by John Allen Paulos

Bertrand Russell’s advice for aging gracefully is rather simple: Broaden your horizons. He recommends that we should try to expand our interests and concerns. Doing so will help us become less focused on ourselves and more open to the world around us.  He adds metaphorically, “An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

I think to a large extent people tend to do this naturally. Businessmen often become less concerned with their assets and money and more with their larger family and society as they get older. Likewise lawyers frequently grow tired of having their briefs in a tangle and mellow out as they age. A similar phenomenon holds for athletes, academics, and workers of all sorts.

Of course, not everybody follows Russell’s counsel. Some remain hard-charging and a few so much so that they resemble the man in Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”Given the opportunity to possess all the land he can walk around in one day, the man’s greed leads to his death and thus provides the answer to the question in the title. A man needs about 6 feet by 2 feet by 4 feet – enough for a grave. More appealing is Dylan Thomas’ contrary exhortation not to “go gentle into that good night” but rather “to rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Notwithstanding Tolstoy and Thomas, the rocks and waterfalls of a life do tend for most people to give rise to a desire for calmer waters. Sticking with Russell’s metaphor suggests that in the limit we might arrive at what the French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland first termed in a letter to Freud the “oceanic feeling,” a sensation of eternity and of being one with the world. Stated differently, our personal identity slowly fades and is replaced by an impersonal cosmic one. Read more »

“Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations.
The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have
even more in common with human language, such as conveying
information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the
elements of human language such as phonology, semantics and
syntax. And the similarities run deeper, including analogous brain
structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning.”
……………………….. —Smithsonian Magazine, Do Birds Have Language

What Needs to be Sung

. . . and here I thought I am descended from apes;
but it may be birds who speak from trees
rather than primates who swing through them
with whom I am more comfortably close
because they sing! and singing’s a beautiful thing
if done with the art of Cardinals, but
still, I can’t fully deny the grunts of apes
who share my lack of delicate precision when it comes
to telling things as they are, who pound chests
and rattle nearby undergrowth in the midst of jungles
when other brutes enter their perceived turf,
they too share my penchant to articulate,
though in more bellicose poetry
while from the canopy above
singing their way through the world
under threat of hawks and cats
or snakes who would enfold them in lethal hugs
or a fox who would steal their young

they employ the syntax of a piccolo
the semantics of a violin
the phonology of a trill
to say what needs to be said,
to sing what needs to be sung

Jim Culleny, 3/2/22

by Raji Jayaraman

Audio Version

It didn’t matter that what Addie and Maddie did or didn’t do in their personal lives was none of our business. We made it our business. We thought their behaviour begged some questions, and we made it our mission to find answers. As far as we were concerned the evidence pointed in only one direction. A scandalous one for the conservative community in which we were schooled.

First things first. Addie and Maddie were what they called each other and we called them, behind their backs. Officially, Addie was Addison Richter and Maddie was Madeleine Walker. Miss Richter and Mrs. Walker to us. Maddie was in admin, so we didn’t have much direct interaction with her. She was brick-shaped and didn’t walk so much as waddle. She was married to Terence, who was head of middle school. Both of them smiled constantly. It made you wonder how their faces didn’t hurt. Addie was the phys ed teacher. She was a permanent fixture in our lives. Each week, we had her twice for regular PE, twice for intramural sports, and then if you were on a school sports team, an additional three times. Because she did so much PE she was incredibly fit despite, what seemed to me at the time, her advanced age.

Addie was born in the mid-thirties, which means that she must have been around fifty by the time she entered my consciousness in middle school. The fact that she was, at that age, a Miss and not a Missus made her immediately suspect. Unnatural, even. The story we initially floated was that she had had a fiancé, but then he was drafted into the army and died and that broke her heart, and she remained hopelessly in love with him, disavowing men forever after.

That story turned out to be as watertight as a sieve. In its initial telling, the fiancé had died in World War II. Then one person did the math, and another noted that child marriages were illegal. Luckily, Addie was American so WW II wasn’t our only go to. The Korean War was out because of that child marriage business. That left the Vietnam War until some investigative journalist type ruined it by pointing out that Addie had long left the U.S. by the time the war had broken out, so where was she supposed to have met said fiancé? Read more »

Raqib Shaw. Detail from Ode To a Country Without a Post Office, 2019-20. (photograph by Sughra Raza)

Acrylic liner and enamel on birchwood

        “Black on edges of flames

         It cannot extinguish the neighborhoods,

         The homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers.

         Kashmir is burning.”

         Agha Shahid Ali. I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight, 1997.

More here, here, and here.

Current show.

by Rebecca Baumgartner

During the recent Christmas shopping rush, I had to park at the very back of a crowded Target parking lot. By the time I trekked across the lot and reached the door of the store, my knees felt a bit achy. Not a big deal. After about half an hour of walking around shopping, I was extremely tired, limping slightly, and desperately needed to sit down.

By the time I was halfway through the parking lot heading back to my car, I was hobbling and leaning heavily on my cart as a makeshift walker. With every step, something in my knees ground against something else that wasn’t giving way, like there were too many bones fighting for space in there, or as though my kneecap were being polished like a gemstone in a tumbler. 

