by Joseph Shieber

One of the strange juxtapositions appearing in the past few weeks was the publication of Ibram X. Kendi’s essay, “The Crisis of the Intellectuals” in The Atlantic, followed – a day or so later – by Marty Baron’s essay, “We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too?” in the Washington Post.

Kendi’s essay is focused on pushing back against the traditional framing of the intellectual “as measured, objective, ideologically neutral, and apolitical” – a framing that Kendi finds crippling and, indeed, life-destroying. In contrast, Baron’s essay is focused on defending the ideal of objectivity from its detractors – including, although he is not mentioned by name, Kendi.

The authors themselves also offer a marked contrast. Although now undoubtedly an academic superstar and public intellectual, Kendi himself describes his ascension as unlikely, given that he “came from a non-elite academic pedigree, emerged proudly from a historically Black university, [and] earned a doctorate in African American Studies.” In contrast, Baron enjoyed a more predictable pathway to the pinnacle of his profession. He earned his B.A. and M.B.A. degrees in four years from Lehigh University, began his journalistic career at the Miami Herald, and then progressed quickly from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times, and then – now as executive editor – back to the Herald, after which he became executive editor of the Boston Globe (immortalized in the movie Spotlight), and finally the executive editor of the Washington Post. Kendi is 40; Baron, a generation older, is 68. Read more »

At the train station in Freienfeld, South Tyrol.

by Derek Neal

According to my father, David Mamet once said that his scripts are about “men in confined space.” I have been unable to verify this quote, but if you look on the internet, there’s an awful lot of writing about Mamet and “confined space.” In particular, I suspect the origin of this apocryphal statement may be a review of American Buffalo by Roger Ebert, in which he mentions that Mamet’s play succeeds where the film fails because, on stage, the characters are “trapped in space and time,” while on the screen they seem “less confined.” It goes without saying that a film allows for greater movement of its characters than a play, but a movie can trap its characters if it chooses to, and this choice can be all the more effective because it’s a conscious one, not something imposed by circumstances. One film that makes this choice is Living, which I saw this past weekend.

The first scene of the film sees Mr. Wakeling, young and fresh faced, join his new colleagues on the platform of the local train station. They’re heading into London for the day’s work, and they, along with most everyone else on the platform, are dressed in suit, tie, and jacket. It’s 1953. Because it’s Mr. Wakeling’s first day, he’s unsure about what the appropriate etiquette is. He’s not at work yet, and he hasn’t met two of his new colleagues, although he does recognize a third from the interview. Should he go over and introduce himself? Should he avoid them, pretend he hasn’t noticed them standing there? He makes eye contact with the one he recognizes from the interview, who nods almost imperceptibly, granting him permission and entry into their group. Read more »

Kevin Beasley. Reunion.

More here, here, and here.

by R. Passov

My founding partner, Jennifer, is right. Eventually I’ll run out of tricks and have to to start teaching math. Still the tricks are fun and, actually, they do help. The trick I brought to Sonia’s 3rd grade class in North Hampton, MA. is – truth be told – one I found in a math book for kids: I draw strange symbols on the board, get the class to agree to a consistent interpretation for the symbols then arrange the symbols in patterns that, run against the pre-agreed upon interpretations, become sentences in English.

As a group got near to the end of a correct deciphering, their squeals gave them away. What a privilege to watch.

Sonia suggested I arrive at the beginning of the day to watch the class settle. Each of the 22 or so students had a brown paper bag. They scrambled over one another while digging through their bags, all of which contained the same items: something made of dough wrapped in cellophane, that looked like a hot dog and something else, also wrapped in cellophane that I was unable to assign to any particular food category. At least half the students unwrapped packages only to play with the contents.

After breakfast, Sonia brought the students to a carpet at the front of the class. While she sat off to the the side, she began the day’s instructions: “Jayden, it’s your turn to choose the greeting.”

Jayden chose a peace sign. “Ok,” said Sonia, “give your greeting to Drea.”  “Peace,” said Jayden. “Peace and happiness.”  

Sonia turned to Drea: “Give your greeting to Mikel.” And so it went, each student gleefully obeying as Sonia orchestrated one greeting then another. After the greetings, Sonia selected a student to be the crew leader. Mikel, a tall, skinny boy, walked over to artwork hanging on the inside of an open closet door. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

My favorite bookstore closed this month. Well, my favorite bookstore in Zurich, where I live. Also it hasn’t actually closed, it’s only changing hands. But Pile of Books, opened in 2007 by Daniel Nufer and run by him and his wife, Verena Nufer-Huber, until two weeks ago, has been such an expression of Dani’s character that it is hard to imagine the form it will take in his absence.

