by Joseph Shieber

One of the pleasures of reading Amartya Sen’s new memoir, Home in the World, is stumbling upon little anecdotes that provide new perspectives on, or an opportunity for a deepening engagement with, major intellectual figures.

One such occasion for me was Sen’s discussion of the influence of the economist Piero Sraffa, one of Sen’s academic mentors at Cambridge in the 1950s, on the later thought of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

That Sraffa was influential on Wittgenstein is undeniable. In his preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein describes the path that led him to repudiate his earlier philosophical positions, as elucidated in his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and to arrive at the positions that he develops in the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein notes that, “since beginning to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book. I was helped to realize these mistakes—to a degree which I myself am hardly able to estimate—by the criticism which my ideas encountered from Frank Ramsey … . Even more than to this … criticism I am indebted to that which a teacher of this university, Mr. P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practised on my thoughts. I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book.” (Philosophical Investigations, viii)

Though Wittgenstein doesn’t elaborate on the nature of Sraffa’s contributions, Sen locates Sraffa’s influence on Wittgenstein in Sraffa’s insistence that Wittgenstein’s earlier reductionist theory of meaning (more specifically, the picture theory of meaning of the Tractatus) was inadequate to capture the complexities of human language use. Sraffa emphasized the complex social arrangements that sustained and gave meaning to language, social arrangements that Wittgenstein attempted to capture with his notion of “language games” in the Philosophical Investigations. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Suppose that we could all be good for just one day. No one would be tempted away from doing the right thing and towards their own selfish interests or illicit urges. No one would be afraid of retribution. We would be free of all internal and external obstacles to being good. What would happen?

Some good things would happen and would last beyond one day. For example, dictatorships would collapse into rubble. If no one would do evil or allow evil to be done for just one day then the thugs would stay home (or join in) while the people took back their country.

Some other nice things might get done. People might take the day off work and spend it doing good deeds like picking up the garbage in their neighbourhood. This wouldn’t last since the effects of those deeds wouldn’t last (it is easier to dismantle something evil and build something good). But even in their own right these good deeds probably wouldn’t amount to very much. This is not only because there is only so much that can be done in one day, but also because most important things require cooperation and coordination to achieve. We wouldn’t know which of the many possible good things to try to do, in what order, or to what extent. Should we give our life savings to Oxfam? Should we go adopt a cat from the shelter? Should we volunteer to teach English to recent immigrants? Where should we start and when should we stop? Merely acting on the intention to be good is not enough to actually do much good. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Dick Edelstein

Hello, my name is David Coronado. The grave where your grandfather is buried is being exhumed. I think you can come to collect his remains and say a proper goodbye to him.

The above quote from a recent article in the Spanish newspaper El País illustrates how David Coronado approached relatives of people executed in 1940 by the forces of General Franco’s regime. The bodies of their family members had been buried in a common grave in Paterna, a townland near Valencia. Coronado was working with the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), an NGO founded by journalist Emilio Silva following the exhumation in the year 2000 of a common grave containing the bodies of thirteen Republicans. Silva’s grandfather was one of those buried in the grave, and relatives of other victims asked him to help them recover the remains of their loved ones. Thus, Spain joined the vanguard of the current movement for the recovery of historical memory, a worldwide movement whose general aims have become a topical issue during the past two decades.

A longtime Spanish friend, Concha Catalan, told me her family’s Civil War story:

My family experienced trauma too. My grandfather was imprisoned by both sides during the Civil War. After the war, he was sent by the regime to various prisons and later to one of General Franco’s colonias militarizadas penitenciarias [penal colonies], where he worked as an engineer directing a crew of fellow prisoners forcibly assigned to public works tasks. His absence and suffering had a lasting effect on my family.

Concha is one of the founders of Innovation & Human Rights, a Spanish NGO that focuses its efforts on facilitating public access to archival data relating to Civil War casualties and victims of reprisal. Concha, who had worked and trained as an investigative journalist, met co-founder Guillermo Blasco at a hackathon in Barcelona, an event that brought together journalists and computer experts to share skills and resources and develop solutions to specific problems involving data and information technology. Blasco, a proficient coder, took an interest Concha’s work as an open data activist in the field of human rights, and their subsequent collaboration resulted in the founding of Innovation & Human Rights. Read more »

Photo from a few days ago of the moonrise above Plose in Brixen, South Tyrol, and a streetlamp near me which looks like a sunrise.

