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 »

by Sarah Firisen

I began the process of cutting the cord when I moved back to NYC from upstate NY 10 years ago. I didn’t sign up for cable or home phone service. Instead, I had a mobile phone and Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu. It felt liberating. Periodically, Verizon FIOS (through whom I had my home internet service) would contact me to offer me a “great deal” on a package that would usually include a home phone line and some sort of cable package, and I would happily tell them where to shove it. I never regretted this decision, and I know I’m far from the only person to do some version of this over the last decade.

My mobile phone service has been through my employer for the last few years, but I recently decided I wanted to take my number out of the corporate plan and pay for my mobile service. Our mobile phone numbers have become an increasing part of our identities. I remember the early days of mobile phone numbers when New Yorkers became anxious that the “prestigious” 917 area code numbers were running out. I have a 518 area code because I lived in upstate New York when I first got a mobile number. But that area code no longer has any connection to my physical location; I’m domiciled in Florida and spend most of my time in the Caribbean. But it is the number that all my online accounts are tied to, which connects me to every aspect of how I manage my life these days. I could change it, but it would be painful.  Read more »

I was surprised by how large normal-sized traffic lights are (they are a foot in diameter) when seen close up. I was walking by one which happens to be at ground level and this time I put my left hand against it for scale.

by William Benzon

Notice that I said, “discovered,” not “created.” The Metaverse has always been there, you just have to know how to look for it. Mark Zuckerberg is just one in a long line of supplicants in search of the Metaverse. Whether or not he’ll find it, who knows? Neil Stephenson named it in his first novel, Snow Crash. He ran an interesting variation on it in The Diamond Age, where it appears as the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. But that primer is only imaginary. The one I created, with the help of my friends, was real.

Here’s the story.

Bérubé’s American Air Space

It all started back in 2006 at Bérubé’s joint. That’s Dr. Michael Bérubé, professor of English Literature at Penn State and proprietor of American Air Space, a most distinguished blog, now, alas, defunct. There was then, and there is now, no space like American Air Space. Once a day, five days a week – weekends off – Prof. Bérubé would post something. Sometime it was politics, lots of politics. That was back in the days when we had real politics, not this FAKE MAGA and post-MAGA politics. Sometimes it was about his son Jamie, who has Downs Syndrome and who loves the Beatles, golf, enumerating state capitols, and drawing, among other things. For a while Michael had a regular series, “Theory Tuesdays,” on which he would write succinct disquisitions on literary theory and criticism. Sometimes it was sports, hockey, always with the hockey. And then there were those Arbitrary, But Fun, contests on Fridays.

One day Michael got inspired. He decided to found the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party, aka WAAGNFNP. There’s a story about that, a true story, but this is not the time and place for that, but you can find part of the story here. Any worthwhile political party needs and party apparatus, so Oaktown Girl agreed to be Ministress of Truth, Justice, and the WAAGNFNP Way. As her first official act Oaktown Girl decided that the WAAGNFNP need to have a Show Trial to show that It Means Business. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

It is difficult to discuss politics openly and intensively with my Chinese friends, but I have some general idea of their political views and how to differentiate their politics. For example, Justin Lin, with a Chicago doctorate, seems to have slowly moved from conservative or mainstream economics to be in recent decades an advocate of interventionist industrial policy tinged with Chinese economic nationalism. Yingyi Qian is more of a liberal economist, and is wary of Chinese ultra-nationalism which is rampant now. Another bright liberal economist in the same vein is Chengaang Xu, whom I have known since his London School of Economics days and later in University of Hong Kong. Discussing with, and reading, Yingyi and Chengaang I have come to appreciate the unique combination that China has accomplished between political centralization and economic decentralization. Another economist with whom I have profitably discussed the Chinese economic and political system is Yang Yao, currently the Dean of the National School of Development at Peking University. On the basis of these discussions and further thinking on governance issues in China I gave a lecture at Renmin University in Beijing in 2018. Xiaobo Zhang, the editor of the international journal China Economic Review was in the audience; he persuaded me to write it up and he published the article there in 2020.

