by Richard Farr

On February 14 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest opened at London’s St. James’s Theatre. There was mild consternation over the lack of a moral, but most people let this pass — as well they might, having been treated to a first view of the funniest play ever written. Only four days later, Oscar Wilde’s feud with the Marquess of Queensberry came to a boil and his epic fall began. Wilde made the fateful decision to sue Queensberry for libel; what followed was public humiliation, criminal prosecution, prison, ill-health and exile. I was reminded of this story recently while listening to David Runciman’s excellent podcast Present Past Future. It’s  always a Proustian experience for me. I am immediately taken back to being ten years old. And sixteen. 

Ten because of my mother. A passionate lover of theatre all her life, she helped found a local company that put on Importance. She was cast as Algernon’s terrifyingly formidable aunt, Lady Bracknell; as a result I can hear those famous pronouncements only in her voice:

Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd.

JACK: I have lost both my parents. LADY BRACKNELL: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

I’m reminded of being sixteen because Tom Stoppard collated some scraps of historical fact into an absurd idea for an Absurdist play. In 1917 James Joyce, Lenin, and the Dadaist artist Tristan Tzara could all be found working in the Zürich public library — Joyce on Ulysses, Lenin on Imperialism, and Tzara on, for example, cutting up other people’s poems and then rearranging the words by picking them out of a hat. Joyce had also become the business manager of an amateur theatrical company, The English Players, whose first production was to be Importance. Joyce had a nasty, petty financial run-in with the man cast as Algernon, a British consular official named Henry Carr. 

It took a writer of Stoppard’s talent to present these facts through Old Carr’s garbled memory, and to do so in part by lifting many of the best lines and plot elements directly from Importance. The garbled memory and the purloined drama are only two of many reasons the play is called Travesties.  Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

The 2020 documentary Gunda captures a stage in the life of a barnyard sow and her brood. The director, Viktor Kossakovsky, embarked on this mission to at least in part remind “us of the inherent value of life and the mystery of all animal consciousness, including our own.” It would be foolhardy to expect a real-life version of Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web, and anything resembling Babe would be a stretch. As we do have a tendency to humanize our animals, maybe there was a chance the film would come out like an extended video from The Dodo, where animals cooperate with warm hearts and easily recognized intentionality.

Wrong.

Like most wildlife documentaries, Gunda doesn’t show humans. Unlike most wildlife documentaries, it also lacks a narrator. Interestingly, however, at points throughout you can almost hear the voice of Werner Herzog from his own documentary Grizzly Man. That film tells the story of Tim Treadwell, a man who dealt with his life’s problems by spending summers among Alaska’s grizzlies. Where in the movements and faces of grizzlies Treadwell saw personality and intent, Herzog saw “no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”

Why do Herzog’s words hover over Gunda? Isn’t all life connected, as the synopsis to Gunda implies? Yes, it is. All of life on our dear planet is linked and interdependent. If the web breaks, none of us, from the smallest to the largest, will find salvation moving to another planet.

But connection is not the message that came out of Gunda. At least not when viewed in 2025.

The film is less a following of the titular character and her piglets, and more a detached observation. You get the impression Kossakovsky often planted the camera and left it. There are many extended shots. One scene fixed on chickens confronting a fence made them appear completely other-worldly. And the feeling that lingered was how strange and different these animals are from us humans. How boring their lives are. How repetitive and how barren of meaning.

There is drama, though it’s difficult to imagine Gunda appreciated it, or had any sense of it, even when it was of her own making. Early on, Gunda kills—accidentally or intentionally, it’s impossible to say—a piglet. It was a straggler, maybe the runt. That’s a reminder to us viewers: the world is merciless. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

As a long-time trekkie, I admit that I am worried about the future of the Star Trek franchise. It might seem strange to be pearl-clutching over a piece of sci-fi intellectual property with… you know… EVERYTHING happening (war, genocide, starving children, ICE raids, colonial/imperial boomerang, gutting of the social safety net, etc). But hear me out. Our future imaginary that feels approachable and possible (as long as you ignore the impossibility of faster-than-light space travel) could face a conservative makeover. But why should that matter? Isn’t it just mass produced culture, that maybe has some liberalish politics, but ultimately just reinforces a particular imperialist ideology? That ultimately depends on how you look at it. While sometime functioning as an apologia for American empire, the show could also ask some hard questions about that empire, even as it ultimately embraced the supposed idealism of the US experiment. More importantly, the show imagines a better, more progressive future where everyone belongs. In times like these, we absolutely need these kinds of hopeful story associated with Star Trek. Changing it into a generic space action series would strip it of what made it special. Many focus on the way it champions science, but ultimately, Roddenberry sought to illustrate a humanist future where technology serves humanity, rather than controls us. We need this vision now more than ever, as everything that so many people have fought for seems to be violently being erased.

