by Dick Edelstein

Ireland has produced a number of prominent scientists despite being a small nation, but if you ask an average citizen about John Stewart Bell, one of the top Irish scientists of all time, you are likely to draw a quizzical look. That is mainly because the area of Bell’s important contribution, quantum mechanics, is so difficult to grasp.

Robert Boyle, on the other hand, is well known throughout the land. Boyle’s Law describes the relationship between the pressure and volume of gas molecules in a closed chamber. Tourists visiting Dublin’s Trinity College to view the Book of Kells, a spectacularly illuminated medieval bible, also see a 17^th Century bust of Boyle prominently displayed in the Long Room of the Trinity College Library.

The public reputation of the 18^th Century scientist and mathematician William Rowan Hamilton lies somewhere between that of these two figures. His name is fairly well known, and each year a prestigious guest lecture commemorating his work and career is given in the historic physics building in Trinity College. The importance of his work and exactly what he has accomplished in science and mathematics is less well known. As with Bell, this is partly because his most important discovery is not easy to grasp. In addition, his work was for a long time regarded as esoteric. In fact, it took over a century for his discovery of the mathematical concept of quaternions to have a significant application in technology. Read more »

by Derek Neal

“Paradiso” by Erlend Oye is a song I’ve heard many times in many different settings. This is largely a result of circumstance: it is one of the few songs I keep on my iPhone, and I return to it when I’m driving and my phone doesn’t have cellular service. Once upon a time I had an iPod loaded with an extensive music library, thousands and thousands of songs, maybe even up to and over 50 GB, although I suppose this number has steadily increased in direct relation to the time it’s been since I owned an iPod. Every generation has their version of this story—record collections, cassette collections, CD collections, MP3 collections. Perhaps my generation was the last to experience the phenomenon of collecting and curating a music library as an ordinary cultural experience and not as a conscious act of rebellion against streaming technology, which by its very nature precludes the idea of ownership, having or not having, and the decisions that lie therein.

I could be wrong: maybe kids today sit on the school bus and share their Spotify libraries with each other in the same way that we would hand over our iPods and await judgement. But without the need to own music to listen to it, to decide what’s in and what’s out, and when everyone has access to every song, there must naturally be less of an impulse to cultivate a library. In any case, I’ve often found myself in various locations where I can’t stream Spotify, or call up YouTube, or listen to a DJ mix on SoundCloud: for example, driving in a foreign country, or going to my family’s cottage where the reception is poor, or when I simply don’t have any data left on my phone. “Paradiso” is one of the songs that I’ve returned to in these moments, and it has wormed its way through my ears and into my brain, not from love or obsession, although I do of course enjoy the song, but from mere repetition and necessity. The song describes one of the eternal human dramas that everyone will be able to relate to at some point in their lives. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

In recent years the institution in England I have visited frequently is London School of Economics (LSE), in 1998 as a STICERD Distinguished Visitor, and in 2010-11 as a BP Centennial Professor (this was shortly after the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, so I hesitated telling people about my designation), and numerous times as visitor just for a few days. In recent times most of my interactions there have been with the development economists Tim Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak in the Economics Department and with Robert Wade, economist  Jean-Paul Faguet and some years earlier, John Harriss (the political sociologist specializing in India) in the International Development Department. In recent years, apart from departmental seminars, I also gave two somewhat formal public lectures in a large LSE auditorium, once on China and India, and the other time on A New Agenda for Global Labor.

In earlier decades on my way to or from India I’d often stop in London, and go to LSE and spend some time with my friends, including Nick Stern and Meghnad Desai (since then both of these people became Lords). Meghnad once invited me to a visit at the House of Lords, showed me around and took me to lunch there. Meghnad with his distinct Afro hairdo and all has always been a flamboyant character. He used to claim to be a Marxist economist. Rumor had it that he and his first wife (Gail, who I think was related to the wealthy Guinness Family) had a summer villa in south of France, where reportedly the only book on the shelf was Das Kapital. During the Vietnam War days he was active at the LSE protests against the War. I was told that my teacher Frank Hahn, who had moved from Cambridge to LSE by then, once suggested to Meghnad, in a characteristic Frank Hahn way, to publicly immolate himself in front of the LSE building in a spectacular anti-war protest gesture (around that time some Vietnamese monks immolating themselves in protest in Saigon had hit the headlines). Later Meghnad became one of the Thatcher-admiring (or –internalizing) Labor Party members. Now I hear in India he is a Modi-admirer. He is also the Chairman of the Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics he has founded in Mumbai. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

