by Joseph Shieber

January 1 was Public Domain Day. One of the pleasures of the day is stumbling upon hidden gems as the collective wisdom of the internet – yes, there still is such a phenomenon, if one knows where to look! – unearths them.

That’s how I came upon this passage from Wittgenstein’s Blue Book – a passage that I must have read previously many times, but one that hadn’t struck me until seeing it out of context like this, in Berfrois under the heading, “Ludwig Wittgenstein arranges books”:

Imagine we had to arrange the books of a library. When we begin the books lie higgledy-piggledy on the floor. Now there would be many ways of sorting them and putting them in their places. One would be to take the books one by one and put each on the shelf in its right place. On the other hand we might take up several books from the floor and put them in a row on a shelf, merely in order to indicate that these books ought to go together in this order. In the course of arranging the library this whole row of books will have to change its place. But it would be wrong to say that therefore putting them together on a shelf was no step towards the final result. In this case, in fact, it is pretty obvious that having put together books which belong together was a definite achievement, even though the whole row of them had to be shifted. But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.—The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know. E.g., to see that when we have put two books together in their right order we have not thereby put them in their final places.

The immediate point of the passage is that, if you set about to arrange a disordered collection of books, it is very unlikely that you would search first through all of the books, until you found the book that occupies the first position on the first row of the first shelf, place it at its location, and then go back to the piles and find the book that occupies the second position on the first row of the first shelf, place it next to the first book, and so on.

Rather, what you would likely do, even if you began initially with the first position on the first row of the first shelf, would be to put books that belong together in a row on one of the shelves – somewhere in the middle, say – knowing that, although the books will remain together, they will likely wind up together somewhere else in the overall arrangement of bookshelves. Read more »

Sughra Raza. First Snow 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Emrys Westacott

On the anniversary of the attempt by Donald Trump and some of his supporters to subvert the 2020 US presidential election, Joe Biden denounced those who “place a dagger at the throat of democracy.” To which one can only say: About bloody time! The threat posed by Trump and the Republican party to America’s democratic institutions–highly imperfect though they are–is so obvious that anyone who has a bully pulpit should be pounding out a warning at every opportunity.
Regarding the current situation, one can identify three main issues:

• The historical and legal roots of the problem
• The nature and causes of the current crisis
• The best strategies available to protect and, ideally, extend, existing democratic norms.

On each of these, whole books could be and have been written.

The roots of the problem

The existing political system is seriously flawed in many ways. The method of electing a president through the electoral college means that the will of the majority can be overridden (as it was in 2016 when Hilary Clinton received 3 million more votes than Donald Trump). It also means that only a few swing states receive any attention from presidential candidates. In the majority of states, where the presidential vote is a foregone conclusion, voters know that their vote won’t be added to the grand total.

Ironically, the electoral college was established because the founding fathers didn’t trust the good sense of the people. They feared the prospect of tyranny emerging in just the way Plato describes in the Republic: a demagogue arises who, by misinforming and misleading the people, hoodwinks them into electing him to office, whereupon he proceeds to entrench himself in power. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

A large number of jobs exist not because they create economic value but because they make business sense given the institutions we have – customer expectations, bureaucratic regulations, and so on. They do not solve a real problem but a fake problem created by inefficient institutions. They therefore do not make our society better off but rather they represent a great cost to society – of many people’s time being expended on something fundamentally pointless instead of something worthwhile. One way of spotting such anti-jobs is to compare staffing in the same industry across different countries. US supermarkets employ people just to greet customers and bag groceries, for example, which would seem a ridiculous waste of time in most of the world. In Japan one can find people standing in front of road construction waving a flag (they are replaced with mechanical manikins on nights and weekends).

Another way to spot anti-jobs is to to observe the effects of Covid restrictions and look for areas where removing workers or tasks made no impact on performance, or even improved it. Take waiters. In America there are around 2 million people doing this job (1.4% of all employment). The experience of Covid lockdowns shows that much of what waiters do can be done better by pasting a QR code to tables for customers to scan to visit the menu webpage and order and pay directly. Having learned this, it would be ridiculous to go back to employing people to waste their time and their customers’ by doing such fundamentally needless work. We still need some waiters to bring the food and drink we ordered (for now), but we don’t need nearly as many because we don’t need to employ people to ask us what we want and then tell someone else to make it. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Dick Edelstein

In this last of four essays on historical memory, I consider some of the guises under which this topic arises in Spain, the conflicts that exist between the need to remember and the need to forget, and those that crop up when different groups appeal to the right to remember. I previously discussed the issue of public access to archival data on Spanish Civil War casualties and victims. For two decades Spain has been on the leading edge of a wave of concern over historical memory: how social groups and nations construct and identify with particular narratives about historical periods or events.