by Derek Neal

According to the website Rotten Tomatoes, there are four types of movies: good-good movies, good-bad movies, bad-good movies, and bad-bad movies. These types can be identified using the Rotten Tomatoes score for each movie, particularly the relationship between the critics’ score and the audience’s score. Let me explain. Rotten Tomatoes is a website that collects movie reviews and assigns them a rating of either “fresh” (if the review is positive) or “rotten” (if the review is negative). It then calculates the percentage of fresh reviews and assigns this as a score to the movie. If the score is 60% or greater, the film itself is considered fresh, whereas if the score is lower than 60%, the film is rotten. This is a useful way of rating a movie, but there’s a problem here, too. Let’s imagine every reviewer gives a movie three out of four stars, indicating a good film but not a great one. These reviews would all be classified as fresh, and the film would receive a misleadingly high score of 100% (The Terminator has a 100% rating, for example, while The Godfather does not). Let’s imagine another film receives all two out of four-star reviews. These would be classified as rotten, and the film would receive a rating of 0%, indicating one of the worst movies of all time. But the movie wouldn’t really be that bad.

In addition to the critics’ score, there is also the audience’s score, which simply calculates the ratings of the website’s users to decide whether a movie is fresh or rotten. This is based on hundreds to thousands of reviews as opposed to the 40 or 50 that make up the critics’ score, and in its relationship to the critics’ score it can give us valuable insight into the characteristics of a movie. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

Is loneliness a choice? Is love?

Such timeless questions resonate particularly a year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic as we continue to weigh the risks and rewards of companionship, of intimacy, and calculate our capacity for solitude. Those quandaries propel the bittersweet romantic, sometimes droll meditation I’m Your Man, a new German film directed by Maria Schrader from a script she wrote with Jan Schomberg off a short story by Emma Braslavsky.

Alma (Marren Eggert) is an anthropologist pressured into participating in an evaluation of humanoid, robotic, made-to-order mates. Hers is a dapper, dignified database named Tom (Dan Stevens), who can rumba, recite Rilke, or cite a just-published journal article written by Brazilian cuneiform experts. Alma’s tastes, atop the crowd-sourced desires of millions of other women, dictate his algorithms, which are fine-tuned as he interacts with her. Out of the box, he comes on a little strong. “You’re a very beautiful woman, Alma,” he says upon first meeting her. “Your eyes are like two mountain lakes I could sink into.” But he’s a quick study and soon tones it down. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Presidency College had a good Department of Economics and Political Science. I’d say that the teaching standard at my time there would compare quite favorably with the standard I found later when teaching undergraduate classes in Berkeley. I remember in my first lecture in Berkeley in a large undergraduate class I was using some bit of calculus. After my class a female student came to see me to complain about the use of calculus in class. I told her that I was not using any advanced calculus, so if she brushed up her high school-level calculus she should have no difficulty in following the class. She said that in her high school in Carmel, a California coastal town, there was the option to take either calculus or yoga, and she had chosen the latter. I told her, unhelpfully, that this was a choice unheard-of in the land of yoga, India, and, I thought to myself, certainly in Presidency College.

One outstanding teacher I had there was Bhabatosh Datta. I can say that if I have to count four or five best Economics teachers anywhere in the world, I’d include him in the list. He not merely had an excellent expository style, more importantly he inspired us, even as undergraduates, to aspire to reach the frontier of the subject. I remember once rushing to the Library to take out a front-ranking research journal (Quarterly Journal of Economics) to read up some new article that he referred to in class. This is somewhat rare at the undergraduate level in most parts of the world. Of course, I did not understand half the article without taking his help. As the poet Robert Browning said, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp; by pushing us this way Datta wanted to see us achieve more. Read more »

by Michael Liss

I live on an island. It happens to be a rather densely populated island, with a surface that seems largely covered by steel, masonry, glass, and architectural curtain wall, with nary a coconut or palm tree in sight. Still, it’s an island.

We island dwellers engage in R&R differently than our suburbanite friends and family. There are no golf courses, no country clubs, no massive “Friday Night Lights” facilities. Still, we don’t lack for sports. The newest craze is “Dodge the Electric Bike,” which improves agility and hand-to-eye coordination, particularly when the deliveryman is going the wrong way on a one-way street.

For myself, I like to run. If one wants to call it that. I’m certainly not particularly good at it, but I’ve been running/jogging/plodding since shortly after the end of the Peloponnesian Wars. I’ve torn through countless pairs of running shoes, each with an idiosyncratic wear pattern that is a not-so-subtle reminder that a major factor in my lack of speed is also a pronounced lack of grace. To demonstrate that I have no self-consciousness about this, I’ve run in a fair number of New York Road Runners races. Yesterday’s Fifth Avenue Mile was my 49th, and, I’m happy to report, I’m slower than ever.

I don’t care. I like doing it anyway. Running gets me outside; running (temporarily) satisfies my sitzfleish deficiency; and it has probably kept me off statins. During the darkest part of the pandemic, it helped with sanity, like a lightning rod grounds electrical charges. Get into your shorts (or tights, depending on the season); fill your pockets with whatever is needed out there; take two masks (believe me, you will want the second after you finish); and go. Read more »

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

“The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” is a now-canonical lyrical-critical essay by the French anarchist and Christian mystic, Simone Weil. In it, Weil critiques the Iliad to arrive at an understanding of what she calls force, something just beyond human action, alive in and ruling over the interactions of persons. “In this work,” Weil writes of the Iliad at the top of the essay, “at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.” The truth of force, she writes later, is that “nobody really possesses it”; instead, it possesses us: it intoxicates, destroys, instigates conflict and props of hierarchy between the weak and the strong, strikes finally and surely with the intensity of what Weil calls “blind destiny” against both the weak and the strong. “He that takes the sword will perish by the sword,” Weil writes, and then she cites the Iliad: “Ares is just, and kills those who kill.”

What force really does for Weil is turn the human into an object. “Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment,” Weil argues, “our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face.” The soul who discovers death’s omnipresence must castrate itself, she continues, of all yearning for life; its sole aim becomes the destruction of others. There might be a way out of this bind, she suggests: “To respect life in somebody else when you have had to castrate yourself of all yearning for it demands a truly heart-breaking exertion of generosity,” a generosity which Weil believes attaches only to Patroclus in the poem. But, she dismisses out of hand that such generosity is a historical force. Those who possess force—which is to say, those for whom force is acting in the benefit for the moment only—do not have space for this generosity. “Lacking this generosity,” she continues, in a dark mood, “the conquering soldier is like a scourge of nature. Possessed by war, he, like the slave, becomes a thing … Such is the nature of force. Its power of converting man into a thing is a double one”—double for it takes hold of the soul of the possessor of force, remaking him into a mere peon of force’s action, the aim of which action is to reduce the victim of force to mere body, to destroy them.  Read more »

Galleon America

the complexity of your crossed purposes,
beauty and war, grace and wastefulness,
you rest solidly at sea upon a liquid
without yet dropping through,
a steel log with algorithmic spurs
hollow inside of rust and rot, a contradiction,
weighty and weightless, floating
white swan, Earth burns, black pawns,
Jesus weeps, Mars is gloating

Jim Culleny
2/15/20

Pen & ink 1997, Jim C.

by Usha Alexander

[This is the twelfth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

In the late 1960s and early 70s, Pocatello, Idaho, was one of the fastest growing towns in the United States. It was, and still is, a bland little place in the arid montane region of the American West. I don’t know why it mushroomed then; it has since stagnated and even shrunk. Nevertheless, the summer I turned four, my family was one among many who moved to reside there. Our little red brick house, still unfinished on the day we moved in, was the last house at the end of a newly laid street, still half-empty of houses. Our street stretched like a solitary finger into a kind of wilderness, an austere, high-desert landscape that surrounded our foundling residential colony. From my vantage as a child, preoccupied with the flowers, spiders, and thistles that stuck to my socks, I would see this place transformed.

Little did I know that this landscape was, in fact, already overgrazed and degraded, that some of the plants, which so quickly became familiars—like the Russian Thistle, aka tumbleweed—were actually invasive species. Despite that, it thrived. The undulating hillsides were coarsely matted with hard grasses and sedges, sagebrush, gnarled juniper, all hues of dusty green and wood. Here and there, yellow flares of prickly pear blossoms. Blood red Indian paintbrush splashed across the pale dirt. A sprinkling of white sego lilies.

All the new, single-story homes along our street were encircled by large, grassy yards, where the neighborhood kids played for hours into the lingering, northerly summer sunsets. Next to our house, a dusty trackway wound down the hillside toward a rustic, little ranch below. A brook that passed by the ranch could be made out by the vibrant streak it traced through the pale grasses and shrubs, an incongruous density of ferns and spindly, deciduous trees that grew up from its steep banks. A set of fences out beyond the dirt road sometimes corralled a few horses or cows. Alongside them, a scratch of a trail led further up into the open hills. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

The chill in the early morning air hinted of autumn, yet the intensity of the rising sun promised summer heat. Black Tupelo and Red Maple leaves teased memories of fall with premature wisps of yellow and orange. The sky was a depthless cobalt blue, its crystallinity making everything and everyone shimmer. It makes sense that the stunning weather on that particular morning should become a shared referent for our collective dissonance, a common denominator of terror, mourning, and remembrance spanning two decades.