Francis Fukuyama does not mind having to play defense. Recognizing that the problems plaguing liberal societies result in no small part from the flaws and weaknesses of liberalism itself, he argues in Liberalism and its Discontents (Profile Books: 2022) that the response to these problems, all said and done, is liberalism. This requires some courage: three decades ago, Fukuyama may have captured the spirit of the age, but the spirit has grown impatient with liberalism as of late. Fukuyama, however, does not think of it as a worn-out ideal. He has taken note of right-wing assaults, as well as progressive criticisms that suggest a need to go beyond it; and his verdict is that any attempt at improvement will either stay in a liberal orbit or lead to political decay. Liberalism is still the best we have got.

Liberalism, according to Fukuyama, is primarily a system to manage diversity. Its foundational idea is tolerance, for which reason Fukuyama places its roots in the seventeenth century, at the end of the early modern European wars of religion. He swiftly moves on to individualism, property rights, and free trade, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps as to what all this has to do with each other: the historical introduction proceeds at such a pace that there is little time for details. From the French Revolution onward, Fukuyama identifies two competitors to liberalism: nationalism and communism. Social democratic parties are introduced in one breath with communism, but are clearly compatible with liberalism.

Fukuyama’s thesis from here on will be that liberalism has a ‘core idea’ – its emphasis on individual autonomy – that works best in moderation, but has been taken to extremes that have in turn led to illiberal backlash. Read more »

by Joseph Roth (translated and adapted by Rafaël Newman)

Every now and then, a nation becomes modern. Greeks and Poles and Russians were modern, for a time. Now it’s the Ukrainians’ turn.

The Ukrainians, about whom we and the rest of the Western world know little more than that they reside somewhere between the Caucasus and the Carpathians, in a land of steppes and swamps, and that the Ukrainian leg of our junket was relatively pleasant on account of the increased per diem for the duration of the trip. We also have an exceptionally fuzzy notion of a “Ukrainian peace for bread,” owed to the political dilettantism of an Austrian military diplomat.¹ Otherwise, “Ukrainians” are among those peoples who cannot definitively be declared mere cannibals—or worse, illiterate cannibals. Judging by their origins, at any rate, they must certainly be “Russians or the like,” and, by their faith, primitive Catholic heathens, whose clergy is all flowing beards, gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Such operetta commonplaces concerning a country and its people are all too seductive. The Poles have already been excessively Westernized, and we even have more precise information now about the Greeks, ever since Mitteleuropa learned that Greek monarchs and film starlets are equally susceptible to monkey bites.² Russia itself has become a familiar concept, thanks to all the German émigrés and POWs, so it’s no longer of any use for cabaret and operetta. What’s left?

Ukraine. Read more »

“Many life forms are so hard to categorize that (scientists) call these organisms
the ‘Problematica.’”—from: Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will
Survive a Mass Extinction, by Annalee Newit

Problematica

Here we are, never still, casting lines
upstream like fly fishers toward sources
teeming with what came first
hooking what we can, reeling it in
holding it before our mind’s eye smiling,
snapshotting bizarre Cambrian trophies
placing ourselves at the daisy chain’s end
hoping not to be rolled over or under
by our own cleverness and become extinct
as past Problematica looking
odd and grotesque to future fishers
—as uncategorizable as the dead husks of
Amebelodon whose strange tusks are the only ruts
they’ve left in rutted time

by Jim Culleny

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

As the January 6th hearings continue and Americans watch new, seemingly undeniable video evidence of insurrection and quibble about whether one could reach the steering wheel of the Presidential SUV from the back seat, the ideas of Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher and historian of science who coined the phrase “paradigm shift” to explain scientific revolutions remain prescient as ever, even as we approach his 100th birthday.

According to Kuhn in his most famous work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientists generally think and work in a state of what he called normal science. Under normal scientific conditions, all research occurs within a paradigm. Paradigms, he explained, do four interrelated things.