Some years back Yingyi had introduced me to the veteran economist Wu Jinglian, one of the major architects of market reforms in China; he presented me with his book Chinese Economic Reform and told me (this was around 2010) that he thought the Chinese case was turning into one of crony capitalism. His sharply expressed opinions have often landed him in trouble. During the Cultural Revolution he was persecuted (including being beaten up, his mother’s home ransacked and half of his wife’s head shaven by Red Guards). Again in recent years hardliners have tried to discredit him as a US spy in state-controlled public media for his pro-market stand. “I have two enemies,” he said in a 2009 interview with the New York Times, “The crony capitalists and the Maoists. They will use any means to attack me.” Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

On Friday before sunrise, I walked across campus with our dog, Lola. Summers in Oklahoma are unpleasantly hot. If you can manage, it is best to be out early. Besides, Lola is an early riser. It is hard to stay in bed when you can hear the pacing of impatient paws.

While crossing campus I stopped to enjoy the view of Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn sprinkled in a line across the eastern sky. A conjunction of thoughts joined together in my mind. I had a 3QD essay due this weekend, it was Friday the 13th, and it is surprising but true that the 13th of the month is more likely to be on a Friday than any other day.

My former colleague Ralf Schmidt was the one who first told me this startling fact and why it’s true. I thought it would be a pleasant diversion in these turbulent times to talk about something which matters not at all. Why is it that the 13th more often lands on a Friday?

As far as I know, this curiosity was first observed by B. H. Brown at Dartmouth College in the 1930s. In any case, he was the one to pose this as a problem in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1933. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Lanchester’s square law was formulated during World War I and has been taught in the military ever since. It is marginally relevant to the war in Ukraine, particularly the balance between the quantity and quality of the two armies’ weapon systems.

Although more accurately expressed in terms of differential equations, Lanchester’s square law can be roughly paraphrased as follows: “The strength of a military unit – planes, artillery, tanks, or just soldiers with rifles – is proportional not to the size of the unit, but to the square of its size.”

Let me illustrate this with a schematic conflict between two armies, one denoted QN (for numerical or quantitative) and the other QT (for technological or qualitative), each of which has 500 pieces of artillery. (The exposition is abstract, the numbers used are arbitrary, and QN and QT are not to be understood as Russia and Ukraine.)

Further assume that the two armies’ artilleries are more or less equivalent in effectiveness and are capable of destroying each other at a rate of, say, 9% per month. This assumption suggests that after one month each side will have 91% of what it had the month before. Neither side has an advantage, but let’s alter the balance of power in a way similar to an example put forward by Derrick Niederman and David Boyum in their book, What the Numbers Say.

Specifically, let’s see what happens if we assume that army QN can increase its artillery to 1,500 pieces, 3 times as many as army QT has? Read more »

“Gas stations at night can sometimes be weird places.”
…………………………………………………. —Ruchira Paul, 5/7/22

Gas Stations Can Sometimes Be Weird at Night: Circa 1958

While in HS I pumped gas at a station in town
owned by an amiable, but besotted old Italian guy
who sat in his desk-chair next to the register,
feet crossed upon a case of oil,
supine as the chair would allow,
head back, gazing at the ceiling’s tin tiles
through smoke of intermittent puffs
from the butt of a Chesterfield
daintily held between finger and thumb,
elbow on armrest, forearm plumb as a column,
smoke circling his bald head,
ears tuned to radio: opera
cranked up

Louie, lead tenor, belting bourbon-tinged arias
at full volume between drags,
warbling Puccini for all he was worth,
swathed in perfumes of grease and oil
in splendor on the stage of the Met,
gazing in glory at a full house
while I pumped gas, checked oil,
and ran squeegees across windshields
waiting for the night’s curtain to drop
to a chorus of imagined bravos
bellowed from the street
amongst deafening applause

…Yes, gas stations at night
can be weird sometimes—
and beautiful

…Me? I liked rock and roll
and sang with Elvis
in my car

…Louie and I?
We got along just fine

Jim Culleny
5/7/22

by Tim Sommers

In “Shower of Gold” by Donald Barthelme, Peterson, a sculptor who welds radiators together, applies to be on a TV show called Who Am I? – strictly for the money. In the ensuing interview, he asks the interviewer, Miss Arbor, what the show is about.

