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 »

by Michael Liss

On November 11, 2019, I wrote a review of Willful: How We Choose What We Do (Yale University Press, November 2019), by Richard Robb, Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and CEO of the investment firm Christofferson, Robb & Company.  He was kind enough to let me interview him in our changed times.

Michael Liss: Richard, last fall you published Willful, which introduced a new model of how to think about the way we make choices. Willful reached beyond classical “Rational Choice” to something you called “For-Itself Choice.” I know it is an economist’s job to be able to project into the future, but did you ever anticipate having such a bonanza of opportunities to demonstrate your ideas as that which arose because of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Richard Robb: I didn’t foresee COVID-19, Michael, if that’s what you’re suggesting! But yes, the pandemic has given us a “stage”—however ugly—on which to test a variety of ideas, including a few of mine. 

My book was published in November last year, and my hope was that the phrase on which I rest my thesis—“for-itself”—would someday seep into the language. It would have come in handy during the pandemic. For instance, when President Trump, seeking to scoff at those he saw as COVID-wimps, said that we continue to drive cars despite auto accidents, Dr. Fauci called that “a false equivalency.” He could have explained that it’s a false equivalency because the choice of how quickly to de-isolate is for-itself. Read more »

Socrates said to Glaucon,”The things we think we know are like shadows cast by a  distant light on the walls of a cave  of things unseen we do not know.”

The Thin Skin of Our Conceits

—For L. who couldn’t find the balloon she’d saved
in remembrance of a cousin of her childhood

You called last night troubled,
looking for something in particular
(a pink balloon shaped like the heart
of your long dead cousin)
you’d stumbled upon a hole in the banal:
a weakened spot in the thin skin of our conceits
stretched so taut over the otherworld
a hint of it broke through and pierced
your shell of rapt doing
and you glimpsed the truth of shades
that dance upon the walls of caves
to music most often unheard
under the rush of jets
behind the daily brushing of leaves against sky
drowned by the litanies of radios
made silent by the roar of willed tornadoes
blowing through the aisles of malls
muted by the fierce narcissism of war
the accumulation of stuff thrown up
as dikes to keep the unspeakable sea at bay
and you wondered if perhaps Socrates was right
So I recalled for you a day driving to Colrain
when a song bled from the dash
so filled with poignancy my heart broke too
and I sobbed from the steel arched bridge
where two rivers meet to the office door
remembering my mother,
my father, and Danny my autistic brother
hearing them hearing me sob
through a veil of ordinary tears and regret
saltier than the Dead Sea
This is where you and I meet, where we all meet,
on the beach of that sea, catching now and then
between surf and horizon glimpses of creatures
breaking through, breaching the membrane
between worlds unexpectedly
as we wonder how the dancing shadows
on cave walls can be true

by Jim Culleny
11/14/11

Plato’s allegory of the cave

by Usha Alexander

[This is the first 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.]

In 1997, I was living on Ambae, a tiny, tropical island in the western South Pacific. Rugged, jungle-draped, steamy, volcanic Ambae belongs to Vanuatu, an archipelago nation stretching some 540 miles roughly between Fiji and Papua New Guinea. There, under corrugated tin roofs, in the cinderblock classrooms of a small, residential school, I taught science to middle- and high-schoolers as a Peace Corps volunteer.

That December, the rainy season was in full force, with heavy downpours most afternoons, lasting sometimes long into the night. Never before had I, and never again would I, witness rains like those, where the water poured straight down, not in drops, but in globs and sheets. Standing in it felt like standing under a waterfall; I’d catch myself stepping forward or back, left or right, in an attempt to get out from under the flow, but it was everywhere. It seemed impossible that the sky could hold so much water, constricting summer’s broad daylight to a sodden gloaming.

One evening, during such a downpour, I left a teachers’ year-end potluck to return to my room—one in a row of tiny, concrete flats for the school’s single female staff. Mine was not much more than 100 yards away across an open lawn, which was now filled with ankle-deep water flowing gently down the long campus green toward the sea. As this was not my first deluge, I wasn’t concerned by the prospect of a routine water-logging; it was only water, after all, and not at all cold. The only problem was that the rains had washed away all light into a blind, enveloping darkness. I knew that once I stepped into it I would become disembodied, aware of my limbs only through my untrained sense of proprioception. How dependent we are upon the faculty of sight, even to know where we end and the external world begins.

Read more »

by David Oates

Some time before the beginning of the quarantine, walking in a pleasantly not-fancy Portland neighborhood near my own, I was stopped dead in my tracks: Bach on the piano. And close by!  Suddenly all my thoughts were of music. The day’s work dropped away; the tangles and labors of writing; the distant threat of disease; the mental backdrop of our national ordeal-by-politics. . . all forgotten. Music.

After a long beat I was able to place it as one of the famous Goldberg Variations. It was coming from a little duplex with a front window facing the sidewalk, a black piano glimpsed just within. And someone practicing this difficult, beguiling music. Not struggling, no indeed quite fluent. But stopping, repeating, working out some tricky bit.

Isn’t it a wonder when music floats in all unexpected? Yes, we all have music on demand. Radios and devices, earbuds and headphones. But there is a change in the air when living sound, sound in the very act of creation, reaches us. We halt, suddenly in the moment. Not digitized, irreal, somewhere else: Here.

