by Paul Braterman

This short book deserves the widest possible readership. The author, Paul Nurse, shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the control of the process of cell division, and is currently Director of the Francis Crick Institute in London, and among other things is Chief Scientific Advisor for the European Commission. Here he gives a marvellously lucid exposition of highly complex subject matter, in a way that makes difficult ideas accessible to non-expert, while I believe that even the expert will gain from the clarity of overall perspective, as well as from the many illustrations of the scientific process in action, drawn from the author’s own career and elsewhere. I do have some criticisms, but will reserve these for later.

I was privileged to hear Sir Paul lecture to Glasgow’s Royal Philosophical Society on the central concepts of biology, and the present book is an exposition and enlargement of the concepts in that lecture. The “five steps” are the cell, genes, evolution, life as chemistry, and life as an information-handling system. After a short but important and highly topical chapter on “Changing the world”, the book concludes with a return to the central question. What is life? What is it about life that gives rise to its wonderful diversity and effectiveness, given that living things are built out of the same atoms as all other material objects, obeying the same laws of physics and chemistry? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Varun Gauri

The realist case for the Democrats to expand the Supreme Court, and more generally to reform and modernize the federal judiciary, should they have the opportunity, can be stated simply: What is the point of unilateral disarmament? For several decades, Republicans have weaponized the judicial branch by appointing a large number of ideologically vetted judges, some with less than stellar qualifications. As Bouie puts it, Republicans “blockaded”  the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, filibustering Obama’s nominees and labeling routine efforts to fill vacancies as “court packing.” They barricaded Merrick Garland’s path to the Supreme Court. Defying precedent, they planted Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court two weeks before a presidential election. Republican arguments questioning mail-in voting and limiting the franchise in the current election amount to a “fight in a much longer war.”

If Democrats don’t respond, given the opportunity, it sends the signal, in the words of Ocasio-Cortez, that Democrats “don’t have the stones to play hardball like they do.” A failure to act locks in Republican judges’ skepticism  of voting rights, making Democratic electoral victories harder and Democratic policy objectives — fighting climate change, redressing social and economic inequalities — that much less likely.

Why should Democrats refuse all constitutionally available options when the other side does not? Why act like a chump?

A frequently expressed response to this realist case, especially on the part of those who value the institution of the Supreme Court, is that a Democratic expansion of the Court would merely extend the escalating spiral of retaliation between the parties. As Laurence Tribe put it in 2019, “Obviously partisan Court-expansion to negate the votes of justices whose views a party detests and whose legitimacy the party doubts could trigger a tit-for-tat spiral that would endanger the Supreme Court’s vital role in stabilizing the national political and legal system.”

To speak to concerns like this, I want to argue that, in addition to the compelling realist case, there is an idealist case for expanding or reforming the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary more generally. By idealist, I mean a point of view that takes as its starting point that it is valuable for law to maintain its normatively binding power in our society. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

When I was a kid, I used to see this little sign everywhere (still see it occasionally): “No shoes. No shirt. No service.” It was on the door of every store, including the store down at the gas station. It used to make me laugh for some reason. Maybe, just the image of this shoeless, shirtless madman storming the store for more toilet paper.

I’ve been thinking about that sign a lot lately. I think of it every time I see a new video of some mask-less person trying to force their way into a Walmart. In my whole life, I have never once heard a single person suggest (much less argue) that “No shoes. No shirt. No service.” violated their freedom. How, in the midst of a global pandemic that’s killed over 225,000 Americans so far, can anyone think they are exempt from complying with the simplest, most effective way of fighting back against the virus – because, what? “freedom”?

Trump’s people are everywhere these days lecturing on us on their freedom not to wear a mask. One told the employees of a Montana coffee shop that in doing so they were “bending the knee to tyranny”. Here’s the more-or-less official Trump-world line on this from Vice President Mike Pence during the Vice-Presidential debate: “We’re about freedom and respecting the freedom of the American people.”

I agree with Michael Tomasky’s recent New York Times article: “It’s high time Democrats played some philosophical offense on the concept of ‘freedom.’” But even Tomasky doesn’t take it far enough. He talks about it as if it were a matter of conflicting rights or of Mill’s Harm Principle (“the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection”). But it goes deeper than that. Read more »

The river Eisack flowing fast through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in October of 2020.

by Thomas Larson

In 1874, Thomas Hardy married Emma Gifford, a woman who never let her novelist husband forget that she was born of a higher class than he, ever his superior in taste and breeding. After her death he got back at her—poetically—in a big way. And she—from the grave—at him.