I’d recently been diagnosed with osteoarthritis in my knees, after more than a year of writing off the gemstone-in-a-tumbler feeling as a normal part of aging. In the Target parking lot, as I limped past the parking spaces designated for people with disabilities, I allowed myself to think for the first time, “Maybe I would not be feeling this bad if I had been able to park there.”

It appeared to me that this was a very straightforward problem with a clear solution, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990: I could apply for a special parking placard that would let me park in one of the handicapped spaces every business is required to have. 

I got home, medicated myself, and googled the application form for my state. Turns out this is a very simple form that merely requires a doctor’s signature. But what I soon discovered is that when a doctor diagnoses you with a degenerative disease, they are certainly happy to show you pictures demonstrating how messed up your bones are, prescribe you pain medication, and perform expensive surgeries on you – but they’ll be damned if they’ll sign a handicapped placard form for you.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Jochen Szangolies

The quantum world, according to the latest science, is, like, really weird. Cats that are both dead and alive, particles tunnel through impenetrable walls, Heisenberg can’t both tell you where he is and how fast he’s going, and spooky influences connect systems instantaneously across vast distances. So it seems that anything that serves to reduce this weirdness should be a godsend—a way to bring some order to the quantum madness.

Superdeterminism, its advocates say, provides just this: a way for every quantum system to have definite properties at all times, without instantaneous influences—and no cats need to come to harm. All we have to do is to give up on one single, insignificant assumption: that our choice of measurement is, in general, independent of the system measured.

Yet, belief in superdeterminism has so far remained a marginal stance, with the vast majority of scientists and philosophers remaining firmly opposed, sometimes going so far as to assert that accepting superdeterminism entails throwing out the entire enterprise of science wholesale. But what, exactly, is superdeterminism, why should we want it, and why does it polarize so much?

The story starts, as so much in the foundations of quantum mechanics does, with Bell’s theorem. I’ve written on that topic at some length before, but a quick refresher will serve to lay the groundwork for what’s to come. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

Discussions of artificial intelligence are hard to avoid. A recent Pew study, for example, found that 90% of Americans have heard at least something about artificial intelligence – which is astounding, when you consider that only about 70% of Americans likely know who the current Vice President is.

Despite this growing awareness of AI, it is quite possible to argue that, if anything, people are too slow to recognize its potential. That same Pew study noted that only 18% of all US adults have tried ChatGPT. This is disturbing, given how wide-ranging the effects of AI promise to be.

For example, as summarized by a recent explainer by Our World in Data, the capabilities of AI systems have improved remarkably in just the past 10 years – particularly in the areas of reading and language comprehension.

This increase in the capacities of AI systems has been mirrored by increased academic interest in artificial intelligence, with the numbers of scholarly publications related to AI more than doubling in the previous decade. 

Since I’m going to be arguing that these systems are neither artificial nor intelligent, it will be useful to designate them differently. I’ll call them LLMs, or large language models. Read more »

At the Italian town of Limone sul Garda.

by Thomas R. Wells

The recent history of the term ‘political correctness’ and its association with the contemporary left and the tedious culture wars obscures its true character and ubiquity. Political correctness is real, significant, and arguably the dominant mode of politics since before humans could even talk. It is the few trying to rule over the many by persuading the many that they are the ones in the minority.

The goal of this form of politics is the manufacturing and maintaining of something called ‘pluralistic ignorance‘ where members of a group mistakenly believe that most other members disagree with them. As a result, a well-positioned minority is able to persuade the group as a whole of the existence of a fictitious shared consensus supporting their rule or values. Taken separately, many individuals may recognise that they don’t agree with what is being done in their name. But at the same time they believe they are the only one (or one of a very few) who think this, and so they go along with the thing they disagree with.

How is this rule of the few established and maintained? It is essential that the majority never realise that their views are in the majority, or they will withdraw the grudging allegiance on which the minority’s precarious rule relies. Therefore on certain issues, silence must fall. By one means or another, members of the majority must be dissuaded from speaking truthfully about what they believe in places where others might hear them, believe them, and say ‘Yes – me too!’ For such a cascade of personal disclosures would quickly unravel the delicate fabric of the fictional consensus. Read more »

by Derek Neal

A few days ago I watched The Yakuza (1974), Paul Schrader’s screenwriting debut, and the following day I saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) at the cinema. These two films would never feature on a double bill together, and yet, due to having watched them within 24 hours of each other, they seem related in my mind, and I can’t help but interpret Nostalghia in light of The Yakuza.