Following Franco’s death, the main Spanish political parties negotiated the Pacto del Olvido, an agreement that was formalized in the Ley de Amnistía, which freed political prisoners but also protected those who had committed crimes during the Civil War and the subsequent Francoist regime. In 2007, the Ley de Memoria Histórica provided a new legal framework for investigating the human rights violations that fell under the amnesty and for identifying individuals buried in unmarked mass graves. Some conservatives considered that this legislation violated the spirit of the earlier pact.

The governing Spanish Socialist Party is now providing funding for the activities covered by the Ley de Memoria Histórica, which had been blocked since 2011 by the right-wing Partido Popular. The government is also drafting a more ambitious act to deal with the legacy of the Civil War and the dictatorship. Its objectives include funding the exhumation and DNA identification of casualties and victims, investigating past crimes, and educating children about the Civil War. Read more »

by Derek Neal

It’s the time of year end lists: Best Movies of 2021, Best TV Shows, Best Fiction. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen many movies that came out this past year, haven’t streamed many TV shows, haven’t read many books. I’m not saying I haven’t seen any movies, or watched any shows, or read any books—I have—just not many that were released this year, 2021. But really, outside of reviewers and critics, has anyone? The phenomenon of year end lists seems to me to be much more of a marketing and business endeavor than one based on actual artistic merit. And how can one keep up? There’s simply too much stuff out there, and I’ll never have the time to read and watch everything I’d like. The number of unread books on my shelf is rising, and I keep buying more. I don’t have much to say about this year, 2021, but a more interesting question to ask would be, “What’s the best of your 2021?” Not what was made this year, but what you discovered this year.

For me, I went on a New York mob movie kick—Carlito’s Way, Donnie Brasco, King of New York—that splintered out into other films like Jackie Brown, American Psycho, and L.A. Confidential. I read, mainly, books I picked up at used bookstores and used books sales on front lawns. I’ve found that the best way to alleviate an ever–increasing stack of books is not to make a list or plan but to walk into a store, or sale, and buy a book in a serendipitous fashion—maybe it’s an author you’ve been meaning to read but have never gotten around to, maybe the cover is interesting, or maybe you read the first page and are hooked. This works for me, as I can buy the book and read it right away. The trouble is buying just one book. Read more »

Water freezing on a chain link fence near Mittewald, South Tyrol.

by N. Gabriel Martin

What did my friend mean when he told me that there was no such thing as a seagull? He didn’t mean that the aggressive bird that had stolen my chips didn’t exist, nor did he mean that it was something else, not a seagull. He meant that “seagull” isn’t the right word.

He went on to explain that there is no particular species called a seagull. What stole my chips on Brighton beach was a herring gull, which is different from the glaucous-winged gull I’d seen going after fries in Vancouver and the silver gulls that harass picknickers in Sydney.

Okay, fine. But he had no right to correct me. It was a seagull after all. Calling it a herring gull or even Larus argentatus would be no more or less correct than calling it what I’d called it. It wouldn’t even be any more precise.

He was insisting on a distinction that may well be significant for scientific purposes, but which may have obscured the perfectly true things I want to talk about when I talk about nuisance seabirds. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

At ISI we were assigned statistical assistants who’d take our large data analysis jobs to the IBM computer at the Planning Commission, but for relatively small jobs they’d do the calculations themselves by furiously rotating the handles of the small Facit mechanical calculator they each had, you could literally hear the noise of ‘data crunching’. This was before electronic desk calculators came to Indian institutions. I remember buying a small Texas Instruments calculator in a short trip abroad and was quite impressed by its capacity; and I told TN that I did not need to learn the operation of Facit machines, which I saw him cranking all the time. (This reminds me of a British economist, Ivor Pearce, who told me that just before the War he used to work for an accounting firm where they had not yet heard of log tables; he said he finished the whole day’s work in just an hour by using the log table and read books in his office the rest of the time). Of course, I am told today our tiny laptops/smartphones contain computing capacity million times larger than the biggest IBM machines in India at that time.

