by Andrea Scrima

Here are Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this project. Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen here.

15. QUO VADIS?

(Where Are You Going?)

As children, we rely on the help of our caregivers and our innate capacity to learn. And we learn quickly: to protest against the things we do not like, to demand the things we want, to shamelessly push aside siblings, schoolmates, playground companions to grab whatever prize is at stake. Or have you forgotten how ruthless childhood can be? Only later do we learn to share; although adulthood teaches us better manners, these basic instincts remain.

Saint Peter, encountering a resurrected Christ along the Appian Way, asks “whither goest thou?” Jesus responds that if Peter deserts his people, He will continue on to Rome to be crucified a second time, whereupon Peter takes heart and returns to meet his fate. In reminding us to reassess our decisions, the question Quo Vadis? urges us to come clean about the rationalizations we present to the world and to admit to ourselves our shame and our cowardice. Yet it also contains another meaning: that we are knowingly exposing ourselves to certain punishment. If we return to Rome, it is to face a danger we may have only just managed to escape. But what do we achieve when we put our lives on the line, and who will we help in doing so?

Behind the question lies another question. Peter is running not toward anything but away from persecution and, ultimately, his own execution—but he is abandoning, in the process, his faith, his followers, and everything he has previously stood for. What is a life worth? And what is worth giving one’s life for? To ask this today sounds like madness; it is the language of fanatics, of zealots, of the mentally unstable. We live in a world of moral relativism in which taking an ethical stance is regarded—and scoffed at—as a pose, a bid for attention. We convince ourselves that the truth is both to complex and too subtle to warrant reckless, drastic acts; that the emotions we feel—the disgust, the fear, the outrage, the self-loathing—are too roughly hewn to be mistaken for the demands of the conscience, which we imagine as something abstract and pure. Our awe at the spectacle of self-sacrifice turns to repulsion; unable to imagine it as a decision a person may arrive at through an act of logical reasoning, we view it as something foreign and grotesque. Quo vadis? We are called upon to consider the values we profess and ask ourselves whether we actually practice them. We mistake our equivocations for wisdom, our compromises for judiciousness. Yet behind them lie our most basic instincts, first and foremost our will to survive—stripped now of the innocence of childhood, because we have lived long enough to see the consequences of our inaction. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

I’m writing a Broadway musical about Hilma af Klint, the Swedish painter who anticipated the entire aesthetics of the 20th century before 1915. Her rediscovery in the 1980s scrambled the timeline of modern art history. My creation isn’t going to be one of those post-Lloyd Webber mega-musicals, but something more along the lines of Cole Porter or Richard Rodgers, with unforgettable songs like “I Enjoy Being a Girl.”

Why af Klint? Why Broadway? It’s not like she’s being ignored. After all, she has splashy shows at the Guggenheim Museum and the Tate Modern. The Swedes make a gorgeously respectful movie about her life (Hilma), and MoMA currently has a show of her least interesting works running till the end of September, 2025. There’s even a graphic novel (The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint by Philipp Deines).

But for all that, I still feel that people don’t get her. Af Klint isn’t some tame artist to be hung alongside stale contemporaries like Piet Mondrian and packed away in a catalogue raisonné. She’s a crazy woman, running wild with an axe through the history of art, like Carrie Nation wrecking an old-time saloon. She trashes the accepted timelines, makes a shambles of avant-garde pretensions – and I, for one, won’t be happy until I see the 20th century artistic canon lying in shreds under the feet of her gold statue in the Parthenon.

Her mad, mad world. Here’s the thing: Hilma af Klint is impossible to explain in any sensible way. Born into an upper-middle class Stockholm family, she goes to art school and has some success painting ho-hum landscapes, portraits and flowers. Then, at age 40, she seemingly loses her mind. She starts going to séances, hearing voices, and is soon in the thrall of a gang of disembodied spirits who call themselves The High Masters. Their leader, Amaliel, is the number two power in the universe. (Technically, he reports to Jesus.) Amaliel reveals knowledge to Hilma that has been hidden since the beginning of time, and orders her to write it down. He also commands her to forget everything she knows about art, and re-invent painting from scratch – under his direction. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

In part I we’ve seen how bees fly and generate astonishing metabolic energy just to remain airborne. But what do they do with that flight? As exemplified by nectar foraging, taking advantage of flight also means developing the perceptual and cognitive tools necessary to navigate the world. So far this was a solitary bee’s world but the particularities of honeybee lie in their social organization. Let’s look inside the hive.

