Jaun Roberto Diago. Sin título (Untitled), 2011.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

According to Johns Hopkins University, as of this writing, 315,023 people worldwide have died from Covid-19. One of those 315,023 was the incomparable John H. Conway.

At the age of 82 and with health issues, Conway was well within what the CDC euphemistically describes as “people who are at higher risk”. It was perhaps not unexpected that someday soon he would no longer be with us, but it was a shock to the mathematical world, nonetheless. Conway’s mathematical powers, irreverent style, and forceful personality made him a well-known and seemingly permanent feature of the mathematical community for more than sixty years.

When I was a graduate student twenty or so years ago, John Conway came to my university to give a series of lectures. Like many math departments, we had an endowed fund to bring in eminent visitors who were well regarded as both researchers and speakers. In our case, the standard format was for two talks: one for undergraduates and one for the faculty. In truth, this more often ended up being one for graduate students and faculty, and one for specialists. Not surprisingly, many mathematicians aren’t the greatest at making their talks accessible.

As the OG mathemagician, Conway had no trouble being accessible, interesting, and entertaining. That said, I must confess that I have only the dimmest recollection of the talks themselves. But I do remember the talks for a quintessentially Conway reason.

At the time the department had an honorary T-shirt which was given to speakers as part of the introductory activities. Nearly every speaker made the same joke. Without fail they would chuckle and ask if they were to put the T-shirt on immediately. We would politely laugh as if we hadn’t heard the same joke told by the previous week’s speaker.

Conway being Conway, he skipped right to the punchline and beyond. Conway stripped off his shirt, strode barechested across the stage in front the entire math department, pulled the T-shirt on, and dove straight into the beginning of his first lecture. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

Stuck inside? Unable to travel? Have you considered traveling through time instead of space? Time travel is impossible, you say? Wrong. We are, each and every one of us, time travelers, traveling forward second by second, hour by hour, day by day into the future.

Why not consider traveling in the other direction? If you are afraid of traveling to the past because you fear paradoxes – killing your own grandfather, stepping on a butterfly while fleeing from a dinosaur, etc. – I have great news for you. My new theory of time travel will allow you to travel into the past without creating any paradoxes – guaranteed! (Time machine not included.)

Let’s not go straight to the big payoff. Let’s work our way up to it. Hannibal Buress has pointed out that when people go through something rough in life, they sometimes say, “I’m taking it one day at a time.” Hannibal says, “Yeah. So is everybody. That’s not a philosophy. That’s how time works. If there’s a way to go faster, let me know?”

I am here to help. You can move through time more quickly than your friends and family (that is, travel to the future faster than they do). Here’s how. Either go very fast or stand close to something really massive.

You might say, Tim, I know that it follows from Einstein’s general theory of relativity that there is no universal “now”, that simultaneity is an illusion, and that we all travel through time at different rates depending on our speed and proximity to extremely massive objects, but do you have any empirical evidence that this actually, really happens in the real world?

I’m glad you asked. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Something has happened in the last forty days. The planet has gone quiet, a vast, reverberating, gesticulating global chorus suddenly muted by something wee and invisible which is borne across continents, streets and rooms by friends and strangers. Mass extinction, once the whispered woe of a distant future, suddenly sounds louder and doable in the here and now. The world is compelled to gaze at its own mortality.

When the coronavirus forced us to retreat from daily life, the blanket of silence that fell was like the muffled air after a fresh snowfall—eerie, familiar, cozy even, and not entirely unwelcome. We are not the only beneficiaries of the newfound hush. Birds who have had to compete with our noise to sing to mates are suddenly alone on stage, ready for their seldom solos.

As a species, we are a noisy bunch, our decibels swelling with our need to grab attention where only the most aggressive bring home the prizes. We attach ourselves to machines that make even more noise than we do—cars, buses, trucks, trains, airplanes, bulldozers, amplifiers. And we fill the spaces in between with idle chatter, raised voices, music turned up high, leaf blowers, and hair dryers. Most are idle now, even cries behind closed doors are muffled. The soundtracks of our lives have moved into the adagio phase—softer, interim, slower. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The month of Ramadan is at once a time of respite from the external— when one’s focus shifts from worldly affairs to the spiritual— and a time to deepen one’s sense of compassion and fellow-feeling via the rigors of daily fasting, prayer, reflection and generous giving. It is a time to break free from day to day concerns and to pay attention to one’s lifelong inner journey, whether it is through revitalizing the connection with the Divine or investing in human relations: personal, communal, and global.