In the cool air and bright glare of the sun, our glass and steel towers gave evidence of our dominion over nature and, by extension, everything and everyone else. Our arrogance, brilliance, barbarism, and beauty, wrapped in the spectacular innovations and intoxicating aesthetic brutalism of modernity, stretched magnificently into the endless expanse of sky. In a reversal of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, the twin towers, like two fingers of iron and glass rising out of the mud, reached toward the heavens searching for the invisible hand of God. We were the kings and queens of the second millennium, 21^st century global conquistadors of culture and finance, the immaculate children of Artemis, oblivious yet intuitively aware of our power as only the powerful can be. A comforting stillness cocooned us in the din of our urban hustle, told us that we were safe, to go about our business, to even pause for a few seconds to admire the tragedy and majesty of it all. Who could deny that we not only had the world by the balls, but Mother Nature on her knees?

It was my first semester as an assistant professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey and the first week of classes. From the highest point on campus, you could see New York City’s iconic skyline. Even though it’s a suburban New Jersey public university in the heart of Essex county, its proximity to New York City allowed me to imagine its ethos as more urbane than it actually was. By proximal association, I would claim New York City my spiritual home, even though I slept in Hoboken and worked in Montclair. Read more »

by Philip Graham

Margot Livesey’s The Boy in the Field is a mystery novel in the broadest sense of that literary term. Yes, the novel begins with the discovery of a crime, and the perpetrator remains at large for most of the narrative. Yet the “what happened next” of a standard mystery novel concentrates on the three siblings who came upon the victim lying in a field, the reverberations of that event on their young lives, and of the family they are a part of. “Mystery” can reside within all of us, to locate or evade, and that is the deeper reveal that Livesey hunts for in this wise and haunting book.

Philip Graham: In your novel, The Boy in the Field, Duncan makes an observation about his family: “During his brief period as a Boy Scout, he had learned that the compass has thirty-two points. Now he could say with confidence that each person in his family was heading toward a different one.” This insight of Duncan’s seems to be the basso ostinado of your novel’s structure: how do members of a family find their individual paths while still remaining a unit called a family?

Margot Livesey: What a great phrase: phrase basso ostinato. Years ago, I read a quotation by Katherine Mansfield, (from her diary, I think) musing about her great story “Prelude.” Even in the happiest of families, she claimed, every member is striving desperately to get free. In The Boy in the Field I hoped to show what is, in many respects, a happy family but one in which, as Duncan remarks, everyone is heading in a different direction. How far can they go, on their separate quests, without threatening the family? The father’s affair threatens it in one way; Duncan’s search for his birth mother in another. Matthew’s and Zoe’s quests are less immediately threatening but also carry them away from the family. Perhaps that’s why they all need Lily, Duncan’s almost perfect dog. Read more »

Florine Demosthene. Before The Decline, 2019. Collage on paper.

More here, here, and here.

by R. Passov

By the time my father left to do some time, everything of any value had been pawned. What remained were a few stale cigars which led to a serious vomiting fit, and an old Craftsman tool box. If anything entered our small flat, and if it wasn’t a cat or a dog, I’d drag that tool box out from the bottom of a closet.

Not long after my father went away, my paternal grandmother talked the manager of a gas station into giving me a job. For a dollar a day, every now and then I was sent for a tool. Once, a mechanic let me watch as he adjusted the valves on a running engine. The pushrods, he explained, sat on the lifters, one each for intake and exhaust valve. The rocker arms sat on the pushrods. With a valve cover off, the inner workings were exposed: Eight rocker arms, running in a precise rhythm, moving so fast they looked still. 

From experience I learned an engine, if you treat it well, gives rise to a faith your care will be rewarded. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

Fatherhood and motherhood are always a compromise between a form of Nazi eugenics and a compulsion for repetition. —Paul B. Preciado

If it were up to certain contemporary authors, the title of arch-villain—or rather, Worst Person Ever—might go collectively to a particular category of human normally held up as a model of nurturance and care: viz, to anyone who has willingly and consciously engaged in the act of procreation, whether by “traditional” means, or with scientific assistance. Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh have written very different, equally angry indictments of parents, while those who appear in the works of Jenny Erpenbeck and Deborah Feldman give the Grimm Brothers a run for their money. And Paul B. Preciado, the gender theorist of my epigraph, is joined in his radically downbeat appraisal of human reproduction by Junot Diaz, who has accused dating apps like Tinder of propagating a species of selective racist breeding.

The convention of decrying rather than celebrating parenthood, of course, did not first arise with the Millennials, or even Generation X. In 1818, Mary Shelley chose as the epigraph to Frankenstein Adam’s surly question to God in Paradise Lost (1667):

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

—a complaint that places culpability for the travails of life squarely on the shoulders of progenitors, who carelessly indulge their arbitrary, self-centered whims (or allow free rein to their rampant libidos) at the expense of hapless future generations. Read more »