It seems like every traveler has a story of music in a faraway place. Choir practice transforming a quiet weekday cathedral, guitar heard in a favela, strain of song floating out over a crooked cobbled street. The moment becomes immortal, at least in the memory of the lucky traveler: the strange magic of the close and the near, the heartsound, found amidst alien ways. Read more »

by Philip Graham

Although my love of music goes back to the glory days of the long-playing vinyl album, I’ve embraced all the succeeding platform incarnations, from tapes to CDs to downloading to streaming (well, not so much streaming—shame on you, Spotify, for disappearing musicians’ royalties down to the teeniest fraction of a penny).  But I hate to confess that while I can recognize a modulation, I’d be hard pressed to tell you from what key to the other. My knowledge of musical notation remains shaky, and sometimes I can’t distinguish between an alto and a tenor saxophone on a recording. I never learned to play an instrument. When clapping along at a singer’s request (remember those ancient concert rituals?), I begin cautiously, afraid to undermine the rhythm of my neighbors. I can’t even snap my fingers. So why imagine I can write about music?

I don’t know what exact percentages of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and water vapor make up the air, but still I breathe. And I will inhale any genre of music with delight. In a movie theater I sometimes wait to the end of the interminable final credits so I can locate the name of a song whose snippet in a minor scene erased for me the rest of the film. All my books have been written with music offering a friendly counterpoint—each page holds the echo of a secret playlist.

I almost never hesitate to track down an intriguing, unfamiliar song. It’s impossible to predict when such a moment will arrive. Certainly there was no warning that night near the end of my last semester at college. The threat of graduation had reared up too quickly, and with a sense of doom I parked myself at a free table in the school’s library—always a cozy place to study, tucked as it was (some might say crammed) into the first floor of one of the oldest buildings on campus, its presence nearly lost beneath the two upper floors reserved for dorm rooms. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Akim Reinhardt

In the Age of Trump, the banality of evil can perhaps best be defined as unfettered self-interest. Banal because everyone has self-interest, and because American culture expects and even celebrates its most gratuitous pursuits and expressions. Evil because, when unchecked, self-interest leads not only to intolerable disparities in wealth and power, but eventually the erosion of democratic norms.

American culture has historically found ways to limit individual self-interest. Particularly during times of calamity and instability, it has created expectations of sacrifice for the common good that pressure political leaders to limit their excesses.

For example, during and after the American Revolution, the concept of republican virtue advanced the notion of self-sacrifice to safeguard and develop the fragile new nation and its untested, grandiose, halting experiment in democratic self-rule. Military service in local and state militias was the core of national defense and a standard obligation of male citizens. Elites eligible for political service (most commoners initially could not vote, much less hold office) were expected to sacrifice their personal self interest, forgoing their business and commercial pursuits to temporarily serve the public interest before returning to private life.

The point is not that everyone lived up to these expectation. Many did not. Rather, it’s that the expectations existed, and they helped temper runaway self-interest. Overt selfishness at the expense of a then narrowly-defined polity was hardly eliminated, but it was discouraged, criticized, and sometimes even censured. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

I may rise in the morning and notice that a long overdue spring rainfall has revived the flagging vegetation in my kitchen garden. I may give thanks to an unseen, benevolent power for this respite from a protracted and wasting drought. And I may record in my journal: “The heavens cannot horde the juice eternal / The sun draws from the thirsty acres vernal.” In such exercises, I will not have practised rigorous inquiry into the causes of things; I will not have subscribed to any particular view of the metaphysical; and I will certainly not have produced literature. But I will have replicated the conditions for the birth of science, as sketched by Geoffrey Lloyd in his account of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the first thinkers (at least in the Western world) to consider natural phenomena as distinct from the supernatural, however devoutly they may have believed in the latter; and who frequently set down their observations, theories and conclusions in formal language. For my observation of a natural phenomenon (rain and its effect on plant life), while not methodical, would bespeak a willingness to collect and consider empirical data unconstrained by superstitious tradition, and would not necessarily be contradicted by my ensuing prayer of gratitude to a supernatural force; and the verse elaboration of my findings into a speculative theory would not consign them to the realm of poetry (or even doggerel), but would merely represent a formal convention, whose forebears include Hesiod, Xenophanes, Lucretius and Vergil.

Such an accumulation of pursuits may seem bizarre and contradictory to a modern sensibility, which has since relegated each to a separate sphere: the scientist studies the natural world; the cleric provides a conduit to the beyond; and the poet records lived experience in elaborate or heightened language. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History is a clearly written argument if ever there was one. Bregman believes humans are a kind species and that we should arrange society accordingly. The reason why this thesis needs intellectual support at all is not that it is particularly profound or complicated, but that there are so many misunderstandings to be cleared away, so many apparent objections that need to be overcome.

You have already thought of those objections, or you will if you take half a minute. Bregman confronts many of them squarely. He looks at historical atrocities, social-psychological experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment, and famous anecdotes about human cruelty or indifference, patiently explaining how we should look at these in a different light. The anecdotes turn out to be less damning to human nature, and the experiments more flawed than common perception has it.

Of course, this leaves, well, human history. Bregman is aware that his beloved humans have committed all kinds of horrific acts of violence over the millennia. This is a problem for his thesis, and it remains one. Though the book does present an attempt to explain all the violence in a way that lets human nature off the hook, I do not think that this attempt is satisfactory. Read more »

A walk through these woods preceded the climb up to Fane Alm in the South Tyrol in July 2020.