by Mike O’Brien

“Would that I did not have to speak!” —Confucius, Analects 17:19

Some writers are cursed with the belief that they have something uniquely important to share with the world, and that they must toil in order to make this special gift known to the world. I am free of such a terrible burden. But I know that if I didn’t write, I would simply degenerate and revolve around my own private mental drain-holes, so I hitch myself to writing obligations such as this one. It seems to be working out. I do, however, get the occasional twinge to write about the things that most bedevil my mind, whether or not I believe that anything good will come of it. These are, chiefly, the inevitable and hastening collapse of “normal” climate patterns (and the ecosystems dependent on them), and the perhaps not inevitable but certainly hastening march of lawless fascism in the United States. These two issues grip me like no others, because I live on Earth and, more precisely, above the United States. I don’t think that I have the power to ameliorate either situation by concatenation of the right sequence of letters. But I do feel an itch to see my feelings about these catastrophes put into words outside of my own head. Maybe as an affirmation of my own internal experience, maybe out of some duty to witness and to testify.

I shy away from indulging this impulse because I don’t want to bore people, or to further depress myself. I suppose this is a failure to believe in the entertaining power of my own writing, because when I read other writers’ work on these subjects I am not bored (and only a little more depressed), but rather absorbed and incensed. Some months ago I found a writer whose concerns and attitudes almost completely echoed my own in the bleak realms of empire, environment and global existential hurtling. Read more »

by Allen Hornblum

Fifty years ago this July, newspaper headlines shocked the conscience of the nation with a disturbing story of racial bias and medical mistreatment in one of America’s most honored institutions. The alarming Associated Press story first appeared on July 25, 1972 in the Washington Star. The front page headline, “Syphilis Patients Died Untreated,” caught readers attention. They’d go on to read that the goal of a strange, non-therapeutic experiment conducted by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) was not to treat the sick or save lives, but “determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body.”

The next day every newspaper in the country covered the story. The New York Times front-page headline “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated For 40 Years,” informed readers that hundreds of illiterate Black sharecroppers with syphilis in Alabama were denied treatment due to their participation in a scientific study. The alarming revelation not only provoked outrage and embarrassment, but caused Americans to look with a more discerning eye at what was occurring in the hospitals, orphanages, and prisons in their communities. It would also spark a long-overdue re-evaluation of the medical community’s cavalier practice of using vulnerable populations as raw material for experimentation.

How could such a thing happen in America people wanted to know, especially under the auspices of the government and scientific community? In the following days and months, academics, lawmakers, ethicists, and op-ed writers would ponder what the repugnant, four-decade long study of “Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” said about science, race, and the soul of America? Now, a half-century on and over two decades into the 21st century – and the 90th anniversary of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study’s inception – we are still reflecting on those same questions. Read more »

Kandis Williams. Triadic Ensemble: stacked erasures, 2021.

More here and here.

by Joseph Shieber

One of the aspects of contemporary intellectual life that I find baffling is the extent to which online culture revels in ad hominem attacks. By this I don’t only mean the way in which someone who offers up an argument is “called out” for some personal transgression of theirs that is utterly unrelated to the argument they’re presenting. I also mean the way in which the mere names of long-serving opinion writers can serve as a short-hand for a type of writing or position reviled by a certain internet subcommunity. (In a recent post at Three-Toed Sloth, Cosma Shalizi suggests that these aspects are endemic to literary life more generally; I should drop the qualifier “online”.)

So, for example, you might read that “pundit types … seem to forget that [Matt] Yglesias rose to the top of the blogosphere based on being from Harvard and being early in the game and that’s it. Nearly two decades later and it’s just bullshit all the way down.” Or that “[Thomas] Friedman’s true peak of influence was in the late 90s through the 00s, when he combined random fake conversations with taxi drivers, Friedman Unit facile discussions of the Iraq War, and paeans to globalization as our savior that routinely made fun of the anti-globalization movement as hopeless Luddites who wanted to hold the world back.”

(I chose these examples from the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog – a blog I greatly admire! – but I could no doubt just as easily have found similar snark on right-leaning blogs about, say, Robert Reich or Paul Krugman.)

In one sense, of course, such snark isn’t baffling at all. It’s fun to read! Also, Yglesias and Friedman are both enormously successful and enjoy outsized public platforms, something that’s likely to engender at least a smidgen of jealousy from academics and others who rarely achieve those rarified levels of public prominence.

