by David Kordahl

Physicists, as a tribe, are overwhelmingly likely to believe that smart extraterrestrials exist, and are also overwhelmingly likely to believe that they haven’t visited Earth. I’m considered a bit of a kook by my physicist friends because I harbor genuine confusion on this point. I want to believe, but I also want unambiguous evidence—which unfortunately leaves me as a reluctant agnostic. Yet despite my self-consciously atypical attitude, this doesn’t stop me from talking with my physicist friends about alien possibilities. After all, even physicists who have decided that science fiction-type ETs don’t exist will often still let them creep into thought experiments. The alien thought experiment I’m most interested in, the one I won’t shut up about, involves a simple question. Suppose that the aliens were to land on our lawn. How much would they know about physics?

This question reveals a split that’s more fundamental than anything about aliens per se. It probes whether science lets us in on universal truths, and whether we can expect these truths to be universally accepted. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Island Pond Algae, Upstate NY. July 26, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani

‘To be a woman is to be an actress’, writes Susan Sontag in her 1972 essay The Double Standards of Ageing. She is referring to the beauty norms that expect women to freeze ageing while levying no such expectations on men. As the popular saying goes, men become wiser with age while women become older; men being judged by their maturity while women through their bodies. Beauty is often associated with the young and so these pressures of eternal youth trap our subconscious in unrealistic standards of attractiveness. Performing to a biased audience, women become objects of their own calling for as Sontag writes, ‘From early childhood on, girls are trained to care in a pathologically exaggerated way about their appearance’. She wrote this nearly 50 years ago. Since then, there has been a lot of consciousness-raising debates about these reductive attitudes, and nowadays you would be hard pressed to find someone who would admit to the pressures of ‘youthful preservation’.  They call it ‘selfcare’, instead. But is it really?

I’ve always been suspicious of dressing up to please others but I’m even more skeptical of dressing up for myself. Despite all the consciousness-raising feminist movements that made us aware of women’s history of objectification, the fact remains that prior to the pandemic many of us still spent a lot of time and money on beautifying ourselves according to societal standards. Only this time the capitalists were selling it to us as ‘selfcare’ and ‘wellbeing’.  The pandemic has made us rethink how beauty and youth have been rebranded as ‘selfcare’ while still pandering to the imaginary audience that makes being a woman a performance. Much along the lines of Sheryl Sandberg’s neoliberal ‘Lean in’ feminism which tells women to take responsibility for their marginalization, the new beauty standards tell us to look good ‘for ourselves’. In other words, looking good is for our own good. Read more »

by Paul Orlando

I’ve been exploring ways that tech innovation could lead to inevitable outcomes. Here’s a continuation of that, specific to the enduring human need for music.

Music has been around as long as there have been people. Longer if you count music made by animals. It’s safe to say that music will be a part of this world  as long as there is life. So what happens when new technology encounters an eternal constant for humans?

Demand for something like music is built into what it means to be human. Music related tech development (especially if it is more about improvements rather than step changes) can be somewhat predictable. I use the term inevitable because we’re combining enduring human needs with forces that are largely about laws of physics applied to manufacturing. Supporting business models form.

Early Tech

Let’s look at some of the changes over the 20th century of the music industry. Treat this as a thought experiment on applying second-order thinking.

If you were born in 1900, in the early years of the recording industry, it’s likely that all of the music you heard growing up would be live music. An informal local band, or a more formal chamber orchestra, or singing in the home. You also would have been a child when Enrico Caruso recorded these versions of “Vesti la Giubba,” from the opera Pagliacci (which premiered in 1892).

Enrico Caruso – Vesti la Giubbia, first decade of 1900s

Caruso was one of the first international stars, both because he was a great tenor and also because his career coincided with the development of the early recording industry. His combined “Vesti la Giubba,” recordings are counted as the first million unit record sale in the US. (A bigger deal back then with one-quarter of today’s population and less disposable income.) Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Anitra Pavlico

As we wait for life in this era to regain a sense of normalcy and rationality, we take refuge in other eras. There is a severe shortage of contemporary human activities–art-making, conversation, building things. The past becomes closer and larger. The future has shrunk and become clouded, even dark. We have nowhere to go but back, but the past is likewise little comfort, partly because five months ago feels like five decades ago–quaint, old-fashioned, hopelessly out of touch.

The themes of time, memory, and collective humanity in Albert Camus’s The Plague have preoccupied me lately. The Algerian town of Oran is cut off from the rest of the world in an attempt to contain the pestilence that has taken hold there. 

But the plague forced inactivity on them, limiting their movements to the same dull round inside the town, and throwing them, day after that, on the illusive solace of their memories. . . . they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.

