New growth, even on the evergreen trees, in the woods near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Bill Murray

A nasty typhoon punished southeast Africa in early 2023. Cyclone Freddy dropped six months of rain in six days, killed 1400 and pounded the poor, overmatched region for thirty-eight long days. From its origins in the Indonesian archipelago, Freddy wound up across the entire breadth of the Indian Ocean before battering the continent, reversing course, then returning to do it again. It was the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded.

Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique almost never get good press. The modest coverage of last year’s hurricane that struck twice paled alongside coverage of a terror attack in 2021 in the northern Mozambican coastal town of Palma. Survivors recount an utterly harrowing siege, an attack so ferocious that French energy giant Total fled from its $20 billion liquified natural gas investment there, and operations have yet to resume.

Around 200 Black locals and 20 expat contractors found themselves holed up inside the Amarula Palma Hotel. Authorities called in South African private military company Dyck Advisory Group and, as Amnesty International described things,

After the majority of the white contractors and a few well-off Black nationals – among them the Administrator for Palma – were rescued, those left behind attempted to flee by ground convoy but were ambushed by ‘Al-Shabaab.’

This isn’t the better known Al-Shabaab, but rather a local and more rag-tag group loosely affiliated with other Islamic insurgents. Theirs is a shaky, patchwork ideology incorporating local grievances, like Total’s control over local mineral wealth.

Several countries, Angola, Botswana, Rwanda, South Africa maintain a peacekeeping presence in northern Mozambique now and low level fighting is still going on, 36 months later. The poor governance and political instability that give rise to insurgencies like these color the rest of our story. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

The “frozen trucker case” got a fair amount of attention a few years back. At Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing Senator Al Franken hammered him about it. You can watch it here. The facts of the case are these:

Alphonse Maddin was employed as a truck driver by Petitioner TransAm Trucking (“TransAm”). In January 2009, Maddin was transporting cargo through Illinois when the brakes on his trailer froze because of subzero temperatures. After reporting the problem to TransAm and waiting several hours for a repair truck to arrive, Maddin unhitched his truck from the trailer and drove away, leaving the trailer unattended. He was terminated for abandoning the trailer.

Maddin challenged his discharge in a proceeding before an Administrative Law Judge and won. TransAm appealed to the Administrative Review Board, and Maddin won again. TransAm then appealed to the Court of Appeals, which issued its decision in August of 2016, more than seven years after the incident.

The 10^th Circuit found in Maddin’s favor, with Gorsuch in dissent. All that is water under the bridge. Today Gorsuch has a life appointment to the Supreme Court, and Franken is back in private life. But it is worth revisiting the case for what it can tell us about legal reasoning and judicial decision making. Read more »

—“For all practical purposes a lie is as true
as the bias of its believer.” —Roshi Bob

Plum of a Lie

If I told you a lie
would you believe it?

….. Will it be a true lie? Will it
….. pierce my bias to the bone? Will it
….. meet my need?

Does that matter?

….. As sure as my world is flat, it does.

It would be a help then?

….. I cannot believe without a true lie
….. therefore, please tell me a plum of a lie,
….. gild it, make it sing, craft it so well
….. I’ll not know, have it swell,
….. have its juice challenge the
….. breadth of the universe

Shall I then?

….. Please, please—

.Jim Culleny,
3/27/18

by Martin Butler

The expression ‘Live your best life’ is very much in vogue. It appears more than 3 million times in Instagram posts, which are no doubt full of pictures of smiling attractive 20-somethings completing amazing sporting feats, strolling along glorious beaches or doing exciting things in exotic places. Working 12 shifts delivering parcels for Amazon presumably doesn’t make the grade. As with many other inspirational (or is it aspirational) sayings that pepper the internet, perhaps we should dismiss this expression as just part of the froth produced by internet influencers desperate for our attention. But what does its popularity say about our times? Let’s look beyond the predictable healthy lifestyle stuff and try to actually make sense of it as a philosophical idea. After all, if interpreted generously, it does have a certain philosophical pedigree.

To start with, what does best actually mean? It very much depends on how we view human beings. Regarded in a narrowly hedonic way, where the only things that matter are pleasure and pain, our best life would be one where we avoid as much pain and experience as much pleasure as possible.  This is clearly implausible for many reasons, one being the conclusion of Nozick’s powerful thought experiment: few would regard their best life as being permanently hooked up to an ‘experience machine’ which eliminated pain and provided you with nothing but delightful pleasure. The passive experiencing of pleasure would not be enough. A best life surely requires that we participate in meaningful activities which lead to fulfilment and flourishing, a point which tends to lead to a more individualistic notion. Most people are roughly similar in terms of what they find pleasurable and painful; masochists excepted, human beings tend to find physical injury painful and sweet food pleasant. This is not the case, however, with regards to living a fulfilling life. I personally wouldn’t find a life dedicated to martial arts, rock climbing or running marathons fulfilling, but for many these activities are deeply fulfilling. So is there something distinctively modern about the individualism implicit in living your best life? Read more »

Latifa Echakhch. Taqsim, 2017.

