by Sarah Firisen

Many years ago, I returned to my old high school for a visit with friends who were classmates back in the ’80s. Exploring the school and marveling over what had changed and what remained exactly the same, we ventured into the language lab. The room smelled exactly the same as it had in 1983, and it took me right back to those days of incredibly boring language lessons and sitting in that room with headphones on repeating monotonous phrases. 

I took French for seven years in middle and high school, Latin for five, and German for two. Language classes were always my educational Achilles heel. Those seven years enabled me to speak the most halting, grammatically painful, badly accented French when we visited on vacation, and I’ve always wished I spoke it better. 

I’m now planning to visit Paris in January with my daughters, Sasha, 18, Anya, 21, and Anya’s boyfriend, Liam. Growing up in the U.S., they all learned Spanish in school rather than the de rigor in the UK, French. My daughters never showed much more linguistic aptitude than I did in school. In preparation for our trip, Anya suggested that we all download Duolingo, a language learning app. Read more »

I went to the station in Brixen, South Tyrol, to pick up a friend who arrived from Venice on this train. Photo taken on November 9, 2021.

by Bill Murray

Cogito Ergo Sum? Welcome to the party. There’s a lot more going on out there than we sometimes think: Cephalopods memorize, learn, invent, and play; indeed, they acquire information about the outside world while still in their eggs. • The small, flowering thale, or mouse-ear cress, can detect the vibrations caused by caterpillars munching on it and so release oils and chemicals to repel the insects. • The fruit fly Drosophila shows evidence of depression if it gets too hot. • Plants discern the difference between blue and red light, and use this information to know which direction to grow. They differentiate between the dimming scarlet light of sunset and the brightening orange light of sunrise, to determine when to flower. • Pigs comprehend symbolic language, plan for the future and discern the intentions of others. They bore easily and show a clear preference for novelty. • When researchers arranged oat flakes in the geographical pattern of cities around Tokyo, slime mold constructed nutrient channeling tubes that closely mimicked Tokyo’s metro rail. • Some plants can feel you touching them. • Cuvier’s beaked whales can  dive to 10,000 feet and stay there, at tremendous pressure, for up to two hours. In 2020 scientists recorded a Cuvier’s beaked whale staying below the water for 3 hours 42 minutes. • The nearly blind star-nosed mole, the world’s fastest eater, can find and gobble down an insect or worm in a quarter of a second. It hunts by bopping its star against the soil as quickly as possible, touching 10 or 12 different places in a single second. • The 10 centimeter long cleaner wrasse, a reef fish, has joined great apes, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, Eurasian magpies and a particular Asian elephant in exhibiting self-awareness. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

ASC, “altered states of consciousness” – I don’t know when the term was first coined, but I became aware of it late in the 1960s. I took it as referring primarily to states of mind induced by psychoactive drugs, such as marijuana, mescaline, and LSD, and to states induced by meditative practice. It presupposes “ordinary consciousness,” which is hardly a single thing when you consider that one can ordinarily be daydreaming, working a math problem, eating a meal, perhaps a good meal, perhaps one that is merely tolerable, hiking in the woods, and so forth, for a long and various list of activities, all of them ordinary.

Music is one of those activities, one I treasure a great deal. I my experience states of musical consciousness can be quite various, some tending toward the ordinary other rather extraordinary. When I was eleven or twelve I read the this is Jean-Baptiste Arban’s Complete Conservatory Method for Trumpet, originally published in mid-nineteenth century France, and variously edited and reprinted since then. Arban is expressing his hopes for the instrument:

There are other things of so elevated and subtle a nature that neither speech nor writing can clearly explain them. They are felt, they are conceived, but they are not to be explained; and yet these things constitute the elevated style, the grande ecole, which it is my ambition to institute for the cornet, even as they already exist for singing and the various kinds of instruments.

What was he talking about? What does he mean by “grande ecole”? I doubt that I sought out an English translation. Whatever it was, it seemed important, albeit mysterious. Perhaps even, important because mysterious.

Does this grande ecole involve an altered state of consciousness?

Rock and Roll

During the early 1970s, while I was working on a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, I played with a rock band called St. Matthew Passion. We modeled ourselves on Blood, Sweat, and Tears and on Chicago, bands that blended elements of jazz with rock. Thus, in addition to a four-piece rhythm section (guitar, bass, keyboards, drums) we had three horns: sax, trumpet (me), and trombone. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

At MIT outside the Economics Department there was one scholar, whose several lectures I have attended was Noam Chomsky. I knew of him as a pioneer in modern linguistic theory, but his fame in the outside world is as America’s topmost dissenter (his position is somewhat like what used to be that of Bertrand Russell in Britain, a towering figure in his own subject philosophy, but his fame outside was that of Britain’s leading dissenter).