First, they define the terms that describe the universe, like atom or force. Second, they determine what counts as legitimate questions. (“What is the mass of the electron?” might be fair, for example, but not “Do electrons have polka-dots?”) Third, they set limits on which tools you can use to answer those questions. (Reading a voltmeter is perfectly acceptable, but reading tea leaves is out.) And fourth, they determine what counts as an acceptable answer to those questions. (Just to pick one: you don’t get to use negative lengths.)

Normal science is puzzle solving. The paradigm frames riddles and gives us the rules we need to follow in order to solve them. If you solve an approved riddle, you get to publish your answer, becoming a member of the community of normal scientists. The paradigm gives members of the scientific community their union cards, essentially, so the last thing they want to do is to question the rules of that paradigm. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

I knew it was coming, yet I was still surprised when it hit my classroom. 

“We shouldn’t be looking at this.”

Students have complained about my course before, certain that they should not be expected to read anything so difficult in a high school philosophy course. The effect of this grumbling can be seen in the watering down of some English courses deciphering Hunger Games instead of Hamlet.  I enjoyed that popular trilogy, and I’m no Shakespeare stan, but I do assert that it’s vital to develop more complex reading skills and close reading habits  in our teenagers with works that demand consideration of each word before they walk out of high school. Too many in our society are losing their ability to sustain attention to the end of a magazine article and grasp the nuances of an ambitious claim to the point of believing radical headlines and letting noxious chants sway their voting habits. So I firmly stand my ground, luring them to continue with the potential reward of being able to impress their friends and destroy their enemies with their enhanced reading superpowers.  

But this semester brought out that other quibble. 

A few students were adamant that I shouldn’t be getting them to read philosophers who are sexist or racist or homophobic. 

But that’s almost all of them! Read more »

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

I think a lot about the fate of human civilization these days.

The subject worries me because, after a half-century of studying the destructive forces at work in the systems of civilization, my gut feeling is that it is no better than a toss-up whether, in the coming generations or centuries, humankind will get its act together well enough to prevent our civilization from destroying itself

(Or, if not destroy itself utterly, at least inflict profoundly catastrophic damage– through some catastrophic nuclear war, or through some ruinous degradation of the systems of Life-on-Earth.)

And I worry because it doesn’t seem that humankind, taken as a whole, is giving this uncertainty about the human future – which could hardly be more consequential — nearly the kind of attention it deserves.

(Deserves– when so much of what we hold sacred is under serious threat — from human well-being, to the beauties of this living planet, to our aspirations for a human world ruled by Justice and the spirit of “Peace on Earth” and “Goodwill Toward Men”).

Upon reflection, that deficiency of attention is not so surprising: our history had no reason to equip us – to a depth commensurate with the stakes – with the capacity to connect our minds and our motivational core with this kind of challenge. Read more »

Lorenza Böttner. Face Art, 1983.

Digital C print.

” … Born in Chile, Böttner lost both arms in an accident at the age of eight. Institutionalized in Germany, where she moved with her mother for treatment, she rejected prosthetics intended to compensate for her supposed disability. In art school, she started presenting as female and assumed the name Lorenza. Although her career spanned just sixteen years, Böttner created hundreds of individual works, painting with her feet and mouth and using dance, photography, street performance, drawing, and installation to celebrate the complexity of embodiment and gender expression. Casting herself as a ballerina, a mother, a young man with glass arms, a Greek statue, Böttner’s work is irreverent and hedonistic, filled with the artist’s joy in her own body.”

More here and here.

Thanks to Laura Raicovich for making me aware of this amazing person!

by Jim Britell

Wise words from 50 years of managing political and environmental campaigns, and doing staff work in all kinds of settings from a Cabinet secretary’s front office to local planning boards.

10 proverbs on Politics

When someone says, “I’m not getting down to their level,” don’t expect anything at any level.

A forum in which truth is not a defense is a political proceeding.

The best guide to a president’s values are their golf partners.

Most American generals would gladly sacrifice their life for their country, just not their careers.

The first step in making change is to transform the “utterly impossible” into the “highly improbable”.

People often call things “perfect storms” to obfuscate human agency and blame.

Fascists fear most their moderate followers.

To get a progressive to abandon a sensible policy, attack it as racist or sexist.

Idealism is the craving for political processes other than the ones you have.

