by Callum Watts

Christmas gets me thinking about magic. Remembering the way I enjoyed Christmas as a child brings me back to a time when I believed in the power of supernatural phenomena. The most exciting piece of magic I performed was writing a message on a piece of paper, addressing it to Santa Claus in the North Pole, and setting it alight so that the smoke would be carried away on the winter breeze and read by him (I thought flying reindeer seemed pretty neat as well). The joy was of taking some of my innermost desires, embodying them materially and sending them into the world through a very practical activity, so that the universe could respond.

The sadness I felt at my loss of belief in Santa came from the realisation that I was living in a solely ‘material’ universe. As a scientifically curious child with no religious beliefs, the last bastion of magic had fallen. This death of magic was deeply disappointing, but this loss is not just at an individual one. In society as in biology, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is to say, I was merely following in the steps of a journey of disenchantment that many secular societies had already been on. 

Max Webber was the first to comment on the way the triumph of science and bureaucracy was melting away traditional beliefs about the power of religion and the supernatural. He christened this process, which is distinctive of modernity, ‘disenchantment’. Science, by reducing the functioning of the universe to physical cause and effect gets rid of the need for explanations in terms of magic and gods and spirits. Likewise, modern bureaucratic systems reduce social life to rationalised processes which become ever more difficult to escape from, and dilute social activities of their traditional meaning in the name of efficiency and process. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has exactly one strategy in his EU trade negotiations: threatening to drive Britain into a no-deal wall unless he gets what he wants. In other words, Johnson has been approaching this extraordinarily important matter of national interest as a peculiar version of the game of chicken. This explains much of his bizarre behaviour over the last 18 months, such as his antagonistic attitude, stubbornness, time-wasting, and even (part of) his buffoonery. Nevertheless, to be explained is not to be justified. Not only will the strategy fail, as it did before when Johnson used it in the Withdrawal Agreement negotiations. It has also foreclosed any hope for a substantive trade deal that could have fulfilled the positive aspirations of Brexiteers.

In a traditional game of chicken, two teenagers drive their cars directly towards each other at high speed, threatening mutually comprehensive destructive. The one who swerves away first is the loser, but still better off than if they had crashed. It is a game that rewards the most reckless player, and so it is no wonder that a famously irresponsible politician like Johnson would select it. He is willing to make huge bets with Britain’s national interest because he seems to see politics as just another game, and one that he gets to play with other people’s money rather than his own. The way Johnson decided to support the EU referendum back in 2016 illustrates this. He calculated that supporting Brexit gave him his best chance of winning the Prime Ministership – naturally the public interest was irrelevant to his considerations.  Not unrelated to Johnson’s disinterest in taking politics seriously, the other reason he relies so heavily on gambling as a method of government is that he is famously lazy and incompetent (in stark contrast to his Churchillian self-image). Thus, Johnson decided to play the trade negotiations as a game of chicken both because he knows that EU politicians and institutions do take the responsibility of politics seriously and will be unable to match his recklessness, and also because he knew that neither he nor the witless Brexit loyalists he has filled his government with would be capable of conducting a normal negotiation process. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

Audio version

When you say you have an ancestral temple, it sounds fancy. To be fair, some are. My mother’s ancestral temple, the Vaitheeswaran Koil, is a vast complex with five towers and hall after cavernous hall housing both worshippers and elephants. The temple is dedicated to Shiva in his incarnation as a healer. Perched on the banks of the Cauvery river, a dip in any one of its eighteen water tanks is said to cure all ailments. Dedicated to Mars, it is one of only nine ancient Tamil temples devoted to the planets. (Before you get excited about the prescience of the nine, I feel obliged to inform you that two of them are the sun and the moon, and another two are “Rahu” and “Ketu” who reside somewhere between the sun and moon, causing eclipses.) It has gold plated pillars; emerald encrusted deities; and inscriptions dating back to at least the Chola period in the twelfth century. All very impressive.

I would bask in the reflected glory except that I don’t stem from a matrilineal religious tradition, so my ancestral temple is said to be my father’s. Our parents’ biannual visits to India always included a temple tour with a mandatory visit to the ancestral temple. The itinerary never included Vaitheeswaran Koil, and looking back, I can see why. My ancestral temple was in a village called Tholacheri, and I use the term “village” loosely. Tholacheri contained four or five mud-walled, thatched roof structures surrounding three sides of a viscous pond. On the fourth side lay the temple compound.

