by Guy Elgat

Undoubtedly many insights and lessons can be drawn and will be drawn for a long time to come from the current worldwide covid19 epidemic; insights, for example, about the responsibility of politicians in the managing of health crises, about the importance of human cooperation both locally and internationally, about the vulnerability of the global economy to disturbances in the regular flow of people and commodities, about the crucial yet contentious role of the various media in the dissemination of information, etc. But here I am interested in focusing briefly on related issues regarding the problematic relationship of science and the general public. Specifically, I want to offer some reflections on why I think science in trying times can be hard to live with.

What I have in mind is this. During times of normalcy (whether on the individual or collective level) our engagement or concern with the institutions and practices of science is rather limited. Of course, we constantly rely on the technological applications of science, but these almost magical apparatuses which pervade our lives do not for the most part raise any questions for us about the role of science in their emergence, as these technologies are typically taken for granted as the natural medium in which we exist. Specifically, we remain oblivious of the long and arduous process that made them possible in the first place: the years of research, the fits and starts, the difficult births, the contingent nature of discovery, etc. – all these remain for us far behind the scenes, deep under the hood. The various devices that we enjoy seem to descend unheeded from the sky – as if bestowed upon us by some benevolent god – and we embrace them (or not) depending on our desires or whims.

Almost the exact opposite is the case in moments of crisis and distress. Here there is a reversal: we, the public, are no longer the passive recipients of technological dispensations, but actively demand that science provide answers and solutions to our urgent, life-and-death, needs. Science is called to account from the bottom up. Additionally, as part of this transformation, we become, to various degrees, more interested in and concerned about the practice of science itself. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

Materialism is the view that everything that exists is made of matter. What’s matter? It’s hard to say with both precision and completeness, but it can’t be far off to think of matter as whatever can engage causally with the known forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and atomic forces (strong and weak). If a thing responds to any of those forces, that thing is material. Of course, maybe there are some unknown forces of nature, and we’ll have to revise as they become known, but right now, this seems to be an adequate criterion for judging what counts as matter.

But I don’t think materialism is true, and it’s not because I believe in spirits or love or imagination or magic. It’s because of math. Math is a science of form: it explores the possible forms or properties or systems that are possible. Some of these possible structures, of course, describe the real systems we come across in our world, which is neat, and makes physics possible. But there are many, many more possibilities than are actual. It doesn’t take many beers before a gang of interested mathematicians will start describing all sorts of things that could never come to exist in our puny world because they are too big or complicated.

As the gang of mathematicians start describing these otherworldly possibilities, they are not just making stuff up. They can get things right, and get them wrong. It’s really hard to do math, because it’s all about proofs, which slide easily from validity into invalidity, or from coherence into incoherence, with a move as subtle as the fall of an eyelash. But communities of mathematicians keep one another in check, and what they do is as rigorous as any human endeavor can be.

So what about all these non-actual possibilities? If they are not just make-believe, what makes them genuine as possibilities? The best answer, I think, is that there are truths about structure, truths about form, which outrun all of the truths about matter. Our material world is the real-life version of a relatively small set of possible structures, but there is a much bigger world in existence, which is the one that math describes. Read more »

A view of the Dolomites in the distance during a thunderstorm in Brixen, South Tyrol, in August of 2020.

by Peter Wells

Our classes in the British university where I was teaching Pre-sessional students (mainly Chinese) were cancelled for a Special Event. Instead of their normal lessons on academic English, our students were shepherded off to witness a series of presentations on ‘learning.’ Learning, they were told, was ‘Collaborative,’ ‘Creative,’ and ‘Self-directed,’ and depended upon ‘Taking Responsibility for one’s own learning,’ ‘Thinking Critically,’ ‘Problem-solving’ and ‘Taking the Initiative.’

While no one would dispute that these approaches are valuable in themselves, and relevant in some learning situations, they clearly exemplify stereotypical Western liberal values. I looked in vain in the prospectus that had drawn my students to attend our university for evidence that the syllabus included the imparting of these ideals. No, what they had paid for was instruction in the English language; specifically, training in academic writing.

To me this looked like a failure on our part to supply our customers with the goods they had paid for. More seriously, it looked like a neo-colonialist attempt to impose British cultural values upon a captive audience of rather vulnerable foreigners. I do not think that our lecturers, if they attended a conference in Beijing, would appreciate being obliged to attend a plenary session on Chinese Communism. I observed as much to a senior lecturer, in the politest possible manner.