The statistical assistants at ISI were literally called ‘computers’ (I was a bit taken aback when on the first day a man came to see me and said “I am your computer, sir”). One day when I was chatting with this human ‘computer’, he said some years back he had worked with a foreign professor who was rather short-tempered and used to scream at him for the slightest delay or lapse. (It so happened that I knew this professor). I said he should have protested if the professor was unnecessarily rude. He gave me a sneaky smile and said that he and other ‘computers’ had taken their ‘revenge’ on that guy. When I asked how, he said they used to mess up his calculations without the professor knowing about it. I was aghast (and also made a mental note not to trust his data analysis of that period). This was an example of what Jim Scott, the political scientist, has called ‘weapons of the weak’ in his eponymous book; many decades earlier the famous Czech novel ‘Good Soldier Švejk’ had satirical accounts of passive-subversive resistance of military authorities by the soldier. Read more »

Uroboros

new year, end day of a beginning,
two limits of an endless rope,
sunup/sundown, the day we split infinity
that lazy 8 napping on its side as time goes by,
the day we draw a deep breath
in belief that its undulant line may really be broken
regardless of the will of a universe to ever be
unsplittable in the extent of its being,
as if a year arbitrarily set to solar cycles
marks anything but a wish to apply human order
to a thing as opaque but terse as a snake biting its tail,
yet it can be done, and is
in love    by love

Jim Culleny
1/2/2022

by Rafaël Newman

Beginnings are a theme for sages,
For adepts of our Golden Ages:
When the victuals were prodigious,
And division un-litigious—
Since the stores, in their abundance,
Rendered striving a redundance;
Why in gardens Paradisal
Our ancestors scorned reprisal
As they supped upon the flower
That was bounty, boon, and bower;
How dread Rome was born from zero
When a hapless, vagrant hero
Laid the fundaments imperial,
Having shunned the charms venereal
Of a likewise diasporic
Queen of Carthage, prehistoric;
That the very Earth we tread on,
Raise our children, earn our bread on,
Once was spoken into being
By a deity all-seeing,
Whose division was prodigious—
Not, however, un-litigious. Read more »

by R. Passov

Eldon Hall spent the first seven years of his life climbing hills alongside Oregon’s Snake River, trailed by a faithful Shepard dog. He and his father “…went fishing in the mountains…” and “… slept outdoors while his mother, safely residing at home, worried about the poisonous snakes that might bite [them.]” In 1926, when Eldon was seven, his father passed. If not for that, Eldon would have carried on farming alongside the banks of the Snake.

Unable to hold onto the farm, Eldon’s mother took her three children across the river to Paytte, Idaho. There she married a subsistence farmer. While Eldon was tempered working as a farmhand, she held his dream of getting an education.

The day before Pearl Harbor, Eldon defied the odds by enrolling at the University of Washington. The war dried up funding. On the verge of dropping out, he joined the ROTC. In 1943 he was called to active duty. The few college credits he brought along gained entry into a newly formed “Army Specialized Training Program” that led to City College, NY where his days were “…filled with lectures, testing, military instruction, calisthenics, and some free time to tour the Big Apple.”

After 18 months he was sent across another river to Rutgers University to begin a “training program” in electrical engineering. Of the two hundred or so men who started the program, 65 finished. The top four graduates joined the Manhattan Project. Eldon graduated in 5th position. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Rainy Reflection Self-portrait for 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Eric J. Weiner

January, 2022. East End, Long Island, NY. It’s getting colder. I just recovered from a bout with COVID. I am sitting around the fire pit sipping tequila, drinking homemade bone broth from a mug, and watching lists of very important dead people, ripped from various newspapers and magazines, burn in the fire. Life is good.

It is curious to me that the ending of each calendar year should signal the production of these lists. Against the backdrop of so much death from COVID in 2021, they are exclusively brief and, in the Marcusian sense, one-dimensional. Commodify your nostalgia: the bad and ugly exchanged whole cloth for the good. Death as salve, all is forgiven or, at the least, quickly forgotten. Beck got it right: “Time is a piece of wax falling on a termite/Who’s choking on the splinters.” No one gets out alive. But for those of us who are teachers, the lessons we learned from our dead brothers and sisters, those intimates who have touched and transformed our lives in deep and meaningful ways, can be reanimated through our teaching.

From the pedagogical perspective, the lexicon of death is not about lore, myth-making, or some other practice of forgetting. Rather, it suggests a critical practice of recognition that is concerned with how they lived their lives; how they taught their own students; how they treated their colleagues; the way they represented their work; the way they situated themselves within and beyond the university and school; the way laughter informed their interactions; and the seriousness by which they undertook their various social/political/educational projects. Read more »