by Rafaël Newman

By a quirk of the calendars, Passover, the annual commemoration of the flight from bondage, is precisely coterminous this year with Academic Travel. This latter, a twice-yearly feature of the university in Switzerland at which I am guest teaching this semester, is that institution’s “signature program”: a week-and-a-half course, typically offered in a location outside Switzerland, focusing on a topic arising from that site. A chance for students to read a city, as it were, like a text.

This year, for obvious reasons, Academic Travel has been canceled – or rather, radically curtailed, with students in the university’s home city of Lugano, in the canton of Ticino, required to produce negative virus tests before traveling merely to other parts of Switzerland, all reachable by train and bus, instead of, as in years past, flying to more appealingly distant locations, such as Poland, Greece, Turkey, and points further afield. For now even relatively nearby destinations, such as Italy or France, have been ruled out by the authorities, shrinking the offerings for the spring semester’s Academic Travel to the familiar hotspots of the Swiss grand tour – Lucerne, Zermatt, Geneva – which are then to serve as makeshift staging grounds for courses on topics in environmental science, history, economics, and the like.

And thus the Jewish festival of Passover, a holiday explicitly celebrating escape from plague, freedom of movement, and the crossing of borders, falls during a period in which students, under threat of contagion, are subject to personal restriction, and are confined within the borders of their current national location.

The convergence of a traditional commemoration of ancient release from bondage with a frustrated travel project in the present is especially poignant for me, perhaps yet more so for my students, since the course I am teaching them in regular session, on “Jewish Writing in German”, involves among other things the reading of three texts that treat themes of migration from a variety of perspectives, and in each of which a Passover scene figures centrally. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Philip Graham

I discovered my ideal radio station by accident.

In the fall of 1979, my wife Alma and I took up a brief week’s residence in the Paris apartment of a friend, a pause before we’d fly to West Africa and then live in a small upcountry village in Ivory Coast for over a year. In those days, graduate students in anthropology often sought a Claude Lévi-Strauss benediction before heading off to their first fieldwork. On the nervous morning of Alma’s scheduled meeting with the founder of Structuralism, she needed a weather report to help her decide what to wear. In those pre-smartphone days, the radio by the bedside was the place to search for just that. I pushed the On button, but before turning the dial I paused at the unmistakeable voice of Randy Newman. What was he doing on a French radio station?

He was singing “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today.”

Alma and I laughed—we’d tuned to a song that predicted the weather! She looked out the window into the blue sky of that warm September day. “Well,” she said, “maybe we’ll take along an umbrella, just in case.”

A Chopin étude followed Newman’s song. Now my attention was more than caught—what sort of station was this? The Supremes’ “Baby Love” came on deck next, then sinuous Raï music from Algeria, and after that a French psychedelic band popped up whose name I still wish I’d caught, and so on. Every new song arrived as a surprise. That radio station, with its gathering of unlikes and frissons of unpredictability, had, I realized, the soul of an anthology.

I have always loved anthologies. Read more »

Trees in the late afternoon in early March in front of a mountain in Vahrn, South Tyrol. They will all soon be full of leaves.

by Bill Murray

Larger than life writers always have that one extra experience, the one that puts your trip to shame. Lawrence Ferlinghetti did when, having achieved the Russian east coast via the Trans-Siberian railroad, he was ordered clear back across the continent because of paperwork. His calamity leaves most of us with nothing to say about our own, more ordinary trips.

If you want to write about the world, you still have to do the trips. You have to see for yourself what better writers were describing. You have to go, so you see how they say what they say.

Doing trips yourself is a way to stretch a little, to stand in the great explorer’s footsteps. You need to go to a few ends of the earth. Throw rocks in the Straits of Magellan. Stand and consider how odd it is that the nearly Antarctic tip of South America came to be known as Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire. Imagine being as far from home as Ferdinand Magellan and his crew, sailing to a place no European had ever seen and spotting huge bonfires onshore, where tribes called Yaghan and Ona kept fires constantly stoked for warmth.

