by Varun Gauri

In his recent book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders offers insights into writing good short stories. I may consider his craft advice in another context; here, I want to explore the book’s implications for bad stories and, specifically, the bad stories we call public narratives.

Saunders contends that “we might think of the story as a system for the transfer of energy.” This comes in a discussion of Chekhov’s “In the Cart,” in which a description of Marya, an unhappy, lonely school teacher, creates an expectation for the reader that Marya must necessarily endeavor to become less unhappy, less lonely, as the story unfolds. That’s the energy transfer — an observation at one point in time creates heightened attention, and specific expectations that are the springboard for action, later on.

Public narratives are similar. When we say America is “the land of free,” we not only evoke, implicitly or explicitly, the stories of the American Revolution and the liberation of people under the Axis powers, but create specific expectations that America will later fulfill or fail. Robert Shiller, in Narrative Economics, makes a similar point: “If we want to understand people’s actions . . . we need to study the “terms and images that energize” (Shiller is quoting the historian Ramsay MacMullen). Authoritarian societies provide many examples of the energetic function of public narratives; for example, a statement that the Aryans were the master race was not only an historical claim but an exhortation to make it true, by dominating and destroying other races. Read more »

by Filippo Santoni de Sio[1], along with Marianna Capasso, Rockwell F. Clancy, Matthew Dennis, Juan Manuel Durán, Georgy Ishmaev, Olya Kudina, Jonne Maas, Lavinia Marin, Giorgia Pozzi, Martin Sand, Jeroen van den Hoven, Herman Veluwenkamp[2]

Abstract: This article, written by the Digital Philosophy Group of TU Delft is inspired by the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. It is not a review of the show, but rather uses it as a lead to a wide-ranging philosophical piece on the ethics of digital technologies. The underlying idea is that the documentary fails to give an impression of how deep the ethical and social problems of our digital societies in the 21st century actually are; and it does not do sufficient justice to the existing approaches to rethinking digital technologies. The article is written, we hope, in an accessible and captivating style. In the first part (“the problems”), we explain some major issues with digital technologies: why massive data collection is not only a problem for privacy but also for democracy (“nothing to hide, a lot to lose”); what kind of knowledge AI produces (“what does the Big Brother really know”) and is it okay to use this knowledge in sensitive social domains (“the risks of artificial judgement”), why we cannot cultivate digital well-being individually (“with a little help from my friends”), and how digital tech may make persons less responsible and create a “digital Nuremberg”. In the second part (“The way forward”) we outline some of the existing philosophical approaches to rethinking digital technologies: design for values, comprehensive engineering, meaningful human control, new engineering education, and a global digital culture. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

I love birds, and I’m obsessed with words, so I suppose it stands to reason that I’m fascinated by the names of birds. I enjoy the “what it says, it does” names such as gnatcatcher and wagtail. (Further investigation reveals that the gnatcatcher family includes gnatwrens such as the chattering gnatwren and the trilling gnatwren, who I assume also do what their names say.) There are also bee-eaters and brushrunners, leaftossers and treecreepers, berrypeckers and foliage-gleaners.

Rollers perform acrobatic flight maneuvers to woo a mate or protect their territory. Bowerbirds build elaborately decorated structures to attract a mate, and some ovenbirds (furnariids) build nests of clay that roughly resemble tiny ovens. Weavers are known for their intricately constructed nests, which they build by weaving grasses and other types of vegetation.

I also delight in names that describe a bird’s appearance: the checker-throated stipple throat and the harlequin duck, for example. The male twelve-wired bird-of-paradise has twelve wiry filaments near his rear that he uses in his courtship display. The prothonotary warbler was named for a yellow-robed notary at the Byzantine court. The rainbow-bearded thornbill is a hummingbird with a narrow glittering band along its gorget (throat feathers) that ranges in color from green to red (more visible in the males than in the females). Read more »

Jammie Holmes. (title not found)

More here, and here.

by David M. Introcaso

Tragically, President Biden’s 21-page “Tackling the Climate Crisis” Executive Order signed January 27th failed to make any effort to address the increasingly dire health effects caused by the climate crisis.  This may seem surprising since, for example, just one-month earlier Lancet published its fifth, well publicized and highly regarded annual report, “Countdown on Health and Climate Change.”  The report’s introduction opens by asserting planetary warming is “resulting in profound, immediate and rapidly worsening health effects.”  Nevertheless, the executive order makes no mention of the Medicare and Medicaid programs and ignores the fact the US health care industry’s greenhouse gas emissions significantly contribute to climate crisis-related health effects.  This is disturbing since the federal government, responsible for safeguarding the health of America’s most vulnerable citizens, should not allow the healthcare industry to systematically harm their health.

