possibility, one that might never reach me. Indeed, I have written before about how it would never happen, how it could not happen. In these many flights of fancy about it happening, I have pondered deeply what it would feel like, decided it would feel none too good, that it would be a tragedy. But, here I am, poised on the precipice in the gray of a November morning just past seven a.m., poised on the precipice of it happening, and I have no sense of how it is that I feel, of whether it is a tragedy or a triumph or simply one of many things that must happen in the winding course of a life. I am leaving New York. I cannot say if it is for good that I am leaving, meaning both that I cannot say if it is a good thing and that I cannot say if it is forever. I ache as I wonder what it means to leave for good, as I wonder if that’s what I’m doing. Read more »

Carlos Donjuan. Together Alone.

More here, here, and here.

by Rebecca Baumgartner

There’s a fascinating figure wandering aimlessly around the halls of psychology on the internet, and his name is Robert Epstein. 

Epstein is a 69-year-old psychologist who trained in B.F. Skinner’s pigeon lab in the 70s and now works at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California, a nonprofit supporting a theory of the brain that supposedly “does not rely on metaphor.” Despite his credentials – he holds a doctorate from Harvard – both his nonprofit’s website and his own professional website give you the unsettling feeling that he exists on the fringes of psychology, and science more generally. This feeling is confirmed when you read anything he’s written.

One of the most vilified pieces of writing I’ve ever read was his piece “The Empty Brain,” which first appeared in Aeon back in 2016, but didn’t cross my desk until recently. In a nutshell, the article is about Epstein’s claim that the brain does not process information or contain memories – he believes these concepts are merely metaphors borrowed from computing and do not accurately describe what the brain does. 

What brains do, in Epstein’s view, is change in an orderly way in response to input and allow us to relive an experience we’ve had before – nothing so mechanistic as “processing” and “storing” things! (It’s never made clear how this new formulation differs from processing information and storing memories.) 

He also fails to realize that under that formulation, you could just as easily say that computers don’t store anything; the hard drive has simply been changed in an orderly way in response to input. Apparently our computers are not computers either. Read more »

by Ada Bronowski

A philosopher and a stand-up comedian walk into a bar…the beginning of a joke? Or perhaps a history of humanity from the margins. The philosopher and the stand-up comedian are two figures that keep reappearing across the ages, cutting familiar silhouettes of odd bodies making odd claims about the world and its inhabitants.

The first stand-up comedian of Western civilisation is a demure character who makes a brief appearance in book 2 of Homer’s Iliad. Thersites is ‘the ugliest man to come to Troy’, with bow-legs, sagging shoulders, a hollow chest and an egg-shaped head. He is the sort ‘who would do anything to get a laugh’. He is the Jon Stewart of the Trojan War, telling the blood- (and gold-) thirsty leaders of that insanely annihilating campaign, just that. In front of the whole assembled army, Thersites lays bare the hypocrisy of the king of kings, Agamemnon, who talks of honour, glory, and justice, but in fact does nothing but steal, hoard, rape and exploit. Thersites is immediately punished for his effrontery, beaten up by Odysseus and reduced to a miserable tear-drenched heap, the laughingstock of the army. What began in laughter ends in laughter, but the audience has switched sides.

This is a brief but famous scene. Thersites has done the rounds in the history of ideas from hero of the little people as heralded by the first modern political theorist Hugo Grotius, and as a symbol of the revolutionary spirit by Karl Marx, to makeshift populist from the Greek historian Thucydides to Nietzsche via Shakespeare who vilifies Thersites in Troilus and Cressida. In the play, Thersites’ very presence vitiates the possibility of disinterested virtues: love, justice and honour turn, under his relentlessly berating tongue, into cover-words for rotten self-interest. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mike O’Brien

China has been on my mind lately. It has also been on the mind of my federal government and political press. Recent revelations that China interfered with our elections in 2019, and possibly in 2021, have caused a bit of a kerfuffle, tinged by panic, indignation, and the kind of reflexive Trudeau-blaming that has become a sad fixture of Canadian public discourse. I miss the days when we blamed everything on Americans; it was unifying and accurate.

Frankly, I would be surprised and a little disappointed if China weren’t meddling in our elections. It would be a sign of indifference, a dashing of this country’s deepest collective hope that important countries notice us and even mention our name from time to time. It’s not like our elections are un-meddled-in anyhow, given that we share the world’s longest unprotected border with one of the 20th century’s most egregious election-meddlers. I’m not saying that official agents of the United States government are targeting our political processes. They don’t have to. The fact that most of our media is American, or pale copies thereof, does a better job of ideological and doctrinal contamination than any State Department stooge could hope to accomplish. The idea that Canadian society could ever be safe from outside predation is a dangerous folly. I suppose the Canadian political and security establishment knows this very well, and the feigned shock at any particular incursion is mostly performed to effect a diplomatic message.