America is devolving from the best country in the world to the least worst. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Varun Gauri and Ayesha Khan

Much has been written about the U.S. Supreme Court’s last term.  The conservative majority is in a hurry to undo decades of jurisprudence.  But what is the Court substituting in its place?

In its recent decision, West Virginia vs Environmental Protection Agency, the Court declared that the Clean Air Act of 1970 did not authorize the EPA to establish a carbon dioxide emissions trading system.  And in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Court held that a high school could not prohibit a football coach from taking a knee in prayer at midfield after games.  In the former decision, the Court relied on the “major questions” doctrine; and in the latter decision, the Court relied on a “historical test.”

These may seem like disparate decisions, covering entirely unrelated circumstances.  But what unites them is that, in both cases, the Court failed to tell us what its test means.  The U.S. Congress, state legislatures, public school districts, police departments, and federal agencies are all subject to the U.S. Constitution.  When the Court announces tests and doesn’t tell those institutions what those tests mean, not only has the Court failed to do its job, but the institutions are left to guess.  Even worse, amorphous and ill-defined tests leave the Justices free to rely on their personal, religious, and political viewpoints in the decisions in question as well as in cases that come before them in the future. Read more »

by Michael Liss

In interpreting what is meant by the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to ‘liberty,’ we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy.

–Justice Samuel Alito

Elections have consequences. Sometimes those consequences may be unintended, but they are always there. Elections have consequences. You can’t say it too many times because too many voters don’t act if they believe it. They should. Elections have consequences.

The rule was ignored by President Obama and Democrats in 2014, which led to a disastrous Midterm that flipped control of the Senate to Mitch McConnell and his band of Merrick Garland stonewallers.

It was ignored when too many Republican POTUS hopefuls crammed into the 2016 primary, giving Donald Trump an opportunity to run one of the most brilliant games of political snooker ever, putting to death their personal ambitions one by one, and capturing an entire political party.

It was ignored when too many Democrats wrung their hands over the highly qualified but easily disliked Hillary Clinton and just couldn’t bring themselves to get to the polls because, well, how bad could Trump be, he’s a businessman, and Hillary Clinton is…Hillary Clinton.

It was ignored by Trump and Republicans in 2018, when Trumpian overreach and bombast led to the Democrats’ winning 40 seats and taking back the House, with enough cushion to leave control of the future January 6 Committee in the hands of Nancy Pelosi.

It was ignored by Trump a second time (although he likely didn’t care) when his blistering approach to his loss in Georgia helped Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff become Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, giving working control of the Senate back to the Democrats. Read more »

Snail sitting on a chair in my backyard in June, 2022.

by Bill Benzon

11th Street Lilies: That’s a kind of photograph that exemplifies an urban pastoral sensibility. Loosely speaking it depicts an urban setting, but one that evokes a pastoral mood. In this case the photograph is dominated by the lilies in the foreground, which are in a flowerbed in a median strip running for several blocks on 11th street in Hoboken, New Jersey, where I currently live. It is a residential area, with two and three-story row houses and one or three small low-rise apartment buildings. While the flower bed is obvious enough when you walk the street, it dominates this photograph because I chose to make it so.

* * * * *

It was in graduate school, I believe, that I heard someone refer to Hart Crane as a poet of the “urban pastoral,” referring, I believe to his collection “The Bridge” – which I’ve not read. That was the first time I heard the phrase, “urban pastoral,” and it has stuck in my mind. But the phrase disappeared from view until 2004 when I began wandering my Jersey City neighborhood, camera in hand, in search of wild graffiti.

I photographed the graffiti, of course – lots of it – but that’s not all. I photographed other things as well, close-ups of bees and flowers, panoramas of this or that neighborhood view, of the Manhattan skyline from Jersey City, and – cliche of cliches – sunrises and sunsets. Thus on October, 1, 2007, ago I blogged “This Jersey City My Prison,” in which I set Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” amid photographs taken in Jersey City. I have since reset the poem with photos I’ve taken in Hoboken. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

I recently started a new job. The process of looking and interviewing for this job was unlike any other I’ve been through because I now live on the Caribbean island of Grenada. I moved here during the height of the pandemic when everyone was working from home. When I told my plans to the company I was working for then, their only comment was that I needed to stay domiciled in the US, which I have. But now that we’ve all gone back to some kind of post-COVID normalcy (even if variants are still coming at us hard and fast), I wasn’t sure how to approach a new company with my slightly unusual living situation. My initial thoughts were that I get through a first interview before bringing it up, but that seemed not only disingenuous but also pointless; they were going to have a problem with it, or they weren’t. Putting off the reveal was just a waste of everyone’s time. And so, I mostly led with this news. Amazingly, no one cared. 

