From ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ to ‘Succession’: Reading the Themes

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

Two series have been streaming recently, to considerable success – The Queen’s Gambit (a Netflix miniseries, now concluded) and Succession (HBO, two series so far and more planned). They are interesting for a number of reasons – both for what they show, and perhaps more for what they do not, possibly cannot, show. So let’s consider some of the things we see and don’t see. I’m not going to recount the plot of either of them, as you can get that from Wikipedia and plenty of other places. But: spoiler alert: some will be divulged. Let’s look first at The Queen’s Gambit.

The Queens Gambit‘s success has been enormous. The acting and ‘look’ of the lead -Anya Joy-Taylor – is clearly an important part of it. She even looks on occasion like some elegant chess piece come to life in a Lewis Carroll kind of way. The production values and the way the plot steers away from some (not all!) expected outcomes is also relevant. The theme of success via struggle, including those against ‘inner demons’ isn’t new, but this film (based on a 1980s novel) handles them in an interesting way. But what is this series about? Here are a few suggestions about the world of TQG and what it seems to be saying.

I.  TQG is a meticulously crafted fantasy, with many fairytale elements. It has many of the features of a quest/trial story, modified via contemporary psychological and social themes. It even has a ‘helper’ (Jolene) who steps in to give the hero the means she needs to overcome her last trial. It is also a bildungsroman – about how one becomes an adult, or successful self. The themes of mental illness, addiction and abandonment could not be more timely. Read more »

Monday, January 18, 2021

In memoriam: Sahabzada M. Yaqub Khan, my uncle

Posted on by Muneeza Shamsie

by Muneeza Shamsie

Sahabzada M. Yaqub Khan, Government House, Karachi, 1948

This year, 26 January marks the fifth death anniversary, of Sahabzada M. Yaqub-Khan (1920-2016), my uncle. To me it seems as if it was yesterday. He was my mother’s youngest brother and her only sibling in Pakistan. The bond between them was so close that I cannot remember a time, when he was not integral to my family life. To my younger sister, Naushaba (now Naushaba Hasnain) and me, he was always ‘Mamou’. I have no idea when Mamou and I first met. He was a prisoner-of-war at the time I was born in Lahore. As I grew up I was told by my parents never to ask him about his POW years because it was such a dreadful experience.  I learnt in time, that he had been captured in Egypt (at Bir Hachim after the Battle of Tobruk) and he escaped in Italy with two fellow officers – the future Commander in Chiefs of the Pakistan and Indian armies respectively, Generals Yahya Khan and Kumaramangalam – but they had been recaptured. Mamou was then moved to a concentration camp in Germany. He had utilized those years to learn languages: French, German, Italian and Russian. Afterwards he was sent to England to convalesce. There he was often mistaken for his second cousin, the Nawab of Pataudi, the famous cricketer.  The resemblance was so uncanny that two generations later, my daughter Kamila chanced upon a photograph in a book on cricket history. She did a double take and thought ‘What is Yaqub Nana doing here?’

My first conscious memory of Mamou revolves around the unsolved mystery of Fuzzy Wuzzy Kitten, my favourite book. This had big pictures of kitten in a lovely soft, velvety material. Possibly Mamou used to read it to me. One day the book disappeared.  For some reason I thought that he was responsible. He would often tease me – and ask with a big grin – until I was quite grown up. “Who took Fuzzy Wuzzy Kitten?”  I would point to him. He would go into peals of laughter. And I still don’t know what happened to Fuzzy Wuzzy Kitten. Read more »

On the varieties of change

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

A block of tungsten and a bottle of sodium

I have been thinking a lot about change recently. 2020 seemed like a good year to do this, for several reasons. There was the political turmoil in the United States where I live. There was the global pandemic. There was the birth of our daughter. There were a few projects I worked on related to long term change on evolutionary timescales. All of these issues gave me the opportunity to think about change and some of the paradoxes associated with it. Everybody defines change in their own way, and some changes may be more important to some of us than to others, so how we react to, adapt to and enable change is ultimately very subjective. And yet we all have to deal with some very objective measures of change, at the very least those pertaining to life and death. So the paradox of change is that while it impacts us on a very subjective, personal level and each of us perceives it very differently, on another level it also unites us because of its universal aspects, aspects that can help us define our common humanity.

