Sughra Raza. Charles River Esplanade. Boston, August, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Usha Alexander

[This is the second in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

When I was a kid, I used to wonder about the possibility that the planet could slip back into an ice age. I grew up in the Rocky Mountain region of the northwestern USA, where winters lasted half the year and summers were brief and blustery. I hated being cold all the time. Aware that ice ages result from some sort of natural cycles, I worried what might happen if the planet should head that way again. I tried to imagine how we would construct cities and farms, how we would travel between countries or even build roads, if huge glaciers grew down from the Arctic Circle and smothered our little mountain town. 

So I was surprised to learn, much later, that we actually do live in an ice age. In historical memory, we’ve been enjoying a warmish, rather pleasant phase of this ice age, to be sure—an interglacial phase, called the Holocene, that’s persisted for about ten thousand years. But interglacial phases, like our present one, have only been brief respites, as the ice age has cycled between glacial and interglacial phases over the past two million years. Past interglacials never lasted very long and, left to its own geological devices, all signs suggested that this one would end too, to be followed by a much longer glacial phase—the stuff of my nightmares. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

On the first day of August in Year One AC (anno coronae), I boarded an Intercity train in Zurich bound for Singen, in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg. In Singen I transferred to the Intercity headed to Stuttgart but left the train a few stops shy of the state capital, at the town of Horb am Neckar, where I was met by friends and driven to Burg Hohenzollern. Looming over the mild and hilly Swabian countryside, the castle is the ancestral seat of the senior branch of the dynasty that would go on to rule Prussia, and eventually the German Empire, before retiring to wealthy obscurity at the end of World War One.

What was noteworthy about my first excursion across the Swiss border in over six months, since a winter holiday spent in Alto Adige before the lockdown, was not so much its particular destination (although that will bear mention below) as its timing: August 1, or Erschtouguscht in Swiss-German dialect, is the annual commemoration of Switzerland’s founding, and thus, depending on your political coloration, either a uniquely unpatriotic day to leave the country, or the ideal moment for an escape from the pathos and pyrotechnics of a populist rite.

European national holidays are typically history-laden affairs, at least in their original conception. Of the countries just beyond Switzerland’s borders, France hosts the most venerable festivities. The Quatorze Juillet marks the significant initial, if not particularly effective, revolutionary gestures of July 1789, and lends the symbolic elements of its exercise – stormed ramparts, tricolore, battle hymn – mutatis mutandis to the general vocabulary of national identity. Italy’s is the next eldest, although it celebrates a political event fully two centuries later: the Festa della Repubblica, on June 2, commemorates the referendum in 1946 in which the Italian electorate opted for a republican form of government following the fall of fascism, and features wreath-laying and a military parade. Read more »

by R. Passov

In early 1970, after three years of fighting induction into the army, Muhammad Ali neared the end of his resources. In that same year, before he left for prison, my father gave me boxing lessons. I wasn’t going to be the type of fighter Ali was. According to my father, instead of back-peddling on my toes I needed to fight on the inside.

Between lessons I listened to stories about Jack Dempsey perfecting the weave, ducking under a jab, twisting all of his weight into a short left. Then about my father’s favorite, Rocky Marciano, who paid two punches to throw one and hit so hard it was worth it.

Rocky was from my father’s youth, when tough Irish, Italian and Jewish kids ran the black and white streets of eastern cities. An inside-the-game fighter, Rocky spoke straight at the camera in slow, perfect sentences, as if on the twenty-third take of his own thoughts. He didn’t threaten the limits of my father’s understanding. Instead, he was a man among his kind of men.

Ali was different; Black, lecturing, out of bounds, on his own, making change. I wanted from Ali what my father wanted from Rocky. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

Once we thought we’d look into a cruise. As skeptics in principle, we agreed we’d have to choose carefully. We wouldn’t join an enforced entertainment experience with a thousand shipmates enduring professional smiles.

We wouldn’t just pocket a few easy off-the-beaten-track conquests (although these look promising). The fun of those is getting there on your own. This ruled out a queasy crossing of the Drake Passage with newly retired strangers. Fine.

We wouldn’t sail anyplace that made our fellow cruisers too keyed up to have fun. This ruled out anything billed as a “trip of a lifetime.” Them’s marketing words. Finally, we hadn’t the free time for tramping aboard a cargo ship, although Gregory Jaynes’s Come Hell on High Water makes a strong case. One of these days.

We settled on sailing from Walvis Bay, Namibia on the world’s last royal mail ship, the RMS St. Helena, a stubby little bulldog bound for St. Helena and Ascension Islands, some 1800 miles east of Brazil and 1200 miles west of Angola, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, among the more remote places on earth. Read more »

Fly on my menu at a restaurant in Brixen, South Tyrol, in August of 2013.

by Philip Graham

I serve as the family cook as well as the family DJ, so no dinner party preparation is complete without a small stack of CDs waiting for guests to arrive. When the doorbell rings and my wife Alma walks to the front door to greet our earliest guests, I idle the burners on the stove and hurry to the living room stereo, where I press Play for the first CD. A song should already be in progress before the exchange of Hellos, because music, like furniture, is a form of home decoration, filling and defining silence the way a couch or chair fills and defines space. The music must be dialed low, just enough for a home to express quiet domestic welcome. I like to think that I’m long past my ancient feckless undergraduate days of booming a song through an open window.

Yet over dinner, rarely does someone ask, “What is that lovely music?” Such a longed-for question always fills me with joy—someone heard its beauty too!–and I’m happy to reply, “Oh, that’s Brian Eno’s Music for Airports,” or “We’re listening to the Afro-Spanish singer Buika Concha,” or “You like the Kora Jazz Trio, too?” Am I the only one who can be diverted from dinner chitchat by an airy chorus, or a husky vocal phrase, or a tack piano’s piquant modulation?

That magic question does get asked from time to time. I remember in particular one evening, many years ago, when I hit paydirt as guests passed serving plates and bowls back and forth at the dinner table and an austere mix of resonant metallic percussion, choral voices, an organ and a violin wafted from the living room.

“What are we listening to?” my old friend Bruce asked. Bruce! Of all my friends, I knew he had that question in him.

“It’s ‘La Koro Sutro,’ by a contemporary American composer, Lou Harrison.” Read more »

by Bill Benzon

That, I assume, is the floor slab of a demolished industrial building. It’s located near one of the remaining fragments of the Morris Canal in Jersey City. Back in the day the Morris Canal delivered anthracite coal from Eastern Pennsylvania to New Jersey and New York City – the Hudson River is no more than half a mile to the right of this slab. Things have changed; the Morris Canal was abandoned in 1924. I don’t know just when guerilla skate boarders appropriated this slab for their sport, but I took the photo at 6AM on July 30, 2011. One feature in this do-it-yourself (DIY) skate park remains unfinished – that pile of dirt and rock to the right of center. Notice the Myspace URL at the bottom of the photo.

DIY parks have been an aspect of skate boarding for a long time. There aren’t enough purpose-built parks to meet the demand. People don’t like skate boarders using public sidewalks, plazas, parks, shopping centers, and streets, and skate boarders don’t like be harassed for doing what they love. What to do? Find an out-of-the-way spot and build your own park, that’s what. Read more »

by Varun Gauri

These days, fights about social identity are coming to the boil. Could mindfulness practice lower the temperature of those disputes? I want to suggest that it could. To understand why, it’s useful to start by describing the psychological components of social identity. There are a variety of ways of thinking about the topic; many have addressed it. I want to highlight three dimensions.

First, identity enters the body and the imagination. You can tell what groups people belong to from their languages, accents, clothing, symbols, habits, and ways of carrying themselves. Some Sikhs wear turbans on their heads; some Catholics wear crosses around their necks. Most Brazilians and Portuguese speak the same language, but with different accents. Women tend to carry handbags and men wallets. People have strong emotions about the way their bodies and words disclose their affiliations — sometimes pride, sometimes shame. They love their country’s rivers and mountains; they relish the food and drink of their neighborhoods; there are songs that bring them to tears, smells and gestures that evoke the sense of being at home in the world. Even when people reject their identities of origin, the disavowals often have the effect of acknowledging the relevance of those identities to their self-understanding. Let’s call this the expressive aspect of identity.

One could try to argue that Christianity is a more imaginative and beautiful religion than Buddhism, or vice versa, and it might be fun to waste some time on that debate, but it really doesn’t make sense to say that one group’s languages or symbols are superior to another’s. Some expressions of identity are morally contestable (consider headscarf bans or statues of Confederate soldiers), but as a general rule, people are, and should be, free to express their identities. Read more »

by David Copp and Gerald Dworkin

We have argued in a recent article in 3 Quarks Daily that there is a moral obligation for those who are able to safely be vaccinated against serious diseases such as measles and COVID-19 to do so. The gist of the argument is that, when certain factual conditions are met, people have a duty to accept vaccination. There are two conditions. First, there is a significant benefit to the person who is vaccinated and little risk. Second, there is a significant benefit to those to whom the person might otherwise transmit the disease. The benefit is a reduction in the risk of serious harm, which obtains if the disease is life-threatening or seriously threatening of significant pain, physical or emotional damage, or significant expense or effort to avoid these, to a significant subset of the population. We will refer again to these conditions, so let’s have a term for them. Call them the “factual preconditions” of an obligation to accept vaccination.

In this essay we are interested in a different set of issues–those surrounding the use of legal coercion to enforce the moral duty above. It is important to see that the two questions are distinct. There are moral obligations that we do not use the law to enforce. For example, we are generally obligated to tell the truth.  People often lie when they are obligated not to do so.  But lying is not generally a criminal offense.  Suppose that someone who is seriously hurt and trying to get to an emergency room in his car, asks us where the nearest emergency room is.  If we gave him false directions, we would clearly be failing to comply with a moral obligation to tell the truth in such circumstances. But, to our knowledge  there is no law which requires us to tell the truth in such a circumstance. Read more »

Two young men greeted a new crew member on a ship’s quarterdeck 60 years ago and, in a matter of weeks, by simple challenge, introduced this then 18 year-old who’d never really read a book through to the lives that can be found in them.… —Thank you Anthony Gaeta and Edmund Budde for your life-altering input.

An Evening Narragansett Walk to the Base Library

bay to my right (my rite of road and sea:
I hold to shoulder, I sail, I walk the line)

the bay moved as I moved, but in retrograde
as if the way I moved had something to do
with the way the black bay moved, how it tracked,
how perfectly it matched my pace, but
slipping behind, opposed, relative
(Albert would have a formula or two
to spin about this if he were here)
behind too, over shoulder, my steel grey ship at pier
transfigured in cloud of cool white light,
a spray from lamps on tall poles ashore
and aboard from lamps on mast and yards
among needles of antennae which gleamed
above its raked stack in electric cloud enmeshed
in photon aura, its edges feathered into night,
luminescent as it lay upon the shimmering skin of bay

from here, she’s as still as the thought from which she came:
upheld steel on water arrayed in light, heavy as weight,
sheer as a bubble, line of pier behind etched clean,
keen as a horizon knife

library ahead —behind
a ship at night

the bay to my right (as I said) slid dark
at the confluence of all nights,
the lights of low barracks and high offices
of the base ahead all aimed west, skipped off bay,
each of its trillion tribulations jittering at lightspeed
fractured by bay’s breeze-moiled black surface
in splintered sight

ahead the books I aimed to read,
books I’d come to love since Tony & Ed
in the generosity of their own fresh enlightenment
had teamed to bring bright tools to this greenhorn’s
stymied brain to spring its self-locked latch
to let some fresh air in crisp as this breeze
blowing ‘cross the bay from where to everywhere,
troubling Narragansett from then
to me here now

Jim Culleny
12/16/19

by David Kordahl

Physicists, as a tribe, are overwhelmingly likely to believe that smart extraterrestrials exist, and are also overwhelmingly likely to believe that they haven’t visited Earth. I’m considered a bit of a kook by my physicist friends because I harbor genuine confusion on this point. I want to believe, but I also want unambiguous evidence—which unfortunately leaves me as a reluctant agnostic. Yet despite my self-consciously atypical attitude, this doesn’t stop me from talking with my physicist friends about alien possibilities. After all, even physicists who have decided that science fiction-type ETs don’t exist will often still let them creep into thought experiments. The alien thought experiment I’m most interested in, the one I won’t shut up about, involves a simple question. Suppose that the aliens were to land on our lawn. How much would they know about physics?

This question reveals a split that’s more fundamental than anything about aliens per se. It probes whether science lets us in on universal truths, and whether we can expect these truths to be universally accepted. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Island Pond Algae, Upstate NY. July 26, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani

‘To be a woman is to be an actress’, writes Susan Sontag in her 1972 essay The Double Standards of Ageing. She is referring to the beauty norms that expect women to freeze ageing while levying no such expectations on men. As the popular saying goes, men become wiser with age while women become older; men being judged by their maturity while women through their bodies. Beauty is often associated with the young and so these pressures of eternal youth trap our subconscious in unrealistic standards of attractiveness. Performing to a biased audience, women become objects of their own calling for as Sontag writes, ‘From early childhood on, girls are trained to care in a pathologically exaggerated way about their appearance’. She wrote this nearly 50 years ago. Since then, there has been a lot of consciousness-raising debates about these reductive attitudes, and nowadays you would be hard pressed to find someone who would admit to the pressures of ‘youthful preservation’.  They call it ‘selfcare’, instead. But is it really?

I’ve always been suspicious of dressing up to please others but I’m even more skeptical of dressing up for myself. Despite all the consciousness-raising feminist movements that made us aware of women’s history of objectification, the fact remains that prior to the pandemic many of us still spent a lot of time and money on beautifying ourselves according to societal standards. Only this time the capitalists were selling it to us as ‘selfcare’ and ‘wellbeing’.  The pandemic has made us rethink how beauty and youth have been rebranded as ‘selfcare’ while still pandering to the imaginary audience that makes being a woman a performance. Much along the lines of Sheryl Sandberg’s neoliberal ‘Lean in’ feminism which tells women to take responsibility for their marginalization, the new beauty standards tell us to look good ‘for ourselves’. In other words, looking good is for our own good. Read more »