I work in sales in the technology start-up space, and I realize that this niche of corporate life is perhaps not representative. However, it’s still interesting that not one of the companies I interviewed with even took a beat over my location. The company I finally accepted an offer from, BusinessOptix, is split between the UK and Kansas in the US. The client I’ll be managing is mainly in New York City, so as long as I was in the same time zone as them and could get back to NYC quickly, it wasn’t an issue. 

In a couple of weeks, I’m running a workshop in New York where I’ll meet some of my new colleagues for the first time. This is a meeting I’ve been pushing for, because, as much as I am a huge advocate (and beneficiary) of remote work, there are also times when you just need to be in the same room as people sitting across a table for a bunch of hours, then breaking bread and drinking some wine together. I’m far from the only person trying to find that perfect balance of in-person and virtual. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

In the early 1990’s I was a visiting fellow at St Catherine’s College and an academic visitor at Nuffield College in Oxford. At Nuffield College at that time two friends from my Cambridge student days were Fellows, Jim Mirrlees and Christopher Bliss. (I think Jim was mostly away during my visit, and graciously asked me to use his large office at Nuffield). The other person I used to see there off and on was Tony Atkinson who became the Warden of Nuffield shortly afterward. I knew Tony since our student days in Cambridge. Like me he also moved from one Cambridge to the other, to MIT, roughly around the same time. Both of us were heavily influenced by our teacher James Meade, though Tony never did a Ph.D. (as used to be the old British tradition—neither James Meade nor Joan Robinson had a Ph.D.) Tony did not follow Meade in the latter’s work on international trade, as I did, but in other respects he broadly followed on the footsteps of Meade, apart from sharing Meade’s personal characteristics of modesty, decency and a positive vision of the future. Tony was certainly among the best economists of my generation, with pioneering work on inequality, poverty, public policies, redistributive taxation, and welfare. He was also an advocate of Universal Basic Income. I had co-authored a chapter for the Handbook of Income Distribution that he co-edited with François Bourguignon, a French development economist friend of mine.

Among Meade’s international trade students one of the most famous was Max Corden (who grew up in Australia after fleeing Nazi Germany), also a very decent cordial man, who was a Fellow at Nuffield College, but had left for US some years before my visit. I had known Max since his earlier Oxford days. Whenever we met we shared our experience and memories of our common teacher, James Meade. Max was of the opinion that whatever people later discovered to be important in international trade theory was somewhere in the dense prose of Meade’s two big volumes on international trade, published in the early 1950’s. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Computers are not alive. Hopefully, we can agree on that. It’s a place to start.

But if anyone succeeds at creating a program that exhibits true artificial general intelligence, wouldn’t such a program, despite not being alive in the biological sense, deserve some kind of moral consideration? Or, at least, if we loaded the AI into a robot body, especially one capable of experiencing pain-like discomfort, wouldn’t it be wrong to use it as a slave? (Ironically, the word “robot” comes from a 1921 Czech play, R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”) by Karel Čapek, and specifically from “robata,” which is just the Czech word for “slave.”)

But if an AI exhibited certain characteristics, like human-level intelligence, we would consider it, I hope, a person in the moral sense, despite its not being alive. On the other hand, presumably streptococcus or human sperm, while clearly alive are not persons. If that’s right, then being alive, in the biological sense, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a person in the moral sense.

If friendly, intelligent aliens showed up to help us out with global warming, they would probably be alive, unless they were robots. And they would, of course, not be human (unless they seeded the Earth long ago with their DNA and they are us). But if they are intelligent, able to communicate, and act with admirable intentions, they would deserve to be treated as “persons” in the moral sense, surely? Similarly, if we succeed at decoding dolphin language, or find that some other nonhuman animal exhibits intelligence on par with human intelligence, shouldn’t we think of them as persons? Non-human persons, sure, but persons nonetheless.

Since whether you are human or alive does not settle the question of your personhood, we are going to need some other criteria. But, first, what do we mean by personhood in the moral sense? Read more »