There was of course the pandemic that forced great changes. A way of life which we took for granted was suddenly and irrevocably changed. Careers and lives ended, we hunkered down in our homes, stopped traveling and started looking inward. For some of us who had been caught up in immediate matters of family, the pandemic even came as a welcome respite in which we got to spend more time with our significant others and children. We stepped back and reevaluated our life on the treadmill. For others, it posed a constant challenge to get work done, especially with kids whose schools were closed. For my wife and me, the pandemic was a chance to spend more time with our newborn daughter and avoid the stresses and boredom of the commute and stresses of physical meetings in the office. What can be unwelcome change for one can be unexpectedly welcome for another. In this particular case we were privileged, but the tables could well be turned. Read more »

My Cousin Daryl Pens a Paean to Lauren Boebert

Posted on by Joan Harvey

by Joan Harvey 

Still from Rural Colorado United video

I always knew that we couldn’t Make America Great Again without Sarah Palin. So when she retreated to Alaska to be with John Galt and all the others who shrugged because they were tired of holding up the Lib-tards and their socialist laziness, I figured we were on the path to becoming Venezuela. Sure, Donald Trump, the greatest president since Abe Lincoln and probably tied with George Washington for second, was in office, but he couldn’t do it alone. This country has so many Lib-tards and blue-state welfare queens that without someone like Sarah Palin, our country was due for collapse.

So I took things into my own hands. Have you read The Secret? You have to read it! It’s about using the energy of the universe to get what you really, truly, deeply want to make your life AWESOME! The book says to make a vision board with some magazines and glitter and rubber cement, because the universe needs pictures to help it know what you want. Well, I knew I couldn’t make a vision board (you know I don’t mess with that girly shit) so I got my old lady Darla to make one. Right in the middle of that vision board, Darla pasted Sarah Palin. And then she surrounded her with the other Palins: Todd, and Trig, and Track, and Sailor, and Bristol, and Plumber. And then we pasted on the text of the Second Amendment, and pictures of some friends totally armed to protect ourselves from Antifa and BLM. Guys that could keep America Great and Free! And we waited, and we prayed, and we let ourselves be open to the universe.

And that’s when Lauren Boebert walked into our life as if she had walked right off our vision board! Read more »

(Re)reading Don DeLillo in Dark Times

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

Adapted from a talk given on April 28, 2017 at the New School, New York City, as part of The Body Artist: A Conference on Don DeLillo.

For some readers, Don DeLillo is a guy thing: an immensely gifted geek whose male characters are incapable of emotional communication; whose dialogue sounds more like the brilliant inner monologues of a mind challenging its own assumptions than individual expressions of distinct personalities; who has examined, analyzed, and celebrated American culture with a wistful nostalgia for baseball, poker, fistfights, and billiards, the kind of rough-and-tumble male bonding that redeems unremarkable domestic existence. Whatever his weaknesses might be, most would agree that DeLillo is a wary paranoiac with an uncanny ability to predict, well in advance, shifts in culture, technology, and the communication media and their effects on individual and collective psychology and to express these phenomena in evocative and hypnotic prose. DeLillo speaks powerfully to American obsessions: our anxiety at being alive, our fear of death, the way in which our efforts to transcend ourselves in some meaningful way are stymied by a culture that both engenders and entraps us. The question now is whether his work can help us analyze the unprecedented political situation we find ourselves in today.

I’ve been living in Berlin for over thirty years. Live outside your native culture long enough, and you begin to see it as a sort of double exposure in which your sense of family and identity and belonging is overlaid with a strange, shape-shifting disturbance pattern in which everything seems normal until it suddenly doesn’t, and you begin to see the country from a foreigner’s point of view. For as long as I can remember, America has enjoyed its superpower status, exporting the products of its creative industries around the globe, often through aggressive means, and showing little sustained interest in the cultures of other countries. Lawrence Venuti, the translation theorist, has spoken of “a trade imbalance with serious cultural ramifications” resulting in “a complacency in Anglo-American relations with cultural others, a complacency that can be described—without too much exaggeration—as imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home.” Only a tiny percentage of all publications in the United States are works in translation, meaning that we have comparatively meager resources to examine our society and culture in comparison to other societies and cultures, and that this impedes our ability to reflect objectively on ourselves.

What does this have to do with Don DeLillo? Read more »

Science and magic

Posted on by Charlie Huenemann

by Charlie Huenemann

I think it is fair to say that we usually see science and magic as opposed to one another. In science we make bold hypotheses, subject them to rigorous testing against experience, and tentatively accept whatever survives the testing as true – pending future revisions and challenges, of course. But in magic we just believe what we want to be true, and then we demonstrate irrational exuberance when our beliefs are borne out by experience, and in other cases we explain away the falsifications in one way or another. Science means letting what nature does shape what we believe, while magic means framing our interpretations of experience so that we can keep on believing what feels groovy.