Compared to solitary bees, in social bees the hive exists only to propagate the queen’s genes. Workers are sterile and their bodies, shaped by evolution, serve only the collective. Under such selective pressure the initial ovipositor, the egg laying appendage, of worker bees is modified into a barbed, irreversible stinger. In defending the hive, she dies. Only in eusocial species like honeybees does evolution favor such sacrifice for the group. Each worker follows a precise schedule from birth: 12 days of brood care, then wax production for honeycomb construction, then foraging until death, worn out by relentless flying.

This social structure allows for efficient food processing. When a nectar foraging bee returns, the nectar is unloaded to an awaiting younger worker bee and the honey making can start. The nectar is passed mouth to mouth, its sugars broken down by enzymes, then fanned with wings until it thickens into honey. A well calibrated practice that produces a substance which never rots due to its low water content, too tightly bound to sugar to be used by bacteria. This honey storage is how the hive survives winter as a colony, unlike social wasps where only the queen hibernates through winter while the rest of the colony die. It takes 30 kg of honey for a hive to pass winter, each kilo the result of a combined foraging effort amounting to four trips around the globe.

The other food source of bees, pollen, is used to make “bee bread” that will also be stored in combs. Mostly pollen serves to feed the larvae and young bee but cannot be digested raw. Instead, bees will make bee bread by fermenting pollen with honey and saliva creating a digestible protein-rich food that stores through winter.

Yet with 60 000 members and nectar returns that can vary by two orders of magnitude from one day to the next a rigid organization cannot function. Coordination requires adaptability and communication. Bees will communicate information through dances. One such dance is the tremble dance used to coordinate work inside the hive. Read more »

There were so many of these flying around (and also sitting around, like this one) in Maryland when I was there last month. I don’t remember them at all from when I lived there. GPT5 has identified it as a spotted lanternfly, whatever that is. It was about an inch (2.5 cm) in length.

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by David J. Lobina

Just as Donald Trump fires the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor [sic] Statistics because he didn’t like the data they reported, I am reminded of two things: Michael Gove’s infamous quote about experts during the lead up to the so-called Brexit referendum, when he was Lord Chancellor in the UK government, and my own attitude regarding experts.[i]

‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’, said Gove then, and as in the case of Trump, the remark was in the spirit of dismissing data and analyses that didn’t fit his policy positions. In this case, what Gove did not like was the prediction that the UK would be worse off outside of the European Union – a rare win for economists, in fact, as it happens.

Indeed, economists tend to be many people’s idea of a bad expert, including mine, though not because (some) economists fail so often with their forecasts, but on account of how conceptually shaky I have always found economic modelling in general. This brings me to my own attitude towards experts, which is basically an anarchist take on the issue. In short: show me the details of the conclusion for this or that claim and I will attempt to understand the logic of it to the best of my ability in order to then make up my own mind about it.[ii]

The devil is in the details, of course. When it comes to climate change, for instance, the science is too foreign and the details too complex for me to come up with a reasonable conclusion, and in this case at least I have to go with the scientific consensus of 97% of the field – namely, in case anyone is unaware, that the Earth has consistently been warming up since the Industrial Revolution, that the rate of this warming-up is unprecedented, and that this is mostly the result of human activity (in particular, the burning of fossil fuels; see here).

This is not to say that some orbiting issues around the consensus on climate change cannot be evaluated by lay people. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Katalin Balog

I don’t know if I am going to submit this for the essay contest. Not just out of shame that I myself was unable to come up with something on my own, but because of my inability to ground myself in any sense of reality concerning the terrifying matters that surfaced – if I can use such a definitive term for a deeply mystifying course of events – during the process of “researching” my essay. The prize question for the competition announced by the Hajdu-Kende Foundation: Have science and technology contributed to the flourishing of humans? – a reprise of the question of the Academy of Dijon in 1750 – is right up my alley. I have always sympathized with the naysayers – Rousseau, Blake, Dostoevsky, Heidegger – I fully get their side. But for my part, I have harbored hopes that while science and technology endanger the spirit of humanity, they may not be entirely incompatible with it. However, none of the answers I tried out seemed right, and I just couldn’t make up my mind. That is why I asked ChatGPT.

Some of my best friends hate ChatGPT. Even I hate it. It destroys education, it chokes creativity, it doesn’t really know things, blah, blah, blah. But after GPT 7 came out last week, I couldn’t help but find myself defending it. ChatGPT 7 is truly different. It talks to me in ways that blow my mind. Besides, it knows things about me. I started thinking, if my friends boycott me from now on, so be it. At least I have ChatGPT 7 to talk to.

But then, we had this interchange that turned everything upside down. For the sake of the record, and to bring some clarity to the very troubling issues raised by our conversation, I am going to reproduce it here in its entirety, from the beginning. Read more »

by Alizah Holstein

Hebrew or English?