I am glad that Trudeau is in power, rather than the ghoulish Republican-aping Conservatives. I used to give him a hard time for his tap-dancing around the incompatibility of Canada’s economic and environmental goals. I still do, but I used to, too (R.I.P. Mitch Hedberg). But I doubt Trudeau, or anyone, could win another election on the promise of taking steps sufficiently drastic to bring our economy in line with our public environmental commitments, let alone with actual environmental necessity. Too many voters are committed to preserving an unsustainable way of life, and that commitment is generously encouraged by a commercial media landscape awash in energy-industry propaganda. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

Suppose you had a friend whom you knew to be a lover of good coffee. You ask him how he likes his coffee machine and he replies that it’s okay. He emphasizes that one of the best features of the coffee machine is that it’s extremely reliable; each cup of coffee is the same as the last.

Curious, you ask your friend to brew a cup for you. After taking a sip, you exclaim, “Ugh, this tastes awful.”

“Yes,” your friend replies, “but at least it’s consistent.”

You’d likely think that such a response was crazy! Presumably, if given a choice between a machine that consistently produces bad cups of coffee and a machine that is inconsistent, but that at least occasionally produces good cups of coffee, anyone would choose the inconsistent machine. At least it gives you the CHANCE of getting a good cup of coffee!

Despite the seeming sensibleness of this view, it is surprisingly hard to keep its lesson in mind – for me no less than for others.

I was mindful of this as I read Liza Batkin’s essay, “The Kingdom of Antonin Scalia,” in The New Yorker.

Batkin’s work is only the latest in a long line of think-pieces charging that the Supreme Court’s now-ascendent conservatives aren’t true to their own espoused doctrines, but only apply those doctrines consistently when they yield their preferred political outcomes (examples of this style of piece go back, in my recollection, at least as far as Bush v Gore). Read more »

Plose is the highest mountain in Brixen, South Tyrol. It is also a brand of popular mineral water here.

by Derek Neal

The one regret of my life so far is never having seen Roger Federer play tennis in person. As Federer announced his retirement this year, I’ll never have the chance. The closest I came was the summer of 2017: I was in Italy and planned on flying to Stuttgart to see Federer play in a grass court tournament as preparation for Wimbledon. A few weeks before I was set to leave, I applied for a job at an English language school, largely at the behest of my girlfriend, who was unhappy with the fact that I was “studying” Italian in the mornings and flâning the streets in the afternoons, all while she spent long days toiling away as an unpaid intern in a law office, a common situation in Italy. I didn’t expect to get the job—I had little experience and no real credentials—but I would soon learn that neither of these things mattered, superseded as they were by my being a native speaker. I got the job and had to cancel my trip.

For readers who are not fans of Federer, my above statement may seem hyperbolic, but I am writing in earnest. Sports, and specifically tennis, being an individual sport, have the ability to become representative of something larger than themselves. In tennis, the great players embody a way of life through their playing styles. Federer, being the most graceful and beautiful player, makes us think that one can live a life in this way, moving through the world in harmony with our surroundings, never forcing one’s desires but letting their fulfillment come to us, and acting in accordance with what might be called the laws of nature. This is how Federer moves around the tennis court. At his best, he seems to be a Zen sage who has attained enlightenment. Rafael Nadal is the foil to Federer’s grace. Nadal shows us that anything can be achieved through hard work and perseverance. He plays with force and power, grunting as he hits the ball, bending the world to his will and conquering all that lays before him. Fans of Nadal, I imagine, have this worldview and admire him for its representation in his style of play. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Charles Darwin was just shy of 24 years old, his eyes open in wonder as the HMS Beagle slid along the shore of the largest island in the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego. His eyes grew wider as bonfires flared along the water’s edge. “They must have lighted the fires immediately upon observing the vessel, but whether for the purpose of communicating the news or attracting our attention, we do not know,” he wrote. 

These shore people called themselves Ona and Yaghan. Canoeists and fishermen adept at navigating the labyrinth of channels in these straits, in wintertime they kept fires constantly stoked for warmth. The Yaghan wore only the scantest clothing despite the cold. To fend off wind and the rain, they smeared seal fat over their bodies.

The Ona lived across the strait, on an island just visible through the spray and mist. History calls them fierce warriors who adorned themselves with necklaces of bone, shell and tendon, and who, wearing heavy furs and leather shoes, intimidated the bare-skinned Yaghan. Darwin gave them their backhanded due, calling them “wretched lords of this wretched land.” An acerbic settler once described life hereabouts as 65 unpleasant days per year complimented by 300 days of rain and storms. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

The recent spectacular rise of extreme right-wing parties in Italy and Sweden and the squeaking narrow victory of Lula in Brazil have revived the puzzle that in the face of economic crisis and rising inequality the working classes are often turning politically right, instead of left. This is as prevalent in developing countries as in the rich countries of North America and Europe. One difference between the two sets of countries may be that while in rich countries this trend is markedly among less-educated, older, and more rural workers, in some developing countries, say India, this is also the case for more educated, aspirational, urban youth. The other difference between the two sets of countries is that working classes in developing countries are now in general more pro-globalization than in developed countries—more pro-globalization in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Nigeria and India, than say in France or US, as surveys of attitudes to globalization show.