The Yakuza is a sort of Japanese film noir: an ageing American war veteran returns to Tokyo 20 years after leaving to do one last job, but events predictably spiral out of control until they threaten to consume him and everyone he cares about. Ultimately the film is about relationships and what one owes to others, and how this understanding is complicated by differing cultures and a modernizing world. Read more »

“The past is inevitable”  —Delmore Schwartz, Poet

I’d Never Thought of it Like That

          though it’s likely to come, tomorrow’s not set,
…….. this day’s loose ends twist in the wind
………like kite tails in blue jerked at the end of present’s string,
………they’re codas no one can sing—
………the future’s not something on which you should bet

only now sings real arias

if I stand on the bridge in the middle of town
where the river splits in bow waves at abutments
beneath my feet as the bridge’s foot in the stream
becomes a ship’s prow plowing north to nowhere,
the riverskin gives back an early crimson sky,
an oscillating rendition of itself—
in the otherwise slick mirror of the stream below
I catch a glimpse my rippled head in flames
of pleated clouds

                     I am its aria

as I turn and walk off I get it,
the past is inevitable
and set

Jim Culleny, 12/17/15
Photo: The Bridge of Flowers
by Martin Yaffee

by Michael Liss

I have here in my hand a list of 205 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy. —Joseph McCarthy, February 9, 1950

Seventy-four years later, that phrase, from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Wheeling (West Virginia) “Enemies Within” speech, still has the capacity to remind us of an era when America’s faith in its own institutions was challenged almost to the breaking point. It was a time of bullying and blacklists, screaming headlines and wild accusations. “McCarthyism” became the byword for a type of paranoid style in politics where the power of the government is turned on the individual for merely exercising his or her rights.

The speech itself is neither eloquent nor subtle. The former amateur boxer wades in with both fists. It’s likely even built on a lie—there was no list—at least not one McCarthy would let people look at. There was no precise number. There are multiple versions of the speech, some have it at 205, others 57 or 71. McCarthy liked the mystery—part of his peculiar genius was his ability to mangle the truth in a way that left reporters eager for more.

Of its political impact, there can be no question. Wheeling vaulted the relatively unknown (and frankly often disliked) 41-year-old first termer to national prominence, a place he would occupy without pause for most of the next five years. Read more »

by R. Passov

Summer of ‘22

In a coffee shop a short train ride north of Manhattan along the Hudson River, there’s a vigil. A group, drawn from neighboring villages, is watching a someone slide to their end. Though long in the making, the apparentness is recent – severely distending belly, shrunken arms, swollen legs, gaunt face.

Basi, close to his real name, is a nickname sometimes used. There’s nothing special about him. He’s in his late 60’s with two grown children and well into a long-term suburban marriage, the kind where you stay while doing all you can to get away.

His first coffee shop was across the street from the shop in which he tends his last days. We come by. We sit, we order – double macchiatos in my case, espresso or cappuccinos for others. Basi sits with us, too infirm to move. Thankfully a nice young woman – Julene – patiently works the counter, handling orders along with critiques of her barrister shortcomings.

Read more »

Noah Davis. Isis, 2009.

More here, here, and here.

by Gunnar Heinsohn (translated by Rafaël Newman)

The past weekend marked the second anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The following article originally appeared in German in Die Welt magazine on April 29, 2022. It is posted here in a first-time English translation, with the permission of its author and in his memory, during a period in which the meaning of genocide is being discussed with new urgency.

Following his initial genocide—committed from 1999 to 2009 in Chechnya—Vladimir Putin has now embarked on a second, under the pretext of preventing an alleged genocide of Russians in Eastern Ukraine. A historic first.

Putin evidently sought legal grounds for a war of aggression, and all his experts could come up with was the UN Convention on Genocide. Under article 1, the Convention’s Contracting Parties—147 states, including Russia—are obliged to “prevent” genocide, not merely to punish it. Such a provision does not exist even for the prevention of an ordinary civil war. Putin’s accusation of genocide, leveled at Ukraine, and his strict avoidance of the terms war and invasion, can be explained by the will to embellish his monstrous project.

Like all murders, genocide requires intent and planning. A spontaneous massacre may leave 1,000 dead, but legally speaking it is still a case of mass manslaughter. Premeditated genocide, on the other hand, though it be hindered after “only” 100 people have died, has nevertheless produced 100 victims of genocide. This is a crucial legal distinction. Read more »

by David Winner

1976

All sixth-grade summer, the name of the Greek historian Xenophon pounded in my ears like a minor chord banged upon a piano.  I had borrowed a book by him from my father’s shelves but misplaced it in the last days of school. Fearing the wrenching disappointment that accompanied misplaced articles and forgotten tasks, I would slip nervously past the empty space in the bookshelf where Xenophon belonged. An English professor rather than a classicist, he would hardly have need for it, but still might sense its absence like a missing limb.

   2021

The night before my father’s last health crisis, Hurricane Ida came to Brooklyn.  My wife, Angela, and I heard lightening, wind, distant branches crashing downwards, but next morning’s mild weather made it seem like the storm had underwhelmed.

I was playing with my computer the following morning, waiting for 8:30, the hour at which I had been calling my father each morning since my mother’s death ten years before when the phone rang.  434, my father’s area code, but not his number.

Ninety and frail, he’d been struggling alone in the old house in which I grew up.

“Your dad,” said Rick, the man who drove him around and took care of his yard, “isn’t doing so good.  He wants you down here right away.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley