Illinois man arrested for spray-painting
swastikas on gravestones  —NY Daily News, 5/31/18

Epidermis

….. skinhead:
a thing shrink-wrapped in pink tissue,
shorthand for fear

….. epidermis of a skinhead:
a nonsensitive layer of skin
covering the true skin, or corium;
or the outermost living layer of an animal,
a layer so thin it flakes like filo 
when touched even lightly
by love or veracity

….. corium:
true skin the sheathing of ordinary saints,
a tougher, deeper covering than that
enveloping the shrunken skulls of
those who graffiti grave stones 
with swastikas; —typically absent
in skinheads

Jim Culleny
5/31/18

by R. Passov

A little more than five years ago, in a nice home in Sugarland Texas not far from where he once worked, Jack Garman gave me several hours of his day. I had reached out from New York, saying that I was a random retiree interested in learning about his career. Something in the way I phrased my introduction made him want to give me some time. As I got to know Jack, I came to understand that he knew what he wanted to say was special, that he liked an audience and had gladly told his story time and time again.

Five years from a stem cell transplant which provided a hopeful path in his fight against blood cancer, he had reserves of energy. I recorded our conversation. As much as possible, I’ll let Jack speak in his own words.

***

When I joined NASA, in April of 1966, since my birthday was in May, I could still claim I was 21. My wife, Sue, a Rockwell brat, moved to Houston in 1964. Since she wanted work but didn’t have a college degree, NASA hired her to be a Math Aid.

Sue helped NASA engineers see what they were doing. Those were the days before CRT screens (cathode ray tubes) were attached to computers. If output from a computer belonged on a graph, a plotter was engaged. Plotting was done by hand onto glass surfaces by women who knew how to translate output from a computer onto a graph, and who also knew how to get coffee for the engineers.

My father was a banker and had moved the family to Lebanon, Jordan in the 1960’s as then Lebanon was the West of the Middle East. Since there was no family left in Texas, Sue and I just went downtown and got married. Read more »

Sughra Raza. It’s Still Winter After All. March 2021.

Digital photograph.

by Michael Liss

Let’s talk about voter suppression. Not about whether it’s good or bad or legal or moral (you can get more than enough of that virtually 24/7), but about what practical implications it might have.

I have looked at the 35 Presidential Elections from 1880 to 2020 to see how tight they were, and where modern forms of voter suppression might have impacted past results.

I made a few assumptions. The first was to limit it to just suppression, and not include potential crossover votes. To make that a bit clearer, if you have an election that ends up 50-50, I propose to simply eliminate votes from one side, not add to the other. I set the bar at two suppressed votes per hundred (I’m going to call that a “Suppression Penalty”), which I think is conservative, given the extent of some of the new laws being passed. Applying that 2% Suppression Penalty, would it have changed the results of some of the closest and most controversial elections of the past?

Obviously, this is a crude method. Some states engage in suppression, others do not, and different forms of suppression will have disparate impacts. But I thought the exercise was worth it, as ever-increasing sophistication in targeting, along with a sense of anything goes, will encourage more use of the tactic. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

Through the academic grapevine, it came; a story of an eminent sociologist who argued that he wouldn’t want to work with graduate students who he couldn’t fuck. The infamous statement was allegedly said in a faculty meeting in the 1990s at a progressive urban university where they were considering an official ban on faculty-graduate student sexual relationships. Most, if not all, of the female faculty at the meeting were appalled and offended. They accused the professor, to varying degrees, of being misogynistic, prurient, boorish, patriarchal, naïve, profane, immature, and, most stinging of all, willfully blind to inequities of power and the abuses that surely follow. He laughed good-naturedly, as was his wont in the face of intellectual disagreement, and tried to explain the reasoning behind his admittedly provocative statement.

He believed that adult women (and men) have sexual agency and should be free to pursue whatever consensual sexual relationships they desire; to argue for its regulation in the service of comfort and/or protection is to infantilize both women and men and repress, from a Reichian perspective, the “unified erotic impulse” of sexual desire, tenderness, and empathy.[1] Specific to women, he argued that feminist-driven policies that inadvertently deny, diminish, and/or discipline women’s sexual agency and freedom do not serve women’s liberation from male supremacist ideology, but provides the “self-perpetuating basis of a sadomasochistic psychology that is in turn crucial to the maintenance of an authoritarian, hierarchical social order.”[2] Policies that discipline the unified erotic impulse would impose a form of repressive libidinal desublimation in the name of liberation.[3] Regulating and disciplining sexual desire denies a women’s right to choose who, where, and when to fuck; furthermore, if equality is a precondition of sexual agency, then any erotic attention is “always already” problematic. Power between two (or more) intimates is never equal. He emphasized that he was not reasserting a notion of sexual freedom that ignores or denies the structural reality of male supremacy and the unfair burden it places on women who demand and deserve sexual freedom without apology. His argument, in other words, was not driven by self-interest, i.e., he didn’t actually want to have sex with any of his graduate students. He was fully aware of how “sexual morality, [even when it arises from the left] in a patriarchal culture becomes a primary instrument of social control.”[4] Nevertheless, he believed that policies that ban sexual relationships between graduate students and professors, in the final analysis, place too much emphasis on preventing sexual coercion and “undercut feminist opposition to the right.”[5] Equally concerned about the pedagogical implications of the proposed ban, the professor agued that it contradicted the progressive and critical modalities of education that they all supported and practiced. I am told the professor went on to link the imperative of sexual freedom to the praxis of radical social change. I do not know how the meeting ended, but I never forgot the story. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