Chomsky in his lectures used to tirelessly blast the framework of American imperial policy, the capitalist military-industrial complex, the corporate-controlled media machinery for manufacturing consent, and the near-complete lack of control of common people over economic policy. I often agreed with the main thrust of his lectures, but the question that nagged me, but never could ask him in the surging crowd of his admirers around, was about the feasibility of the socio-political alternatives he might have in mind.

In some of his writings his constructive ideas seem close to old-style left-libertarian or anarcho-syndicalist views; in one place he describes his ideological position as revolving around “nourishing the libertarian and creative character of the human being”. What little I have read of this positive side of his ideological position has left me somewhat unconvinced; I have wondered if he has fully applied his mind to the various problems that arise in the real world beyond the anarchist or left-libertarian utopia. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

But even my teacher would admit that’s not much of an upside. Certainly, I was more motivated by the sticker you got for hitting 100 than the counting itself.

Another downside is that you can’t count to every number. If you need to count to sixteen, you can do it with twos, but not fives or tens. This is fixable, though. We just need to agree that 1 can be included when we count, regardless of how we are counting. Then counting by fives turns into 16 = 15 + 1 or 16 = 10 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. If it makes you feel better, you can think of 1 as a sort of degenerate two, five, and ten.

With 1 in hand, we can count to any number we like, so the question becomes what are the fewest numbers we could use? To count to seven using twos, you could do it as 7 = 1+1+1+1+1+1 or 7=4+1+1+1, but plainly 7=6+1 is the smallest sum that works.  But that question is still rather dull, to be honest. It seems counting is unavoidably boring.

Or is it?

I’m bummed my math education never got around to some of the interesting ways to count.

For example, how about the square numbers:

1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, ….?

The first question is if you can even use these to count. That is, can you get to any number you like by adding up squares? Sure. Since we have 1, we can always just count by ones. The real question is if we can do better. In 1770 Lagrange proved that every natural number (that is, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, …) can be written as a sum of four or fewer squares. For example, 14 = 9 + 4 + 1. In modern terms, we would state Lagrange’s theorem by saying that

w² + x² + y² + z²

is universal. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

A soft-spoken, self-effacing young man from Seoul may be the most listened-to living composer on the planet right now, with two blockbuster works of cinema and TV on his resumé. Not only did Jung Jaeil compose the score for the Oscar-winning Parasite, but his subsequent gig, Squid Game, has just stormed into the record books: Seen and heard by hundreds of millions by now, it has become a global phenomenon, another sign of South Korea’s approaching and encroaching hegemony over all things cultural.

Learning more about the elusive Mr. Jung is not as easy as it would seem, even if he’s all over YouTube and even if his English, if you can find it, is as elegant and formal as it is fluent: Thank you so very much, he said last week upon receiving a prize for Squid Game (that inserted ‘so’  a rarity of politesse). His Wikipedia entry is woefully thin, and mystery shrouds his early life. Most of his interviews are in Korean and not subtitled, including a Q&A on stage with Bong Joon-ho, director of Parasite, who discovered Jung Jaeil through a 2014 film Bong wrote and produced, Sea Fog (Haemoo).

As obscure as his biography may be, the task of placing this peripatetic music maker inside a category is even more daunting. From an astonishingly early age, as a quasi auto-didact, he has straddled the yawning divide between pop and classical, performing in a funk band while immersing himself in the Western canon. He wrote his first film music at 15, for an R-rated movie he wasn’t even old enough to see. It’s been a long journey from funk to punk to the barefoot-performing monk he resembles today at 39, but Jung is a master of metamorphosis, his musical transformations enhanced by fluctuating involvements in social and global issues, historical commemorations, theatre, art installations and pop music, as well as his attention to traditional Korean music—all adding up to many more commitments than one might expect from any other producer of tonal atmosphere for worldwide box-office hits. Read more »

Mary Kuper. “… our curious type of existence here.”

“A response to the close of David Jones’s introduction to ‘In Parenthesis’

This writing is called ‘In Parenthesis’ because I have written it in a kind of spaces between — I don’t know between quite what— but as you turn aside to do something; and because for us amateur soldiers (and especially for the writer, who was not only amateur, but grotesquely incompetent, a knocker-over-of –piles, a parade’s despair) the war itself was a parenthesis— how glad we were to step outside its brackets at the end of ’18—and also because our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis.”

More here, here, and here.

Thanks for the introduction Vicki Sharp!

by Peter Wells

In Philip Pullman’s 2019 novel The Secret Commonwealth, the hero, Lyra, aged around twenty, suffers an attempted rape. If I say it is the most convincing description of a sexual assault I have ever read, this is not to say much, as I have never been raped, though in my youth I had some unpleasant encounters with predatory men that gave me some inkling of it. Anyway, it’s a creditable effort by Pullman to depict a nightmare experienced much more often by women than by men, and he should be applauded for attempting to help his readers (male readers especially) to imagine it.

The scene begins in a train, where Lyra finds herself, far from her own country, in a carriage occupied by soldiers whose language she does not know. There have already been grins and nudges, and alcohol has started to circulate.

The bottle went around the compartment again; the talk became louder and looser. They were talking about her, there was no doubt about that: their eyes moved over her body, one man was licking his lips, another clasping the crotch of his trousers.

Lyra attempts to escape, only for the man opposite to push her back into the seat and say something to the man by the door,

who reached up and pulled down the blind over the corridor window. Lyra stood up again, and again the soldier pushed her back, this time squeezing her breast as he did so.

Then the assault proper begins, as all the soldiers launch themselves upon her. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

This past Friday, 3 Quarks Daily linked to a review by George Scialabba of the recent posthumous publication of a Richard Rorty lecture series called Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. The review was called, “Should Philosophy Retire?” I promised myself I wouldn’t respond to it. That I wouldn’t respond, for example, to the claim that philosophy “led Western thought into a dead end and should be retired”.

Or Scialabba’s claim that Hume, Mill, and William James would agree with this, and Rorty’s that Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger would too. But when Scialabba went on to insist that Rorty is “widely-revered”, I had, at least to ask this much. “Widely-revered” by whom? Not by philosophers, surely.

But let me start by saying something positive about Rorty. Rorty is a clear, crisp, concise writer whose  prose style fits firmly within the analytic tradition. Analytic philosophers are seldom credited as great writers, but the best are great. “I prefer desert landscapes,” Quine said in explaining his thinking, but it might as well as been his prose he was describing. “To be is to be the value of a bound variable,” was his answer to the mystery of existence. “Science,” he wrote “ is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.” And Donald Davidson, another great writer, spare but whimsical, famously wrote that “Conceptual relativism is a heady and exotic doctrine or would be if we could make good sense of it. The trouble is, as so often in philosophy, it is hard to improve intelligibility while retaining the excitement.” (Keep that one in mind for later.) Rorty had a similar style and a similar talent for turns of phrase. “The world does not speak,” he wrote, “Only we do.” Since Rorty was one of the few analytic philosophers widely read outside the field, I think he is, as a writer, if not a thinker, our prose emissary to the wider academic world.

It was Rorty’s argumentation that was infuriating. Read more »

A colorful denizen of Brixen, South Tyrol. Photo taken last week.

by Varun Gauri

Do most people care a whit about foreigners? Would they be willing to reduce their own countries’ well-being for the benefit of foreign nationals? Global cooperation entails a variety of incentive-compatible deals among nation-states, but it rests, ultimately, on cosmopolitan values. If people can’t be bothered with the citizens of other countries, the prospect for long-term, stable solutions to crises like climate change, pandemic diseases, migration, and trade policy may be bleak. 

In series of large, representative surveys from Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Japan, the United States, Colombia, and Guatemala, my recent paper with Xuechunzi Bai and Susan Fiske finds more support for moral cosmopolitanism than a quick scan of the news headlines might lead one to suspect. 

Broadly speaking, respondents everywhere distinguish preventing harm to foreign citizens, which almost everyone supports, from redistributing resources, which about half of respondents endorse. These two psychological dimensions of moral cosmopolitanism, equitable security (preventing harm) and equitable benefits (redistributing resources), are correlated with attitudes toward contested international policies, such as support for international organizations, reducing a nation’s carbon footprint, enforcing anti-bribery rules, and expanding international migration. The equitable benefits dimensions also predicts the likelihood of sending real resources to international, rather than domestic, NGOs, as well as support for the global distribution of masks to fight Covid-19. The equitable security dimension predicts responses to a thought experiment protecting foreigners, as well as support for vaccinating the world against Covid-19. In short, people tend to temper their altruism with a dose of moral parochialism, or patriotism, when redistributing benefits, but they are moral altruists when preventing harms.  Read more »

by David Oates

A scar is a shiny place with a story.

A skink is a story you could never imagine.