It is difficult to tell whether time for us has slowed to a near-stop or has sped up. We have less variety in our days, and yet there are times when the hours race by and we haven’t accomplished a fraction of what we set out to do that day. It is more likely that we have slowed down, dulled by inaction to insipidity, than that time has accelerated, but the result is the same: nothing results. As Camus writes: Those who had jobs went about them at the exact tempo of the plague, with dreary perseverance. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

In high school, I attended a “debate camp” at a small university in southeastern Missouri. I was thrilled to visit my first college bookstore while there and I bought a cheap, slender volume out of the remainders bin called “Parables and Paradoxes”. It was written by Franz Kafka. I am embarrassed to say that I recognized the name only because I was a big fan of the stories of Jorge Luis Borges and he mentioned Kafka here and there. In one essay, for example, Borges used Kafka to illustrate how great writers rewrite the works of their own precursors. Surveying a disparate collection of works, Borges says that “Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist.”

The difference between Kafka and Borges that struck me almost immediately was that despite the labyrinthine, elliptical, and self-referential character of Borges’ stories it always seemed more or less clear to me what they meant; whereas Kafka’s stories seemed clearly to mean something, but it was never clear to me exactly what. What is the meaning of that hideous machine that writes on human flesh, the secret trial where Joseph K. is never charged but loses his life, of Gregor Samson transformed into a gigantic bug? The very elusiveness of meaning in Kafka intensifies the search for it.

It’s not just me. Psychologists asked subjects to read either “The Country Dentist” by Kafka or a rewritten version that changed all the weird, unexplained bits. Subjects who read the Kafka story were better able to spot hidden patterns in rows of letters afterwards than those who read the “normalized” version. The experimenters theorize that encountering the unexpected can increase people’s ability to creatively search for meaning. They call it “The Kafka Effect”. Read more »

Wild martagon lilies growing in a forest near Fane Alm in the South Tyrol in July of 2020.

by Adele Wilby

Nothing focuses minds like grave events that bring about severe disruption to everyday living. Over recent times, two major happenings, one with global and the other with more regional implications, have jolted people out of their complacency and compelled some reflection on unpredictability and uncertainty in life, and what is going on around us.

Firstly, the coronavirus pandemic has concentrated governments and the people throughout the world on measures to control this previously unknown deadly virus that has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and infected more than double that amount in the process. The ‘lockdown’ of entire populations in a bid to starve the virus of hosts for its reproduction has been the key strategy adopted by many governments in dealing with this lethal viral infection. People have stayed at home, ‘lock-downed’, and travelling has been brought to a halt. ‘High’ and ‘low’ and all those in between have had to garner themselves for tough times behind closed doors, cutting themselves off from loved ones and friends as the most effective strategy of containment of the lethal potential of this minute protein invisible to the human eye.

The second issue that has jolted the thinking of many people across the globe, particularly the western liberal world, stems from the recent murder of an innocent black man, George Floyd, by the police in Minneapolis, in the United States (US).  The video of this man being viciously and callously murdered by a white police officer as he pleaded for his breath has appeared in all forms of social media throughout the world, sparking widespread abhorrence, condemnation, anger, and for many, utter rage. The image of the US as a liberal, just society with solid institutions based on equality and fairness has been shaken, perhaps irreparably shattered. Tragically, this is not the first incident of police officers killing black men in the US, but it is an incident that proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back and set off widespread protests across the US and in many other countries in sympathy and solidarity with the US protestors. The murder and subsequent protests have placed racism more generally and institutionalised racism in the United States once again to the fore, elevating it to one of the hottest topics in US politics today. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

Many social commentators in the claustrophobic gloom of their self-isolation have shown a tendency to write in somewhat feverish apocalyptic terms about the near future. Some of them expect the pre-existing dysfunctionalities of social and political institutions to accelerate in the post-pandemic world and anticipate our going down a vicious spiral. Others are a bit more hopeful in envisaging a world where the corona crisis will make people wake up to the deep fault lines it has revealed and try to mend things toward a better world. Some others take an intermediate position of what is called upbeat cynicism: hold out for things to be better but guess that will not happen (somewhat akin to Antonio Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”).

Some have turned to literary narratives of pestilence of one form or another, to make sense of what is happening around us, and referred to the novel by Camus on the plague in the Algerian city of Oran, to the play by Ionesco on the strange disease of humans turning into rhinoceros in a small French village, to the novel by Saramago on a mass epidemic of blindness in an unnamed city with a heavy-handed government, and to the more recent Book of M by Peng Shepherd, where the infected find that they cast no shadow and soon lose their memory, etc.. These are all narratives of human frailty and social breakdown, but also of human resilience as in the portrayal of the respective doctors in the novels of Camus and Saramago. (The narratives of Camus and Ionesco have also been interpreted as analogies for the reactions of ordinary people in the creeping Fascism of occupied France).

