by William Benzon

Jerry Seinfeld is fond of comparing jokes to machines: Jokes are tiny intricately crafted machines, where all the parts fit neatly and precisely together, moving in precise, if sometimes surprising, fashion. Last summer I decided to pit Seinfeld against the precisest (is that even a word?), most super-modern, and biggest intricate machine I could think of, GPT-3. You may have heard of it, it’s an AI engine. As you may know, AI engines are not at all like automobile engines. They’re not mechanical devices. They’re, well, you know, they live up in the cloud, where all the super-modern high-tech gizmos and gadgets hang out, or whatever it is that they do while secretly plotting to take over the world.

Seinfeld tells a joke

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with something we know, Jerry Seinfeld. Here’s his very first television appearance. It is from 1977 on Celebrity Cabaret, a nationally syndicated show. He’s doing a bit that involves the Roosevelt Island tramway. You know what that is? If you’re familiar with the New York City area you do. Otherwise, it may be something of a mystery.

But first things first. Here’s the video (joke starts at about 0:29):

I’m not sure he’d get away with the word “ghetto” these days, but back in the 1970s it was A-OK. This particular sketchy part of town is the South Bronx which, as my colleague Michael Liss reminded me, was the setting for a 1981 crime drama, Fort Apache, The Bronx. It’s also the setting for the 2016 Netflix series, The Get Down, about the early days of hip-hop. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

We arrived in Berkeley and found it to be a pleasant place to live. I always have a partiality for small university towns that are culturally and politically alive. And yet Berkeley is not far from a thriving major city (San Francisco—“the unfettered city/resounds with hedonistic glee”, as Vikram Seth describes it in his verse-novel The Golden Gate) on the one hand, and from wide-open spaces on the other. Nature in Berkeley itself is quite beautiful, nestled as it is on a leafy hillside and facing an ocean and its bay, with gorgeous sunsets over the Golden Gate Bridge (on days when it is not shrouded by the mysterious fog—which appears almost as a character in San Francisco noir, like in the crime novels of Dashiell Hammett). Once driving in the dense fog in a winding street in the Berkeley hills I missed a turn and lost my way; I fondly remembered that famous scene in Fellini’s semi-autobiographical film Amarcord, where one winter-day in Rimini, his childhood town, the fog shrouds everything, the piazza disappears, and the grandpa loses his way home.

I found the people here also somewhat more laid back than in the intense cities of the east-coast. (Once a friend from New York visiting Berkeley told me that when a shop-assistant at the end of the transaction gave him a smile and said ‘have a nice day’, his first instinct with his New-Yorker neurosis was: ‘what? what did she mean?’) The cafes, restaurants, book shops, music stores and cinemas just outside the campus hummed with lively people. Strolling through the Sproul Plaza in the campus you sometimes get an experience associated with the soap-box speakers at Hyde Park in London or the performers in Latin Quarter in Paris: at one corner a religious preacher with Bible in hand is sternly telling us that the wages of sin is death, while a group of non-believers is busy mocking him; at another gathering some group is loudly bashing Israel for oppressing Palestinians while some Hillel International students are protesting; at another place five women are silently standing each exposing one breast, pointing toward donations for research on breast cancer; at another some Punjabi men and women are doing a vigorous bhangra dance;  at another a group of PETA women for animal rights is protesting the abuse of those rights in university labs; at another a stand-up comic is entertaining a large crowd; in a quiet corner you see a man covered with gold dust standing perfectly still like a golden statue, and so on. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

The “Crito” by Plato opens with Socrates in prison (circa 399 B.C.E.) awaiting execution, having been unjustly convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and teaching false gods. When his friend Crito assures him that he can get him out, no problem, that “some people only need to be given a little silver”, Socrates has a surprising response. Suppose Athens were to say to me, he says, “Socrates, did we not agree on this, we and you, to honor the decisions the city makes?” Because the city has basically given birth to me by marrying my father and my mother so they could conceive me. And Athens made me who I am, educating me in the arts and gymnastics and so much more. And I could have left any time. But I stayed. How can I now, having been duly, even if not justly, convicted, leave and put myself above the law?

This may be the earliest extant example of a social contract argument.

