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.

by Bill Murray

Anguilla is a sandbar ten miles long. It’s three miles wide if you’re being generous, but generous isn’t a word that pairs well with the endowments of a small, arid skerry of sand pocked with salt ponds.

A seventeenth century history of the West Indies cursed Anguilla as a place “filled with alligators and other noxious animals.” A hundred years later people still lived “without Government or Religion, having no Minister nor Governor, no Magistrates, no Law, and no Property worth keeping.”

It was too dry, its soil too rocky to meet the requirements of the great sugar plantations, so Anguilla never attracted many white overlords, feudal estates or the vast slave holdings required to tend them. After a time, the few would be plantation barons couldn’t manage to feed what slaves they had, so they gave them most of the week off, three days to tend subsistence plots and Sunday for church.

Who named Anguilla “the eel?” The Spanish may have sailed by under Columbus, though there is no known record. The French definitely called there, but both declined to colonize it, leaving that to the Brits, who found Anguilla unworthy of its own governor. They had it administered from Antigua, then St. Kitts; both applied determined neglect, prompting islanders to petition London to reinstate direct colonial rule in 1872. That request was studiously ignored. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

I was a Philosophy major in University from 1988-1991 (degrees are 3 years in the UK). To be accurate in British terms, I read Philosophy. Some friends and I would socialize with a group of our professors. We’d often talk and drink late into the night in the living room of one of the more gregarious lecturers. Reflecting on what I remember of philosophy 30 years later, a lot is from those late-night, informal conversations. One or more of the professors at the center of a group of intellectually curious young people. In contrast, the large lectures I sat through during the day had content that barely resonated at the time and certainly hasn’t stayed with me. Whether it’s high school or college, most people can probably relate. Talking with a friend recently who is a university professor, she said that she much prefers to assign reading to students which they can then discuss in smaller seminar groups rather than stand in front of them lecturing, knowing they’re not absorbing the information.

Education methodology hasn’t changed dramatically for hundreds, if not thousands of years. What has changed is that higher education has become very expensive in the US. Meanwhile, having a college degree has become an even greater predictor of professional success, “On average, college graduates make 84 percent more over a lifetime than their high school-educated counterparts. “ But this same report goes on to detail, “While everyone who attends college can expect a significant return on their investment, different undergraduate majors lead to markedly different careers— and significantly different wages.” I’m the mother of a college Junior who is going to graduate with not insignificant student debt. Top of mind for me is the question of her earning potential and ability to pay this loan back while maintaining a decent standard of living.  Like every other student, her schooling has been online for the last 4 months. It seems that her college plans to resume on-campus education in the Fall.  But other colleges have already announced that they will continue online. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

One of my favorite areas of mathematics is Ramsey theory. In fact, my first 3QD essay was about F. P. Ramsey and his marvelous result which launched the field. It is one of those rare parts of mathematics where the results are often easy to understand, hard to prove, and yet delightfully surprising. Just last week came a breakthrough in Ramsey theory which I’d like to tell you about.

Meta-mathematically, Ramsey theory tells us that order unavoidably emerges whenever something is sufficiently large. Even if the structure is completely random or, worse, fiendishly crafted by a nefarious opponent, order cannot help but be found.

Ramsey theory is almost philosophical. How is it that consciousness emerges from our complicated neural network? Or that life appeared from the rich soup of prebiotic molecules in the Earth’s ancient waters? Once you know about Ramsey theory, such things seem more inevitable than miraculous. As Ian Malcolm said, “life finds a way”.

Ramsey theory comes in numerous flavors. Once you know to look for order inside large scale structures, you start finding it everywhere. In Ramsey’s original theorem, he showed that any group of six or more must have three people who are all friends or all strangers [1]. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Some good news, amongst all the bad this month. Our medieval Supreme Court took a break from being irredeemably awful to decide a case in the right way for the right reason. In Bostock v Clayton County, Georgia, Neil Gorsuch –  yes, that Neil Gorsuch, the one nominated to the court by Donald Trump, who once ruled against a man in an unlawful termination case for leaving a truck by the side of the road rather than freezing to death in it – wrote the decision for himself, Chief Justice John Roberts and the four more liberal justices. The Court concluded that an employer violates the law – specifically, Title VII of the Civil Right Act of 1964 which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin – “when it intentionally fires an individual employee based in part on sex…” including sexual orientation and gender identity. “It doesn’t matter if other factors besides the plaintiff’s sex contributed to the decision,” the Court affirmed, and, for the first time, ruled that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”

With uncharacteristic clarity, Gorsuch explained why gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination are sex discrimination:

Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague. Put differently, the employer intentionally singles out an employee to fire based in part on the employee’s sex, and the affected employee’s sex is a but-for cause of his discharge. Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge.

That this is the right decision will be self-evident to progressives and LGBT+ advocates, so let’s focus on why this case was decided for the right reason. Read more »

Joseph Rovegno via justiceforgeorgenyc Instagram. Black Lives Matter Protests, June 2020.

(with permission from the artist).

More here and here (JR is raising funds for BLM and ACLU … do check out the links).

by David Kordahl

Physics writing, let’s face it, is usually pretty boring. In a recent essay for Tablet, Adam Kirsh diagnosed one reason for this. When physicists write non-technical literature, they often begin with the assumption that the world as revealed by physics is the real one, and that the job of physicists, when they speak to the poor math illiterates, is to show them how best to live with this tormenting truth. As Kirsh puts it, “Popular physics writing is best understood as therapy for this torment—as metaphysical self-help.”

Those of us who have spent time with physicists might question whether they (or we, if I include myself) are temperamentally suited, on average, to be therapists. We might also wonder if the world described by physics is the real one, though I’ll set that question aside for today. Today, I’m interested in a style that captures not the real world, whatever that is, but the real world of physics—or, more plainly, the social world of physicists.

To capture this world as it is (not, of course, as it should be) might require a certain anti-therapeutic nastiness. This possibility is on my mind because last month I read Quantum Profiles, Second Edition, by the physicist Jeremy Bernstein. Though Bernstein shares most of the baseline prejudices of his fellow physicists, he isn’t boring, and he certainly isn’t nice—after all, his subject is physicists, not just physics. The first edition of Quantum Profiles came out in 1990, and since then its size has nearly doubled, inflated with rants and investigations, a graveyard of settled scores. Read more »

by Paul Orlando

I have a friend who is a self-described “cop magnet.” He’s been arrested six or seven times, just standing there.

I understand why. He looks like trouble. A propensity for wearing all black clothing. A shaved head and a full beard. Multiple tattoos; never smiles. He’s a gentle and intellectual person, but you’d never guess from looking at him.

It’s an undesirable problem to have, looking guilty. There was even a case of a man in Taiwan, who similar to my friend, looked so much like a potential (not actual) Triad member (with the expected police reaction), that he had plastic surgery to make himself look nicer. My friend deals with law enforcement run-ins by avoiding signs of aggression and keeping his eyes down. That being said, his techniques obviously don’t work perfectly when it comes to a police officer’s presumptions.

As we move to an artificial intelligence-fueled world, including in law enforcement, what will change? Is AI in law enforcement presumption that you can blame on something else? Read more »