But this belief – that we can clearly distinguish between magic and science – turns out itself to be an instance of framing our interpretations so as to allow us to keep on believing something that makes us feel good. In other words, the relation between magic and science is far more complicated, and magic is not so easily brushed aside.

“Science”, as we use the term, is a relative newcomer on the scene. “Scientia”, meaning expert knowledge, is Latin, but using it or its cognates to refer to a special method of acquiring knowledge – especially one that involves microscopes, telescopes, and test tubes – is a much later innovation. What has always been around, ever since we started jabbering, has been an interest in understanding how nature works, usually conjoined with our practical interest in prediction and control. Call that interest “natural knowledge”. Read more »

Dante: Still Bringing Hope From Hell

Posted on by Thomas O'Dwyer

by Thomas O’Dwyer

At one point midway on our path in life,
I came around and found myself searching through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost.
How hard it is to say what that wood was, a wilderness savage, brute, harsh, and wild.
Only to think of it renews my fear. 

Dante presenting the Divine Comedy to Florence by Domenico di Michelino.
Dante presenting the Divine Comedy to Florence by Domenico di Michelino.

The opening lines of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy are as well know to every Italian as “To be or not to be” is to an English speaker. We can only speculate on how many people outside Italy are familiar with the entire poem’s content or context. But none can dispute the depth to which Dante, like Shakespeare, has penetrated not only his native culture but that of the world for centuries. Both did civilisation an immeasurable service by elevating former dialects spoken by their native peoples to the same dignity and power as formal “superior” languages spoken by Europe’s literate elites, such as Latin and Greek.

Dante died 700 years ago this year in 1321 and, pandemic or no pandemic (a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost), Italy will again be celebrating the memory of its great genius. He defines its national soul the same way Shakespeare does for England and Miguel de Cervantes for Spain. Events are planned throughout Florence, Ravenna and close to 100 other towns and villages connected to “il Sommo Poeta,” the Supreme Poet. Born in Florence, Dante died in Ravenna just one year after completing his masterpiece. The Divine Comedy, one of the greatest works of world literature, has 14,233 lines split into three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. It traces a pilgrim’s journey in the afterlife through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Read more »

Poetry in Translation

Posted on by Rafiq Kathwari

Ardor

after Iqbal

Her seduction keeps him fluid as mercury
Has she taught him the rules of passion?

Restless, he finds comfort yearning
Is she his eternal flame?

Is he a lover of ancient beauty?
She, small Sinai; he, small Moses

His search for illumination —
An insect longing for light

 

By Rafiq Kathwari. His new collection of poems, My Mother’s Scribe, is available here and here and here.

Turtles All The Way Down

Posted on by Mike O'Brien

by Mike O’Brien

I don’t always make great decisions, but swearing off political commentary two months ago was a really, really good one.

Ahem.

As I stated two columns ago, I’ve been wanting to write more about ecological ethics, and more specifically about ethical obligations across species. Last month I laid out my criticisms of animal rights. In summary, rights discourse is a language game, and humans are the only animals on Earth who can play it. Not to say that we can’t articulate a case for treating animals well using a language of rights; this is indeed the most effective path to legal protection at the moment. But we say something nonsensical when we articulate that case, which may or may not matter in the grand scheme of things.

For my next trick, I’d like to take on ethical naturalism, and similar presuppositions about where morality comes from. Ethical naturalism is basically the idea that moral rightness and wrongness is a natural fact, and can be discovered by observing natural facts. Read more »

Towards Responsible Research and Innovation

Posted on by Fabio Tollon

by Fabio Tollon

In the media it is relatively easy to find examples of new technologies that are going “revolutionize” this or that industry. Self-driving cars will change the way we travel and mitigate climate change, genetic engineering will allow for designer babies and prevent disease, superintelligent AI will turn the earth into an intergalactic human zoo. As a reader, you might be forgiven for being in a constant state of bewilderment as to why we do not currently live in a communist utopia (or why we are not already in cages). We are incessantly badgered with lists of innovative technologies that are going to uproot the way we live, and the narrative behind these innovations is overwhelmingly positive (call this a “pro-innovation bias”). What is often missing in such “debates”, however, is a critical voice. There is a sense in which we treat “innovation” as a good in itself, but it is important that we innovate responsibly. Or so I will argue. Read more »

Whatever Happened to the Neanderthals?