The compound’s architectural ensemble comprised the temple itself, consisting of a small anteroom and alcove; a hut that served as the priest’s residence; and four or five giant-sized painted terracotta statues of Ayyanar deities. These statues were armed with machetes. They had bulbous eyes, protruding tongues, and outsized fangs. As an adult they looked almost comical but as children they struck the fear of God in us, which I suppose was the whole point. Read more »

by Jackson Arn

I: Bubbles

Not knowing they’re impossible, they slip

through geometry or fitting, go

squarish where they must, kissing

the rainbow mouths to right-left-up-down

from here to death.

Bathing in clones, each holds,

with skin and neighbors,

a secret breath.

Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

There is a spate of popularizations of neuroscience promoting the idea that “reality isn’t something you perceive, it’s something you create in your mind”, that “everything we perceive is a hallucination created by the brain”, or — as one Scientific American article put it — “It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination.”

These popularizations are unfortunate, because they run together at least two claims that we should distinguish from each other. The first claim is that perception isn’t merely a process in which the brain passively receives impressions from the world. Rather, it’s a process in which the brain is an active participant, testing predictions about the world against the inputs that it receives. The second claim is that, if the brain is an active participant in perception, then perception “creates reality in your mind” or is a “hallucination”.

Now, when neuroscientists make the first sort of claim, they’re speaking on the basis of their expertise as scientists. Indeed, the past thirty years have seen the rise of views in psychology and neuroscience that understand the brain as, in the words of  the noted philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, a “prediction engine”.

Here’s how Lisa Feldman Barrett puts this idea in her book, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain :

The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in psychology and neuroscience. What we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it. … Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest. (Feldman Barrett, Chap 2)

Of course, it’s important not to downplay the significance of this development in our understanding of perception. Traditionally, philosophers drew a stark distinction between perception and inference. On this traditional view, perception is the primary route by which we acquire new information, whereas inference can only transmit information that we already acquired. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Tapestry. November, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Emrys Westacott

Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class is a famous, influential, and rather peculiar book. Veblen (1857 – 1929) was a progressive-minded scholar who wrote about economics, social institutions, and culture. The Theory of the Leisure Class, which appeared in 1899, was the first of ten books that he published during his lifetime. It is the original source of the expression “conspicuous consumption,” was once required reading on many graduate syllabi, and parts of it are still regularly anthologized.

The central argument of the can be briefly summarized. In the earliest human communities, pretty much everyone contributed to securing the means of life. In this situation there was no steep or rigid social hierarchy. Cooperative traits were socially valuable and therefore generally respected, and individual property was not important. At some point, however, certain members of the group created a situation in which they didn’t need to beaver away at mundane tasks like tending crops or making clothes. These individuals would typically be the biggest, strongest, boldest, most competitive types–for example, men who were good at hunting, which made them also good at fighting against other hostile groups. Social hierarchies emerged. Women and the less able-bodied men drudged away to produce the means of life; men who possessed the necessary traits engaged only in activities such as hunting and fighting. These men became the “leisure class.”

The leisure class came to include others who did no genuinely productive work, for instance, priests and administrators. This elite came to look down on productive work, which was performed by the majority who had to do it out of necessity. Not having to do such work thus came to be a distinguishing mark of a person’s higher social standing. In smaller societies it was fairly easy to flaunt this privilege in the form of “conspicuous leisure”, but in larger, more complex societies, one exhibited one’s status by showing off one’s wealth through conspicuous consumption. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Robyn Repko Waller

Academic titles aren’t everything. But they signpost what might not otherwise be socially salient; I, and others like me, are present here as members of this academic community. 

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal published a now widely criticized op-ed piece, imploring Dr. Jill Biden to drop her academic title from her public persona before her tenure as First Lady. Many outlets have condemned the misogynistic tone of the piece, which refers to Dr. Biden as “kiddo,” disparages her dissertation as sounding “unpromising,” and encourages her instead to focus, as if it is mutually exclusive, on the excitement of living in the White House. Even the author’s former employer has distanced themselves from his views. 