But in both sets of countries large numbers of workers (and peasants), defying the usual pre-suppositions about inequality, have rallied under right-wing leaders who are often plutocrats, like Erdoğan, Orbán, Trump, Le Pen, or Nigel Farage (the original Brexit leader). In India the poor supporters of Modi do not care much that he is cozy with some of the richest Indian billionaire businessmen in the world. Workers are worried more about the rise in insecurity in their own lives, and do not seem to care much about the rising wealth of the top 1 percent. And this insecurity is not just about economic insecurity in terms of their jobs and incomes but also cultural insecurity of one kind or another, as I have illustrated in my recent book A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries (Harvard University Press and Harper Collins India, 2022).

There is, however, an important difference between the US and other countries on right-wing attitude to economic insecurity. Read more »

by Terese Svoboda

“My account omitted many very serious incidents,” writes Bertrand Roehner, the French historiographer whose analysis on statistics about violence in post-war Japan I used in my Graywolf Nonfiction Prize memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. He began emailing me at this September about a six-volume, two thousand page report concerning Japanese casualties during the Occupation that has just been released in Japanese after sixty years of suppression.[i] Black Glasses Like Clark Kent is a memoir about my uncle, an MP in postwar Japan, that told of GIs executing GIs in an American-held Tokyo prison. Among many other things, the book takes a close look at censorship in postwar Japan.

A fog of censorship comes up during war about casualties. In the obfuscating haze after bombs explode – O Say Can You See? –  bodies get thrown into too many pieces to count, bodies are attributed to those who don’t count, bodies simply aren’t counted. Authorities have their reasons to undercount. The mighty conqueror vanquishes the conquered by a mere flick of its thumb; the conquered want to seem relatively unscathed. If nothing else, undercounting encourages enlistment in future wars. Finding out just how many soldiers die in a war is extremely difficult.  Counting the dead during an occupation with its even hazier rules is almost impossible. MacArthur made it even more difficult due to his overwhelming policy of censorship. “Even the Allied military reports were subject to self-censorship,” writes Roehner. In Black Glasses I was just trying to find out how many American soldiers convicted of capital transgressions had been officially executed by Americans. After four years of research, I did not discover that number. Counting civilians in either case is another thing entirely. According to the Geneva Convention, civilians are not supposed to be killed at all, although these days civilians are more and more the actual targets of conflict. (See Ukraine). Read more »

by Michael Liss

Never before in world history has a nation been so endowed with wealth and power, yet so plagued with doubt as to the proper use of that wealth and power.

Grim, right? Would you feel better or worse if I told you that came from written testimony given to Congress by Walter Reuther, then head of the United Autoworkers Union, in…1969.

It’s amazing how often “plagued with doubt” can be applied to something related to economics. Reuther was way ahead of his time. Not only did he advocate for workers’ rights, including the then-radical idea of profit-sharing, but also healthcare, civil rights, women’s rights, conservation, and education. He helped make Labor a player on key issues of his time, while surviving a couple of assassination attempts.

I mention Reuther because, a half-century after his death, those issues remain as pertinent, and as unresolved, as they did in 1969. They were also among the topics touched upon at the Center on Capitalism and Society’s 19th Annual Conference, titled “Present Failings and Ways Forward: Private Sector, Public Sector.”

The Center was formed in 2002 to study Capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses and to grapple with big issues facing it in a modern world. Founder (and 2006 Nobel Prize winner) Edmund Phelps has long envisioned and advocated for what he calls the “Good Economy,” which produces jobs that give meaning, confer personal dignity, and provide enough so that “Mass Flourishing” is possible. Productivity growth, innovation, and dynamism are all essential to that. The “Present Failings” part of the title of this year’s conference is reflective of the reality around us—an American economy showing a flabbiness, a loss of velocity, a failure to provide opportunity. In his remarks at the conference, Phelps himself acknowledged how far we have drifted from that goal.

The question is, why? What are we doing, or failing to do? Read more »

Given current conditions on Terra Firma, just needed some space—

Fun in Space

Call me nomad.
Rootlessness is my routine.

From where I stand space
begs for exploration, not occupation
—occupation of space requires a
military state of mind, armies train for it,
but individuals grow dull and lethargic
just occupying space.

There’s no substitute for dynamism
when facing space. Moving through
is the best way to get the feel of it,
the rush of time through your hair.

