by Pranab Bardhan

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

After my student days in Cambridge, in my professional life I have been to Britain many times, occasionally for lectures and conferences, but sometimes more formally on visiting assignments. The latter, except for the two terms at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Visiting Fellow, have been more to Oxford and London School of Economics; this may be partly because for some time there was a relative decline in the quality of the Cambridge Economics Department after the internal troubles and the exit of some big names that I have alluded to before. In Oxford I have been on formal visits to All Souls College, St. Catherine’s College, and Nuffield College.

The first time in Oxford I was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College in 1983. The occasion was an invitation to give a set of endowed lectures at the College, named after S. Radhakrishnan, who used to be a philosophy Professor and Fellow at the College, and later President of India. Amartya-da was then a Fellow at that College. I remember I arrived one afternoon straight from California and Amartya-da said he’d take me to dinner at College and explain the various quaint customs practiced in this College founded in 1438.

The College had no undergraduates and hardly any graduate students, only Fellows. I already knew that it had the reputation of being a Tory citadel and rather stodgy and rigid in its customs. After a great deal of contentious debate it admitted women only in 1979. I had also heard the story of the famous historian and Shakespeare scholar, A. L. Rowse, who at age 22 sat for the Prize Fellowship Examination at All Souls and did well in the written exam. But then there was another hurdle; he was invited to the dinner to check his table manners. At the end of the dinner pudding was served, and on top there was a cherry. Rowse did not know what’d be a proper way of disposing the cherry stone that was in his mouth. He pondered about alternative ways, but could not make up his mind, so he swallowed it. He did get the Fellowship, but even when he was past 90 years in age he told a journalist that he still had not figured out what was the proper way of tackling that stone at the All Souls dinner table in 1925. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

The separation of church and state seems to be dissolving. It’s becoming increasingly easy for politicians and other public figures to cross the line between expressing their faith and aggressively proclaiming it and its alleged real-world consequences. Although often leading to social strife and intolerance, such overweening proclamations are growing in frequency. They may be cumulative and insidious like the Supreme Court’s recent okay for coaches to publicly pray at the 50-yard line after a game, or they may be all-out assaults such as GOP Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”

Because religion and religious ideas are being so publicly professed, political candidates and others should get used to the free expression of doctrines contrary to their own, in particular to irreligious perspectives. People’s religiosity naturally invites questions about their beliefs and the reasons for them and these questions, I think, should be a bit more pointed than the usual softball queries about the role of faith in their lives.

Below are a few such questions that I would like to see directed to political candidates during debates or press conferences. You can imagine the attendant microphones and cameras, moderators and reporters. The questions may seem commonsensical to many, perhaps jejune to some, but I won’t hold my breath until one of them is asked. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

Today is July 4th, a day when Americans reflect on the value of freedom and the costs and sacrifices required for it. So it is an appropriate day to reflect on America’s deepest political aspirations.

Nah. Let’s talk about our brains. The neocortex is where all our fancy thinking takes place. The neocortex wraps around the core of our brain, and if you could carefully unwrap it and lay it flat it would be about the size of a dinner napkin, and about 3 millimeters thick. The neocortex consists of 150,000 cortical columns, which we might think of as separate processing units involving hundreds of thousands of neurons. According to research at Jeff Hawkins’ company Numenta (and as explained in his fascinating recent book, A Thousand Brains), these cortical columns are capable of modeling patches of our experience (he calls them “reference frames”)  and setting our expectations of what we should experience next, at any given moment. [Note: the remarks that follow are inspired by Hawkins’ book, but shouldn’t be taken as a faithful representation of it.]

The neocortex’s complexity is considerable, but not infinite, and what’s most surprising is that such a relatively small network—you can fold it up and put it in your head—is capable of understanding calculus and making up jaunty little tunes and comparing Kierkegaard to Heidegger, not to mention doing all three in a single afternoon. 

It’s hard to believe that the wide world of human thought can come from such a comparatively small albeit complicated structure, and my guess is that it doesn’t. It’s not that I believe in a soul or immaterial mind or anything like that, but I think that probably there is a lot less going on in our thinking than we think there is. Our thinking and our experience is extremely gappy, and we spackle over the gaps with a paste of fictions, supplied mainly through language and culture. Read more »

Sam Gilliam (1933 – 2022). Quatro, 1994.

More here, here, and here.

by Mary Hrovat

When the city of Melbourne set up email addresses for trees so that people could report problems, the trees received affectionate fan mail as well as messages about dangling limbs or other hazards. Here are some letters I’d write to trees, if I could.

To the aspens in Hannagan Meadow

I saw you in fall 1979; I’d been married to my first husband for only a few months. We traveled a lot that fall, scouting out places we might like to live out our back-to-the-land dreams and raise a family.

I was only 18, and I’d never lived in the country. I wasn’t sure I was ready for life with cows and chickens and a big garden. Sometimes, especially when we were driving at night through what seemed like the lonelier corners of Arizona, I was frightened at what I’d gotten myself into. Maybe my husband and I both were, but we couldn’t tell each other.

When I saw you, we were halfway up the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway from Clifton to Springerville, in eastern Arizona. This highway covers only 129 miles, but it’s a slow, dramatic drive, up and down through the White Mountains along curves and switchbacks.

We stopped at Hannagan Meadow for a break. You were probably the first stand of aspens I’d seen in fall colors, tall and slender with yellow leaves against beautiful white bark. I loved your brilliance and the movement of your glowing leaves against a more somber backdrop of tall evergreens. I didn’t know much about aspens, but I wonder now if all of you, the aspens I saw that day, are part of a single clonal community.

The sight of you in that meadow, tall and bright in the sunshine, dazzled and comforted me. You called me out of myself and my worries. Among all the beautiful things I saw that fall, you’re the one that has remained most vivid in my memory. I hope you’re still there. I’d like to see you again someday. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

From the start, punk rock was a translocal phenomenon. Punks in London took influence from their New York City counterparts. The British Invasion of punk inspired a new generation of young North Americans to blast out three chords and embrace DIY. By the early 1980s, punk scenes existed across the western world, into the global south, the Eastern Bloc, and non-aligned world. Many of these scenes went underground as part of the hardcore wave of punk rock. But other punk genres emerged that challenged dominant nationalist or imperial narratives with a bottom-up perspective. Post-colonial punks included artists that sought to employ a punk rock attitude to champion previously colonized and marginalized cultures.

The debate over whether punk is political began with the birth of the subculture. Many of the first wave punk bands are generally understood as non-political. But these “non-political” bands sometimes made political statements. The Ramones mocked President Reagan with “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.”

Read more »

Five Verses from a Qawwali
Sung by the Late Great Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

by Rafiq Kathwari

When I ask, how does it rain?
You rap a bead of sweat on your forehead.

When I ask, how does lighting strike?
You glance at me and lower your eyes.

When I ask, how does day meet night?
You veil your face with hair.

When I ask, where does music get its magic?
You spike your talk with honey.

When I ask, what good is yearning?
You snuff a candle with your robe’s hem.

For Annie Zaidi

by Brooks Riley

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise. —Novalis

The first full moon I saw after the procedure looked as if it might burst, like a balloon with too much helium. It was just above the horizon, fat and dark yellow —moving slowly upward to the firmament where it would later appear smaller and take on a whiter shade of pale. I could distinguish its tranquil seas, the old familiar terrain coinciding with a long abandoned memory.

It had been a while since I’d seen the full moon this way. For far too many moons, all I had seen were the fractured doubled contours of an indeterminate object in the night sky where the moon should have been. The problem was cataracts, or clouding of the ocular lens.

Advancing age metes out decline in increments. I hardly noticed the changes in my vision. Spending so much time on the internet, I was getting second-hand access to the world and its visual splendor and diversity through photographs and videos—none of which prepared me for the increasing inexactness that met my gaze wherever I went.

***

Even before the bandage came off, the implant’s ID card seemed to confirm it: I am a camera—with a new Zeiss lens made in Jena. Jena is back in my life.

How can that be, when I’ve never visited the city, only passed through its train station on my way to nearby Weimar? As I cautiously open my left eye to a rush of fine details I couldn’t see a week ago, the first words that come to mind are Jena Paradies, the name of the train stop that always made me smile. Jena’s Paradise is a nearby park. Mine is a second chance at sight. Read more »

Frederica Krüger feeling lazy and lying on the floor in my office a couple of days ago.

by David J. Lobina

As I mentioned last month, the first thing one notes when approaching Rudolf Rocker’s 1937 book, Nationalism and Culture, is its impressive combination of breadth and depth, thus making it entirely unpublishable today. Not only that, and what’s worse, the book is also rather modern in outlook as well as original. The originality stems from Rocker’s interest in the practical effects of nationalism on the people that have to undergo the typical processes of becoming a “common people” (not something historians care much about), whilst the relevance of the overall account follows from the prescience of some of the ideas defended in the book.