There have been other bookstores in my life, of greater or lesser importance to me depending on my phase of development. There was for instance the gift shop on Saint Catherine Street, in Montreal, the city of my birth, where my grandparents took me in the mid-1970s to pick out a Passover present (actually my ransom for finding the afikomen), and I, in an early gesture of perversity, chose a glossy album commemorating the Tutankhamun exhibition. Then there was Britnell’s, at Yonge and Bloor in Toronto, the city in which I came of age following our move from Quebec in the wake of the Révolution tranquille—a shop now long gone but in the late 1970s an invitingly Dickensian emporium, and the site of my first agonized Christmas gift-buying with an embryonic disposable income. Later, after my departure from Canada, there was Micawber Books, the explicitly Dickensian shop in Nassau Street, in Princeton, New Jersey, where I had my copy of Time’s Arrow signed by its author, Martin Amis, who was in town to give a coruscating talk on American socio-politics and to reminisce about his childhood on campus when his father lectured at Princeton in the 1950s. Read more »

The day after the parade in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Bill Benzon

I became hooked on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in the Spring of 1969, my last semester as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Three years later “Kubla Khan” had become the standard against which I measured my understanding of the human mind. That is why I am about to tell a story about how my interest in the mind has evolved through “Kubla Khan” to include, most recently, ChatGPT. Strange as it may seem, that poem is the vehicle through which I am coming to terms with this new technology and arriving at a sense of its potential.

There is a sense in which the story of that great poem can be traced back to the 11th century invasion of Britain by the Norman French, for that’s what gave rise to the English language. Some centuries later that story encountered a tale born of an encounter between an Italian merchant, Marco Polo, and a Mongolian warlord, Kubla Khan, which, when enlivened by the East India Company’s trade in opium, set fire to the mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We need not trace that trajectory in any detail. I mention it only to give a sense of the scope of this 54-line poem, which is one of the best-known poems in the English language, and is perhaps unique in the annals of Western literature. It has made its mark on popular culture, from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, where it names Kane’s estate, Xanadu, thereby establishing the matrix for the whole film, to a hit song and film by Olivia Newton-John, Xanadu, and even provided that most vulgar of real-estate barons, Donald Trump, with the name for the nightclub, Xanadu, in his now defunct Atlantic City casino. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Zambia is home to a near-blind species of Ansell’s mole-rats that can sense magnetic fields with their eyes. It is part home to the world’s largest artificial lake by volume, and home to the world’s largest curtain of falling water. But that’s not why I want to go to Zambia. I want to go to Zambia because it is at the far end of an eighteen hundred kilometer railway halfway across the middle of Africa called the Mukuba Express, leaving every Friday from Dar es Salaam.

Neither a luxury Rovos Rail-type train for well-heeled retirees, nor a people-on-top desperation ride, the Mukuba Express is what I understand to be an ordinary, working means of transport African style, chugging across the Tanzanian plain from the coast and into the Zambian hills, offering third, second and first classes, restaurant cars between classes and a bar car.

If similar experience holds, the Mukuba Express will set out across the savannah triumphant and hopeful, restaurants and lounge bursting with goodwill and chilled beverages. The goodwill will remain as the cold boxes lose their vigor, their contents seeking room temperature. This has yet to be seen and will be reported further, but I believe it to be likely true.

This is a Tazara train, “ta” as in Tanzania, “za” as in Zambia “ra” as in railway, run by the Tanzania-Zambia Railway authority. The express route approaches 42 hours if the trains run on time, which they do not. The ordinary service “stops at every serviceable railway station in the respective regions of Tanzania and Zambia” and takes about two days. Read more »

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt is best known for his article-turned-manuscript On Bullshit, in which he distinguishes between lying and bullshitting. Most of us are raised to condemn liars more than bullshit artists, but Frankfurt makes the claim that we’ve all got it backwards. His argument is philosophical, rather than scientific, which means observable evidence is hard to come by, but recent political events have filled the gap.

Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson regularly makes the news as a provocateur, but during the last couple of weeks, he has found himself IN the news. A major mouthpiece supporting Donald Trump before, during, and after his presidency, Carlson sent problematic text messages that became public during the libel case initiated by Dominion Voting Systems. Stories about his texts have dominated a few news cycles.

Carlson’s texts were problematic for two reasons. First, Carlson had been one of the primary voices pushing “the big lie” that the election of Joe Biden was the result of fraud. His texts revealed that Carlson knew the lie was a lie, even as he claimed it wasn’t on air. He was intentionally seeking to undermine a free and fair election in order to play a part in a conspiracy designed to install an unelected leader in the White House.

Second, Carlson’s texts revealed that while he was lying on air in support of Trump’s attempt to subvert democracy, he was secretly telling confidants he hated Trump passionately and thought he was a poor President. “That’s the last four years,” he wrote. “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

Because of Carlson’s role as a leading Trump apologist, House Speaker Kevn McCarthy gave him exclusive access to thousands of hours of video of the January 6th insurrection. Carlson used that access to create a propaganda report, cherry-picking calm moments from the insurrection to mislead viewers about what actually happened on January 6th. His effort to soft-pedal the attack was so extreme that even Republican senators condemned it. Kevin Kramer from North Dakota called Carlson’s piece a lie, but North Carolina’s Thom Tillis called it bullshit. Which was it, though, really? Read more »

Betta Than Meta

Here’s an idea:
in FB scroll down at say
a post a second —keep on keeping on
(maybe Meta’s your thing)
find your groove, lose yourself
in avatars and memes,
get a timely sense of your milieu,
what you’re enmeshed in now, good or ill,
a scroll of streaming truth, or not, soundless,
unless you hum a track yourself; but not downbeat,
keep it up and light or you’ll fly off rails
it might be meditative,
but whateva,
considering the stakes,
there must be something betta
than Meta

Jim Culleny, © 5/26/16