Posted on by Carol A Westbrook

by Carol A Westbrook

It is 42,000 years ago, somewhere in central Europe. A human hunter treks through the forest, dressed in furs. He is carrying a large pack. Alongside him is his mate, a short, blond Neanderthal woman, and their son, about 8 years old, with features of both.

They reach their destination, a Neanderthal dwelling adjacent to the winder cave.

A man walks out, pleased to see his daughter and her mate, along with their son.

“Greetings and welcome, he said.

“Greetings back to you,” the human says. “I have brought some gifts.”

He presents the two saber-tooth tiger pelts and the large teeth to the Neanderthal man. The man reciprocates by giving him some well-crafted flint tools, a spear tip and a scraper.

“Today, I will show my grandson how to chip flint.”The H. sapiens thanks him. He is anxious to bring this expertise to his tribe. The Neanderthal flints were the finest in the area.

His wife goes off to help her mother cook the food. The Neanderthal man said to the homo sapiens man,

“I’m so glad you took my daughter to mate. It is getting hard to find any of my tribe, and few sons of an age to mate. We have grown scarce as a people.”

He replies,”Thank you, old father. Your daughter is a good wife, she is kind and hard-working and will bear me many children.” Read more »

Make Love, not War

Posted on by Peter Wells

by Peter Wells

Let me recommend a New Year resolution, in case you don’t have one yet: Be nicer to people you disagree with.

I’ve been moved to make this recommendation by my recent reading of The Guardian, a British centre-left newspaper. It has disappointed me.

This is sad, for I agree with the general tenor of The Guardian’s views, oscillating, as I do, between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. What is more, The Guardian has allowed me to read its columns free of charge. But increasingly I note that in its attempts to express its views more forcibly, it has begun to resort to vilification. Read more »

Monday, January 11, 2021

The Reindeer and the Ape: Reflections on Xenophanes’ Rainbow

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

This is the third part of a series on dual-process psychology and its significance for our image of the world. Previous parts: 1) The Lobster and the Octopus and 2) The Dolphin and the Wasp

Rudolph, the blue-eyed reindeer

Fig 1: No one knows what it’s like: reindeer eyes, golden-brown in the summer, turn blue in winter. (Photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash)

With Christmas season still twinkling in the rear view mirror, images of reindeer, most commonly in mid-flight pulling Santa’s sled, are still fresh on our minds. However, as the Christmas classic The Physics of Santa Claus helpfully points out, no known species of reindeer can, in fact, fly.

That may be so. But reindeer possess another superpower, one that sets them apart from all other known mammals—once the frosty season sets in, their eyes change color, from a deep golden-brown to a vibrant blue (to the best of my knowledge, there are, however, no reports of unusual colors related to the olfactory organs). The reason for this change of color has long been a mystery, until a study by Glen Jeffery and colleagues from the University College London pinpointed a likely reason in 2013: the change in hue serves to better collect light in the dark of winter.

When we think of eye color, we typically think of the color of the iris—but for some mammals, cats most familiarly, another factor is the tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer behind the retina. Due to its color change, reindeer eyes are able to gather more light—thus, the lack of light is offset by an increased capacity to utilize it. The world outside gets darker, but the world the reindeer see, the world they inhabit—their lifeworld, in Husserl’s terminology—may not, or at least, not as much.

The world comes to mind through the lens of the senses. The lifeworld is never just an unvarnished reality, nor even an approximation to it—it is the world as transformed in our experience. A change in this lifeworld then may herald both a change in the world, as such, as well as a change in our perception—or reception—of it. Read more »

Evaluating a new (centuries old) proof of miracles

Posted on by Joseph Shieber

by Joseph Shieber

Completely by chance, I happened to come across a discussion of Tyron Goldschmidt’s paper, “A Proof of Exodus: Judah HaLevy and Jonathan Edwards Walk into a Bar”, in Cole Aronson’s review of the 2019 book Jewish Philosophy in an Analytic Age. I was intrigued by Aronson’s celebration of Goldschmidt’s “characteristic verve”, so — with the help of my college’s outstanding Interlibrary Loan — I got hold of the paper.

Just as a matter of literary quality, Aronson undersells Goldschmidt’s paper. Goldschmidt is a delightfully engaging writer. If you’ve dipped into some contemporary academic philosophy and come away with the impression that it’s all turgid and dry, check out Goldschmidt’s essay. It’s a treat.

Now, of course, I’ve got to go ahead and ruin your impression of the delightfulness of academic philosophy by attempting to point out flaws in Goldschmidt’s argument. I can’t help it; it’s in my nature.