In this article we shall look at the prospects of social democracy in the post-pandemic world, at the strengthening or weakening of pre-existing tendencies in this respect, and at new elements, circumstances and challenges. Our attempt should be seen as neither a straight-forward prediction, nor just a matter of wishful thinking, more a clear-eyed analysis of constraints and opportunities that social democrats are likely to face or have to be prepared for. Read more »

Petrit Halilaj. Poisoned By Men In Need of Some Love (Ana platyrhynchos), 2013.

More here and here.

by Mike O’Brien

One of the greatest joys of my graduate studies was reading primary sources in full, rather than a mishmash of summaries and excerpts. I could have done this prior to graduate school, but I didn’t, because I was lazy.

(I am still lazy.)

Having to read and re-read the works of authors, in the presentation in which they chose to be received, created a more personal relationship with them. “Personal” meaning, in its literal root sense, pertaining to that which speaks for itself. Rather than dragging the thinker, by means of citations, onto a panel of experts marshalled together for some inquiry, reading all the words, in the order intended, allows the thinker to express themselves as they willed. One has the sense of reading someone rather than just something, and one can posit a mind that understood things in its own way. Getting to know a mind thus, a reader can even guess how a writer might have understood things that are not explicitly mentioned in their work.

One of the misfortunes that befalls great thinkers is that they are cited vastly more often than they are read, and when read are not understood on their own terms because of the frame in which they are presented. When the thinker is someone whom I have read in depth, this can be offensive in the same way that hearing untruths about a friend is offensive. The mistaken claims need not be slanderous or abusive; the mere fact that they have gotten your dear friend wrong is objectionable in itself. But if one has famous friends, one can’t expect every person who speaks of them to know them beyond a public persona. And so one has to distinguish between, for example, discussions about Mark Twain and discussions about Samuel Clemens. (I am not friends with Samuel Clemens, but I like to think we’d get along). Read more »

by Callum Watts

The debacle around the development of the UK coronavirus contact tracing app has got me thinking about the role of technology and startup style businesses in addressing large scale social problems. The UK government’s shambolic app release, pursued at the expense of tried and tested human contact tracing, is an example of a larger trend of using technology led approaches to solve social and political problems.

In the US we see it in the enthusiasm with which Trump asked tech luminaries such as Peter Thiel to become key advisors to his government. In the UK we see a similar obsession with “startup land”, where Dominic Cummings has been attempting to hire developers, data scientists and ‘misfits’ into the civil service, apparently inspired by technology startups. Whilst software businesses have led to some incredible ideas that solve individual problems, I’m sceptical of the potential for these organisations to do anything truly radical when it comes to the societal level issues faced by governments. 

There is a double irony here. First, in spite of all their vaunted innovations, the superstar ‘social’ media companies have struggled to match their commercial impact with positive social impact. Secondly, the startups that are so often described with the language of revolution are largely ignorant of the history of true social revolutions. They are culturally disconnected from the reality of the social problems they are being asked to fix. Furthermore the politicians who are so enthusiastic about the potential of technology have a poor understanding of the scope of problems that it can actually solve. It is not difficult to see why this union is likely to end in disappointment for both parties. Read more »

by N. Gabriel Martin

The pandemic has increased our awareness of the moral significance of our day to day habits. While there have always been moral perfectionists who agonise over every choice and action, most of us tended to draw a line under our day to day habits, taking them for granted and reserving moral scrutiny for the extraordinary.

It’s not that eating out, buying chocolate, or going to a party were ever devoid of all moral significance—it was always possible to scrutinise, for example, the labour practices under which chocolate was grown, or the environmental impact of packaging—it just didn’t seem obligatory. Even though we might have known that the choice to buy a chocolate bar had moral significance, we were, for the most part, used to ignoring it. To do otherwise was a lifestyle choice, and not a necessity. That has changed with the coronavirus. Suddenly, we have had to examine—in our own consciences, with our families, and on social media—the choices we used to take for granted.

The pandemic brought moral considerations home to us, into our lives. We can no longer draw a sharp line between obviously immoral actions—spousal betrayal or shoplifting, for example—and the everyday, morally ambiguous ones that we were not used to subjecting to scrutiny. For any one person, visiting a friend, going to a café, or taking a train are not activities that are more likely than not to cause harm to anyone (even now), but if we all carry on with these activities then people will suffer and die and our public health systems will become overwhelmed. As a result, we are now confronted with the moral seriousness of the choices we used to take for granted. Read more »