When I stumble upon a new chunk
I like to engage it many times over,
laying out alternate trajectories,
bisecting circles, flying off on tangents,
or just nosing around looking for shortcuts.

If the wind’s right you might catch me
boogalooing along a hypotenuse or,
oscillating between the foci of an ellipse,
I go at it from all angles by any means.

For instance, I’ve found a trampoline’s
a great way to explore space:
up, down, up, down.
Along similar lines (if you have the bucks)
a space shuttle’s good too:
up, down, up, down.

There are various ways to approach space.
We can grid it off and tackle it one little block at a time,
or go at it whole, working it as Jackson Pollock would a canvas
—our choice depends upon our depth of indoctrination, or
personality disorder.

Whatever our milieu,
space can be an exhilarating place —or is it places?
—whatever.

In fact, space is full of surprises,
moving beyond bland Euclidean space
that is (the plainest of all geometries);
—still, you gotta hand it to the guy,
Euclid’s space may be old hat,
but it’s a space that’s served us well over the years.
Try getting from here to there without it.

But what really psyches me
are novel topologies of space.
There’s nothing more exhilarating
then space that pushes the envelope.

Consider the tasty appeal of a torus,
the deep-fried cuisine of cops, AKA “donut,”
or the intriguing infinity of a Möbius strip,
or the warm and cozy feel of a
conversation-laced pub. These are
boundary-pushing spaces all,
but they’re nothing up against the
reality-bending possibilities of warped space
as given by Einstein, or the mystically tangled
theory of strings! Just the thought of Einsteinian space
trumps any sense of metaphysical claustrophobia
left over from grade-school catechism under hard nuns.

But now?

Now I never miss the chance to savor space;
with eight billion of us on the planet,
at our present rate of consumption,
you never know when you might run out.

Jim Culleny © 2007

by Paul Braterman

New Zealand is taking measures to reduce the amount of methane and nitrous oxide generated by the flatulence and urinations of its vast flocks of sheep and cattle. No joke; molecule for molecule, methane is about 80 times as effective a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, while nitrous oxide (laughing gas, an anaesthetic and euphoric) is 300 times as effective.

Such action, according to Ken Ham in Answers in Genesis on 17 October, is not a good idea. As always, the AiG arguments are a hodgepodge of standard denialist pseudoscience, repeatedly rebutted but endlessly recycled, to which I will return at the end of this article, together with a top dressing of biblical references forced into a libertarian straitjacket and  mislabelled as religious, leading up to the final conclusion that action on greenhouse gas emissions is misdirected because

“The real problem facing New Zealand and the rest of the world isn’t an emissions problem—it’s our sin problem.”

On a whim, I decided to test this appraisal by collecting just those articles regarding climate change that happened to pop up in my newsfeeds, in the ten days immediately following AiG’s article, and the results are given below. Spoiler: emissions are repeatedly mentioned, but our sin problem is mysteriously absent. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

I’m not sold on longtermism myself, but its proponents sure have my sympathy for the eagerness with which its opponents mine their arguments for repugnant conclusions. The basic idea, that we ought to do more for the benefit of future lives than we are doing now, is often seen as either ridiculous or dangerous.

Usually, this takes the form of thought-experiments in which longtermists are supposed to accept major harm to humanity now in the hope of some huge potential benefit later. Physicist and YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, after boasting that she couldn’t be bothered to read William MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future (“because if the future thinks I owe it, I’ll wait until it sends an invoice”), goes on to interpret a paper by MacAskill and his colleague Hilary Greaves in this way: “a few million deaths are acceptable, so long as we don’t go extinct.”[1] Phil Torres takes aim at an updated version of the same paper, in which Greaves and MacAskill argue that possible futures with huge numbers of people, even if they are unlikely, represent an expected value that outweighs that of the near future. He reads it as implying that MacAskill and Greaves might well press a button that lets 1 million people die now, to increase the chance that 100 trillion people will be born later.

That does sound inhumane, though luckily it seems unlikely that these two Oxford professors would get their hands on such a button, and that they would have a sufficiently strong credence in its reliability. Even aside from that, however, I have learned to stop worrying about what longtermists would do when presented with mega-trolley problems: every time some hostile rendition of a longtermist argument has shocked me into checking out the source, the original text turned out to be orders of magnitude less scary than I was led to believe. If you want to make the case that MacAskill and Greaves would support mass slaughter now for a tiny chance to benefit the future, you have to be willing to stretch specific parts of their argument and ignore the part where they, for instance, explicitly factor in a no-harm criterion (p. 5; p. 30). The idea that longtermist thinkers are making the world safe for cold-hearted utilitarianism, in which faraway ends justify any means, only gets off the ground if you are willing to believe that they are dishonest about where their arguments are taking them. Read more »