In the face of unprecedented grief, anxiety and uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, this Ramadan has been a rare opportunity for reflection. Where social distancing has taken away the comfort of breaking the fast in communal settings and sharing the challenge and peace of the sacred season with family and friends, it has shown a hitherto unknown way to experience this sacred time.

On a typical Ramadan day, I would wake up to make the pre-dawn meal, and get the family ready for the usual morning routine— school and work, balancing the day between Ramadan demands and the family’s routine demands such as work deadlines, tests, after-school activities and work-related social commitments that required us to participate in a state of fasting, feeling exhausted and isolated. Being able to share with others, often only on weekends, the singular sense of contentment that comes from Ramadan-fasting always makes the challenges feel worthwhile.

This Ramadan, we are cut off from loved ones and friends; we cannot invite anyone or visit the mosque for special prayers and have festive Iftar meals together. While the daylong hunger and thirst of every Ramadan is a bodily reminder of those among us who struggle with basic needs, this year I’m also reminded of those who live under lockdowns imposed by military occupations. The idea of a lockdown suddenly feels much more immediate, more oppressive. How does one bear curfews that go on for months and months— the uncertainty, the impossibility of accessing ordinary necessities such as food and medicine, of gathering for prayers, weddings and funerals? Read more »

Flowering trees in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in April of 2020.

by Michael Klenk

The COVID-19 pandemic has instigated talk of the systemic- or societal relevance of institutions and professions. Quickly, attributions of systemic relevance have become a matter of distribution of resources. In Germany, for example, a union recently demanded extra financial support for systematically relevant professions. Whether your profession is deemed systemically relevant may thus be of material consequences for you, and eventually for the constitution of our societies.

But in my previous post, I raised a question about the societal relevance of academic philosophy. Academic philosophers do not predict the virus’s spread like epidemiologists. They don’t take care of patients in hospitals like nurses, and they do not stack the much-desired toilet paper into supermarket shelves. What, then, is their societal relevance?

As we will see, there is little hope for providing an a priori argument for the societal relevance of academic philosophy. But, in an interesting twist, the way of thinking that leads to that conclusion is paved by philosophy. At the end of this post, I’ll briefly consider what this means for questions about societal relevance in general and how it reflects back on the value of philosophy. Read more »

by Cynthia Haven

What is worse – coronavirus itself, or the social and economic catastrophe that comes with it?

René Girard, one of the leading thinkers of our era, argued that the biological and social aspects of a plague are interwoven: he points out that historians still debate whether the Black Death was a cause or a consequence of the social upheavals in the 14^th century.

The Stanford professor, who died in 2015 at age 91, has been called “the new Darwin of the human sciences,” but he began as a literary theorist. His work, beginning in the 1960s, offered a new concept of human desire: our desires are not our own, he said, but are “mimetic.” As social creatures, we learn what to want from each other. Imitation leads to competition, which leads to conflict, which then spreads contagiously throughout a community. Eventually, the community targets one person or group to blame for the disorder, someone like Oedipus. The targeted scapegoats are punished, expelled, or in the past, often killed. Girard began in literature, but quickly took on anthropology, sociology, religions, and more. And while he initially wrote mostly about myths in archaic societies, he eventually became an observer of contemporary culture, focusing on rivalry, violence, and warfare today.

Towards the end of his life, he wrote about the social ramifications of natural disasters, and plagues are no exception. Certainly our desires and hostilities have proven as contagious as COVID-19, which has in many ways fueled and exacerbated them, and variously targeting presidents, governments, protestors, and the Chinese for blame.

In 2005, Girard met with Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age; Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, and The Dominion of the Dead, for a two-part interview on Harrison’s celebrated “Entitled Opinions” radio and podcast series, available on iTunes.

The full transcript is among the interviews included in the Conversations with René Girard: Prophet of Envy, edited by Cynthia L. Haven, published this month by Bloomsbury. Read more »

by Ali Minai

Like most people who have time to think in these stressful days, I have been thinking about life after the COVID-19 pandemic has passed – mostly at a personal level, but also a little about the world at large. This essay is an attempt to put some of these thoughts down as a time-capsule of how things appear from this perch in May of 2020, the first year of the New Plague.