What puzzles me is that, if the goal of a discussion is intellectual engagement with an idea or argument, then such ad hominem broadsides are at best a distraction – and at worst positively obstructive to appreciating whatever might be gained from considering that idea or argument. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Derek Neal

I recently read Philip Roth’s Nemesis, a novel that’s received renewed attention as it centers on a polio epidemic. This isn’t why I read it, although I’ll admit that reading about the slow build and then cascading avalanche of a virus, and the public’s nonchalance giving way to caution and then increased panic and hysteria, closely paralleled the events of early 2020. I suppose epidemics and our response to them always play out in a similar fashion. I picked the book off my shelf because I needed something to read—much like the setting of the novel, it’s summer vacation for me. My dad had given me the book some time before, and it had sat there, collecting dust on the shelf built into the low walls of my slope-ceilinged attic apartment. As a rule, I hate receiving books as gifts because I then feel an obligation to read them; instead, I prefer to choose and read a book in a more serendipitous fashion. It’s not something that can be forced. But if the giver of the book knows that their gift will go unread, possibly for years, but will then present itself to be read at the right moment, a book can be a great gift.

I took Nemesis to my family’s cottage, which sits at the end of an unpaved road and is situated steps from a small lake. A storm blew through and we promptly lost power. Not having TV, Wi-Fi, or many of the other distractions of modern life, I read Nemesis in a day or two and rediscovered the feeling of simultaneously racing through a book and trying to drag it out; when a novel is good—and Nemesis is a masterpiece in my estimation—the reading experience becomes so engrossing that it has to be artificially prolonged without losing the momentum of the story. Inevitably, this fails, you finish the book, and thankfully there are many more waiting for you. Read more »

by Dick Edelstein

By the time I got to high school, the humanities were seen as a kind of side dish in the educational meal. This was largely due to the exigencies of the space race and an inclination on the part of American society to acquiesce to the suppression of critical thought in the post-war years. The main course from a geopolitical perspective was science and engineering.

Students here in Spain learn philosophy as a subject in secondary school. But, when I was growing up in Seattle, it was not in the curriculum in any guise at all. Probably the school administration felt that the safest thing to do was to leave it out. But my world history teacher in the 11^th grade had a different idea. He wanted to give students some awareness of all of the cultural currents that impacted history. His talk on philosophy was so pithy I can still remember it – even though it took only about twenty minutes.

Here it is in essence. Idealism means that chair you are looking at now is just a reflection of an ideal chair that exists somewhere. Realism means that chair is really a chair. Dialectical materialism involves a thesis, antithesis and synthesis and goes something like the following. Thesis – the sky is blue. Antithesis – trees are green.  Synthesis – Red China should join the United Nations.

While dubious in content, this lesson was significant because I managed to remember it all these years. At least the teacher addressed the topic of philosophy in some way. Read more »

Umbrella, airplane, lamps at an outdoor café in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

by Tamuira Reid

Guns guns guns
on the news
nothing new
here comes the Blue.
Guns guns guns
where we sleep
where we eat
beneath our feet.
Guns guns guns
where we pray
where we play
get outta the way.

—Oliver, Brooklyn, New York (11 years-old)

1. There are more guns than people in the United States.
2. You can legally buy an assault weapon before you can buy a beer.
3. Salvador Ramos bought himself a pair of AR-15’s – and over 375 rounds of ammunition – in celebration of his eighteenth birthday. They felt light in his hands, almost weightless.
4. An 8 year-old Uvalde survivor initially mistook the gunfire in his school for fireworks. He had never heard an AR-17 spray bullets before. “Like this pop, pop, pop sound.”
5. During the Uvalde shooting, a father tried to enter the building to save his daughter, a student at Robb Elementary. “My baby is in there,” he pleaded. But police officers kept him on the outside looking in.
6. (The longest hour of his life would turn out to be the end of hers.)
7. After killing their teacher and barricading the door, Ramos told students, “You are going to die”. He then cherry-picked his victims, one by one.
8. Guns are now the number one cause of death for children in the United States.
9. A fourth grade survivor said she smeared her best friend’s blood all over her body to “play dead”. Her hair is beginning to fall out from where bullet fragments grazed her scalp.
10. Fox News anchors said Ramos “might’ve been trans”, that he “wore eyeliner and came from a broken home”. That he shot-up his grandmother before he shot-up the school.
11. During 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 45,000 Americans died from gunshot wounds.
12. Uvalde was the 27th school shooting of 2022.
13. The FBI has unofficially defined a mass shooter as an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.
14. 11 year-old Oliver, Brooklyn, New York, has been practicing active shooter drills since kindergarten, before he knew how to read. “The teachers call it something else, because they don’t want to scare us. But we know what it is. We know what we’re doing.” He saw bulletproof backpacks were trending recently, and calls product both smart and sad.
15. The National Rifle Association has touted the AR-15 as America’s rifle. Its popularity has skyrocketed in the past two decades.
16. Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
17. Robb Elementary.
18. Nineteen schoolchildren, two teachers, one gunman.
19. Psychopathy – also referred to as Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) – consists of an interpersonal component, an emotional component, and a behavioral component. According to PsychopathyIs.org, children may be at a higher risk of developing psychopathy due to genetic factors. “[These] children may actually need more verbal and physical warmth than other children.”
20. Texas governor Greg Abbott called the Uvalde shooting a “senseless crime,” and that it “could have been worse.” There have been six mass shootings in his state since he took office.
21. The 2022 NRA Convention continued as planned, roughly 300 miles from Uvalde, where some victims have yet to be buried.
(22) Ramos’ father told a Texan news outlet that he doesn’t want the public labeling his son as a monster. “They don’t know nothing, man,” he said. “They don’t know anything he was going through. My son was a good person.”