The merger between Paramount and Skydance has already had one major casualty, The Late Show. Now hosted by Stephen Colbert, the show began in the 1990s when David Letterman was passed over for the “safer” option of Jay Leno to replace Johnny Carson. Under Letterman, The Late Show had a tendency to the weird and countercultural, though less pointedly political. His tone was deeply ironic and cynical of societal norms, while taking a deep pleasure in highlighting the odder corners of American life. Gen Xers idolized him. Colbert ran a slightly more traditional program even as Letterman’s influence shines through. Colbert brought his own signatures to The Late Night, highlighing his geeky bonefides, but regularly commenting on current political events. But after a scathing take on the recent settlement between the current POTUS and Paramount, Colbert’s contract was not renewed. The show will end in May of 2026. Paramount claims the decision was due to “financial reasons.” But no one believes them. Other figures such as Jon Stewart of The Daily Show have weighed in on the settlement with the President in solidarity with Colbert’s view that it was essentially a bribe to ensure the Paramount/Skydance merger to a Trump ally’s son goes through. Many believe that under Ellison, CBS and Paramount will veer to the right, mimicking Fox News. Skydance has already announced a DEI review after the firing of Colbert. It is hard not to see that the ultimate outcome, as David Ellison has promised content favored by Trump and his movement. Read more »

Self-portrait by reflection in car window.

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by TJ Price

In high school, algebra class was fraught with peril. I’ve never been good at math—in fact, I suffer from mild dyscalculia (not “number dyslexia,” as so many people quip), wherein integers squirm and shimmy on the page, mischievously transposing themselves with the others in a sequence. This was danger enough, yet also there was Cheryl, who sat in front of me in class—or, more specifically, Cheryl’s notebook. It was not, as one might have expected, filled with theorems and diagrams but rather words. It was striking, too—in front of her, resting on her desktop, was a row of pens, each one a different color. Some paragraphs in the notebook were entirely in green; some in blue; others in red, or pink. Sometimes there’d even be a single line in a different color.

To the casual observer—and indeed, the teacher—it had the appearance of investment, even application, to the subject at hand. (I was always told that I was “a bright kid,” that if I just “applied myself”… ) Cheryl never did well on tests or quizzes, either. I know this because I saw her grades, inked in red pen at the top of the papers handed back to us. I know this because she had a sad, hopeless look every time she had to pass back whatever pile of dittoes had been handed to her, for me to take one and continue the chain. There was always a flash of recognition, even camaraderie, in that instant. Maybe I knew she was unhappy, even frustrated, with the concepts we had to learn. Maybe it was something else.

Cheryl was not a popular girl, nor did she seem particularly attractive—for reasons that would not become clear to me for a long time—she wasn’t even from one of the three towns whose children made up the population of the school. She’d come in on some kind of extension from a different town, one far more rural, through the “Vocational Agriculture” program. We called it VoAg for short, like some kind of planet in a novel by Vonnegut. Cheryl loved horses, I think. Wanted to be a veterinarian. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

Interest often begins in surprise. It may arise from the encounter of something new or the clarity of insight, when a complex thing finds a simple resolution. We may also be blind in two ways. The first lies in what we fail to notice, and thus cannot be surprised by. The other lies in what we take for granted, missing the complexity.

Consider something you’ve likely seen all your life and are possibly afraid of: the honeybee. Honeybees represent but a few species of the 20 000 species of bees, most of which are solitary bees laying their eggs in tunnels or dead wood. Yet they are the most notorious. But how well do we see them?

We notice them flying, but are we surprised? Until the 2000s, scientists could not explain how bees fly. As the story goes, in the 1930s, engineers considered bee flight aerodynamically impossible. It was found that, by all accounts, their wings shouldn’t be able to lift their bodies. Yet the answer was found in a very different mechanism of controlled turbulence. Specifically, it was found that bees rely on leading edge vortices. Insects in general do not rely on steady flow of air but create controlled turbulence called a vortex at the top of their wings. By sweeping their wings at a sharp angle bees generate “horizontal mini-tornadoes” that are then pinned on top of the wing. The low-pressure zones of the “eyes” of those mini tornadoes carries them aloft. This is very similar to staying aloft in water by sculling: moving your hand back and forth at an angle in a figure-eight movement. In this pattern both directions create lift, contrary to bird flight. Slow-motion footage reveals bees “swimming through the air” more vividly.

This discovery only brings about a new deeper mystery that might fail to surprise us. To keep those vortices anchored to the wings, bees must beat their wings fast, 230 beats per second on average. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

When Representative (now House Speaker) Mike Johnson told us that the cause of school shootings was the study of Darwinism, he did so from the platform of Shreveport Christian Center, on which there were no religious symbols, but two flags equally prominent, that of the United States, and that of Israel. This symbolizes the political position of the Christian Right in the US, now and for many years past Israel’s main source of external political support.

It is not my intent here to discuss the situation in Gaza. I have already done this elsewhere, and information is freely available, for example from Médecins Sans Frontières, whose reports are based on the evidence of medical personnel on the spot, ¹Disclosure; Médecins Sans Frontières is one of the causes to which I donateand Sky News, one of whose notable reports describes the operation of the current aid distribution system. Reuters issues regular reports (e.g. this, from mid-July, giving a UN estimate of 875 for total number of Palestinians killed in six weeks while trying to collect food), while for distinguished comment from within Israel, see e.g. here and here and here.

Here, I have set myself the more modest task of describing how US biblical Christianity uses support of Israel as a plank in its alliance with the American Right. Their success in doing so does much to explain the otherwise mysterious inability of US politicians to influence Israeli policy, despite Israel receiving almost $18 billion in the year following the October 7, 2023 attack. I will also point out that while this support is unconditional politically, it is not so theologically, may prove a broken reed (to invoke a biblical expression) when it comes to resolving any major crisis that it helps create, and has already, at a crucial juncture, sabotaged Israel’s own peace initiative. Read more »

Footnotes

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  Disclosure; Médecins Sans Frontières is one of the causes to which I donate

by Brooks Riley

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by Mike Bendzela

This concludes the story from last month about the ongoing restoration of a Maine farmhouse by woodworker Don Essman, who is also my spouse. Over the years, Don had built up enough trust with the southern states descendents of the historic property to be permitted to live on the farm rent-free, in exchange for his completing yearly construction and restoration projects. Before I arrived on the scene in 1985, he had re-sided parts of the kitchen ell with clapboards; installed a hand-pumped cistern in the attic to supply running water to the kitchen; and bought a wood-fired Glenwood cook stove from a neighbor with a piped-in water front to heat hot water as needed. A calf waterer set up in the kitchen and filled with hot water was suitable enough for him as a bathtub. He also put new sill timbers under the front of the main house; he reframed walls, insulating with fiberglass as he went; and he began replacing the large windows installed in the late 19th century to “Victorianize” the place with smaller, more period appropriate nine-over-six window sashes.

For years he used the old privy or “four-holer” (an outhouse connected to the barn), which never bothered him. The one time his parents visited Maine in those early years, his mother understandably wouldn’t use the privy and asked to be driven to a gas station to use the restroom. Only at the urgings of the owner and a future roommate did Don install an electric water pump and a modern bathroom. The facilities were completed by the time I moved in with him in 1986. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

One of the most annoying aspects of living in an American – that is, US – world is not the imperialism of it all, with US military bases in hundreds of countries and the many wars and unpunished war crimes that have come with these bases in the last 80 or so years (and let’s not forget economic warfare, of course).[i]

Nay, the worst thing about an American world is the cultural hegemony that stems from the immense soft power the US yields in the world and that we, as regular citizens of overseas countries, must endure. This is especially annoying when it comes to political and cultural discourse that is clearly specific to the US, and to US social and political conditions, but which often becomes, in a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of moment, almost universal.

I say ‘almost’ because the effects do not always hold for long, especially in non-English-speaking countries, but some issues, along with particular ways of approaching these issues, do sometimes become common talking points outside of the US, and often for longer that is merited. A case in point is the meaning and usage of three political concepts that originated, in each case, in Europe, but which have received different (and, sometimes, very different) interpretations in the US, with some of these new readings coming back to Europe in a new incarnation, with various levels of success, but sometimes replacing the original interpretations – even if there is typically little justification for this to happen at all.

The three concepts I want to discuss here are liberalism, libertarianism, and once again, but this time rather briefly, fascism, and my flippant conclusion will be that Americans should be a little bit less colonial and leave our word-concepts alone!

Let’s start with liberalism, the most common of the three, but a term that is used in a variety of ways everywhere you look in the world (no comprehensive review will be attempted here, naturally). From an etymological point of view, the word liberalism, in English, was possibly borrowed from the French libéralisme, from the early 19^th century, whilst the word liberal, either as an adjective or a noun, was in use much earlier.

As an adjective, the Oxford English Dictionary lists two relevant meanings of liberal, both from the 18^th century: said of a person who favours social reform with a degree of state intervention, and said, also, of a person who supports individual rights and civil liberties, with a view to advocate individual freedom but with little state intervention.[ii] Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

The stock market, social media, award contests, product reviews, beauty contests, social media, fashion styles, job applications, award contests, product reviews, and even elections, don’t seem to belong in the same crowded sentence. What do they have in common? Before I get there, a couple of abstract analogues to pave the way.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes noted the similarity between deciders, evaluators, reviewers, and judges of all sorts and readers in newspaper beauty contests, which were very popular in his day. The stated task of the readers was to pick the five prettiest out of, say, 100 contestants, but their real job was more complicated. The reason was that the newspaper rewarded them with large prizes only if they picked the five contestants who received the most votes from the other readers.