Now, the author, Mr. Epstein, does provide an argument of sorts for his views, backed with anecdotal evidence. He cites his decades-long career as a university lecturer and editor of a scholarly publication, a career he has advanced without a Masters or PhD. Sometimes, he notes, students have called him by ‘Dr.’ He reports that he has an honorary doctorate, but he speaks poorly of the kind of individuals who typically have such honorary degrees bestowed upon them in contemporary times — wealthy donors and entertainers. Rather, he quips, “no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child.” (An apropos male doctor reference in a misogynist piece.) Charitably (against all initial recoiling), we may read this as the view that the mere possession of a doctorate, at least of the honorary variety, does little to track the merit or quality of work or worth of the individual. Using the title, then, presumably, does not signify what it seems.

Of course, we may well agree that plenty of meritorious work, academic or otherwise, has been produced by those without a doctorate or even a bachelor’s degree. To think otherwise is to slide into the growing elitism about the “uneducated.” I was a first-generation (undergraduate) college student. Having grown up in a proud working-class family, whose character —community-mindedness, warmth, ingenuity, courage — and work ethic were second-to-none, I also recoil at  this growing elitism. Plus I can understand the frustration about celebrity and money trumping desert for academic accolades. Few scholars, if any, have gotten nearly as much attention as Nicole Polizzi, aka Snooki, did when delivering a lecture to a university (although I’m sure it was an interesting address). More seriously, there is a severe socioeconomic barrier to entry into college in the US and elsewhere.  Read more »

Ducks on a pond in Brixen, South Tyrol, in December of 2020.

by Eric Miller

To the mainland

When we climb the stairwell out of the depth of the ferry, where our car rests parked amid grimy trucks, we find taut bands of yellow plastic tape setting off the tables and benches of the observation decks. We have to sit far from other people. Someone took pleasure in this prohibitive festooning, officious pleasure perhaps but also childish joy. It is like decorating for a dance, though its effect is opposite: to un-couple us, to make all of us wallflowers. A disinvitation to the ball! Now our huge white ferry sets off from Swartz Bay—a self-willed tower. Excluding wind and sound, impervious windows mute the passing islands, each projected for us as in a theatre. The thrum of the engine pleases, supplying constant reassurance that everything is fine. Its weak, unvaried arpeggio would seem to guarantee the integrity of our own simmering organic system. A humming machine befriends us. It defends and supports us by a flattering yet ideally stable mimesis of our private vibe, our autonomic hubbub.

The Salish Sea imparts not the least sensation of rocking to the vessel, the vessel is so big relative to the swell. When I see that yellow tape, however, I always worry about the disposal of it. It consists of a sort of plastic that stretches thin, but is reluctant to disappear. Round and round the globe like longitudes and latitudes, such tape persists impertinently after the end of perceived emergency that—once upon a time, it will have been so long ago!—cordoned off part of the habitable world from the rest. The rationale is Covid-19.

From where I sit like a moviegoer, I watch the water. Without pangs of apocalypse or a sense of my witness being in any way representative, my contemplation accumulates the fewest seabirds I have ever seen, the fewest birds in general I have ever seen, between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen. Three gulls. Three cormorants. On other occasions Bald Eagles have been as common as crows, murres dove before the bland advance of our blanched castle, rafts of ducks, mergansers, all nonchalance, paddled a derisive minimal distance from our apparition. The ocean almost stagnates, preserving the bubbles of our ferry’s hours-before previous passage as though so surpassingly enervated as not to prick them. Flabby Neptune’s trident is too dull, this August day, to lance any eruption. We can see how little the skipper deviates from a set course by these viscous-looking residues. The brisk ship hurries to escape an ambient torpor. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

Can the moon strike twice? Sadly, no.

The question hovers over John Patrick Shanley’s new film Wild Mountain Thyme because it aims for the same sort of bittersweet heartache seasoned with gritty and eccentric comedic beats that characterized his Oscar-winning script for Moonstruck (1987).

The grit then was of the Brooklyn Heights variety while now it is West Irish farm dirt. The story, adapted from Shanley’s 2014 play Outside Mullingar, was inspired by a trip the Bronx-born writer took with his octogenarian father to the family’s County Westmeath homestead. Shanley was smitten with its denizens’ quirky, homey warmth and he translates that into a stew of poetically depressive, circular philosophizing centered around a thwarted romance between two neighboring farmers, Rosemary Muldoon and Anthony Reilly.

The result is a beautiful, somewhat patronizing, nonsensical muddle, in large part because it is irritatingly unclear what exactly does thwart the romance. The answers, near as we can tell, are Anthony’s self-doubt, inertia, and psychological instability and Rosemary’s pride. He is “touched,” as country folk often are on Broadway — talking to himself and carrying a sensitive secret. The long-suffering Rosemary has been waiting decades for him to make a move and subsumes her longing in cigarettes and a stoney-faced stiffness. On the rare occasion that she smiles, we fear that her visage may shatter. Read more »

Until

I’ve not roamed the four corners of the earth
but I have roamed the four corners of the earth
I contain as much love and callousness as any human does

I love and harm as sure as the passionate sun does,
which inflames dawn clouds in iconic peace and beauty
which inflames sunset clouds in ironic blaze and beauty
in billowing portraits of the One

and which the brutal sea behind its placid sun-struck
sometimes mask of absent wind and freeze does
when a seaborne mist of amethyst and gentle swells comes
with southern breeze and warm calm but with sense to know
we drift up to a brink . until

(as everything from dust to stars does)

Jim
12/1/20

by Rafaël Newman

All my life I’ve been fascinated by the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors… —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 2019

When I was quite young I had a dream, or fantasy, of a Purple Book: a richly satisfying, totally illuminating, all-encompassing volume that would replace all others and provide endless comfort and sustenance. There were to be numerous candidates for this status in my subsequent “real life”, including novels like Watership Down, Ulysses, Bouvard et Pécuchet and Austerlitz, as well as books of towering historical survey or “grand theory” such as Mary Beard’s SPQR, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and Tony Judt’s Postwar. The Purple Book remained for a long time a symbol of an elusive fulfilment, now and then briefly glimpsed, always fleeting; until the more pressing cares and more vivid, if still ephemeral, satisfactions of adult life drove it into retreat.

That such total understanding and ultimate satisfaction should have been represented in my imaginary by a printed object has a fairly straightforward aetiology, given the academic culture into which I was born. The purpleness of that dream book, for its part, was multiply motivated: by my youthful apprehension of the color’s sacerdotal significance; by a naïve, pre-adolescent suspicion of its intoxicating powers of erotic evocation (I had once heard the father of a grade-school colleague refer to crème de cassis as the “sexiest” liqueur he had ever tasted); and, perhaps most profoundly because least patently, by its subterranean association with Jewishness, that most elusive, and thus most attractive, element of my own personal cultural makeup, which would remain a tantalizing chimera during much of my youth and young adulthood. For not only was the velvet bag enclosing my Polish Jewish grandfather’s prized Crown Royal rye whisky, famously manufactured by the Bronfmans, Canada’s preeminent Jewish dynasty, a dusky papal hue; not only was the membership of the notorious Purple Gang, which had been among the mobsters smuggling the Bronfmans’ products into Prohibition-era America, and which rated a name-check in Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock”, predominantly Jewish; but the very description of the Jews as “the People of the Book” lends itself, by oneiric transposition (people/purple), to a connection with the color. (Extra weight may have been granted the association by my Jewish father’s invention, in my infancy, of a game he called “the Purple Terror”, which involved propping me up against the back of the sofa and then allowing me to collapse, riotously, into the cushions, thence to be “rescued” by my deliciously horrified mother: a ludic enactment of the illusory promise of upright paternal support giving way to a vertiginous subsidence into the amorphic maternal.) Read more »

by R. Passov

This will be one of the most important compounds of our generation. —Jeff Kindler, former CEO, Pfizer, commenting on Torcetrapib

Failure of a drug in development, especially in a late stage clinical trial, is shocking. Torcetrapib, for example, failed at the very end of its phase III trial. So many resources had been expended to get that far in development. Everything spent was lost. All that remained was a big data pile worth virtually nothing, along with pilot plants that were built to supply the drug to thousands of patients across years of clinical trials.

The high cost of failure is why big rewards are offered to underwrite the risk of drug development. But because the costs of failure are so high, you have to be careful not to over-reward success. This is can happen rather too easily when the odds of success are relatively immutable with respect to the amount of money spent in search of success. And when the prize money continues to grow.

When you have these circumstances the incentives to take risks grow to the point where the amount of risk taken is excessive leading to repeated failures and wastage. How does this happen? When, given success, there is too much pricing power; too much power such that the profits the industry generates fall into the realm of what economists term ‘rent’ vs true profits that result from increasing overall social welfare. (See Garthwaite.) Read more »