His response was robust. Apparently, learning can take place only with the sort of educational approaches that have developed in our culture over the past generation or so. My suggestion that Chinese people seemed to be very good at learning things – better in some areas than Westerners – was met with a direct contradiction. Chinese people could not really learn at all. Nor, it turned out, as the conversation developed, could Indians, Arabs or Africans. They were not even able to think properly. In fact, only Western people could think, or learn anything worthwhile, the qualification being softened to include people of colour who were entirely Westernised, like, say, Barack Obama. To be fair, the bit about Obama was an inference on my part. Read more »

by Rafiq Kathwari

Before the Modi regime annexed Kashmir on August 5th last, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minster, in fact annexed Kashmir in 1947 just months after India partitioned herself to create the new state of Pakistan.

Delhi flew in a regiment of troops to Srinagar as soon as the Maharajah of Kashmir signed an Instrument of Accession. Even the great Mahatma Gandhi approved of Nehru’s action.

Modi’s so-called annexation last year was religiously motivated. Kashmir penetrates the core of Hindu nationalist idea of Akhand Bharat, united, undivided Hindu India from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Myanmar to Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.

That’s the map draped in orange the color of choice of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS, founded in 1924, a volunteer army of the young, world’s largest fascist organization, based in Nagpur. It’s the parent organization of the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, the present xenophobic regime in Delhi.

Modi’s functionaries told their Hindu goons that Kashmir’s Muslim majority population was now truly an integral part of India and that Hindus should at once apply for Domicile Certificates to buy property in Kashmir. and marry fair-skinned Kashmiri girls.

But Nehru loved Kashmir.  It was his ancestral home.  His family were Kashmiri pandits. There are 250,000 pandits in Kashmir, 3% of Kashmir’s 8 million Muslims. Pandits are 0.1% of India’s 1.2 billion, but Modi’s regime has weaponized the 0.1 % pandits to rouse India’s Hindus. Modi will dump the pandits after doing his feats, and the pandits know it. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

Given the multiple cataclysms that the United States has experienced within the last three or four months, it might seem puzzling that one of the most hotly discussed topics recently has been that of free speech and whether it is under threat by the bugbear of cancel culture. What could be objectionable about open debate? What is there even to discuss about the importance of free speech?

Apparently, a great deal. A recent Cato Institute poll, for example, found that “Nearly two-thirds—62%—of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”

Furthermore, within the past few weeks alone, the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss announced her resignation by means of a fiery letter to Arthur Sulzburger, claiming that she was subjected to a hostile work environment because she championed open debate. Within hours, Andrew Sullivan announced his departure from New York Magazine on twitter.

Prior to the resignations by Weiss and Sullivan, the previous controversy around free speech was sparked by the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, in which more than one hundred prominent intellectuals and writers pledged a commitment to open debate in a statement larded with vague platitudes. Read more »

Sughra Raza. City Lights, Central Park, NY. 2015.

Digital photograph, acrylic on canvas.

by Jackson Arn

Writing seriously about comedy is a thankless challenge. Only an idiot, or somebody who’s used to thankless challenges because he’s a freelance critic, would bother. The risks are high, the rewards low. Overanalyze your subject and you’ll kill it. Treat it too indulgently and you’re left with a jumble of second-hand bits. Clearly, jokes say something important about the society that laughs at them, but woe to the writer who takes them too literally or too earnestly. They are, after all, jokes.

Sometimes, comedy changes so profoundly that it’s worth risking some kind of grand, straight-faced interpretation. And mainstream American comedy has changed profoundly in the last thirty-ish years. It’s gotten thinner, lighter, you could almost say healthier. The style of humor that nourished America for decades has dried up—it’s still possible to find it if you know what to look for, but it’s become the exception where it used to be the rule. To put it another way: comedy has been drained of chicken fat. Where did it go?

If my subject is chicken fat, I have to start with Mad Magazine. No humor source—not SNL, not Carson, not Lenny Bruce—had as much influence on America in the back half of the 20th century. This is impossible to prove, and almost certainly true. Mad was founded in 1952 and lasted until 2019, when it announced it would stop printing new material. At its peak it had two million subscribers. It made its reputation poking fun at McCarthy and Khrushchev and lasted long enough to take on Trump and Putin. Read more »

by Robyn Repko Waller

My professional expertise as a philosopher concerns questions of free will. Sometimes the question is whether determinism threatens our free will. Sometimes the question is whether science speaks against our having free will. And sometimes the question is how others’ influence on our lives limits our control and responsibly. Often the discussion centers on thought experiments about sci-fi manipulators, studies of the neural events that lead to our actions, or logical entailments of the laws of nature. But we don’t need these experiments and metaphysical claims to see a quandary of free will at the intersection of all three staring us in the face: how do we — and ought we — as agents navigate a COVID-19 world? Let me explain.

