by David Kordahl

Every October, I try to carve out a little time to enjoy Nobel Season. This past week marked the climax of the last year’s iteration, with the winners of the various Nobel Prizes announced on successive days of the week. I had fun following the picks, and learning a bit about new things in the fields I don’t follow closely—which, frankly, is most of them.

Physics, however, was a different story. The physics Nobelists this year were familiar to me and most other physicists, seemingly obvious choices, if not exactly household names. Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger have become standard characters in the physics lore of the past few decades. Their stories have even bled out into the wider culture. In Les Particules élémentaires, the 1998 novel by Michel Houellebecq, Aspect’s experiments are positioned as part of a “metaphysical mutation” comparable only to the birth of Christianity and the rise of science itself.

Well, as one might say of many grand claims…sounds important, if true. Here, I’ll be expressing my doubts about a few articles of common faith. Read more »

Naomi Lawrence. Tierra Frágil, 2022.

Acrylic yarn and zip ties.

Photograph by Sughra Raza in Morningside Park, Harlem, NY. September, 2022.

More here.

by Leanne Ogasawara

世中は何にたとへん水鳥のはしふる露にやとる月影（無常）

Mujō (Impermanence)
To what shall I liken this world?
But to moonlight
Reflected in the dewdrops
Shaken from a shorebird’s bill
—Dōgen

1.

Eight hundred years ago, a Buddhist monk, not long into his career, became deeply dissatisfied with the Buddhist teachings available to him in Japan. And so, he traveled across the sea to Song China.

A man on a mission, he wanted to uncover the “true Buddhism.”

This is a story repeated again and again as Buddhism made its way East. Monks and priests, feeling like something had to be “lost in translation,” took to the road in search of the true word. From Japan to China and from China to India—and sometimes as far as to Afghanistan, these early translators were seeking to understand the wisdom that was embedded in the words themselves.

Or maybe what they were really seeking was beyond the words themselves?

The monk Dōgen, after seven or so years in China would return to Japan—his mind filled with all that he had seen and all that he had learned. In time, he would form a new school of Buddhism in Japan: Sōtō Zen.

Interested in notions of time and being, he wrote elaborate philosophical tracts, as well as many marvelous poems.

In the above poem on impermanence, Dōgen compares ultimate reality to that of a reflection: of moonlight reflected in a dewdrop scattering off a waterbird’s bill.

In my first translation attempt, I chose to render mizudori 水鳥 (waterbird) as “shore bird.” It is a valid translation for the Japanese term mizudori, which literally means 水 water 鳥 bird. Maybe I instinctively went with shorebird because I have been taught in creative writing classes to try and be as concrete and specific as possible, so readers can better form mental images. Could this might explain why the translation I found online (made by the great Dōgen-scholar Steven Heine) used the English word “crane” for mizudori.

Dōgen did not choose the Japanese word for crane, which is tsuru 鶴 so why did the translator? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

Today I am giving thanks for the life and work of John Prine, the late, great American singer-songwriter, whose date of birth is October 10, 1946, and who died, of COVID-19, on April 7, 2020.

I am listening to his music and thinking about where he came from, and where he wound up: Prine was born in Illinois but his parents were from Kentucky, where he would spend time in his youth visiting family; his career started in Chicago but he ended his days in Nashville, where he co-founded his own independent record label, Oh Boy Records.

I mention these geographical poles in the life of the birthday boy because they help me make sense of my own intimate, visceral response to John Prine’s work. I was introduced to his music in Toronto in the early 1980s by my high-school sweetheart, whose own parents were from Kentucky, having migrated north, to what is effectively Canada’s Midwest, just like Prine’s folks had when they moved to Illinois. (Of course, having done part of his military service in Canada, William Faulkner is said to have noted the similarities between his own native Deep South and America’s ostensibly ur-Yankee neighbor to the north: but that’s another story.) Read more »

by William Benzon

I grew up in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. At some point “mutually assured destruction” entered my lexicon. I came to accept the threat of nuclear war with the USSR as something I’d live with until I died (perhaps in a nuclear war?). The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and two years later the USSR dissolved. With that the possibility of nuclear war decreased, though the weapons themselves remained. Now, thirty years later, nuclear war is, all of a sudden, more likely than at any time in my life since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962.

I actually do remember the missile crisis, but only vaguely. There is a sense of danger coupled with the image of a grayscale aerial photo, or perhaps a map, of Cuba. But that’s about it. Beyond that, I certainly had a strong sense of persisting conflict between the Soviet Union and American, plus the Free World. The the number and destructive power of nuclear warheads controlled by each side – the so-called missile gap – was a constant concern. Magazines such as Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated regularly carried features about the design, construction, and provisioning of home fallout shelters.

I have a vague sense of one day being in the basement in the TV room and telling my father, “don’t worry, if I’m drafted, I’ll go.” But I can’t recall just what prompted that remark, perhaps a news story about draft resisters. That was before I went off to college. I turned 18 during my junior year and had to register with Selective Service. I was given a student deferment. A year later a draft lottery was instituted and I drew the number 12 in the lottery. I was certain to be drafted once I graduated. By that time I had been actively protesting against the Vietnam War for four years and did not want to be drafted to fight a morally abhorrent war.

I decided to apply for status as a conscientious objector, which would exempt me from military service but require that I perform some kind of alternative civilian service. I sought legal advice through the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization committed to social justice and peace. I worked with one of their lawyers in preparing my application, which was successful. I was assigned to work in the Chaplain’s Office at Johns Hopkins. Chester Wickwire, the chaplain, had been active in both the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, and was able to get two local congressmen to write letters of support. When my term of service was over, 1972 or 1973, I went off to graduate school. Read more »

A reflective street sign iridescing in the sunlight as I walked by it. What looks like a plain white background from a distance (see photo in first comment) is revealed to have much complexity when seen close up.

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

In the previous piece in this series, “The Discernible Reality of a ‘Force of Evil’,” I attempted to show that there is a Force – visibly operating in the world — that can reasonably be called a “Force of Evil.” (With “Evil” defined as “a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world worse.” Or, that “consistently spreads a pattern of brokenness.”)

We can see this Force, I argued, by exploring the connections in “the dense network of cause and effect.” Those connections reveal how the various elements in the human world that are life-degrading – war, injustice, hatred, greed, cruelty, trauma, intrapsychic conflict, etc. – are each both the causes and the effects of one another.

Those connections, in other words, reveal the general truth that “Brokenness Begets Brokenness.” And from that reality – of how brokenness moves through the human world over time in shape-shifting ways — we can infer the existence of a Force that consistently moves a “pattern of brokenness” through the human world, consistently making the human world worse.

This Force — transmitting that “pattern of brokenness” – is something we can see, I said, “the way we ‘see’ the wind in the swaying of the trees and the flapping of the clothes on the line.”

What we see – “a coherent force that consistently makes things worse in the human world” – is something that reasonably be called “a Force of Evil.” And – as it can be discerned by applying reason to evidence – the existence of such a force should be incorporated into the worldview of our secular culture. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

Young Earth creationist organisations are united in rejecting the secular science of climate change.  This science, they say, incorporates the study of positive feedback loops as demonstrated by data from Ice Age cores (true). But all of this is part of the secular science that regards the Earth as ancient (also true) and is therefore unsound (no comment). The creationist organisations are left with the task of explaining the Ice Ages, which they do with a degree of ingenuity worthy of a better cause. This in turn leads to a creationist climate science, in which positive feedbacks are ignored. It follows that conventional climate science can be discarded, and our current concerns rejected as alarmism.

This conclusion fits in well with the aims of the right-wing organisations with which the creationists are intertwined. One frequent commentator on environmental matters in Answers in Genesis  is Calvin E. Beisner, founder and CEO of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which exists to oppose any environmental constraints on industry, and Beisner’s work has been praised by the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute. The Cornwall Alliance itself is deeply linked to creationist theology, and its Statement of Faith commits to separate creation of a historical Adam and Eve, original sin as a historical fact, and “the bodily resurrection of the just and unjust, the everlasting punishment of the lost, and the everlasting blessedness of the saved.” The conservative commentator Jay W. Richards, Senior Fellow of the evolution-denying Discovery Institute, is a Fellow of Heartland and a former adviser to Cornwall. But the political agenda of creationist organisations is a major topic in itself, to which I shall return.

