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.

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

Back in 2018, police raids shut down some New Orleans strip clubs in the famed French Quarter for alleged drug and sex trafficking. In the aftermath, several venues closed for good even though there were no arrests for sex trafficking. In an op-ed, dancer and activist Reese Piper argued that rather than being trafficking victims, most dancers were there by choice and sought greater legal protections for their profession. Rather than making arrests for trafficking, the NOLA police made arrests for prostitution, which they conflated with trafficking. But many sex work activists opposed this characterization of both prostitution and stripping. In her article at The Appeal from 2018, Melissa Gira Grant described how the city proposed changes, such as capping the number of clubs allowed in the French Quarter. Such measures failed because of a protest led by the dancers from the raided clubs. Many connected these raids to the gentrification sweeping the city since hurricane Katrina in 2005, recently described by Joseph Chanoff. As in many other American cities, working class residents, especially people of color, are being priced out of their communities in the wake of Katrina. Many fear that the nature of the city will change, making it a simulacra of itself, an image of New Orleanian culture rather than the thing itself. But what does it mean to change a culture by “sanitizing” it? What about pricing out one community in favor of another? Does revitalization always mean driving out the things that make a local culture unique for a tourist-focused commodified version? What sort of world-view does gentrification create? Making cities safer and more livable should be a priority, but not at the expense of some people in favor of others as Chanoff argued. Read more »

Self-portrait in a passing train window at the Munich East train station in February, 2022.

by David J. Lobina

A testy title for an article about James Joyce in this centenary year of the publication of Ulysses, but all the more pertinent for that, especially in the context of this series on Language and Thought (and I don’t really mean that he was wrong, actually). After all, last month I brought up the role of “talking to ourselves” in reasoning and decision-making – to think – and the narrative technique of interior monologue, amply used in Ulysses, is precisely meant to depict the phenomenon I was dealing with – inner speech, in the parlance of philosophers and psychologists. Not to be confused with the stream-of-consciousness technique, though they are related, the interior-monologue technique is a linguistic rendering of a character’s thoughts, whereas a stream of consciousness may include the character’s perceptions and impressions (visual, aural, what have you) in addition to their inner speech, and it typically comes from the pen of a narrator rather than directly from the mind of a character as is the case in inner speech.[i]

As a case in point:

—Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?

Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?

—Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering.

At first sight the presence of interior monologue in this exchange (signposted by my italics, here and henceforth), as imagined by Joyce in the Ulysses, seems a plausible rendering of the thoughts Stephen Dedalus was having at the time. Is it psychologically plausible, though? I don’t mean whether Stephen was really having such thoughts – he did, Joyce wrote so. What I mean is whether Stephen was actually verbalising these thoughts to himself in inner speech as he was having them. Read more »

Lenin in the Presence of God

A trans creation after Iqbal, by Rafiq Kathwari

God
Aha! Comrade Ulyanov—
Welcome! Or I should say,
Dobro Pozhalovat!

Lenin
You’re alive? But “God is dead,” they said.

God
I inhabit men’s heart: passion’s home,
and for a moment
my angels swayed to your tune.

Lenin
So, this is the source of the babble in churches.

God
Command and Control.
Shock and Awe.
@NoGodButGod

Lenin
I need a drink…

God
Heaven is not your local pub,
but we’ve a house white on tap:
Water of Life. Glass or Goblet?

Lenin
Shot glass. Neat.

God
Think of it as Korsvodka.
Red blush on your cheeks—
it’s not rouge. Is it?

Lenin
‘Tis, but O All Knowing, when will the boat of capitalism sink? Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In both ISI and DSE there was one problem I faced in my research that was something I did not fully anticipate before. Some of the major international journals had a submission fee for research papers which was equivalent to something that would exhaust most of my Indian monthly salary. In the US authors mostly charged the fee to their research grants, which was not a way out for me. I once wrote about this to the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association (AEA), and suggested that for their journals they should have a lower rate for authors from low-income countries. I got a reply, saying that after careful consideration in their Committee meeting they had decided against my suggestion. Their rationale was a typical one for believers in perfect markets: since an article in an AEA journal was likely to raise significantly the expected lifetime earnings of an author, the latter should be able to finance it. (I visualized the dour face of an Indian public bank loan officer trying to comprehend this).