The most important lesson that the current calamity should teach every one of us is humility, though it will surely fail to do so until it is too late. The armchair thinker, however, has the luxury of indulging in the vanity of speculation without risking anything more than a proverbial dish of crow – delivered, one hopes, untouched by human hands and at a safe distance. But the time for that will come later, in a different world with different delicacies and intimacies. This is a message from the “here and now.”

So what will the world come to?

The biggest – and totally unknown – factor that will influence the answer to this question is the future course of the pandemic. Broadly there are four possibilities:

1. An effective vaccine or prophylactic is found by late 2020 and is deployed worldwide by next spring, resulting in virtual eradication of the SARS Cov-2 virus sometime in 2021.
2. No vaccine or prophylactic is found soon, but a post-infection treatment is developed by early 2021 so that COVID-19 becomes a treatable disease – possibly at significant expense and/or inconvenience.
3. Finding a preventive or treatment takes much longer than a year, resulting in a second, third, and more waves of infections before something usable is found or herd immunity develops everywhere.
4. No preventive or treatment is found, and herd immunity fails to develop for some reason.

Possibility 4 is the stuff of apocalypse, so let us assume that it is extremely unlikely. Possibility 1 is conceivable given the scientific firepower being directed at the problem, but seems rather optimistic. If it does come to pass, most things will probably go back to the way they were in November 2019, leaving behind a detritus to bankrupt businesses, lost jobs, disrupted lives, and a deep economic recession. Possibility 2 has similar prospects, but would lead to more significant changes in areas such as work patterns, wearing of masks, large gatherings, etc. The more realistic possibility is number 3, which will have a profound effect on humanity. Going through such an extended trauma will alter life in ways that defy imagination. While humanity waits on science, uncertainty will grip the world. Everything – social interaction, work, education, healthcare, entertainment, sports, travel, politics, business, the media –will change so much during this time that it will be impossible to return to earlier ways. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

What’s the universe made up of? Most people who have read popular science would probably say “Mostly hydrogen, along with some helium.” Even people with a passing interest in science usually know that the sun and stars are powered by nuclear reactions involving the conversion of hydrogen to helium. The dominance of hydrogen in the universe is so important that in the 1960s, two physicists suggested that the best way to communicate with alien civilizations would be to broadcast radio waves at the frequency of hydrogen atoms. Today the discovery that the stars, galaxies and the great beyond are primarily made up of hydrogen stands as one of the most important discoveries in our quest for the origin of the universe. What a lot of people don’t know is that this critical fact was discovered by a woman who should have won a Nobel Prize for it, who went against all conventional wisdom questioning her discovery and who was often held back because of her gender and maverick nature. And yet, in spite of these drawbacks, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin achieved so many firsts: the first PhD thesis in astronomy at Harvard and one that is regarded as among the most important in science, the first woman to become a professor at Harvard and the first woman to chair a major department at the university.

Donovan Moore has performed a service in bringing this remarkable woman’s life story to a broad audience, and he tells it with sensitivity and a wonderful sense of place. His story focuses on the human personalities, and while I was a bit disappointed that the book is way too light on the science, it is still a worthy read. Payne grew up in a quintessentially Edwardian England in the late 19th century, a time when women were all supposed to be like those in “Little Women”, grooming themselves to be proper girls who spent all their time cultivating skills that would make them prime prospects for marriage to a wealthy man. But Cecilia was different from the start, largely because of her parents; she did not care much for looks and dresses and much more instead for exploring nature and playing with her two siblings. Her doting father, a lawyer, writer and musician who was fifty-five when he had her, spared no efforts to get her interested in science, music and books. Read more »

Do Ho Suh. Staircase III.

Installation at Tate Modern, London, 2011.

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by Jeroen Bouterse

I sometimes consider becoming a skeptic, but then I’m not so sure what that entails.

Mind you, I mean a proper skeptic, a Pyrrhonist or something. What attracts me is not this unsustainable Cartesian angst about maybe living in the Matrix, but the wholesome promise of the ancient skeptics: that if you can live with uncertainty, you unlock this treasury of psychological benefits. Suspension of judgment, not believing to know what you don’t know, supposedly allows you to level up intellectually: to be inquisitive and critical, to open your mind without your brain falling out. The ancient skeptics were smart and prescient about contrasting themselves to the ‘dogmatists’ – who wants to be a dogmatist anymore?