That is, they had to pick the contestants that they thought were the most likely to be picked by the other readers, and the other readers had to try to do the same. They were not to give undue weight to their own taste. Instead they had to anticipate, in Keynes’ words, “what average opinion expects the average opinion to be”.

Whether in politics, business, or everyday life, how such group judgments about group judgments develop is unclear, but various mathematical tools ranging from network theory to recursion are useful. A simple game I’ve written about elsewhere and have often asked my classes to play is also relevant. In the game, people in some designated group are each asked to choose a number between 0 and 100. Furthermore, they’re directed to pick the number that they think will be closest to 80 percent of the average number chosen by the group. The person who comes closest to this value will receive $1,000 for his or her efforts. (Don’t read on until you decide what number you would pick.)

Some in the group might reason that the average number chosen is likely to be 50 and so these people would guess 40, which is 80 percent of this. Others might anticipate that people will guess 40 for this reason and so they would guess 32, which is 80 percent of 40. Still others might anticipate that people will guess 32 for this reason and so they would guess 25.6, which is 80 percent of 32. Read more »

Ode to Cells

Before metaphorical allusions
we are warm and wet.
Seas surge within us.

In tiny cytoplasmic bays,
tiny ships of golgi moor near
lysosome cays enclosed by
permeable breakwater membranes
all which rise and fall with nucleo tides
ebbing and flowing through generations
rendering noses, pug or aquiline,
and eyes skybright, or in the colors
of loam.

By the work of Darwin’s surf,
tides sculpt the graceful geographies
of bodies, bodies that draw tissue curtains
between what is and what’s not,
bodies that define muscle and bone,
bodies that inflame passions, heat,
desire to enclose or free the current’s ring,
to come together again immersed,
immersed in what’s warm and wet,
to touch, embrace, to recombine
to love, to sing, to lose,
and remember to forget

Jim Culleny
11/18/16

Cytoplasm
Golgi
Lysosome

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

From the moment that the weather warmed up, every morning I feel an irresistible pull toward my backyard garden.  I wake up and check the news.  Congress has defunded a life-saving social program.  We’ve bombed another country in the Middle East.  A politician has been caught in a lie so consequential that it would destroy the life of anyone else.  I suddenly realize that it is crucial—urgent—that I make sure the hydrangeas have had enough water.

Is this cause for alarm? Perhaps I have become so disaffected by recent events that my strategy for coping is simply to run away.  On the other hand, it might be more than selfish escapism.

In his famous essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus thinks through the implications of the absurdity of human existence.  For Camus, absurdity consists in a confrontation between human desire and an indifferent universe.  We want many things out of our experience in life.  We want our social dealings to be just and fair.  We want people who do good things to be rewarded and people who do bad things to face consequences.  We want the things we do to be fundamentally important and for our lives to matter in the scheme of things.  The universe doesn’t care what we want.  It isn’t the kind of thing that is even capable of caring.

By way of analogy, Camus describes the punishment of Sisyphus, who, for the offense of stealing water, has been doomed by the Gods to push a boulder up a mountain for eternity only to watch it roll back down.  Camus says,

At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved.  Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit.  He goes back down toward the plain.

Sisyphus could agonize over his plight forever, or he could own the absurdity of his situation.  He may not be able to change his circumstances, but he can become the author of his own response. He could become what Camus refers to as an absurd hero. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

Ten years ago, I took a one-way flight to Cairo, Egypt. I lived there for three years (and even wrote a book about it).

As a way to celebrate that decision in 2015, here are ten life lessons that living in Egypt taught me. It’s valuable to periodically remind myself of these things. I hope you get some value out of it too.

1) It’s OK to completely change your “life plan”

I majored in Political Science in college, with a minor in Arabic. The plan was to become a diplomat working in the Middle East. Within a year of moving to Cairo (and meeting diplomats living my “dream life”), that plan was shattered. 

They all seemed to be depressed. They got stationed in a new country every few years, and had kids with no real friends. Their work life was also a far cry from the spy movies I had eaten up. Diplomats spent their days surrounded by stacks of paperwork. Hardly my idea of a good time. 

Now? I work in marketing and help companies make more money with email. If 22 year old Eric could see himself now, I don’t know how he’d feel. Probably confused. Maybe even a bit disappointed. 

But things change. You change, and as soon as goals you set in the past stop serving you, throw them in the trash. Easier said than done, but it’s something I continue to learn. Read more »