Recently I read an article in which an anti-mask protestor held up a sign stating “Is it about the virus or is it about control?”

Regardless of one’s stance on masks, the sign vociferously speaks to the phenomenology of control in COVID times. Now one interpretation of the sign is, of course, that government mandates have restricted citizens’ activity and required masks in some jurisdictions; and this individual might be claiming, then, that government mandates are a matter of state control firstly and public health perhaps only secondarily at best. Or perhaps the protestor is stating that the debated right to not wear masks is an issue of individual liberty, and not a rejection of the statistics of COVID-19. While I personally do not take either of these views of the recent government mandates, the expressed experience of agency of this individual, who felt an encroachment on his control, stood out as intriguing. What is it like to be an agent, a person of personal and civic freedom, during COVID? Read more »

by Jochen Szangolies

J Richard Gott and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

J Richard Gott, now an astrophysicist famous for the notion that the universe might have created itself by reaching back through time, visited the Berlin Wall in 1969, while an undergraduate at Harvard. There, he made the following prediction (paraphrased):

The Wall will stand for at least 2 and 2/3 years more, but no longer than 24 years.

On November 9, 1989, a rough twenty years later, his prediction came to fruition, and the Wall came down, precipitating the reunification of East and West Germany.

How did Gott arrive at this prediction? Did he have some special insight into the sociopolitical climate of the times? Was he so convinced of the inherent flaws of Soviet communist ideology that he could confidently predict its downfall? Or did he merely note a structural weakness in the construction itself?

The answer is, of course: none of the above. For his prediction, Gott needed only one single point of data: how long the Wall has stood so far. At the time of his visit, the Wall had existed for about eight years—construction having begun on August 13, 1961, two months after GDR council chairman Walter Ulbricht’s emphatic declaration that ‘nobody has the intention of building a wall’ (“Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten”).

Armed with this knowledge, Gott estimated that the Wall would stand between one third and three times that time longer. For this, he needed to appeal to two further assumptions—the Copernican Principle, and the Principle of Indifference. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Raji Jayaraman

Audio Version

As a young and idealistic 21-year-old, I spent a year in India working with my hero, Jean Drèze. This was the mid-nineties. There were many idols to choose from. Nelson Mandela was universally worshipped. Even Bill Clinton had a following. Cool kids were building altars to Kurt Cobain, who had recently died by suicide. I suppose it says something about my social acumen that my hero was a pyjama-kurta clad Belgian who had renounced worldly possessions and lived in a Delhi slum. I say he “was” my hero not because he no longer is, but because he is no longer Belgian. He is the only European I know who has wanted, and successfully obtained, Indian citizenship. I’m Indian, but I think I can say without any self-loathing that only someone who is utterly committed to the cause would do that. He is often described as an economist activist. The oxymoron speaks for itself.

In order to afford one square meal a day and avoid having to room with Jean in his basti, I got a day job in the World Bank’s Delhi office. Bretton Woods Institutions, for all their post-modern capitalist swagger, have a strangely missionary zeal in their quest to save the world’s poor. Their employees—including my parents who worked for the UN for decades—regularly go “on mission” to developing countries, and they say that with a completely straight face. In the first month I was there, we had our first mission from Washington which, after a debriefing and reception in Delhi, was going to head to “the field”—a turn of phrase that rhymes with “mission” in all but rhyme.

Over the last few decades, numerous Indian states and cities in the field have been re-christened, mostly because the British romped around the planet mispronouncing names and then spelling them accordingly. I’ve spent a long time trying to decide whether their misspellings are a mark of a. carelessness, b. arrogance, or c. disrespect. My best guess is d. all of the above. Take the names of Indian indentured labourers to the Caribbean, for instance. V.S. Naipaul is clearly just an anglicization of Naipal because as his grandfather was being herded off the boat, the guy in the safari suit and sola topee at the bottom of the gang plank repeated, “Nai-Paul” when grandpa said “Naipal”, because….Well, because “Pal” isn’t a name and “Paul” is, and that just made more sense to write down in a name ledger. Correct answer: d. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

The French scientist Pierre Curie, in the new film Radioactive, is impressed by a colleague’s paper on the magnetic properties of steel. It’s an apt reflection of his attraction to that steely colleague herself, the Polish-born Maria Sklodowska.

They become labmates, chisel through four tons of rock pitch over four years, and discover radium and polonium. In the process, they fall in love and fall ill from their glowing, deadly new atomic treasures.