Flash forward to 1651. Thomas Hobbes was the first modern philosopher to offer a social contract justification for the state. In “Leviathan” which John Rawls called, “Surely, the greatest work of political philosophy ever written in English,” Hobbes argued that the “state of nature” is “a war of all against all”, and that, in that state, there are “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” (Voltaire is alleged to have quipped, that it was not life in a state of nature, but Hobbes himself, that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (which is demonstrably false since Hobbes was over six feet tall)).

In any case, Hobbes argued that life in the state of nature is so bad that we ought to be willing to agree to almost any sovereign power, in fact, that we need the terror inspired by a Leviathan of absolute power to enforce the law. Hence, absolute monarchy. (And yet, perhaps, there was some small, sly subversion in suggesting that it was not the divine right of kings, but the consent of the governed that the power of the monarch must rest on.) Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In 1969, the mathematician Hans Freudenthal proposed a seemingly unsolvable puzzle:

Abbas says to Sally and Penelope: I have two whole numbers between 1 and 100 which are not equal and whose sum is not more than 100. Abbas tells the sum of these numbers to Sally only, and their product to Penelope only. These communications remain secret. You must figure out the pair of numbers. The only other thing you know is that once Abbas spoke to Sally and Penelope, you overheard the following conversation:

1. Penelope says, “I know them not.”
2. Sally says, “I already knew that.”
3. Penelope says, “Now I know them.”
4. Sally says, “Now I know them, too.”

Amazingly, even though it seems you know hardly anything and the conversation between Sally and Penelope seems useless, it is in fact possible to determine the two numbers! Possible, but not easy! When Martin Gardner wrote about this puzzle in Scientific American, he called it the Impossible Puzzle. For a discussion of the Impossible Puzzle (including a solution!) and several similar brain-teasers, see John Berkhardt’s webpage.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia seems to put us in a new Cold War. Certainly, it’s destroyed several decades of uneasy trust between NATO and Russia. This brought to mind a clever bit of mathematics that can be helpful when you don’t trust someone: zero-knowledge proofs. They are in the same spirit as the Impossible Puzzle, but are rather different creatures. Read more »

Hung Liu. Migrant Child  Kitty. 2017.

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

by Paul Braterman

Disaster has been averted at Imperial. But much damage has been done, the group appointed to implement the decisions taken faces an impossible task, and the process has aggravated the very problem that it was meant to address.

For months, as I described here earlier,  Imperial College has been contemplating the possibility of dis-honouring T. H.  Huxley, one of its founders, on the basis of early remarks that we would now condemn as racist, but did no more than express the general assumptions of his time and place.  This despite the fact that Huxley was a lifelong opponent of all forms of discrimination, a fierce opponent of slavery at a time when many cultivated Englishmen were sympathetic to the Confederate cause, and clearly changed his views about race over time.

The President and the Provost have both been urging a whitewashing (if I can use this term) of the College’s history by such measures as removing Huxley’s name and bust from one of Imperial’s most prominent buildings.  As I explained earlier, they attempted to accomplish this using a deeply flawed process.  A History Group lacking in any higher level expertise in Huxley’s own areas of biology and palaeontology was set up, with the College archivist restricted to a consultative role, as was the Imperial faculty member best qualified to comment on historical matters. Two outside historians were consulted, but their areas of expertise did not really include Huxley.¹ Adrian Desmond, Huxley’s biographer, was consulted but as I documented in my earlier article, his unambiguous vindication of Huxley was completely ignored. In October (revised version November), the History Group’s report recommended that Huxley’s name be removed from the Huxley Building, and his bust on display there relegated to a museum. Read more »

by Nicola Sayers

I am a modern-day scrapbooker. Which is to say that, like scrapbookers and notebook keepers across the ages, I am incessantly recording: things I have read, things I want to read, ideas I have come across or had, ways I want to be or to look, memorabilia from places I have been or want to go, inspiring or thought-provoking words, song lyrics, images, film clips, you name it. Like those who went before me, I record things in physical notebooks, but – and this is the new thing – my canvas is far larger than this original form. Digital photo albums, the iPhone ‘notes’ pad, emails to self, Pinterest, Instagram (but not Facebook, which lacks Instagram’s curatorial function): these are all avenues through which a fanatical need to record is fed. 