It leaves a bright streak across your vision and an after-image you might notice even years later, neon greeny blue flashing amidst weed and dry stone and buckbrush and bending sumac trees. Our mountains were called the San Gabriels, a name somehow just barely noble enough for these creatures. In their foothills skinks appeared to us like tiny fragile dragons, fully astonishing, sinuous, and menacing. They liked to writhe. Would bite, the bony jaws clamping onto a fingertip, a ten-year-old’s screaming terror – until it was seen that the grim little mouth could not break the skin. The beast just hung on there, flailing, until screams turned to laughter and showing off, “Lookit, lookit, lookit. . .!”

If someone tried to tell you about skink, it would sound like a lie, an exaggeration. Just seeing it certainly outstripped the lame awe-mongering of, for example, Superman comic books.

And made you wonder what else might be out there.

When my mother’s voice rose up on a summer eve, and we had been allowed to play outside after dinner. When I noticed the mourning doves silhouetted on telephone wires above us, repeating and repeating their strangeness and sadness. Perhaps I would see her standing in the illuminated doorway, in the warm air full of chaparral scent drifting downhill off the mountains. Her voice calling then falling still, while the blue-black sky gathered evening under itself. And us in it.

Then the boys would come barging back into the house, and the mood would break and be replaced with all the reassuring commotion we could muster.

 Once in a while my mom would accidentally back into the truth, like hitting something in the garage with her fender. “Well, we raised them by hand, so. . .” This was not really apology, just what we were: three dusty, slightly used boys, with dents here and there and unstraightened teeth. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

When I first attended the occasional Harvard-MIT joint faculty seminar I was dazzled by the number of luminaries in the gathering and the very high quality of discussion. Among the younger participants Joe Stiglitz was quite active, and his intensity was evident when I saw Joe chewing his shirt collar, a frequent absent-minded habit of his those days. Sometimes one saw the speaker incessantly interrupted by questions, say from one of the big-name Harvard professors, Wassily Leontief (soon to be a Nobel laureate). At Solow’s prodding I agreed to present a paper at that seminar, with a lot of trepidation, but fortunately Leontief was not present that day.

At Harvard the economist I knew best was Steve Marglin whom my friends, George Akerlof and Mrinal, had introduced me to. He was at that time regarded as a whiz kid who was one of the youngest tenured professors at Harvard. He had earlier spent some time in India and became an admiring friend of Punjab’s strong-man Chief Minister Partap Singh Kairon. He was very friendly with me and Kalpana (Steve gave her useful comments on her dissertation), but I had seen him behaving somewhat abrasively with others, including senior professors.

Steve’s early work was on investment and evaluation of development projects. Then by the late 60’s his research and politics took a major turn in a heterodox, radical direction. When he gave me the first draft of his later widely-known paper titled “What Do Bosses Do?”—arguing that the Industrial Revolution was less a technological advance and more an organizational restructuring, with capitalists getting dominant control of the labor process– I was quite impressed reading it. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

Over years of teaching philosophy, I have observed that people fall into two groups with regard to the Biggest Question. The Biggest Question is one that is so big it is hard to fit into words, but here goes: When everything that can be explained has been explained, when we know the truths of physics and brains and psychology and social interactions and so on and so forth, will there still be anything worth wondering about? I am assuming the “wonder” here is a philosophical wonder, not the sort of wonder over whatever happened to my old pocket knife or whatever. It’s the sort of wonder that has a “why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing” flavor to it. It’s the sort of wonder that doesn’t go away no matter how much is explained.

Some people think that on that sunny day when everything that can be explained has been explained, well then, that will be that. We will understand why things have happened, and how we came to exist, and what we should do if we want to be healthy and happy, and why works of art move us as they do. It’s not that such people are in any way shallow or unimaginative or tone deaf. They are open to the most wonderful experiences of life, along with the most heart-wrenching and most tragic. It’s just that they think these experiences can be explained and understood in all their glory through that explanation. If there is anything “left over” — some stubborn bit of incredulous wonder we just can’t shake — then that too will be explained through some feature of human psychology, like the way those patterns still seem to swirl in a static optical illusion even when you know the trickery behind it. The feeling that there is a Mystery can itself be explained as an illusory sort of feeling, an accidental by-product of the cognitive engine we happen to think with.

But other people think that the Mystery is not an illusion or accident, and that there still would be something worthy of genuine philosophical wonder even when the grand explainers have completed their grand task. Maybe the Mystery is worthy of some kind of worship or spiritual reverence. Maybe it can be reflected in a poem or in music or in a painting, or even in a shared and silent moment with friends. Maybe it is exactly what remains when all explaining is done — as Wittgenstein the Sage once wrote, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is”. In his terms, the Mystery is precisely that of which we must remain silent, simply because no amount of talking will capture it. These people would say that the first group of people are the ones with the illusion: namely, the illusion that what can’t be explained isn’t real. Read more »