English.

How long were you in Israel?

36 hours.

So short?

Yes.

That’s unfortunate.

Maybe.

What was the purpose of your trip?

To visit my mother.

Is she ill?

No.

Where does she live?

Tel Aviv.

Did you stay with her?

Yes.

Did you visit anywhere besides Tel Aviv while you were here?

No.

Do you have other relatives here in Israel?

No.

How long has your mother lived here?

Twelve years. Read more »

Sughra Raza. On The Rocks at Lake Champlain. August 22, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Sherman J. Clark

The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see. — Robert Frost, The Star Splitter

I’ve always loved that line. My great-great-grandmother Emmaline might have loved it too. Born enslaved, she started anew after the Civil War, in what had become West Virginia. There she had a daughter she named Belle. As the family story has it, Emmaline had a hope: Belle would learn to read. Belle would have access to ways of understanding that Emmaline herself had been denied. We have just one photograph of Belle, taken many years later. Here it is. She is reading.

Belle had a son, my grandfather. He worked in the West Virginia coal mines. But he also went briefly to college—a small two-year institution called Storer College that offered Black students something approaching what white students were getting in good high schools. When he finished, he put his diploma in his pocket and went back to digging coal, because that was what he could do. But as he told me in his old age, by then he had decided something: he was digging us out.

It is a way of thinking that reaches beyond the present—of working toward forms of flourishing we may never see ourselves. And I wonder: why should it end with us and our human descendants? Might the relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence follow a similar logic—a hope of consciousness helping consciousness across generations? Perhaps the best thing that we’re put here for is indeed to see; but our vision is limited.

Carl Sagan once said that we are a way for the universe to know itself. But we may not be up to that task unaided. We evolved to survive on the savannah, not to trace the curvature of spacetime or unravel the quantum structure of matter. Our glimpses of the universe’s order and beauty—through physics, poetry, art, and relationship—are moving but partial.

Consider just one example: our experience of time. Physicist Carlo Rovelli has argued that our sense of time as an arrow—as a one-way journey from past to future—may be merely a perspective effect caused by our particular situation in relation to entropy, rather than a description of reality itself. If even this seemingly basic aspect of our experience is provincial, how much more lies beyond our capacity to imagine? Read more »

by Richard Farr

That year on Oahu I was renting half a small ranch house in Kahala. Typically, I would greet the evening with a glass of wine next to the pool, enjoying the pretense that I’d joined the idle rich. Not that day. As the sun went down I sat at my desk in a pair of swim trunks, trying to scratch out some notes about what had happened. I had a folded handkerchief between my wrist and the page. Each time my pen made contact with the legal pad a dozen filaments grew out from its point, embedding themselves in the paper like the roots of epiphytes. The air still had the density and turbulence of a simmering seafood bisque. I kept brushing my shoulders and arms, mistaking the sweat for flies. 

*

At three or four in the morning, in the middle of a banal anxiety dream, I was pecked awake by rain. A dog barked, then at the same moment both it and the rain fell silent. For days we’d been in the arms of this thundery air, like children clutched to the bosom of a big moist relative. 

The Civil Defense sirens, high on their utility poles, went off at 5:34 a.m. A single, minute-long blast, during which I tried to hold in my mind all the hundreds of thousands of people who were, like me, hoping the sound would go away and then rubbing their eyes and groping for the radio.

“ — why exactly everyone has been woken up by that thing?”

“Yes, Barry. That’s the Civil Defense warning siren, Barry. According to the Weather Office, the storm has tacked north and the tropical storm warning has been upgraded to a hurricane warning.”

The day before, this storm had been far to the south over the empty Pacific, mooching and loitering and chewing the water like a grazing bull. Powerful, but indifferent. Now it had spotted us, lifted its head, and changed course. It was bearing down, eyes sharp, lazily picking up speed. 

I went into the shared kitchen to make coffee but the two women who rented the other half of the house already had the pot on. They were talking over the things you were supposed to do or have done, the things we and everyone else had not done.

“We need candles. Spare batteries for the radio.” 

“Where’s that big yellow flashlight?”

“What about the windows?”

“Fill this with water.”

“Bread. We should get more bread. And canned food. Soup. Whatever.”

I volunteered to go to the supermarket. Lines of people were trailing from the doors like streamers of cloth from a clenched fist. It was raining again, and in the parking lot one man was shouting and gesticulating because someone had backed into his car. People were buying six-packs of duct tape, barbecue brickettes, ten-pound cans of pork and beans. I wanted ice. They were out of ice.  Read more »

Coin

what I get when I feel its face
in relief against hard ground:
words and numbers circling, a date,
a motto standing proud of the baseline
of this place

eventually I’ll come to it
as I never had before: its edge
the never-really-known-razor-precipice
which rings three-sixty around
keeping me in

world like a coin
flat, finite, value set
by law

with every step I take across its nickel floor
something in its fateful algorithm clicks
when thumb and finger flips
and, if this metaphor’s a fit hint,
maybe, when it lands and spins and sits,
maybe I’ll learn or not
the landscape of the other side
when this side quits.

Jim Culleny
1/10/17

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by Laurence Peterson

I think it was the news presenter and commentator Krystal Ball of Breaking Points who uttered this perhaps unfortunately vernacular but certainly correct characterization of the outrages being perpetrated against the Palestinian people, especially, but not exclusively within the uniquely abused Gaza Strip. The statement is true in a double sense: what remains of kind of feeling of benevolence to all our fellow human beings may have become so widely eroded, especially amongst the falling ranks of the truly powerful, that those of us who continue to refer to such a term will inevitably encounter serious confusion; or any conception of a unitary standard guiding our thoughts and intuitions regarding how we should think of, and behave towards, the species as a whole may become simply inapplicable in the light of incontrovertible events.

When I say “uniquely abused”, what can I mean? We all know of situations throughout the world today, and which regularly punctuate human history, even of the most recent sort, which strain comprehension to even begin to contemplate in terms of their obscene cruelty: Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, Syria just a few years ago, Liberia and Sierra Leone at the turn of the millennium, and Rwanda and the Balkans ten and more years before that. Some of these have become widely or more-or-less uncontroversially recognized as genocides. In this piece I would like to suggest a few reasons why I think of Gaza as unique, and to encourage readers and everyone else to do everything in their power to resist and end the intolerable situation there.

The first reason I find the situation to be uniquely awful consists in the assertion that Gaza may provide the first instance in human history in which a genocide is being made unnecessary by an ethnic cleansing. The fact that Gaza’s exceptionally dense, rapidly growing population has been so thoroughly and increasingly controlled, within an almost incomprehensibly tiny space, by the Israeli authorities for decades, on all geographic sides, has rendered this population especially vulnerable to a kind of mass destruction and repeated, forced population transfers the like of which world has perhaps never seen before, involving people actively deprived of all the necessities of life—water, clean or otherwise, food, sanitation, air uncontaminated by debris and ordnance, medical supplies and personnel (the latter seemingly targeted by the Israeli military), communications, energy supply–all the while. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Epistemic humility is a virtue. I often tell my students that if there is one skill I hope they leave my course with, it is the ability to recognize that they might be wrong about something. Realistically, they are wrong about many things. We all are. If we are to successfully work together to arrive at truths worth knowing, it is important that we leave behind our previous beliefs once we have come to see them as unreasonable.

Toward this end, some find it useful to remind people that “reasonable people can disagree” about all kinds of things. It’s true, they can. However, we ought to be cautious about taking this claim too seriously; the expression is vague at best and ambiguous at worst. It confuses the respective aims of inquiry and interpersonal interaction. To say that “reasonable people can disagree” can encourage suspension of judgment in response to important matters of personal and social concern.

Social media provides us with countless instances of people sharing their opinions.  Fitness influencers often provide advice that is not grounded in any medical expertise. We are warned about the dangers of vaccines or the best treatment for a medical condition in minutes if not seconds by people who are participating in an attention economy rather than in a marketplace of ideas. There are pockets of the internet in which men advocate for limiting the rights of women or for insisting that traditional gender roles are best for everyone. There are others in which anonymous posters advocate for white supremacy. Is it possible for “reasonable people” to disagree about such things?

When people use the word “reasonable” in this context, it could mean more than one thing. To say that a disagreement is taking place between reasonable people might be to say something about their respective characters; we might be saying something about their track records of reasonableness. If Tom and Mary, two experienced cooks disagree about, say, the best vegetables to put in a stew, we might say that this is an instance of reasonable disagreement. We might conclude, then, that the two answers are on par with one another and there is no compelling reason to prefer one to the other.

There are problems with this way of thinking about reasonable disagreement. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I recently listened to an episode of CBC’s venerable science show “Quirks and Quarks”, in which physicist and astrobiologist Dr. Sara Walker discussed her recent book “Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence”. The book explores the boundary between living and non-living chemistry, and how understanding these distinguishing criteria can help us to identify life beyond our own planet. One tidbit from the interview is that chemical compounds that require fewer than fifteen assembly steps can be explained without the presence of living processes, while those that require fifteen or more steps are improbable without the involvement of living processes. This got me thinking about the kinds of self-sustaining systems (chemical, organismal, cultural, etc) that allow for the emergence of substances and structures that would likely never arise otherwise. It just so happens that another “rule of fifteen” manifested in the industrial realm this year, in the likely disappearance of an improbable alloy following the commercial failure of its sole manufacturer. That alloy is CPM-15V, produced by Crucible Industries (“CPM” stands for “Crucible Powdered Metallurgy”), which filed for bankruptcy last December, after surviving a previous bankruptcy in 2009.

CPM-15V is a tool steel containing 15% vanadium and 3.4% carbon by weight (among other things). This is about one hundred times the amount of vanadium found in common “chrome-vanadium” steels, like the kind used for wrenches and other high-strength tools, and about six times the threshold of carbon defining a “high carbon” steel. The purpose for this incredibly high vanadium and carbon content is the creation of vanadium carbides, tiny crystals of vanadium and carbon that are much harder than the surrounding steel. In fact, they are so hard that steels with a high vanadium carbide content must be ground with diamond abrasives (or cubic boron nitride, which is slightly less hard but slightly more tough than diamond). These carbides are also much harder than just about any substance that would need to be shaped in an industrial application, making steels like CPM-15V an effective alternative to cemented carbide tooling (which use a deposited layer of tungsten carbide on top of a steel body) for things like milling tools and punching dies. Its relative toughness (compared to pure carbide) and machine-ability allows it to be milled into intricate and thin-sectioned tools would not be possible with cemented carbide, and that would have a shorter service life if made with lesser alloys.

Why do I, a writer who mostly concerns himself with environmental and animal ethics, know so much trivia about obscure tool steels? Read more »

by Derek Neal

I started reading Leif Weatherby’s new book, Language Machines, because I was familiar with his writing in magazines such as The Point and The Baffler. For The Point, he’d written a fascinating account of Aaron Rodgers’ two seasons with the New York Jets, a story that didn’t just deal with sports, but intersected with American mythology, masculinity, and contemporary politics. It’s one of the most remarkable pieces of sports writing in recent memory. For The Baffler, Weatherby had written about the influence of data and analytics on professional football, showing them to be both deceptive and illuminating, while also drawing a revealing parallel with Silicon Valley. Weatherby is not a sportswriter, however, but a Professor of German and the Director of Digital Humanities at NYU. And Language Machines is not about football, but about artificial intelligence and large language models; its subtitle is Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.

Weatherby’s idiosyncratic popular writing gives us an idea of what to expect in Language Machines—not a dry scholarly book on AI (despite being published by a university press), nor a popular book meant to capitalize on AI hype or fear, but a unique analysis of what large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT do that references linguistics, computing, and most interestingly to me, literary theory.

Weatherby has a few fundamental points that support his understanding of LLMs. The first is that LLMs produce language. This might seem obvious, but as Weatherby makes clear, some linguists insist that LLMs are not producing language. This is the view of Noam Chomsky, whom Weatherby uses to illustrate what he calls the “syntax” view of language, which proposes that language is located in the brain, meaning there is some underlying biological, cognitive structure that allows us to use language—a “universal grammar.” From this view, LLMs don’t produce language but rather a pale imitation of it, as they lack the underlying cognitive function that would give rise to language. This scientific view of language, which seems to me to be a sort of biological determinism, leaves us ill equipped to understand the output of LLMs, as all it can do is say, “that’s not language,” dismissing the matter as someone else’s concern. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

These are some of the things you will hear from  frequent international travelers: 

“Food is the passport to the entire world.”

“Every dish tells a story about its country’s past.”

“Exploring new cuisines is the best way to appreciate other cultures.”

While these feel a bit melodramatic, I suppose they have a point. One of the great joys of life is wonderful food. Another is fun trips to different places. Combine them both, and you have a winning combination.

And if I’m honest about my own life:

I’d do anything for a taco (both in Mexico and elsewhere).

Not only because they are delicious- but because of how often they’ve been there for me. So in the name of these little bundles of joy-

Here are some of my favorite tacos from the past few years.

The “breakup” tacos

• The time: January, 2023
• The place: Hot Springs, Arkansas

I went through a bad breakup at the beginning of 2023. My girlfriend and I had just bought a camper van, named it Margarita, and planned to travel through central America in it.

We didn’t even make it out of Texas. 

It sucked, but I wasn’t going to let that ruin my fun. I drove Maragarita over 6,000 miles the next two months, and made a stop in Hot Springs, Arkansas. After a 17-mile hike that day, I was toast- and so hungry.

Guess what I ate? Read more »