So what’s holding me back? Well, I’m ashamed to say that the first thing that comes to mind are those paradoxes. You know them. Does our skepticism extend to the truth of skepticism, and similar objections. Also, are we supposed to suspend judgment about the truth-value of identity-statements, tautologies or contradictions? And if not, don’t those simple tautologies bleed into more complicated analytical truths, or even into mathematics? I’m not sure. Do I have to have a clear-cut opinion on questions like these before I can, with conviction, call myself a skeptic – all the while maintaining my suspension-of-judgment? That is a difficult balancing act that sounds almost like work.

Even though I humbly admit that I don’t know enough about these issues, I fear that my very insecurity about them demonstrates that I don’t have the mind to be a skeptic. I’m afraid to be a dogmatist about any of these questions, because I’m afraid to be wrong. That’s a condition that can easily escalate into desiring to be right. The skeptic on the other hand, while interested in problems surrounding knowledge, somehow manages to see all of them as somebody else’s problems. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafiq Kathwari

Mother passed away in her sleep at Hebrew Home, The Bronx. The last time I visited her was on 7th March. Hebrew Home locked down on the 10th. Mother died alone on 31 March. She was 96.

Mother’s caregiver, Sabila from Nepal, who over the last 10 years created an extraordinary bond with mother, called her Ami Jan, an endearment, and who follows the Hindu faith, once gave Mother a framed picture of Mother India or Bharat Mata, which Sabila thought symbolized her relationship with Mother who, in turn, taught Sabila to recite the first surah of the Koran which, consequently, Sabila did most beautifully and by heart.

So, here she is Bharat Mata, or as Sabila saw my mother, wrapped in a bright sari, superimposed on a map of India painted on a box of safety matches. It’s incendiary. Kashmir crowns the Mata who wields a trident in her right hand. A multi-color flag erases Afghanistan and Pakistan. Left-hand shadows Bangla Desh gesturing towards Myanmar. Her foot seems bigger than pearl-shaped Sri Lanka which forms the central story of the Hindu epic Ramayana. Here’s how Sabila told Mother the story.

One day, God Rama saw Sita  bathing nude in Sitaharan a spring near the Line of Control in Kashmir: It was lust at first sight. Enter Ravana, demon king who abducted Sita to Sri Lanka to avenge a previous wrong, angering  Rama who flew south to Lanka in his glitzy winged chariot Made in Prehistoric India using indigenous materials, piloted by a crew of monkeys.Rama, who shot a divine arrow which pierced Ravana in the heart and killed him, flew Sita back to Kashmir where legend has it they lived happily until India divided herself 73 years ago.

Mother said, broods of the Dogras want their land back, flora, fauna, valleys, peaks, pashmina goats, Mother said after I told her that Hindutva goons are calling it Zameen jihad.  Of course, they will, she said. It’s the nature of fascists to clasp opposite concepts to serve their own propaganda. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

One of the things that fascinates me about history is the different ways we know historical periods. We know the times we live through in a very deep way, not just the events and how they affect us, but the details of daily life. We know the slang, the jokes, the mid-list books; the forgettable songs and the ephemeral news; what the world smells like and how it tastes and sounds. It’s very hard to know another time period in anything like the detail we know our own: what people wore to work, what they did on Saturday afternoons, what all the machines did and why they were made.

However, it’s easier to see more distant periods of history as a cohesive whole, or a completed story. As details inevitably fade from collective memory with time, and most of the possible futures are abandoned, meaning and coherence can emerge. Distillation and compression over time reveal story lines, themes, and meanings that weren’t obvious in the rich confusion and immediacy of experience.

The meaning we find or make may be illusory, but we value it anyway. Galen Rowell, in The Inner Game of Outdoor Photography, says, “Minute by minute, year by year, details fall away as our mental imagery becomes more iconographic. That’s how we see; that’s how we think.” Perhaps it’s also how we remember, and especially how we form collective memories.

I can only guess how future generations will view the times I lived through. It seems obvious that the Apollo moon landings and the COVID-19 pandemic will loom large. It’s more difficult to say which politicians or writers or entertainers will be remembered (or for what), or even which disasters or events. I don’t know how things will turn out. It’s even harder to guess which books or paintings or films will survive, or how much anyone will know about, say, how we worked or vacationed or died. Read more »

Dandelions in our backyard in April, 2020.