We have known for decades that greenhouse gas emissions significantly contribute to the prevalence and exacerbation of numerous disease conditions.  The Countdown report documents at length morbidity and mortality due to heat stress and heatstroke, wildfires, flood and drought and the transmission of numerous infectious vector-born, food-born and water-borne diseases including dengue, the incidence of which has grown thirtyfold over the past 50 years threatening half of the world’s population.  The Biden administration is aware that during the past 20 years there has been a 54% increase in heat-related deaths among those over age 65 and that nearly half of Americans breathe unhealthy air that explains why fossil fuel use accounts for 58% of excess US deaths annually.  The administration knows this because the Obama administration published in 2016 the nearly encyclopedic report, “The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States.” Read more »

The Brothers Kathwari

after Iqbal

You know the secret
I lack depth

You have a home
I’m a wanderer

You control the sky
I’m prisoner of desire

You profit by interest earned
I’m losing the race

Your ships float in the air
My boat is without a sail

Restless, you’re spring
I’m fall

You’re weak. You’re strong
I’m this. I’m that. So?

***

Translation created from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari who has a new collection of poems “My Mother’s Scribe” available here.

by Charlie Huenemann

“. . . . For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. […] The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.” (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1.4.6)

So when Hume looked inward he found nothing stable: nothing but “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”, he said. But when he wrote about looking inward, he produced intricate and elegant successions of words like the paragraph above, which vividly describes that disordered jumble of perceptions and thoughts. One wonders how a mere bundle of perceptions could produce such a fine account. If Hume were correct about the nature of the mind — an ever-flowing chatter with no suggestion of unity — one might expect to read instead:

“…he kissed me in the eye of my glove and I had to take it off asking me questions is it permitted to enquire the shape of my bedroom so I let him keep it as if I forgot it to think of me when I saw him slip it into his pocket of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with him at the open air fete that one in the cream muslin standing right against the sun so he could see every atom she had on when he saw me from behind following in the rain I saw him before he saw me however standing at the corner of the Harolds cross road with a new raincoat on him with the muffler in the Zingari colours to show off his complexion and the brown hat looking slyboots as usual what was he doing there where hed no business…” [James Joyce, Ulysses] Read more »

by Mindy Clegg 

New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow continues to make the rounds with his new book, The Devil You Know. In it he advocates for a reversal of the Great Migration, when Black Americans fled Jim Crow violence and sought economic opportunity in Northern and Western cities during the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, these refugees from the American South were met with more of the same, Blow argues in several recent interviews. Still, most considered escaping the situation in the south a general improvement, a premise he agreed with until recently.

In Professor Hope Wabuke’s review on NPR, she notes how a speech Blow heard by entertainer and activist Harry Belafonte challenged his thinking about the Migration, prompting this book. Based on recent interviews Blow’s premise is that a new Black migration from the North back to the South will give Black Americans a greater share of political power in America, locally and nationally. Born in Louisiana, he’s recently returned to the south himself and currently resides in Atlanta. The recent political shifts here in Georgia bear him out. Atlanta has become an internationally celebrated Black city that’s been led by Black mayors since 1973. In the past decade or so, Stacey Abrams and many others worked to elect President Biden and Vice President Harris, as well as Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, our first Black and Jewish senators respectively. People expressed shock that this could happen. But that’s only because they’ve not been paying attention to what’s been happening in places like Georgia.