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Since 1990 I have also visited Vietnam a few times. Vietnamese economic reform (called doi moi) started in the mid-1980’s. On my first visit I found Hanoi to be more like a small quiet town in India, with a lot of poverty (and some begging in the streets, but not many visibly malnourished children), while Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City was somewhat better-off, and more raucous and colorful. One lecture I gave in Vietnam was titled “ The Rocky Road to Reform” where I spelled out the challenges of economic transition from a state-dominated economy; after my lecture a Vietnamese academic came to me and said, “Our roads are all full of potholes, so we are used to the ‘rocky road’ of challenges”!

One of the most knowledgeable people in Vietnam on issues of economic reform I met in Hanoi was Le Dang Doanh, who was an adviser to the General Secretary of the Communist Party, and later President of the Central Institute of Economic Management, a premier government think-tank on economic policy (I actually sought him out at the suggestion of my journalist friend, Nayan Chanda, who used to be with the Far Eastern Economic Review).

On my subsequent visits I found out how fast Vietnam was changing. In Hanoi, where I saw mostly bicycles before, it is now practically impossible to cross the road with the unending streams of motor cycles and cars (they’ll not stop for you, you have to take your chance). The Vietnamese economy is now a veritable dynamo of activity in Asia. It started with agricultural exports (like rice and maritime products) but soon followed China, a historical adversary, in the well-worn path of export-oriented labor-intensive industrialization with foreign investment and learning of foreign technology, combined, of course, with a deplorable level of political repression. Read more »

by Michael Liss

Although Mother and Father were not much alike, both were revolted by vulgarity, boastfulness, conniving, and flattery. There was a family understanding that defeat was preferable to viciousness, that one’s achievements must be gained honorably.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer

I think we would all agree that Singer’s parents had all the right values . . . . and would have made terrible politicians.  

“Fortunately,” we voters are not burdened with too many of the moral, upright types (Gresham’s Law applies to politics as well as economics). We might be “troubled” by vulgarity, boastfulness, conniving, and flattery, but if it comes from our side, not excessively so. This allows us to focus on the more important things, like whether there is a disqualifying, empirically absolute limit to repulsiveness directed at the other side, or a disqualifying, empirically absolute limit to the repulsiveness of the behavior or ideas of one of our own. 

In the 2022 Midterms, we are going to put those “character” questions to the test to a degree not seen in our lifetimes. While we are doing that, we will also be applying some very traditional metrics (like Presidential approval ratings), mixed with newly gerrymandered Congressional Districts where incumbency might not be as meaningful, a thicket of voter-suppression schemes (not all of which may act exactly as intended), and the distinct possibility of a considerable amount of outright cheating. Finally, we will be doing this in an environment of rising skepticism in the ability of our system to survive. The Right has its phalanx of Election Deniers eager for power at any price, the Left the growing sense that it will not be permitted to win (by Secretaries of State, by state legislatures and Governors, and by judges facilitating outcomes), even if it can convince a majority of the electorate. 

Before we get to the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, let’s check in on Joe Biden, the incumbent on trial. First, a little bit of history. When Presidential approval is low, the voters take it out on the President’s party in the Midterms. It’s remarkable how short Presidential honeymoons are. Part of the problem, especially for first-termers after a party change, is that they come into the job burdened with the mess for which their predecessors were voted out. Then they get new messes that inevitably come with the job. Finally, they create some of their own out of ambition and a sense of duty to their party. The “vision thing” is often the hubris thing. Read more »

“This is my life.” “This is my only life.”
…. —Stuart  Murdoch, in the chorus of Unnecessary Drama

This is the One

this is my only life
it comes down to this
I may have thought I had others
but life is not mosaic
in any sense that matters
there are no pieces
no re-dos
sequels
tomorrows
this is not a serial
not a cliff-hanger
with absurd rescues
this is singular
fullmoon-like in night sky
this is  the one

Jim Culleny
5/19/22

by Usha Alexander

[This is the nineteenth (and last) in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

No, it’s not your imagination, this feeling that we are entering a time of escalating crises brought by Nature: more frequent and severe storms, floods, and forest fires; more debilitating heat-waves; mounting crop losses and failures; rising water stress, hunger, and related conflicts; unrelenting pest and disease threats for us, our “livestock,” and our crops. Our planet is moving beyond the stability of the Holocene—the narrow climatic range that enabled our modern civilization—to enter a much harsher climate regime, and its effects are starting to engulf us. Today, these effects are being felt much more by some than others, with weather related disasters primarily responsible for having forcibly displaced more than one percent of humanity from their homes by the middle of 2021—already an unprecedented human calamity. Ten times that number—eight-hundred and eighty million people—now lack sufficient food to eat, an increase of over a hundred-million hungry souls compared to two years ago. 

And if you worry that it might get worse, the answer is a hard yes: under the best-case scenarios, it will get much worse—and at a faster rate. This is according to the most comprehensive assessment of climate-change impacts compiled to date, part two of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group II, released in March 2022. The report projects, for instance, that in Africa alone half the population—seven-hundred million people—may be displaced due to water stress by 2030. Earlier forecasts cited by UN agencies that a billion people could be desperately displaced by 2050 do not seem improbable.

But I get it. This isn’t how we’re supposed to talk about the future. I too grew up imbibing and propagating the common technotopian fantasies of the late-20th Century zeitgeist, of a belief in humanity’s manifest destiny of multi-planetary spread and dominion. I imagined I might live to see people permanently inhabiting distant space stations or launching forays to colonize and terraform Mars. Though I’d always been aware that the non-human world around me was being annihilated, I squashed my intuitive fear about that growing danger with my learned techno-optimism about the future. Like most people of my time and place, I just didn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together. Not until very recently, that is. Not until I began truly digging in and trying to understand climate change. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Shadows on Beech Trunk, May 21, 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Jeroen Bouterse

“The constant direct mode of address was a chore. No one will enjoy having this read to them.” Quoting from a referee report on the Nicomachean Ethics misses the point of James Warren’s hilarious rejection letter, but I looked it up because I remember thinking that the fictional critic was onto something, and not just about Aristotle. “I had the impression at times that some kind of conversational or dialectical background was being assumed but this is not at all marked in the text.” Indeed! Why hide the fun part?

I owe several very happy moments to well-executed philosophical dialogues: Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations, Larry Laudan’s Science and Relativism, and Aristotle’s former supervisor come to mind. I will be ever so grateful to anybody who can point me to similarly exciting conversations. The dialogue form draws and holds the attention: it can let worldviews clash in the abstract, but it can simultaneously delve into matters of detail without becoming boring – these details having been established, after all, to flow not just from the idiosyncratic preoccupations of one contingent mind, but from larger intellectual interests common to at least two separate perspectives.

Still, they are usually written by one person. I was thrilled last year to find out about a philosophical dialogue where both positions were written by people actually holding them: in Just Deserts (2021), Gregg Caruso and Daniel Dennett debate the implications of their ideas about free will, especially via the question whether people ‘deserve’ blame, praise, punishment and reward (henceforth ‘BPPR’) for their actions. Caruso’s position is that there is an important sense in which they don’t, and that this ought to be reflected in the way in which we deal with bad or criminal behavior. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

The month of May begins and ends with festivals of rebirth—at least here in Zurich, where May Day, the “Revolutionary First of May,” is a statutory holiday, while Ascension, the commemoration of Jesus’s foundational transubstantiation, having been retained as a feast day by the local Protestant reformers, is routinely observed on the last Thursday of the month. May thus boasts, at its head and tail, the celebrations of redemptive narratives canonized by the master transformational discourses of the West, the Marxist and the Christian, with a new worker’s world arising from the ashes of the old at one end, and the materially murdered Messiah resurrected as a transcendent, immortal, spiritual force at the other, Hegel spinning in his grave between them. And then of course, right in the middle of this median month in the vernal quarter of the year, the season of rejuvenation par excellence, there falls the culmination of yet another chronicle of presumed redemption and rebirth, its roots intertwined with both of those master discourses, the revolutionary and the religious: the anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948—but that’s another story.

In the German-speaking world, as in many other parts of Europe, the coming of May is also traditionally associated with a pre-Christian, pre-Communist fertility rite, observed with dances, maypoles, and bonfires, rituals shot through with the theme of rebirth, whether spiritual, as in the commemoration of the coming of Christianity to the pagan German lands on Walpurgisnacht, or physical, with more or less explicit invitations to procreation. Read more »