The Yaghan wore only the scantest clothing. They smeared seal fat over their bodies to fend off the wind and rain and cold. Canoeists adept at navigating the straits’ channels and tributaries, they hunted the sea. Three centuries after Magellan, Charles Darwin wrote of the same people “going about naked and barefoot on the snow.” Read more »

by Ed Gibney

Just Deserts is a surprisingly slim book, only 206 pages long, which could almost be a chapter for one of its authors, let alone a full book from two. It has a whimsical title that hints it might simply be the sweet ending of a multi-course meal cooked up and eaten elsewhere. But don’t be fooled! Just Deserts holds a titanic discussion concerning two huge cracks in the foundations of human thought. The first is the stated crack about the well-known problems of free will, moral responsibility, and social justice. The second crack is an unstated one that only reveals itself in a meta consideration of the styles of the two authors. That shows us there’s a very deep question underneath it all concerning how we should even do philosophy to properly think about these topics.

I’ll return to that second crack once we’ve explored the first one. But why do that at all? Does free will matter to anyone but a couple of bickering philosophers? Of course it does! Sam Harris noted in his recent Final Thoughts on Free Will that this topic “touches nearly everything we care about: morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, and feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment. … In fact, the Supreme Court of the United States has worried about this and called free will a ‘universal and persistent foundation for a system of law’ and has said that determinism is ‘inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system.’ So, this idea of free will seems to be doing a lot of work in the world.”

Indeed it does! But do we actually have it?

Guiding us through this question are Dan Dennett and Gregg Caruso. Just Deserts grew out of their widely read Aeon article from 2018, which Dan and Gregg have now revised and greatly expanded into 107 individual exchanges grouped into three main parts and a dozen subsections. Lucky us. These are two of the top philosophers in the world on this subject. They speak without jargon wherever possible. They display an incredible command over the academic literature in the field, yet somehow manage not to assume us readers know any of it. They don’t duck or back down from direct questions. They are witty, respectful, and well acquainted with one another’s work. And they write informally and at times emotionally with one another. It produces a literally page-turning experience, like an epistolary novel, where I couldn’t stop myself at times from flipping ahead to see how one or the other would react to what was being said. Read more »

by Ali Minai

“Sadequain!” The very name is like a magic word that triggers a tumult of images in the mind. Arguably, no Pakistani artist has elicited more admiration, evoked more passion, and received more adulation than Saiyid Sadquain Ahmad Naqvi, the subject – and really, the hero – of the book “Sadequain: Artist and Poet – A Memoir” by Saiyid Ali Naqvi. In the world of art, be it painting, music, or literature, it is the pinnacle of achievement to be recognized by a single name – to need no further introduction. And rare indeed is the artist who achieves this distinction in his or her own life, as Sadequain did remarkably early in his career as an artist. And this delightful, beautiful, and insightful book shows why. Beginning with the earliest and formative years of Sadequain when he was not yet a legend, it takes the reader systematically through all stages of his life and his growth as an artist, laying bare both the immense determination and the perpetual restlessness of the artist’s genius.

As one goes through the book, it is impossible not be reminded of another great artist – and a near-contemporary of Sadequain – Pablo Picasso (or just “Picasso”), who also went through a sequence of phases in his artistic life, each of which would have sufficed as a life’s work for most artists. And, just as Picasso ultimately became identified in the public mind with his later work, so Sadequain came to be seen by too many as a painter of poetically inspired works with a focus on calligraphy. One of the best things this new book does is to dispel that limited view of Sadequain’s art by reminding the world of the depth, variety and dynamism of his work over a career spanning more than half a century. For this, and for much else, the author deserves great thanks. It helps that the author of “Sadequain: Artist and Poet” is someone who was extremely close to the artist throughout his life – a cousin, but much more like a brother, of the same age, growing up in the same house, going through the formative years of life together in constant companionship, sharing secret thoughts and private impulses. No one could possibly have written a memoir such as this without a deep relationship with his subject – especially when the subject is a person as complex as Sadequain. Reading the book, one cannot help but think of how fortunate both the artist and his memoirist are in having the ideal foil for their respective roles. Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Philosophical Cynicism is widely hailed as a critical voice from the margins. There are good grounds for this assessment. The Cynic confronts dominant culture and exposes its illusions. Diogenes famously walked the streets with a lit lantern, looking for an anthropos (a true human), thereby implying that those around him are not proper humans. He and his father were exiled from Sinope for adulterating the coinage, but his take on the story was that his job was, under direction from the Delphic Oracle, to alter the political norms. And so, as an exile, Diogenes harshly criticized whatever community he found himself in. Whatever their dominant norms were, he was against them.