There are similarities between us twenty-first century scrapbookers and our forerunners. Walter Benjamin viewed the collector — and what is the scrapbooker if not a collector of memories, ideas, images? — as a kind of revolutionary. By taking things out of their old contexts, and repurposing them according to a new, personal, logic, the collector achieves a kind of renewal of the old world. But there is nonetheless an anxiety underlying the scrapbooker’s work. As Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project, the collector is ‘struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things of the world are found.’ Like our predecessors, we digital scrapbookers, are driven – in our desire to record and to organize – by a kind of existential urgency: an impossible desire to capture the ephemeral, to articulate the ineffable. And like them, we too cling to the touchingly grandiose sense that somehow, via our paltry efforts, existence itself might be single-handedly sewn together into a meaningful pattern. The underlying fear of all scrapbookers, though, is not only the disorder and transience of existence, but the disorder and transience of the self. The unspoken mantra: I record, therefore I am.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Ethan Seavey

I used to sit in class with songs in my head, loud enough to feel their beat in my fingertips. I used to blare Adele instead of listening to my teacher. I would sing voicelessly with Hozier while my classmates read a paragraph out loud. Passenger, P!nk, The Lumineers, Steven Sondheim. Billie Eilish, too, though not openly as it’s not cool to like anything that’s cool.

I would fixate on one song all day, hear it bouncing around my head like a gnat trying to escape a glass box; or I would press the mental play button and enjoy every song of an album in order. Sometimes I could only hear one song and would grow very tired of it, and sometimes I would frustrate myself trying to recall a rapidly vanishing melody.

Often it wouldn’t distract too much from class but when the song reaches its crux, it’s nearly impossible to keep your pen focused on mitosis. It flies into the margins, it tears up the lyrics, it thinks it will finally achieve the ecstasy in your heart with a hasty font, a lyric that feels so much larger in your head. Of course you’ll look back upon it through the lens of failure. It will be sloppy instead of emotionally hasty. Read more »

by Peter Wells

Daniel Everett’s 2008 book Don’t Sleep: There are Snakes tells two stories of loss. First, it tells how the young missionary linguist, who had been trained to analyse languages at the Summer Institute (now SIL), found that the system promulgated by his hero, Noam Chomsky, was unable to cope with many features of the language of the Amazonian tribe he had been sent to. He calls them Pirahã (pronounced something like ‘pidahañ’), though they apparently call themselves the Hi’aiti’ihi (or ‘Straight Ones’). I reviewed this story in a previous essay.

However, Everett lost not one, but two faiths in Brazil, because his experiences among the Pirahãs led him to question, and then to reject, the evangelical Christianity that he had embraced so enthusiastically in his teens. The consequences of this change of heart were much more significant than his loss of faith in Chomsky. His disagreements with the great linguistic philosopher led him eventually (after some emotional turmoil) to distinguished professorships in Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology, but his abandonment of Christianity broke his marriage, and tore his family apart. Read more »

Scene at the airport in Helsinki in February, 2022.

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Most of us were in deep admiration of my DSE colleague Sukhamoy Chakravarty (I used to call him Sukhamoy-da). He was a prodigious scholar, a voracious reader of books (when discussing a book it was not unusual for him to point out to us that the author had slightly changed his position on an issue in question in the third edition in a long footnote), a man of wide intellectual interests, but also a man of charming simplicity and other-worldliness. In my period at DSE as he was mostly in the Planning Commission, I’d occasionally meet him at his home (or at Mrinal’s) in the evenings. I remember one evening I was discussing something with him in his living room, while a whole army of children (his daughter and her neighborhood friends) were enthusiastically carrying books, shifting them from one room to another corner of the house under the general supervision of his wife, Lalita (his partner and fellow economist since their Presidency College days). At one point he digressed from what we were discussing, and pointed to the army of load-carrying children, and said, “You see this is how the Industrial Revolution came about, on the backs of child labor”.

He had many physical ailments and his life was cut short at age 56. Even though he was mainly a theorist, in the last two decades of his life he was dedicated in search of solutions to India’s policy problems. I remember once an Australian economist friend, the renowned trade theorist Murray Kemp, on a visit told me that he had noticed in some of his Indian economist friends (he particularly mentioned Sukhamoy-da and also me) a kind of divided loyalty in their pursuit of economics—even when they were deeply thinking about some theoretical issue at the frontier of economics, half their mind was distracted by the buzzing question: how would all this help India? (He, of course, implied that as a result they would neither scale the theoretical heights they were capable of, nor really help India that much!) Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

Lots of things don’t exist. Bigfoot, a planet between Uranus and Neptune, yummy gravel, plays written by Immanuel Kant, the pile of hiking shoes stacked on your head — so many things, all of them not existing. Maybe there are more things that don’t exist than we have names for. After all, there are more real objects than we have names for. No one has named every individual squid, nor every rock on Mars, nor every dream you’ve ever had. The list of existing things consists mostly of nameless objects, it seems.