Goldschmidt begins by noting that testimony is central to our knowledge. Much of what we know is based on our having learned it from others. If anything, Goldschmidt underappreciates our dependence — the example he uses is historical (our knowledge that Napoleon existed), but he could have easily included countless examples. It’s only because of testimony that I know that Raphael Warnock is a newly-elected U.S. Senator from Georgia, that the top five warmest years on record have been since 2015, or even what my own name is!

Goldschmidt suggests that, by appreciating the centrality of testimony we can appreciate an underrecognized argument for the truth of biblically recorded miracles — in particular, the miracles associated with the Jewish tradition surrounding the Exodus from Egypt. Read more »

Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Buddha Mind

Buddha mind’s a still but never motionless field
Buddha mind holds all, each wave and ripple subsumed
along with every tiny dot, a broken wholeness

no metaphor can speak its more-and-less
no single thought can split its late-and-soon

its splash and depth of shade, golden color,
its sanguine stippled clouds, its calm bronze face serene,
both shut and absent eye welcoming, then with lids raised 
seeing soon-and-later-less-and-more revealed

Jim Culleny 1/9/2021
Watercolor, The Present Moment 
by Mary Walsh Martel

Other watercolors by Mary Walsh Martel
(Click image for expanded view)

Lies, dammed lies, and insurrections

Posted on by Emrys Westacott

by Emrys Westacott

The German language is famous for its often long compound words that combine ideas to neatly express in a single word complex notions. Torschlusspanik, (gate-shut-panic), for instance, referred in medieval times to the fear that one was not going to make it back into the city before the gates closed for the night, and now signifies the worry, common among middle aged people, that the opportunities for accomplishing one’s dreams are disappearing for good. Backpfeifengesicht, sometimes translated as “face in need of a fist”, means a face that you feel needs slapping.

One could certainly find a use for these particular words this past week while watching Donald Trump’s Republican enablers suddenly starting to pose as staunch defenders of democratic principles. But we could also do with our own compound expressions to capture the particular forms of perfidiousness on display. For instance, it would be really useful to have a word that means “culpably late enlightenment.”

Every single Republican politician has known perfectly well for the past two months that the 2020 US presidential election was not fraudulent, or rigged, or stolen. (If there are any who really believe otherwise, they are either utter fools or as mentally deranged as Trump himself.) So please, let’s not start giving out medals for honourable conduct when someone like Kelly Loeffler, the (recently defeated) senator from Georgia, decides, after Wednesday’s riotous invasion of the Capitol by Trump supporters, to no longer object to the certification process that was underway at the time. Actually, her change of heart doesn’t make much sense. If she really believed that her objections to certification were justified, why drop them? The antics of Trump’s mob don’t affect the probability that there were serious voting irregularities in certain states. Read more »

Asking Questions About Vaccines Does Not Make You Anti-Science

Posted on by Godfrey Onime

by Godfrey Onime

Robin Peace, MD, Medical Staff President at UNC Health Southeastern, receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
Robin Peace, MD, Medical Staff President at UNC Health Southeastern, receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.

Ponder this. It is the 15th century and you have a high chance of contracting and dying from a rampant infection. Turns out that you could intentionally infect yourself with a small dose of the contagion, get slightly sick, and become protected for life. Of course, things are not always that simple.  You could get more than just a little sick. You could even die, but 1000 times less likely than if you acquired the infection naturally. Would you infect yourself and beloved family members? I believe I would, and I’ll tell you why.

Long before science knew about bacteria and viruses or that they caused diseases, long before vaccines were even imagined, that exactly was the dilemma that people the world over faced — whether or not to preemptively infect themselves, in hopes of preventing more serious illnesses, or worse, death. Indeed, those were desperate times, with no antibiotics, hospitals, or ICUs.

One vexing affliction for this historical palaver was smallpox, which was rampart in much of recorded history. Not only was it highly infectious, it rendered its victims extremely sick: raging fevers, splinting headaches, searing backaches, crippling fatigue, monstrous skin eruptions, and quite often, death. When it did not quickly and gruesomely kill sufferers, the scourge left them disfigured, not the least with unsightly pockmarks on the face. Little wonder then that many started to intentionally infect themselves and kids with smaller and possibly weaker doses of the infection, which they obtained from the oozing sores on the skins of the afflicted. This practice of using the actual, live bug to self-induce infection is called variolation.  Among those intentionally exposed to smallpox through variolation, about 1-2 in 100 may die. For those who got the infection naturally, about 30 in 100 died. Read more »