But Diogenes nevertheless recapitulates many of the norms of his culture, especially in his attitudes regarding people the margin. Women, the gender non-conforming, people with darker skin, and sex workers and their children are treated with casual scorn and are used as foils for displaying Cynic virtue. Certainly, Diogenes’s resistance to the dominant culture is central to the Cynic perspective, but the question is whether his mistreatment of others who are marginalized is also essential. Must Cynicism be misogynist, racist, homophobic, or otherwise exclusionary?

This occasions a general puzzle for social critics. In order to have an edge, social critique must be identifiable as criticism by those to whom it is addressed. This means that criticism must be legible to those criticized. Otherwise, it is simply noise. This condition constrains the radicality of social critique. The more sweeping the criticism of one element of the dominant culture, the more the critic one must hew to its other elements.

To formulate this puzzle, recall the basic stance of the Cynic.  The point of cynicism is to invert the critical eye, to make it that it is the outsider who gets to judge the insider. Consider Diogenes’s famous exchange with Alexander the Great. Upon his arrival in Corinth, Alexander comes upon Diogenes relaxing in a sunlit grove. Alexander asks Diogenes if he had need of anything, and Diogenes replied, “Yes, you can stand out of my light.” Diogenes not only spurns the goods that Alexander could give him, but he does not scrape and flatter when in the presence of the great conqueror. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by David Kordahl

This is a post about conspiracy theories—yes, another one, after a year’s worth—but let’s start by remembering a benign old theory from a little over one year ago, back when ex-vice-president Joe Biden had won just one primary, down in South Carolina, where he had been aided by the endorsement of representative Jim Clyburn. At the end of February 2020, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both led Biden in the national polls, with Michael Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar all not far behind.

Then, suddenly, everything fell into place. On March 1, Buttigieg announced that he would be dropping out, and on March 2, so did Klobuchar. Both appeared that night at rallies to endorse Biden. When Biden had an unexpected run of victories on March 3, Super Tuesday, the new narrative emerged. On March 4, Bloomberg dropped out and endorsed Biden. On March 5, when Warren dropped out, she withheld any endorsement. Many had expected her to endorse Sanders, but eventually she, too, endorsed Biden.

What had happened? At the time, pundits warned us not to fall into the trap of thinking anything was rigged. Here’s a Washington Post headline: “‘Rigged’ rhetoric makes comeback after Trump’s comments and Sanders’s losses—and gives Russia just what it wants.” And another from Vox: “The problem with saying the Democratic primary is ‘rigged’: An expert on actual election rigging debunks the conspiracy theory.” Early the next week, the Associated Press gave an inside report, based on claims from anonymous campaign operatives, that avoided any hint of collusion.

But there was a problem with this preemptive caution. So far as I can tell, despite all the strenuous arguing, these drop-outs were, in fact, rigged.

Naturally, Democratic insiders wouldn’t put it that way, but the new book Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, inadvertently makes the case. When asked on the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast just how involved the Democratic party was in this process of encouraging Buttigieg and Klobuchar to drop out, Allen is unequivocal. “Yes, the party was very involved.” He recalls the worry of the Democratic establishment: that Bernie Sanders would win, and that the nomination would have to be taken away from him. Read more »

by Varun Gauri

In my last speech of my last high school debate round, at the finals of the Ohio championships, I claimed victory because our opponents, a team from the local private academy, our nemesis, neglected or “dropped” our argument that taxing cigarettes would certainly, absolutely, trigger nuclear war. Therefore, I declared, whatever you, dear judge, think of that argument or of our fast-talking style, a notorious debate technique known as “the spread,” there is no choice but to declare us winners. The rules of the game are binding.

“In the middle of the spread” are the last words of Ben Lerner’s widely acclaimed novel The Topeka School, which centers on a Kansas high school debater (Adam Gordon, seemingly a Lerner stand-in), as well as his partying friends, in the narrative retellings — de-centered, non-chronological, tense-shifting, montage-like — of his psychologist parents, his young debating self, a troubled family friend, and the debater as parent and “well-known poet,” who Lerner is. The primary thematic concern of the novel is the role of language in personal and public life. “A quote like that can save your life,” says the debater’s father, speaking of his colleague Klaus, whose family died in the Holocaust.

“The spread,” both a concentration and deformation of language, is a prominent image throughout this mesmerizing novel, standing in for the “thousands of generations technical progress” that make automobiles and other modern marvels possible, but also widespread alienation and predation in the modern world (“corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time”). Even poets will deliver “nonsense as if it made sense.” There appears to be an “instinct to spread,” given that language and culture, like the intermingling personal and professional relationships among the debater’s parents’ colleagues, commingle self-referentially, incestuously. They are quotation machines. For the person ensnared in the spread, “there is no outside, but one vast interior.” The novel, as it progresses, enacts the poetic spread by constructing an ever thicker, and continually illuminating, web of internal quotations and references. Some novels are praised for their “world building.” This novel is a hypnotizing feat of consciousness building. Read more »

by Chris Horner

The world we live in is changing, and our politics must change with it. We are in what has been called the ‘anthropocene’: the period in which human activity is threatening the ecosystem on which we all depend. Catastrophic climate change threatens our very survival. Yet our political class seems unable to take the necessary steps to avert it. Add to that the familiar and pressing problems of massive inequality, exploitation, systemic racism and job insecurity due to automation and the relocation of production to cheaper labour markets, and we have a truly global and multidimensional set of problems. It is one that our political masters seem unable to properly confront. Yet confront them they, and we, must. Such is the scale of the problem, the political order needs wholesale change, rather than the small, incremental reforms we have been taught are all that are practicable or desirable. And change, whether we like it or not is coming anyway: between authoritarian national conservative regimes, which with all the inequality, xenophobia, or that of a democratic, green post-capitalism. The thing that won’t survive is liberalism.

‘Liberalism’ is a notoriously hard term to pin down. But for the sake of clarity, I would just say that I am not using it in the sense that many in the USA do: as just the alternative to ‘conservatism’, the kind of thing the New York Times, the Democratic Party and so on might represent, a set of attitudes and policies contrasted with the kinds of things a Republican might might hold dear. Rather, I mean an entire political philosophy that most of those in both the aforementioned parties support, as well as those of no party at all. And this applies to most of the ‘centrist’ political parties in western Europe, Canada and Australia. So what is it?  Read more »

by David Oates

A missing tradition is haunting us, though we may not even realize it’s missing. It was called “conservatism,” and in the Anglo-American political tradition it has a record of partnering with liberals to create some of our greatest moments of democratic progress.

Our new president did once publicly hope to govern under a new and restored regime of that legendary chimera “bipartisanship,” liberals and conservatives hammering out compromise bills that advance the public interest. But that fantasy has quickly faded. Even after the departure of the former president and his hateful ways, what’s left of the Republican party seems to be a beast of unqualified partisanship, angry, ravenous, utterly uncompromising.

This became obvious when the “Covid Relief Bill” had to be passed in the Senate with only Democratic votes. Yet it was almost self-evidently needed as a response to an unprecedented public crisis. It was beneficial enough for some Republicans to take credit for it in public . . . despite having voted against it.

Where is the GOP that is heir to, for instance, the conservatives who helped pass civil rights legislation and who founded the Environmental Protection Agency? Or heir to the British conservatives (Tories) who expanded the electorate and made the entire system broader, less class-based, more democratic? Plaintively we ask, where are the conservatives of old? Ay, where are they?

Replaced by reactionaries, every one. And this is not name-calling. It’s sober truth. The United States, as of this writing, has no conservative party. Probably hasn’t for a decade or more.

The grand Anglo-American tradition of careful conservatives offering measured reform and real progress has vanished from America. An apocalyptic trio has replaced them: resentment, revanchism, and reaction. With three “R’s,” alliterative, as if for a tidy little sermon. And I can’t help wondering: what is the sickness of soul that leads to such angry irrationality? Read more »

My friend Stephen Asma painted this oil portrait of Frederica Krüger at my request. I had just brought it home from the framer’s shop and propped it against a bookshelf in my office when Freddy arrived and proceeded to examine it very carefully. Then I asked her to turn around for a second and took this photo.