^
Royalty
Aristocracy
Church Officials
The Merchant Class
Skilled Crafts Workers
The Goddamned Peasants
The Unbelieving Under Class
Criminals to Be Caged & Tortured
Those Whom We Will Publicly Execute

^
WASPS
White Catholics
White-Skinned Jews
Model Minority Asians
White-Skinned, Anglo-Latinx
American Indians as they are Imagined
Dark-Skinned Hispanic Latinos and Latinas
American Indians in Real Life, Not Your Fantasies
African or Indigenous Americans, Depending Where You Are

^
Hahvahd
Harvard and Yale
Princeton, Cornell, Columbia
The Other three Ivy League Schools
Other Elite Private Colleges/Universities
A Small Number of Elite Public Universities
United States’ Elite Military Academy Universities
Flagship Public Research Universities in Most U.S. States
Second Class Public Research Universities across the United States
Former Teacher’s Colleges and Other Underfunded Public Universities
Real Colleges You Have not Heard of and Think, Huh, Is That a Real College?

^
University
4-Year Colleges
Community Colleges
Accredited Online Colleges
Sham, For-Profit Online Colleges
Secondary Schools (aka High Schools)
Middle Schools (aka Junior High Schools)
Primary Schools (aka Elementary or Grade schools)
Daycare Single Mom Sends Child to While Studying for GED

^
Profs
Associate Profs
Untenured Assistant Profs
1-Year Visiting Assistant Professors
Lecturers on Renewable 1-Year Contract
Long Term Adjuncts Who Keep Showing Up
Grad Students with New Syllabi and Fragile Dreams
Come-and-Go Adjuncts Juggling 6 Classes at three Schools
Politician Who Teaches PoliSci Class & Votes to Slash Ed Funding

^
The PhDs
The Medical Degrees
Law/Engineering Degrees
Other Hip Professional Degrees
Various Master of Sciences Degrees
Various Master of Art/Philosophy Degrees
Bachelor of Science Four Year College Degrees
Bachelor of Arts Four Year Degrees: Social Sciences
Bachelor’s of Arts Four Year Degrees in the Humanities
Associate of Arts Degree from a 2 year Community College
M.A., B.A., or A.A. Degrees from an Accredited Online Colleges
Four Year High School Degrees from Expensive Private High Schools
Four Year High School Degrees from Very Selective Public High Schools
Four Year High School Degrees from Open Admissions Public High Schools
General Equivalency Diplomas Earned Taking an Exam Instead of enduring HS

^
3QD Readers
Elite Mag Readers
NYT/WaPo/WSJ Readers
Tabloid Newspaper Readers
People Magazine and SI Readers
Facebook and Twitter Doom Scrollers
Young Adult Fantasy/Sci Fi Book Readers
Small Children Reading Cute Children’s Books
Readers of Graffiti on Doors of Bar Bathroom Stalls

^
Activists
Honest Critics
The Numb Underclass
The Blind Underclass Strivers
Paranoid, Neurotic Middle Classes
Justifiers, Rationalizers, & Excuse Makers
People Who Embrace, Profit from these Pyramids
Precious Children of Embracers & Profiteers of Pyramids
Parents, Furiously Indignant I Dared Slight their Precious Children
Me, Despite My Money & Credentials, Skulking Down Here Like I Belong

^
I
Us
You
Them
All of ‘Em
Eight Billion
Or Thereabouts
And Still Counting
The World’s Many Souls
Drifting and Stumbling About
Each 1 a Human Stone Slotted into
Pyramids of Social, Cultural, Economic
Ranking, Status, Power, Privileges, Opportunity
Perhaps Knowing, or Not, That They Are Very likely
Stuck in Those Slots, More or Less, for All of Their Days
Wallowing in Resentment or Finding a Way to Look Past It
Because At Least They Can Write their Name in Capital Letters

akimreinhardt’s
website is the
publicprof
essor.
com
.

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 »