The book itself is divided into two parts and spans nearly 600 pages. Book I traces the evolution of nationalism and its relationship to the expansion of the state, resulting in the reality of the nation-state, while Book II is a critical analysis of the notion that there is any type of homogeneity to any one national identity or nation. Remarkably, Book I anticipates some features of the modern study on nationalism, and something along these lines is also true of Book II vis-à-vis “the linguistic update of nationalism” I offered so long ago now, with the required modifications and adjustments. So let us deep-dive, as the nerds say nowadays.^[i] Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In the middle 1990’s along with journal-editing I did another job in Berkeley which was even more arduous, but also in some ways quite exciting and instructive. I was invited by the campus academic senate to serve for 3 years in a high-powered committee that decided on all appointments, promotions, salaries and merit payment increases for all Berkeley faculty (then roughly about 2,000 in size). This committee is called the Budget Committee in Berkeley; technically it advises the Chancellor, but the latter took our advice in 99% of cases—in the less than 1% cases when the Chancellor did not follow our advice, the rule was that the Chancellor was obliged to meet us in a special session of the committee and explain why he/she would not follow our advice (most often this involved some legal issues) and we had a chance to rebut their arguments.

Working in this Committee gave me valuable insights into the process of how a top public university like Berkeley, even though substantially more constrained in terms of resources compared to the rich heavily endowed private universities in the US like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Yale, Chicago, etc., could maintain its high ranking in terms of academic excellence in most disciplines. I thought the insights I got from my experience would be of some use in any reform of the public universities in India. I wrote a couple of op-ed pieces in Indian newspapers and gave some public lectures in India with suggestions for reform on the basis of my Berkeley experience, but very few people paid much attention, probably because people thought my ideas were utopian in the Indian context. The Indian public universities have for long been severely hamstrung by political and bureaucratic interventions, overregulation and mismanagement by different governments. (Some years later Jean-Jacques Laffont, a leading French economist, gave me a qualitatively similar account of problems afflicting French public universities.) On top of this the current right-wing government in India has a distinct political-ideological agenda of washing away the remnants of left-liberal ideas from universities, mangling the teaching of history and culture in universities (and schools), and of installing a narrow essentially anti-science Hindu-supremacist nationalist viewpoint. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

One tedious outcome of the ascendance of the anti-abortion movement in the United States is having to listen to the tiresome arguments about “the beginning of [human] life.” It’s like being stuck in a dentist’s office waiting for an appointment while nauseating top-forty hits from the 1970s play on a hidden radio.

Not this shit again.

Abortion is an issue my husband and I have never had, nor will ever have to be concerned about, given that neither of us has a uterus. Nor do we have children from previous engagements, who might have to be concerned about what to do with unwanted or malformed zygotes/ blastocysts/ embryos/ fetuses. But the subject is still interesting to me, given that I have existed as each of those entities at one time or another. Read more »

Umwelt

what I can perceive is the outer limit of what I am
there is a universe of unknown dimensions
it whirls about me but is not about me

I am constrained
I ride its hub

Jim Culleny
6/22/22

by Rebecca Baumgartner

In his book Enlightenment Now, when discussing the drastic improvements in quality of life over the past several decades, Steven Pinker says that “the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor. Perhaps the liberation of women in general.” The most exciting promise of technology is that it will make being a human slightly less terrible. In the case of household appliances, the claim is that they will make being a woman slightly less terrible.

Once women gained access to new labor-saving devices, the story goes, they were liberated from drudgery. We all seemingly agree that these innovations have given us our time back, shifting the role of the home from a place of production to a place of consumption. What used to be produced at home (often by women) is now purchased outside the home in the form of goods and services. Everybody wins! Progress has leveled the playing field and given women so much free time that they’re at liberty to enter the workforce in historically unprecedented numbers. 

Well, hang on a minute. If these devices were supposed to create so much free time and lead to “the liberation of women in general,” then why do women continue to do significantly more household labor than men? Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Climate change is a huge and urgent problem. It is natural to suppose that it is therefore a terrible mistake, an unforced error that we should regret and try to prevent ever happening again.

I disagree. Climate change is the unfortunate outcome of the economic growth that has transformed human civilisation for the better. We cannot regret climate change without regretting the vastly better world for most people that the fossil-fuel powered industrial revolution brought. Nor should we draw the anti-technology lesson that solutions are always worse than the original problems, that humans should retreat to living within the bounds of nature rather than attempting to escape them.

The argument I am trying to oppose is not often made explicitly, but seems to lurk around and underneath the response to climate change, especially among people younger than me. It looks something like this:

P1. Climate change is a huge and urgent problem

P2. Climate change is human-made, the result of the industrial revolution and the striving for economic growth

C1. Therefore, climate change is the result of bad choices based on bad values that we should regret. (This often takes the form of a quasi-religious sense of ‘original sin’ among the climate woke)

C2. Therefore, we should prevent such mistakes from happening again (This further anti-technology/anti-growth conclusion is not drawn by everyone, but is powerful within the environmentalist movement)

Let me take each conclusion in turn. Read more »