Fresco, installation.

More here and here.

by Rebecca Baumgartner

A little over a year ago, in Allen, Texas, we saw the precise moment when a “good guy with a gun” became a “bad guy with a gun.” It turns out that the line between these two different types of people (and there are only two, we’re told) is as slight as a finger squeezing a trigger. Certainly nothing prior to that trigger-squeeze at the Allen Premium Outlets was illegal. In Texas, as of 2021, someone can legally carry eight guns in public – without a license or permit of any kind. 

Under Texas’ recently expanded “open carry” law, you can take as many guns as you want into a library. You can take as many guns as you want into the state Capitol building in Austin. You can take as many guns as you want with you while walking down the street.

This is called freedom.

It’s a freedom that requires you to accept some logical catch-22s, though. For example, the dividing line between a law-abiding citizen exercising his supposed right to bear arms and a mentally unstable man who should never have had a gun in the first place is only discernible after he has killed people. Once someone becomes a gun-wielding maniac, they retroactively never should have been allowed to have a gun. (It’s a shame they don’t have the courtesy to tell us ahead of time that they’re the bad guys.)

You can get around this conundrum if you believe in a world where people are either all good or all bad, and we can tell the difference. Gun extremists believe in a fairytale world split into dark and light. They would have us believe that it’s just a matter of finding out who falls into which camp. The forces for good get as many guns as they want and are trusted implicitly, and the forces of darkness are (somehow, without legislative intervention) kept from getting guns. And then the good guys with guns keep us safe from the bad guys with guns. Just like in stories.

But notably, and tragically, this is precisely what does not tend to happen during mass shootings in the real world. This is not what happened at the Parkland school shooting or the Orlando nightclub shooting. This is not what happened at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, either. The good guys with guns just stood there, scared out of their minds, while people died. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Derek Neal

An excerpt of Rachel Cusk’s forthcoming novel, Parade, appeared in the Financial Times last week. The story features two narratives, one about a female painter simply referred to as “G,” told in third person, and another about a group of people visiting a farm in the countryside, told in first person plural. It is unclear how these two stories intersect in terms of plot—is G the narrator of the second story? Is she the woman living on the farm?—but these are not questions worth asking. Thematically, the two stories fit together as they both tell of women constrained and controlled by male figures of authority: in this case, their husbands.

Nestled within this narrative is a fascinating articulation of a theory of art, which is what I will focus on in this essay. Cusk does not pause the story to explain this theory, as some purveyors of “autofiction” might do, but embeds it within the story by explaining G’s different artistic periods and the way her art relates to her personal life. The story is stronger because of this.

In the beginning of G’s career, she is seemingly self-taught, lacking formal and technical skill but compensating for it with inspiration and honesty. Her painting is described as existing “autonomously, living in her like some organism that had happened to make its home there.” In this characterization, G is simply the vessel giving shape to an artistic drive she scarcely understands, rather than the source of its creation. Read more »

At the airport in Berlin.

by Mike O’Brien

This is going to be a broad-strokes, fast-and-loose affair. Or at least loose. In April I wrote a piece about recent work in the field of animal normativity, a quickly developing area of research that is of interest to me for two key reasons: first, it promises to deepen our knowledge of animal cognition and behaviour, allowing us to better attend to their welfare; second, it promises to fill in the genealogical history of our own normative senses, allowing us to better understand the human experience of morality.

Mostly following the cohort of researchers around Kristin Andrews, who are working on de-anthropocentrized taxonomies and conceptual frameworks for studying animal normativity, I noted that one question of particular interest remains outstanding, viz. “do animals have norms about norms?”. Put another way, do animals think about the (innate, and learned) norms governing life in their communities, and do they (consciously or unconsciously) follow higher-order “meta-normative” rules to resolve conflicts between two or more conflicting norms? The answer still seems to be that they do not, at least not among the higher primates who are the principal focus of study for these questions.

One possible explanation for this apparent absence of recursive or reflexive normativity among non-human animals is a lack of language. It is supposed by some that in order to make norms the object of thought, capable of being analyzed, evaluated, compared and synthesized, some system of external representation is needed, and such a system would fit most definitions of a language. If other species possessed such a powerful cognitive tool, we might suppose that they would use it for all kinds of things, not just resolving normative quandaries. And yet we don’t see much evidence for that kind of abstract, propositional communication among other species. Some tantalizing exceptions come to mind, like enculturated apes using sign language and cetacean communication exhibiting structure and complexity that we have yet to fully understand. But as yet there are no examples of bonobo judges or dolphin sages sorting out the immanent logic of their societies’ rules. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

In 2015, political scientist Larry Diamond warned against defeatism in the face of what he called the democratic recession. “It is vital that democrats in the established democracies not lose faith. […] If the current modest recession of democracy spirals into a depression, it will be because those of us in the established democracies were our own worst enemies.” A few years later, as the world’s most powerful democracy had decided to play out that darker option, Diamond wrote with more urgency about how to protect liberal democracy worldwide. In Ill winds, he emphasized the need to provide not only a rejection of alternatives, but a positive vision. “Democracy must demonstrate that it is a just and fair political system that advances humane values and the common good.”

Daniel Chandler places his book Free and Equal (2023) in this same context: for fifteen years in a row, more countries have experienced democratic backsliding than improvement, and the threatened state of democracy worldwide makes it “tempting to go on the defensive”. However, just playing defense is not enough; an ambitious vision for improvement is necessary. “In a moment that calls for creativity and boldness, all too often we find timidity or, worse, scepticism and cynicism”. Chandler believes he has found a recipe for combining the values of liberalism with the spirit of progress and reform.

This combination is crucial. One of the most dangerous narratives taking root in the collective subconscious is that liberalism has had its day; that history is moving on, that liberal democracy belonged to a geopolitical era that is coming to an end, something we tried and that we know the limits of; a system that has already given all it will ever be able to give. Well, not if Chandler has anything to say about it. “There are plenty of exciting and workable ideas about how we could do things differently”, he announces. As our guide to these ideas he has selected John Rawls, and this is quite plainly an excellent decision: Rawls is at the center of 20^th-century liberal political thought, but also utopian and principled to an extent that he can hardly be accused of rationalizing an already-existing situation. It makes complete sense to use him as a rallying point for a forward-looking form of liberalism. Read more »

Bread Upon the Water

Every book just speaks,
and every light just shines,
and every touch just feels,
and every look just finds,
and everywhere just is,
and every road’s a line —

So, throw your bread on the water
and beat your feet to the chimes
and if you have a daughter
and count your change to the dime
and if you open up the borders, you’ll
let it all fall in behind—

When every deed is done
and you might be feeling so low,
as if a dream is over,
as if it didn’t grow,
you know the soil is still good
and with what we know—

Just throw your bread on the water,
and beat your feet to the chimes,
and if you have a daughter,
and count your change to the dime,
and if you open up the borders
it’ll all fall in behind
……………………………………. it’ll
………………… fall in behind—

Jim Culleny, 1970
excerpt from a song

by Bill Benzon

From beginning to end, Unfrosted is constructed with the intricacy of Seinfeld’s stand-up bits. Taken as a sequence of five-minute segments it’s wonderful, and there are resonances among and mid- and long-range connections among those segments. But you can’t carry an hour and 20-minute film on watch-making intricacy alone. There’s got to be a compelling story, a plot. Oh, we’ve got lots of plotting: Kellogg’s vs. Post, Big Milk vs. Big Cereal, Cuban sugar vs. Puerto-Rican sugar, Russia vs. America, mascots vs. Kellogg’s, and all the while NASA’s shooting for the moon. What holds that together? Pop-Tarts

And that’s not enough. As I noted in my original review, “You can’t take a Godzilla toy, hook it up to an air-pump, and expect to inflate it into a world-destroying comedic monster.” Unfrosted in meticulously crafted, but unfocused and rambling.

It’s not enough. Pop-Tarts themselves exist at the right scale for a meticulously-crafted stand-up bit, which is where the movie started, as a stand-up bit. But in a feature-length film Pop-Tarts are reduced to being a MacGuffin. “MacGuffin” is a term of art that means – I’m quoting the dictionary on my computer – “an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot.” The statue in The Maltese Falcon is a classic example. It turns out to be junk, but it motivates the action.

Let’s take a closer look at Unfrosted. I’m going to start by looking at Seinfeld’s bit about Pop-Tarts, then look at the movie itself, and conclude with some speculative observations about Seinfeld’s aesthetic confusion. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Author’s Note: A version of this essay was presented at the London Arts-Based Research Conference (Dec ‘23) on the topic: “The Emergence of Soul: Jung and the Islamic World through Lecture and Art”.

The Sufis aspire to the highest conception of love and understand it to be the vital force within, a metonym for Divine essence itself, obscured by the ego and waiting to be recovered and reclaimed. Sufi poetry, in narrative, or lyric form, involves an earthly lover whose reach for the earthly beloved is not merely a romance, rather, it transcends earthly desire and reveals, as it develops, signs of Divine love, a journey that begins in the heart and involves the physical body, but culminates in the spirit.

My reading of Sufi love poetry, translated from different languages, shows that even though this tradition spans more than a millennium and includes disparate cultures, it follows the same mystic logic at its core. Whether folkloric or classical, penned or belonging strictly to the oral tradition, this genre has a discernible sensibility that likely stems from interpretations of the Quran itself.

As I explore the relationship between the earthly and Divine beloved in poetry by Persian, Arabic, Urdu or Punjabi poets, I am led to the love epics sourced from the Quran. These have been abundantly repeated, adapted, and studied, and of course yield a variety of interpretations. I approach them here in relation to the three features that I understand to be the dynamics of Sufi Poetics that integrate the earthly and Divine: An all-encompassing, merciful love as the force of deep awareness (Presence) that facilitates an appreciation of differences and contradictions (Paradox) and pours into harmonious coexistence (Pluralism)— forming a circuit that flows in and out of Divine love. Read more »

Christine Ay Tjoe. First Type of Stairs, 2010.

Oil on canvas.

More here and here.