So there also must be a lot of nameless things that don’t exist. The collection of two marbles in my coffee mug — call it “Duo”. Duo doesn’t exist. Nor the collection of three marbles (“Trio”), nor the collection of four marbles, etc. Beyond Duo and Trio, there is an infinity of collections of marbles in my coffee cup that don’t exist, and the greatest portion of them, by a long shot, are nameless. Think of all the integers that don’t exist between 15 and 16. None of them have names. The world is full of them, or it would be, if they existed.

My guess is that there are more nameless things that don’t exist than there are nameless things that do exist. I have read that there is a finite number of particles that exist in the universe, and that’s probably going to limit the number of nameless existing things, somehow. But think of all the particles that don’t exist! There are far more of them, right?

How do we distinguish the nameless objects that do exist from the nameless objects that don’t exist? We could just say that the ones in the first group exist while the other ones don’t, and we would be right, but that doesn’t really explain how we tell the difference between the two. Read more »

by Deanna K. Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog)

When my father died a few years ago he left behind a wife with advanced dementia, a large collection of memorabilia from the Franklin Mint, and every one of his tax returns dating back to 1964. Of course he left other things too, including a house and a car and all that kind of thing, as well as his two daughters, a grandson, and one surviving brother. But it was the stuff that came to haunt me. It took forever to go through his desk and study after he died. I wouldn’t call him a hoarder, exactly, because then I would have to call myself one too. The joke I always make about my own … “archival” impulses goes like this: “As long as everything is stored in neatly labelled, chronologically arranged boxes then it’s not hoarding.” (Except it’s not a joke.) I still own every wall calendar I’ve had as an adult, every date book, every beside-the-phone memo pad. And that’s just the paper items: on my computer is every word I’ve written since 1989, every email I’ve sent or received, every party invitation, every For Sale poster, every financial document, every journal entry. All very organized and therefore definitely not a sign of mental illness. Read more »

“I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire.” —Daniel 7:9

William Blake’s Mandala

in Blake’s split mandala
Being asymmetrically stoops
to lay dualism on the world—
cleaves philosophers’ minds,
inspires theologians to settle scores,
undoes the unity of chaos,
splits it to bits to fuel
fires of war

Being stoops— this buff,
man-like self curiously in his prime,
with ancient head coiffed white

—raking wind gusts furiously
through heaven’s open door—

Being scribes zero with a compass,
leaves nothing out, all is in

from his plush, sanguinary perch
he loads the night with that and this,
here and there, was and is, now and then,
tendering to us a dubious sense of bliss,
propping all its characters for a fall,
but uplifted, countered with a kiss—

.Jim Culleny
3/29/14; Revised 3/11/22
Graphic: William Blake’s Ancient of Days

by Mary Hrovat

A couple of weeks ago, the main healthcare provider in my city sent me a newsletter. One of the items was a brief blurb about how laughter is good for you, with a link to “Learn More About the Benefits of Laughter.” No! If you think laughter is good for our health, link to a video of a cat riding a Roomba or bear cubs on a hammock. I might click through to see those; I might even laugh. I’m not going to look at an article about the benefits of laughter, because it will become another open tab, a nagging chore, an obligation that stands between me and the conditions for laughter.

David Graeber wrote about bullshit jobs, which involve activities that are not in themselves necessary but provide an appearance of something valuable. Sometimes it feels like I fill my life with bullshit activities, things that look valuable or even essential but that I wouldn’t miss if they were gone.

###

I thought of this again when I started reading a book of advice on writing. I want to learn about the practical aspects of writing for money and the options for people who do the kind of writing I do. I was taken aback to find, in the first chapter, a couple of action items: Write a mission statement and begin writing down goals, for example, a target word count for each day.

My spirit is downcast by the phrases mission statement and action item. Even goals is sicklied over with the pale cast of performance reviews past. These words remind me of office jobs, of confinement and boredom and other people’s agendas. In addition, there’s nothing about organizational mission statements to suggest that the concept is useful for capturing my aspirations for a writing career. These highly abstract communications operate in a realm where solutions are provided and expertise is leveraged. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Mood … , Our Pale Blue Dot.

Digital Photograph, August 2014.