We must also remember that while there is no commercial interest in denying evolution, denying the need for action on climate is a well-funded industry, to whose voluminous output the creationist climate change deniers have full access. Read more »

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

At a recent tournament sponsored by the St. Louis Chess Club, 19-year old Hans Niemann rocked the chess world by defeating grandmaster Magnus Carlson, the world’s top player. Their match was not an anticipated showdown between a senior titan and a recognized rising phenom. The upset came out of nowhere.

Throughout the chess world, whispers about Niemann’s improbable victory led to social media posts with rampant speculation about foul play until Carlson, in his own post, directly accused Niemann of cheating. In support of that claim, he advanced several pieces of evidence. First, Carlson claimed that the trajectory of Niemann’s progress as a player was “unusual.” Second, he suggested that during their match, Niemann exhibited a lack of mental focus that didn’t correspond with his surprisingly effective play.

“I had the impression,” Carlson tweeted, “that he wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do.”

Carlson’s third piece of purported evidence, however, has been the most rhetorically effective: Niemann’s prior history of cheating. The 19 year-old has admitted to illicit play twice earlier in his career. “I was 16 years old and living alone in New York City at the heart of the pandemic,” Niemann said in an interview with the St. Louis Chess Club, “and I was willing to do anything to grow my stream. What I want people to know about this is that I am deeply, deeply sorry for my mistake. I know my actions have consequences and I suffered those consequences.”

Niemann insists that he learned from his error and has changed. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

When people say they want equal opportunity, what do they really want? If what they want is whatever it is that the opportunity is an opportunity for, are they really interested in the opportunity at all? Or are they motivated by what de Tocqueville called “the charm of anticipated success”?

Well, there is at least one, quite profound thing, that people want when they say they want equal opportunity. They want to not be discriminated against. Of course, a theory of justice that was silent on all forms of discrimination would be, to use a technical term, bad. Kant defended nondiscrimination two-hundred twenty-nine years ago like this. “Every member of the commonwealth must be permitted to attain any degree of status…to which his talents, his industry, and his luck may bring him; and his fellows may not block his way by [appealing to] hereditary prerogatives.” (One problem is the way Kant keeps saying “his.” It raises the question what counts as a “prerogative.”) Believe it or not, Napoleon endorsed roughly the same idea and popularized this phrase for it: “La carrier est ouvérte aux talents” (careers open to talents).

For the sake of argument, I will assume that a plausible theory of justice says that everyone should have certain (i) basic liberties, the (ii) right to not be discriminated against or equal opportunity, and that in a just society (iii) the distribution of wealth should not be too unequal. Now let’s distinguish between formal equality of opportunity and substantive equality of opportunity. Read more »

 by R. Passov

We are on the train from Lisbon to Cascais. They, riding with their backs in the direction of the train, sit across from me. I am next to a middle-aged woman, smiling, well-coiffed, dressed in white. I fail to speculate on why she heads toward the wealthiest enclave in Portugal where, it has been said, ex-dictators peacefully sun-away the last years of their lives.

I had been in conversation with Ananda before getting on the train. We wandered toward each other to exchange the partial pieces of directions we owned; directions on how to get from our seminar to the museum in that beach town to enjoy a showing by a famous artist who had something to do with the co-founder of our seminar.

Ananda is from Brasilia, a place I had learned about in the 6^th grade and that somehow stayed with me as a Shang ri-La gone astray – an attempt at the future that ultimately lost to the jungle. But Ananda says it’s not in a jungle. Instead, it’s on a giant plain, away from the jungle. It’s the capital and 3 million people live there. Yet I press on with my memory, still seeing the place as a grand replica of Kennedy airport with its 60’s modernism, just empty of passengers. But it’s not like that, Ananda argues. Yes, it’s aged like things are let to age in Latin America, not like in America where you go crazy trying to fill in the cracks.

To get past Brasilia I ask Ananda about the economy and the mood in Brazil, trying to gain insight into whether my small investment in Brazilian government bonds is safe; hoping to hear what I want to believe – that Brazil is strengthening its judiciary, an important step toward improving its investment climate. Ananda smiles. Things are bad, she says. Bad and not getting better. Perhaps I was hoping for drinks later alongside her sun dress, fun glasses, hair that runs away from her ears and the smile. Read more »

Curious cow at the Fane Alm in the South Tyrol last week.