by Mike O’Brien

One of the greatest joys of my graduate studies was reading primary sources in full, rather than a mishmash of summaries and excerpts. I could have done this prior to graduate school, but I didn’t, because I was lazy.

(I am still lazy.)

Having to read and re-read the works of authors, in the presentation in which they chose to be received, created a more personal relationship with them. “Personal” meaning, in its literal root sense, pertaining to that which speaks for itself. Rather than dragging the thinker, by means of citations, onto a panel of experts marshalled together for some inquiry, reading all the words, in the order intended, allows the thinker to express themselves as they willed. One has the sense of reading someone rather than just something, and one can posit a mind that understood things in its own way. Getting to know a mind thus, a reader can even guess how a writer might have understood things that are not explicitly mentioned in their work.

One of the misfortunes that befalls great thinkers is that they are cited vastly more often than they are read, and when read are not understood on their own terms because of the frame in which they are presented. When the thinker is someone whom I have read in depth, this can be offensive in the same way that hearing untruths about a friend is offensive. The mistaken claims need not be slanderous or abusive; the mere fact that they have gotten your dear friend wrong is objectionable in itself. But if one has famous friends, one can’t expect every person who speaks of them to know them beyond a public persona. And so one has to distinguish between, for example, discussions about Mark Twain and discussions about Samuel Clemens. (I am not friends with Samuel Clemens, but I like to think we’d get along). Read more »

by Callum Watts

The debacle around the development of the UK coronavirus contact tracing app has got me thinking about the role of technology and startup style businesses in addressing large scale social problems. The UK government’s shambolic app release, pursued at the expense of tried and tested human contact tracing, is an example of a larger trend of using technology led approaches to solve social and political problems.

In the US we see it in the enthusiasm with which Trump asked tech luminaries such as Peter Thiel to become key advisors to his government. In the UK we see a similar obsession with “startup land”, where Dominic Cummings has been attempting to hire developers, data scientists and ‘misfits’ into the civil service, apparently inspired by technology startups. Whilst software businesses have led to some incredible ideas that solve individual problems, I’m sceptical of the potential for these organisations to do anything truly radical when it comes to the societal level issues faced by governments. 

There is a double irony here. First, in spite of all their vaunted innovations, the superstar ‘social’ media companies have struggled to match their commercial impact with positive social impact. Secondly, the startups that are so often described with the language of revolution are largely ignorant of the history of true social revolutions. They are culturally disconnected from the reality of the social problems they are being asked to fix. Furthermore the politicians who are so enthusiastic about the potential of technology have a poor understanding of the scope of problems that it can actually solve. It is not difficult to see why this union is likely to end in disappointment for both parties. Read more »

by N. Gabriel Martin

The pandemic has increased our awareness of the moral significance of our day to day habits. While there have always been moral perfectionists who agonise over every choice and action, most of us tended to draw a line under our day to day habits, taking them for granted and reserving moral scrutiny for the extraordinary.

It’s not that eating out, buying chocolate, or going to a party were ever devoid of all moral significance—it was always possible to scrutinise, for example, the labour practices under which chocolate was grown, or the environmental impact of packaging—it just didn’t seem obligatory. Even though we might have known that the choice to buy a chocolate bar had moral significance, we were, for the most part, used to ignoring it. To do otherwise was a lifestyle choice, and not a necessity. That has changed with the coronavirus. Suddenly, we have had to examine—in our own consciences, with our families, and on social media—the choices we used to take for granted.

The pandemic brought moral considerations home to us, into our lives. We can no longer draw a sharp line between obviously immoral actions—spousal betrayal or shoplifting, for example—and the everyday, morally ambiguous ones that we were not used to subjecting to scrutiny. For any one person, visiting a friend, going to a café, or taking a train are not activities that are more likely than not to cause harm to anyone (even now), but if we all carry on with these activities then people will suffer and die and our public health systems will become overwhelmed. As a result, we are now confronted with the moral seriousness of the choices we used to take for granted. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joan Harvey

It’s summertime. Things are heating up. A comet trips across the night sky; I make out its vast and blurry tail, then watch a sharp bright shooting star fall through the heavens. I drag a mattress out onto the deck and lie under a massive blanket of stars, a very milky way. I’m alone, and because I’m at the moment far from the terrible violence of the current American system, I’m able to experience this space as voluptuous and luxurious. I sleep and eat whenever I want. Rain comes early in the morning and I drag the mattress back inside. I eat peaches and cream, have an extra cup of coffee. Listen to Monk and The Gossip and Beethoven and various obscure djs and some old Tribe Called Quest. I can be random and feral (which a friend said would be a good name for a law firm). I am aware of how rare and, to use a term now obligatory and perhaps too much bandied about, how privileged this is. I am not living in poverty. My child is grown and on his own. I have space and time and no worries in this remote place of being shot by the police. The land and few people I encounter here have a deep quietness.

Meanwhile in the news, virulently anti-feminist lawyer Roy Den Hollander murders the son of a female judge he wasn’t happy with. In front of reporters, Representative Ted Yoho shakes his finger in Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s face and calls her a “fucking bitch.” Many of us are pretty sure that if we had elected Hillary instead of Trump, thousands more Americans would be alive today. There have been many reports of how much better countries run by women have done during this plague, and yet, as Peter Beinart writes in the New York Times, Hillary was perceived more unfavorably than Trump, and far more unfavorably than Biden. Bernie Sanders is perceived as more trustworthy than Elizabeth Warren even though there is no basis for this. I’ve seen horrendous attacks by both men and women of the left on female candidates, as well as on anyone who has dared support them in any way. Read more »

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