The pair began a premarital affair, fervent and soulful, as romantic and intellectual companions; not long after, they were quarantined in thirty-eight years of a childless and mutually regrettable marriage. When Emma died of a bad heart and impacted gallstones (she wrote treacly poems, many published, and suffered from delusions of grandeur), Hardy at sixty-two composed a loose sequence of verse, “Poems of 1912-1913.” These twenty-one rhyming, pithy elegies, among the finest in English, conjure the ghost of his first wife as the means of grieving his loss in a fatalistic anti-theism that feels downright religious.

For Hardy, as Claire Tomlin writes in her biography, there are three Emma’s: “Sometimes she appears as a ghost, sometimes as the elderly woman who liked parties and hats; more often as the girl of long ago, wearing an ‘air-blue gown,’ or with her ‘bright hair flapping free.’” Hardy names her (“woman much missed”), recalls their slow-dissolving marriage (“scars of the old flame”), owns up to their mutual failures (“things were not lastly as firstly well / with us”), and measures her apparitional lingering, postmortem, in places where she shadows him (“how you call to me, call to me, / Saying that you are not as you were”). He resurrects her girlish form, the woman he began courting long ago, (“fair-eyed and white shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed”). Read more »

by Katie Poore

“The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here.”

So begins Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations, one of the most haunting and beautiful novels I have read in years. I picked this book up on a whim, mostly because it has been categorized as “eco-fiction” by publishers and reviewers, a new sort of climate change novel. It’s a designation that I can’t resist, and so I drove to my local bookstore the day of its release to snatch a copy.

Locating the words for this book feels difficult; it is the most affecting story I have read this year, or perhaps ever, packing a great deal into its relatively slim 254 pages. It is McConaghy’s first foray into the world of adult fiction; based in Australia, she is the author of several young adult novels, and Migrations is the first of her works to be published in the U.S. And how lucky we are, I can’t help thinking, to receive a gift like this.

Migrations is certainly eco-fiction, but this categorization falls woefully short of accessing the heart of this beast. Migrations is really a multi-pronged love story: between man and woman, woman and sea, sea and sailor, woman and animal, human and earth. It is also, paradoxically, a story of profound loneliness. Read more »

by Ali Minai

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
 I guess an’ fear!
—Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”

On January 24, 2017 – four days after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45^th President of the United States – I sat down at my computer and wrote out an 8-point plan by which I feared he and his party could change forever the nature of American democracy. Now, as we approach another presidential election, it is interesting to look back and take stock.

Here was the plan – reproduced verbatim without any change except a small typo correction:

Step 1: Delegitimize all authoritative sources of information – mainstream media, scientists, economists, historians, other experts.

Step 2: Use control of government resources to foment conspiracy theories and generate fake information (including fake data) to delegitimize popular predecessor.

Step 3. Use the judiciary and the legislature to criminalize criticism and dissent.

Step 4 Stop keeping track of data that would quantify inconvenient facts about climate change, economic inequality, social problems, civil rights problems, gun violence, police brutality, corporate greed, foreign wars, etc.

Step 5: Use control of government institutions to revise previous data and generate new false data to shape perceptions of prior dysfunction and current progress.

Step 6: Divide the opposition by tangling them in internal feuds on issues such as trade, race, political correctness, Israel, etc.

Step 7: Pack the bureaucracy and judiciary as far as possible with compliant functionaries who support the program.

Step 8: Use government institutions to ensure single-party electoral dominance for the foreseeable future, thus removing all fear of public accountability.

I would now like to pose two questions:

1. Was all this possible in January 2017?
2. Did it come to pass, and if not, why not?

To answer the first question, yes, it was certainly possible. The mechanisms were all there. Trump had come in with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. The party dominated governorships and state legislatures across the country. The judiciary had already been packed well by previous Republican administrations, and the reversal of this packing stymied by Republican obstruction during the Obama years. The Right-Wing propaganda machine, led by Fox News and Talk Radio, was humming on all cylinders. Read more »

August 18, 12:10 pm

orange serpentine between
sloped green and me
sky pondlight
blue clean, clouds
cumulous/cirrus
half unseen
in a frame
like dream
geometry/physics
bone-like brick
wood-like flesh
and glass that,
with reflections, sings
with ridges and walls,
choral: concrete, spheres, steel
and other distinctly
human things

Jim Culleny
8/18/19

by Charlie Huenemann

Bill: Can you believe these Republicans?! Just four years after swearing up and down that no nominee for the Supreme Court should ever be approved in an election year for the president, and promising on their mothers’ graves that they would never do such a thing, here they are doing exactly that!

Alice: Why are you surprised, Bill?  They are doing exactly what they should be doing. And the Democrats are doing what they should be doing – grandstanding about principles, and declaring that they would never go back on their word, and decrying the demise of American politics, and so forth and so on. Everything is going as it should.