Radioactive is a hybrid of traditional prestige-film grand biopic and quasi-psychedelic time travel. That peculiar combination — occasionally refreshing, more often distracting — speaks to the production’s parentage. Producer Paul Webster has to his credit decades of award-crowned major pictures like The English Patient and Atonement. This film is adapted by Jack Thorne from a graphic novel by Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout, and it is directed by the graphic novelist turned animated-film director Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis). 

The result is a handsome, elaborate production, designed by Michael Carlin with cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle, that chafes at the constrictions of its predominantly linear storytelling and finite historical elbow room. But reminding viewers that the Curies played both Prometheus and Pandora to the wonders and horrors of the atomic age feels unnecessary and vaguely patronizing.  Read more »

Water lilies on a trout pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol, in July of 2020.

by Eric Miller

1.

On occasion, a long epoch of concord with a favouring breeze may seem to grace us: inspiration in the sense that birds must relish it. What a divine—almost avian—thing it was for us, the hotel kitchen staff, to pack cheesecake, kiwifruit and champagne into our rucksacks, to tighten the straps that secured these dainties on our shoulders, and to climb right from the back exit with its tubs of lard to the stark summit of a Rocky Mountain in Alberta.

We felt we flew or, to speak more precisely, scudded upward. I wore shorts and a clean undershirt and sneakers with no socks, my colleagues wore nothing more substantial, and we scaled the steep flank of the darkling peak as though, like magpies, we half hopped, half sailed, never shaking off an appearance of indolence in spite of the winged celerity of our ascent. We might have kicked altitude away beneath our flexing feet, bubbling giddily like divers whom ebullience, in shimmering snorts of submerged laughter, expedites to the water’s surface.

After night fell, a thunderstorm broke out well below us in the valley. We were dry. We watched the lightning flash and fret; it resembled the dome and tassels of a jellyfish aglow in a cove. The spectacle of electrical unrest promoted our repose. When one couple began to thrash in a single sleeping bag, they rejoiced us, intimately clustered on that narrow summit, with the audible excess of their droll yet solemn ecstasy. The sounds they made as they scaled in duet the scarp of their pleasure amounted to musical improvisation, disclosure rather than presumption of form: a gasping flag or panting plume to mark—to augment—the height of the mountain and our happiness. Making instruments of each other, musicians of each other, they performed for and they warmed us. Sonorous fire! Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

Dear Chloe:

You were born an old soul and I was sure you had been here before.[i] You arrived sporting a black, faux-hawk and I immediately imagined you as a punk rock girl banging heads and breaking hearts wherever you went.[ii] From the moment you were placed on your mother’s breast, there was something in the way that you took an account of your surroundings; the alertness of your wide, brown eyes, the perpetual grin of amused curiosity that turned the corners of your rosebud lips slightly upwards, suggesting, perhaps, that you were making comparisons between an older catalogue of memories and the new reality in which you found yourself. You were born into a family tree hardened by the pain of poverty and ripened by the triumph and tenacity of Holocaust survival; a blank slate you were not. Vibrating with light and energy, yet calm like still waters, you frightened and amazed me. I desperately wanted to learn what you knew, reach across the chasm of time and space that separated us, read into the history of your dreams, but I could not speak your language. However nervous your birth made me feel, I was thrilled to have a daughter as I secretly dreaded the idea of having to raise a son within the patriarchy.

It’s extraordinary to me that you will be ten-years-old in January. As I write this letter, the world is plagued by incompetent and corrupt male-dominated governments that are unable to gain control over a viral pandemic; male autocrats at home and abroad continue to do their best to erode democratic institutions; male-dominated militaries fight endless wars throughout the globe; the planet is warming at an alarming rate because male-dominated oil and gas industries refuse to help curb the use and production of fossil fuels; economic inequality is growing rapidly and managed almost entirely by male-dominated financial/governmental partnerships under the banner of neoliberalism; gun violence as well as the production of other weapons of mass destruction is overwhelmingly caused and overseen by men; racial injustice is systemic and overseen by a male-dominated judiciary; homophobia is a normative and constitutive dimension of masculinity; male intimate partner violence against women is pandemic; educational systems relegate the accomplishments of women to the margins of curriculum even as the majority of the teaching workforce is female; male-dominated global media conglomerates produce content and representations of women that are degrading and sexist; and the gender gap remains stubbornly large.[iii] And all of this is true even though feminism is the most successful social justice movement in the world.

This is the focus of my letter to you today; not your Colombian heritage nor your European Jewish ancestry, not our family’s economic class, our educational level, nor our ideological alliances—all vital interconnected pieces of the experiential puzzle that I will write to you about at another time—but your female identity and its measure in the patriarchy. Read more »