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani

Eve was thrown out of heaven because she was a temptress, Sita had a trial by fire because she crossed a line, Lot’s wife (who doesn’t even get a mention by her own name) was turned into a pillar of salt because she was disobedient, but Mary was a saint for giving birth as a virgin. Collectively, the one thing that binds these narratives is a sense of shame. But what if these stories about women were told to us from a different perspective? What if we were told that Eve was a pioneer and a risk-taker for indulging her curiosity about the forbidden fruit? Or that Sita was charitable and fearless for wanting to help an old man in need, Lot’s wife was a patriot and a freethinker for looking back at the land that had raised her, and that Mary was a courageous single mother. How would women see themselves if they grew up thinking of themselves as survivors and not as victims blamed for their choices and penalized for their actions or praised for their purity and silence? What if we saw women for who they are instead of who we want them to be? What if didn’t shame women?

Aib, sharam, haya, izzat, laaj, dishonour — almost every language has a word for shame. And the burden of that shame lies on the shoulders of the female. Because when we grow up in a culture which penalizes women for the consequences of their choices, we internalize a culture of shame — a culture of victim blaming that shames women for asserting their sexuality and agency,  shaming them for raising their voices and scrutinizing their bodies. Women learn to curb their curiosity, to stifle desire, and to take ‘submissive and compliant’ as compliments.

As I saw the backlash against Pakistan’s Aurat (Women’s) March unfold this year, I was reminded of the politics of shame that so many women all over the world internalize. I found myself questioning… what does it mean to grow up knowing you are being watched? What does it mean to live in a voyeuristic bell jar where the collective weight of society determines the choices you make? When the length of your skirt can be responsible for your rape, when loving someone your family does not approve of can get you killed, when violence against you is tolerated and even justified because it is your fault that you could not understand the code of honor? From body shaming to slut shaming, the shame is all yours. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Perseverance, the fifth NASA/JPL rover to land successfully on Mars, is currently looking for life there. What if it finds it?

The discovery of life on Mars would provide evidence that life is ubiquitous and likely to arise spontaneously under moderately favorable circumstances. It would be evidence that life everywhere is very similar – or, alternatively, very different – and give us more reason to suspect that there is life elsewhere in our own solar system. It could even suggest that we – you and I – are Martians. What evidence of life on Mars will not do, despite what some have argued, is make it more probable that human beings will go extinct. That last suggestion, proffered by Nick Bostrom and echoed by others, is (to use a technical, philosophical term) bonkers. So, I will leave it for last.

Perseverance is not just looking for life. It’s exploring the potential habitability of Mars for future missions, collecting samples that may be returned to Earth later, collecting instrument data, and taking spectacular photographs. I am excited about it as I have been excited about every mission since Viking 1 in 1976. (Excited, that is, once I recovered from my initial disappointment that there didn’t seem to be any dinosaurs on Mars. Don’t judge me. I was eleven years old.) But occasionally when I share my excitement with others, usually in the form of photographs, I get a dispiriting response. “It’s just a bunch of rocks,” more than one person has said to be. Either way, it’s still fascinating to me. But, well, maybe, it’s not just rocks. Maybe there is life on Mars.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am not going to distinguish between definitive evidence of past life and current, you know, actual life. Of course, it’s more exciting if there is actual respirating and metabolizing going on there right now. Fossils of extinct life are, well, still just rocks. But we are much more likely to find evidence of past life than anything living. To see why consider the question, why can’t we just see that there is or isn’t life on Mars? It looks pretty dead. Whereas a probe to Earth would detect life from orbit. Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

Over recent times, many books have been published with the aim of writing women into history and crediting them for the achievements they have made to the benefit of humanity more broadly. Janice P. Nimura’s The Doctors Blackwell is in that genre of women’s history and she effectively narrates the biographies of the first two remarkable women to study and practice medicine in the United States: Elizabeth Blackwell and her younger sister, Emily.

In this modern world where the sky is literally the limit for women should they have the ambition, determination and the opportunity, it is sometimes difficult to think of them being stifled in such a way as to constrain their potential, yet that has been the plight of women throughout history, and indeed remains the situation for many women across the globe. Gender has been a crucial factor in defining the lives of women, probably exacting a terrible toll of lifelong intellectual frustration and stifling ambition for many of them. As Nimura’s book reveals, Elizabeth Blackwell, a ‘solitary, bookish, uncompromising high-minded’ young woman was one such woman, until she found her way into medicine. Read more »