Bill: How can you say that? The Republicans – and, okay, I admit it, the Democrats too, to some extent – are being hypocritical, and just saying whatever they think they need to say to score their own political points.

Alice: Well, yes. Isn’t that their job?

Bill: No! Their job is to govern, and to engage in reasoned discourse about the public good, and vote according to their conscience. I know that sounds naive – but the fact that it sounds naive just shows how far we have drifted from the way things are supposed to be.

Alice: I think you deeply misunderstand the nature of truly liberal democracy. You seem to think that if people just reflect hard enough, and speak to one another in even-tempered tones, there will emerge some sort of consensus that, overall, over the long run, tends to track what is truly good for the public. Read more »

by Joan Harvey

The new book by Sandor Ellix Katz, Fermentation as Metaphor, is “Dedicated to bubbly excitement, in its infinite effervescent manifestations.” As our Covid Days drag on, I have a dream about champagne flutes gone missing, though I manage to find other glasses that will do. I suspect this is a dream about our current loss of social celebrations, and a wish for the bubbly groupings of the past, but, also, when I find different glasses, how it is still possible to find other ways to bubble (or with glasses how it is possible to see things differently).

“Bubbles create movement, literally exciting the substrate being transformed by the fermentation, bringing it to life” (Katz 80). When our ideas, our spirits, our thoughts bubble up, it shows that something exciting is taking shape. Fermentation is from the latin fervere, which means to boil. It’s all about the bubbles. We even live in an age of bubbles: the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has written a 664-page tome called Bubbles, the first of a three-part trilogy, a theory of relationship and intimacy that takes us from the womb to the Christian conception of God; the Flaming Lips performed a concert in which every musician and each person in the audience was encased in a bubble, and I, for one, live in a liberal bubble. But Sandor Katz’s bubbles have energy, permeability, and an excitement that is very much shared, rather than isolating. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Autumn Water. Chittenden, September 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Mike O’Brien

This column is not about the American election. You’re welcome.

Instead, I want to write about evidence, justification, and risk. This is partly a response to very recent events, and partly a regurgitation of some ideas I ruminated on years ago.

First, the recent bits. I was listening to the Montreal branch of Canadian national radio, a lunchtime call-in show that was asking listeners about their views on restaurant re-openings. Covid infections have spiked in the last month in Quebec, hovering around 1000 new cases per day in a population of roughly 8 million. The provincial government imposed a one-month lockdown on October 1st, shutting bars, restaurants, and other businesses and public facilities, as well as banning private gatherings. This was originally imposed on the metropolitan areas of Montreal and Quebec City, deemed “red zones”, but this designation was soon applied to just about every urbanized area along the St Lawrence river corridor.

It was a reluctant, long-avoided (bars had been open since late June) bid to keep Covid transmission sufficiently controlled to allow schools to remain open. The centre-right CAQ (Coalition for the Future of Quebec) government is very much a pro-business party, led by an airline entrepreneur, and has been accused of insisting on continued in-person schooling because it allows parents to return to work. I don’t doubt that this was a factor in their calculation, though they may also genuinely believe in their public claims that a return to schooling is necessary for the mental health and educational progress of children. They went so far as to deny children the choice to continue remote schooling, except for rare medical exemptions. I think it’s rather short-sighted, given that children are already known to be spreaders of the disease (and potentially victims of long-term harm, even if they are asymptomatic when infected). Given that Covid is not going away anytime soon, and may be surpassed by even worse viruses in the future, I would have liked to see our government build and maintain remote-learning infrastructure, to allow a rapid shutdown whenever necessary. But I don’t run the government. I just complain about it on the internet. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

Autumn is brilliant. One of the things I looked forward to when I moved to the Midwest from the desert southwest was the experience of a year with four seasons. I did not anticipate how very beautiful autumn could be, and even after 40 years in the Midwest, I can’t get enough of this season. I can’t spend enough time outside in the wonderfully crisp air, under the low-angle sunlight, stopping to drink in the deep burnished golds, the lemony yellows, the gloriously variegated reds and oranges.

It took me a while to start recognizing specific types of trees instead of seeing only a mass of color, and I’m still learning new ones. I didn’t know until recently, for example, that the leaves of pawpaw trees turn the color of the sun in a child’s drawing. The pawpaw trees in my neighbors’ yard briefly cast a warm glow through my bedroom window on sunny afternoons this time of year. The leaves of ginkgo trees turn a similar color that deepens slightly with time; two huge old trees on campus drop countless small golden fans over the ground. (We won’t talk about the smell.)

I realize I have a surprising number of memories specifically about falling and fallen leaves: noticing dry leaves scurrying down the sidewalk, driven by a frisky wind on a cool autumn evening; pausing to watch a single yellow leaf drift to a rain-wet brick sidewalk under tenuous November sunshine as I hurried to a physics lab; seeing the perfect circles of red leaves on the ground under small maple trees; finding, one morning on my way to work, that an oak tree had dropped seemingly all of its leaves overnight, covering the sidewalk with a rich ruby carpet for me to walk on. Late one overcast afternoon last year, the clouds lifted near the western horizon, just enough for the setting sun to illuminate a maple with leaves that ranged in color from green to orange to scarlet. It blazed like a torch against an iron-gray eastern sky. I used to think moments like these pull me out of everyday life, but now I think they re-enchant it. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

Rarely do presidential elections seem so consequential, but 2020 has us all in agreement that voting is critical this year. Many simply yearn for a return to “the normal” of the Obama era or the Clinton years. Is the normal of the 90s and 2000s far enough to really address our various existential crises? I argue no. It’s clear that whatever our political orientation, we’re all reeling from the ongoing pandemic (and the threat of more in the future), global economic precarity (from several decades of neo-liberal policies, exacerbated by the pandemic), the erosion of individual rights among those historically oppressed, the rise of the hard right and the terroristic threats they pose, some left-wing accelerationism on the left, as well as the looming existential crisis of climate change, among other things. A general consensus has emerged that the current administration made these issues worse.

With the exception of a few hardcore holdouts, many prominent members of the President’s own party have come to admit the administration’s failures to address the above issues. Yet the administration represents the logical conclusion of the rightward lurch of the Overton window advocated by the GOP for years now. A quick survey of American and global politics tell us that the post Cold War neoliberal solutions failed us all. As we stare into the void that is 2020, now seems the perfect time to reassess and reorient ourselves to push for a more productive mode of problem-solving from our governments. Although voting Democratic down your tickets could begin this process, a real shift to creating more responsive governance that puts citizens first for the country and world will need active engagement and large-scale collective problem solving based on scientific facts rather than ideology. It is helpful to know the roots of our current problem so I will focus on two byproducts of the Cold War itself: the rise of neoliberal economic structures and the culture wars, and how Republicans and Democrats reacted to both. Solving these problems will require a strong political will for a New Deal level intervention that both regulates the economy and offers protection of basic rights for all. Read more »

by Peter Wells

It’s dawned on me, looking at recent (and not so recent) commentary on Shakespeare, that a wedge is being driven between the Bard and the culture in which he lived. Although I haven’t actually heard the following syllogism, it seems to be lurking behind much current criticism:

• Shakespeare wasn’t stupid;
• Christianity is stupid;
  
• therefore Shakespeare can’t have been a Christian.

For example the explicitly Christian Sonnet 146 is variously dismissed as (a) uncharacteristic (b) insincere (c) the words of a ‘persona,’ or character, or (d) actually not Christian at all.

Whereas, personally, I think that a great deal of Shakespeare’s work can be better understood and appreciated, once we realise that it is grounded in the faith and beliefs of most of his fellow citizens, and that he took that faith seriously. We know that he used Biblical quotations and allusions frequently, they being the common language of his generation. But I would like to explore ways in which he might more meaningfully be described as a Christian. Read more »

Buddha died and

left behind a

big emptiness

— Allen Ginsberg

Vale of Kashmir

700,000 jackboots

fill the emptiness

— Rafiq Kathwari

by N. Gabriel Martin

Among the most frequent and important complaints against President Trump and his administration is that it has contributed to the degradation of public institutions. The title of an Op-Ed in The Atlantic this year referred to his “war on American institutions,” and even prior to his election an Op-Ed in The New York Times warned that he was targeting ‘democracy’s institutions’ with his threats to jail Hillary Clinton. It isn’t just political institutions that Trump undermines, as an article in Nature argued, but scientific institutions as well.

Neither is the threat facing institutions today limited to Trump; other Trump-like political figures, such as Boris Johnson, pose similar dangers, as an article in The New Statesman argued. Still, Trump epitomises it. To sloppily paraphrase Tolstoy: every bad president is bad in their own way. The epitome of George W. Bush’s badness was his futile and venal wars, Trump’s is his destruction of institutions.

As an indictment, the one levied against Trump is oddly intangible. It is surprising that the chief complaint against the most unpopular president in history is not about a death toll, unemployment figures, or some similarly hard fact. I don’t mean that it is less consequential or important, on the contrary, our ideas and other artifacts of our culture are immensely important, and it is encouraging to see broader recognition of their significance in the opposition to Trump. To many, including myself, Trump and his enablers have proven the importance of institutions that had previously escaped attention: institutions such as voting rights, an independent judiciary, and congressional oversight, to name just a few. By endangering these and others, Trump has brought our attention to things that are easy to overlook because of their intangibility and because they can be taken for granted as long as they are functioning normally. Read more »