“‘Let me answer your question with another question,’ Miss Arbor said. ‘Mr. Peterson, are you absurd…’

“’I beg your pardon?’

“‘Do you encounter your existence as gratuitous? Do you feel de trop? Is there nausea?’

‘‘’I have enlarged liver,’ Peterson offered.’

“‘That’s excellent!’…Who Am I? tries, Mr. Peterson, to discover what people really are…Why have we been thrown here, and abandoned? …alone in a featureless, anonymous landscape, in fear and trembling and sickness unto death. God is dead. Nothingness everywhere. Dread. Estrangement. Finitude. Who Am I? approaches these problems in a root radical way.’”

“‘On television?’”

“Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some feel it vividly and continually,” writes Thomas Nagel.

What does “absurd” mean? Various dictionaries say, unreasonable, inappropriate, incongruous, laughable; from the Latin “absurdus”, which literally means “out of tune”. Nagel says the absurd involves “a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality.” “This is what you want. This is what you get,” as the song goes (“The Order of Death,” Public Image Ltd).

Here are Nagel’s examples of absurd events. “Someone gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already been passed; a notorious criminal is made president of a major philanthropic foundation [or the United States]; …as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.”

But it’s one thing to say that particular events in our lives are absurd, it’s another to say, as Nagel and Camus (among others) do, that life on the whole, life overall, is absurd. Read more »

by Nicola Sayers

I regret not having children younger. Like, much younger. I was thirty-six when my first child, now four, was born; thirty-eight when my second was born. I wish I had done it when I was in my early twenties. This is an unpopular perspective. I know this because when I’ve raised this feeling with friends, many of whom had children similarly late in life, I’ve been met with a strong resistance. It’s not just that they don’t share my feelings, that their experience of having children later in life is different to mine, it’s that they somehow mind me feeling the way that I do. They think that I am wrong – mistaken – to feel this way. It upsets them. 

But just think of all the life experiences you’ve been able to have, they say. But you weren’t with Jarad yet, they say. But you wouldn’t have been ready, they say. 

There are, I think, several different beliefs, values, lending force to their pushback. The first is the notion that your own enjoyment, but also personal development, is paramount. Related is the presumption that you need to have many years to pursue that development with a singular focus, and, indeed, that having multiple long term relationships is an important part of that development – without which you might not be the relationship expert that those of us with that backlog of experience presumably are.  Read more »

by Ethan Seavey

The dandelion is thousands of miles from home. It has been in America learning about the world beyond and perhaps it wants to return. It has lived thousands of sad lives. Finally after 300 years, a seed clings to an old man’s jacket as he boards a plane, and happens to land in a small patch of dirt right by the Charles de Gaulle airport; the dandelion is welcomed home graciously, and they share the stories of what has happened in its absence. They notice little differences to him. He has mutated slightly; the increased sun in America has made his petals more yellow; the lawn mowers have made him shorter; the pesticides have made him stronger. They don’t talk to him about the sun or the lawn mowers or the pesticides, though. They talk about their shared home in France. 

Tu me manques. The French have a different construction to mean “I miss you,” which more directly translates to “you are missing from me.” it’s weaker in the sense that the I is doing nothing but feeling unfulfilled in the person’s absence. English implies an active agony; French implies a passive fractured self. I think before coming abroad that I would’ve said English is more accurate to the idea of missing someone. But now I’ve lived in Paris while the man I love lived in Tel Aviv and my family lived in Chicago and Denver and LA and I find the truth is somewhere in the middle, closer to the French side. I miss /you/ are missing from me. Day to day, it’s not active. Missing lies dormant in your body and makes the day a little darker, a little colder. It makes you feel guilty for letting the pain be so tiny, so unnoticeable. But it also rushes in and drowns you some days and you feel a longing for melodrama, which is never satisfied with a text or a phone call. Read more »