I wish to echo Blow’s argument and highlight a necessary strategy for political change. Based on what Abrams and her allies have done here in Georgia—still unfinished work—there is no reason not to think about this in terms of transforming the entire south. I will argue that Blow’s argument has a lot of merit and is how political change happens. When thinking of history, people like to focus on extraordinary individuals and events, but the reality is that changing the politics of a place is a long hard slog undertaken by everyday men and women. Doing that work is going to be critical to creating an enduring and vibrant democracy. Building and transforming institutions are the key to long term change. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mike O’Brien

They say that everyone’s a critic. Some more than others. I have a particularly critical streak, that occasionally strays into full-on curmudgeonry. I have a few excuses. First, the generally awful and worsening state of the world tends to put me into a bit of cranky mood. Second, I am lazy, and picking at the flaws in other people’s work is easier than creating something new. And third, there is a lot of really awful, slap-dash work being done in the world of letters that cries out for detraction.

As a break, if not an antidote, to my nay-saying tendencies, I’m going to attempt something a little more constructive this time around. My first column, way back when, was basically a riff on all the facets of my generalized anxiety, and the ecological facet featured prominently there, but there’s still some unpacking left to do.

First, some predictions. After all, anxiety implies that I think something is going to happen, and in this case that something is very bad and very difficult to avoid. Mass extinction will continue, and continue to accelerate, for the rest of my life and beyond. Global warming, ocean acidification, habitat destruction and atmospheric carbonization will continue to blow past every “point of no return” that scientists set, and narrowly human-regarding effects will continue to immiserate billions of people. If we were the kinds of creatures, organized in the kinds of societies, that were capable to avoiding these inevitabilities, we would not be as far along the road to perdition as we are. This is not about what might happen. This is about what has happened and will continue to happen. Read more »

by Callum Watts

Growing up often feels like a process of finally understanding advice you completely ignored when it was first given to you. For me, this often has the form of thinking I’ve just discovered a profound insight about life, only to realise that it sounds entirely cliché once articulated. Perhaps it supports Plato’s idea that nothing brand new is every really learnt, because learning is really just remembering innate wisdom. More likely though, it’s just a happy reflection of the fact that there really are many general lessons to be learnt on how to live well. Happier still, these are shared and passed down not by philosophers, but by everyone, and so they become clichés. The past year of lockdowns has given me such a remembering, specifically, on the nature of how we find meaning.

Lockdown leaves us bereft of ordinary sources of meaning and value. This is extremely hard to do anything about because meaning is a little like happiness, the pursuit of it tends to scare it away. It is often the by-product of other activities, rather than the goal pursued. Like happiness, it also seems to be the case that the more our source of meaning rests on the dogged pursuit of a single thing, the more it is hostage to the what one thing, and so the more fragile it is.

For example, a person who mainly finds a sense of meaning through their work is extremely vulnerable to existential crises if their job fails to deliver that sense of purpose. The so-called midlife crisis is often (not always) a reaction to professional disappointment, a sense that one’s career has not really lived up to what was demanded of it. In this scenario the failure of a career to have delivered meaning can result in one’s whole existence appearing pointless all of a sudden. Read more »

Sunrise on a foggy day in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in January, 2021.

by Joan Harvey

As we’ve all noticed, as soon you mention something about, say, your neighbor’s annoying poodle and your phone is anywhere within a three mile radius, you immediately get ads for poodles, poodle accessories, poodle food, and yet more poodles. I must have been talking or writing to someone about my immune issues, or possibly just Covid, and boom, they got me. Among all the ads I get for sheer underwear with snakes on it, there it was: immunology, Coursera, first week free, then $49 a month. Okay, I thought, I should know something about this, I’ll sign up, learn a bit, and go on my merry way. Little did I know. Because I’m someone who often doesn’t pay attention to details—exactly the wrong type for this sort of thing—I accidentally ended up in a course from Rice University designed for people with a serious interest and commitment to actually knowing how antibodies work.

I’m not much for video learning in general, or at least I hadn’t been until Covid, when a friend pointed out to me that the wonderful British-Israeli cookbook writer Yotam Ottolenghi did a Master Class. Up until that point I had conscientiously avoided Master Class and all those celebrities telling you they have the answer to life and if you just follow their advice you are guaranteed to become a confident-glamorous-successful novelist-filmmaker-model-architect. I’d also never had a cooking lesson, and found Ottolenghi’s cookbooks (of which I have four) intimidating, though when I attempted one of his recipes, or, more usually, part of one, it was always delicious. I would not have considered learning cooking from anyone else, but Ottolenghi was irresistible. So I paid the fee and there he was in my kitchen: relaxed, gay, handsome, with his wonderful accent, pouring olive oil on everything, squeezing lemons with his hands, squooshing garlic, talking me through each step, making everything easier. With him nearby I was no longer the anxious cook I often am; I was relaxed and reassured, and, following his steps, the food I turned out—Smacked Cucumber Salad with Sumac-Pickled Onions, Mafalda Pasta with Quick Shatta, Pea Spread with Smoky Marinated Feta—was actually amazing. I was only sorry there weren’t more recipes. But that was the extent of the video learning I’d done until my venture into B-cell arcana. Read more »

by Peter Wells

Jesus is reported to have critiqued the seventh commandment as follows: 

You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Mt 5:27-28, New Revised Standard Version).

The principle seems clear. It’s not enough to avoid the act of adultery. You have to avoid wishing to do it. Not in the sense of never being tempted, but in the sense that ‘you would if you could.’ To persist in wishing to do a bad thing is as immoral as to do it. So, when Jesus came to comment on the sixth commandment, you’d assume he’d say something parallel, like this:

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder,” and, “whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.” But I say to you that … everyone who looks at someone with murder in his heart has already committed murder.

However, what Jesus is actually reported to have said at this point is this:

if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool,” you will be liable to the hell of fire.

In other words, insulting someone, or calling them a fool, is the equivalent of murder.

Whether you are a Christian or not, it’s a thought that deserves to be reflected upon. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Libertarianism does not make sense. It cannot keep its promises. It has nothing to offer. It is an intellectual failure like Marxism or Flat-Earthism – something that might once reasonably have seemed worth pursuing but whose persistence in public let alone academic conversation has become an embarrassment. The only mildly interesting thing about libertarianism anymore is why anyone still takes it seriously.

When evaluating a normative ethical theory we should consider three dimensions: 

1. Is the theory plausible in its own right? I.e. does it make sense or is it an incoherent mess of contradictions?
2. Would the world be better if it was ordered according to the theory? I.e. does the theory promise us anything worth having?
3. Does the theory provide a useful guide to action around here right now? I.e. is it any help at all for addressing the kind of problems that actually appear in our practical moral and political life?

1. Does Libertarianism Make Sense?

Libertarianism is a response to the problem of politics – the sphere of activity concerned with the collective management of our social living arrangements that is complicated, contingent, and refuses to obey the authority of reason. The problem of politics has offended many philosophers from Plato onwards. Libertarians’ particular solution to the problem is what I call eliminative moralism: the reduction of the entire noisome political sphere to its supposed basis in a narrow interpersonal morality of consent. The result has an extraordinary intellectual simplicity and normative minimalism which many find appealing and convenient, yet the very sources of its appeal are its deepest flaws. Read more »

“This is conclusive, and if men are capable of any truth, this is it.”
……………………………………………….…— Blaise Pascal, on his wager 

Blaise’s Place

Blaise’s place is on a sunset strip
sliced razor-straight through desert air
many cul de sacs veer from its hot black path
which is squeezed in a pass between mountains there
west where the day goes down in a blaze

The road’s white line on the northern side
is lit with votive flame-tipped wax
while on its south hot neon in glass tubes glows
glazing the way in pink-lit veneer
as fountains spit from golden taps

The landscape reeks of myrrh & beer
on a highway set with a brilliant trap:
a bet to which Blaise alludes
and away from which skeptics steer

A crooner’s song from a glittery stage
with background bells of dollar slots,
a mix in warp & weft on a nameless loom
with Gregorian chants wrung into gambler’s knots

—priests & players in cassocks, albs,
sequined shirts and denim pants
—Adidas shuffling under slick, chic suits,
heads with miters or baseball caps
—water & booze from an aspergillum
dipped in Byzantine plastic flask and flung,
dots ears and eyes and throbbing sternums
beating for life in which wisdom basks

But (as if in Solomon’s chair),
Blaise calls all bettors there,
throws loaded dice against a wall
that runs from floor
past stratosphere,
past moon, past sun, 
past galaxies in curls of space
to end of time, but
always ends down here
where gamblers grumble
and losers grouse
that the odds (by grace)
are always with the house

by Jim Culleny, 1/29/17
Jim Culleny – Blaises Place – Clyp