I also found out that using Indian micro-level data for a research paper in a mainstream American journal in those days was considered so exotic that more often than not the editors, even before reviewing the paper, would immediately suggest sending it instead to an Indian journal or at best a field journal. Read more »

by Emrys Westacott

Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is clearly a historically momentous event, already appearing to cause a seismic shift in the geopolitical landscape. What the long-term consequences will be are hard to say. The most obvious losers are the millions of Ukrainians–killed, injured, bereft, and displaced–who are the immediate victims of Putin’s onslaught. The most likely winner will probably be China, on whom Russia is suddenly much more economically dependent due to the sanctions imposed by the West, and who can therefore now expect Putin to dance to whatever tune it whistles.

The heroism of President Zerlensky and all the other Ukrainians willing to risk their lives in resisting the Russian military juggernaut is remarkable and inspiring. But exactly how countries who wish to support Ukraine should respond to what Putin has done is a question to which no-one has an entirely satisfactory answer.

Supplying the resistance with weapons and ammunition will make the war more costly to the Russian military. Confiscating or freezing the foreign assets of Russian oligarchs will “hurt” these people in limited ways (e.g. by messing up their foreign holiday plans). Economic sanctions will inflict considerable damage on the Russian economy, and the effects will be felt across the board, primarily, as is usually the case, by those who are not well off. Cultural sanctions, such as FIFA barring Russia from international soccer competitions, and universities cutting ties with academic institutions in Russia, will communicate to the Russian population the extent to which the country is isolated as a result of the invasion.

On moral grounds, all these measures are justified, even obligatory. But one also has to ask the pragmatic question: how are they supposed to work? That is, how might they lead to an end to the war–an end that consists of something other than a long -term Russian occupation or a Putin-propped puppet government? Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

The Ouvroir de Littérature  Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), Oulipo for short, is the name of a group of primarily French writers, mathematicians, and academics that explores the use of mathematical and quasi-mathematical techniques in literature. Don’t let this description scare you. The results are often amusing, strange, and thought-provoking.

The group, which was founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in Paris in 1960 and is still somewhat active, searches for novel literary structures that arise from the imposition of mathematical constraints and methods of systematically transforming texts. Theophile Gautier has written that the rigidity of the constraints ensures the durability of the work, whether in poetry, art, or sculpture. More graphically, Queneau described the group’s activity as “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”

Simple combinatorics plays a role in many of Oulipo’s efforts. Queneau’s 100 Trillion Sonnets is a prime example of its approach to literature. The work consists of just ten sonnets, one on each page of a ten-page booklet. (Note that the 14-line sonnet is itself a product of an artificial restriction.) The pages of the booklet are cut so that each of the 14 lines of the ten sonnets can be turned separately. Thus, we can combine any of the ten first lines with any of the ten second lines, which results in 10² or 100 different pairs of opening lines. Any of these 10² possibilities may in turn be combined with any of the ten third lines to yield 10³ or 1,000 possible sets of three lines. Iterating this procedure and utilizing the multiplication principle, we conclude that there are 10¹⁴ possible sonnets. Queneau claimed that they all made sense, although it’s safe to say that the claim will never be verified, since there are probably more texts in these 10¹⁴ different sonnets than in all the rest of the world’s literature. (His claim could, of course, be easily refuted.)

Incidentally, years ago I was inspired by 100 Trillion Sonnets to patent a variant of a Rubik cube that I called About Face. Each of the cube’s six sides pictured a face that remained a face when any of the sides were subjected to a certain class of rotations. The result was a gazillion possible mugshots. Alas, it never went anywhere. Read more »