by Bonnie McCune

I used to feel depressed when I read those notices in newspapers or chat with others about people’s multiple accomplishments. Compared to me, everyone in the world seems to be a raving success. They publish several novels a year, start businesses, win awards, are asked to speak at conferences and, even more, get paid for it!  They run marathons in their spare time, make the “top ten” list in whatever subject interests them, say cooking or astronomy or cup-stacking competitions.  Even worse, they write, call, email and blog about what they’ve done, to the point I want to avoid meetings and acquaintances, reading my mail, or communicating in any fashion, even smoke signals.

Maybe you’re challenged or energized by such information. Not I. When I was a kid, I fell for the Great American Dream. Anyone can be president or a millionaire, if you just try hard enough. I’ve learned that’s not true. Take my primary interest: writing books. Estimates are completely unreliable but range from 500,000 to a million published annually. I may have owned 10,000 books myself over the course of my life. Realistically, the odds of me or anyone selling tons of books are miniscule. In the realm of fantasy, everyone’s doing it.

I try to tell myself to be realistic, my life is going fine. But the sounds of all these folks beating their own drums and tooting their own horns makes me deaf and discouraged. I have a friend with an even more aggravated sense of inferiority than mine. Take her to a group in which friends mention their thriving children or a promotion on the job, and she refuses to see them again.

A change of attitude seems required. I’ve heard about two studies on the secret to happiness. Read more »

When Bach was a Busker in Brandenburg

When Bach was a busker playing for humble coin
he’d set up his organ in the middle of a square
regardless of pigeons, ignoring the squirrels who sat
poised at its edges waiting for their daily bread,
and work to build its impossible structure of intricacies,
assembling its pipes from his scaffold of arpeggios
of baroque means, setting its stops and starts,
its necessary rests and quick resumptions,
seeing in his mind’s-eye each note to come
as he’d placed them just so on paper at his desk,
simultaneously hearing them as they would resonate
against eardrums in potential cathedrals of brains
even before a key was touched,
even before a bow was raised,
even before a slender column of breath
was blown into a flute, or tympanic skins troubled the air,
he’d hear them as he saw them, strung out
along a horizontal lattice of five lines
with intervening measure marks,
following the lead limits of a cleft,
soaring between and around each other
darting out, in and through, climbing, diving,
making unexpected lateral runs between boundaries,
touching sometimes the edge of chaos but
never veering there, understanding the limits of all,
so that now, having prepped for his street-corner concerto,
this then unknown genius would descend from his scaffold
and share with the ordinary world how a tuned mind works
in harvesting songs from a universe of stars,
collecting their sweet sap, distilling it into a sonic portrait
of a universe that forever lies within the looped
horizon of things.

Jim Culleny, 10/3/22

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by Akim Reinhardt

I write this not to counter Holocaust deniers. That would be a waste of time; the criminally insane will spew their fantastical vitriol no matter what you tell them. Nor do I write this in the spirit of “Never forget!” As a historian I am committed to remembering this and many more genocides, particularly the most devastating and thorough genocide of all: the European genocides of Indigenous societies. At the same time, I understand the ultimate futility of admirable slogans such as “Never Forget!” For everything is forgotten, eventually. Everything and everyone.

Rather, I say “The Holocaust happened” as a reminder that human beings are quite capable of the worst. Not during any particular era, but at all times. Not a particular group of humans, but all of them. For no ethnic group is cut out to be the villains or the victims. Inflicting horror is a fully human affair. Any person can become a monster if pushed far enough, and many don’t need all that much pushing. Every society is ready to be awful. If flattered sufficiently, any large group of people will tacitly approve the horrors that others inflict on their behalf and in their name.

Why do humans act so atrociously, while other humans countenance it, or at least sit by unbothered as it happens? The phenomenon is so common that the answer cannot be exotic. The reasons can’t be too specific. Humans do not need some grand excuse to enable their worst behavior, or to cheer it on, much less sit by untroubled. Humans are quite capable of, and even given to, inventing their own petty little lies to serve as ludicrous justification for their hellish actions. This is History’s lesson, recited over and over again. To insist otherwise is to give humanity far too much credit.

Yet, insist we do.

These lies generally come in two forms. The most common and criminal is erasure. The sin of omission. The lie of active forgetting. While humans are doomed to forget and be forgotten, that is a passive process. Instead I am referring to active forgetting. Erasure comes when a society takes active steps to forget the horrors it has committed. Read more »

by William Benzon

Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.” Their condition was different before sin. For as it is written, “They were naked and were not ashamed,”—not that their nakedness was unknown to them, but because nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man. – St. Augustine, Book 14, Chapter 17, City of God

I came of age during the 1960s. I saw the wind-down of the Civil Rights Movement, even as the War in Vietnam was ramping up. I marched against that war, became a conscientious objector to war, discovered “Kubla Khan,” smoked pot, joined a rock and roll band, and witnessed the so-called Sexual Revolution. I even made an ever-so small contribution to that revolution. I contributed a letter the Playboy Forum in the June 1966 issue of Playboy. For those of you who don’t know, those were the pages where readers got to discuss Hugh Heffner’s “playboy philosophy.” I wrote in defense of casual sex, of which I had had very little at the time. My friends tell me it was a good letter.

Don’t laugh.

Whatever Playboy is now, it was substantial back then, something that’s hard to appreciate if you haven’t had direct experience of those ancient days. Yes, it had pictures of naked women, tasteful nudes, no public hair – not until Penthouse and Hustler upped the ante. Did it objectify women? Sure did. But it also had substantial journalism. That same June 1966 issue had an article by Jimmy Breslin, a story by Arthur C. Clarke and an interview with Mike Nichols. The March 1963 issue had an interview with the great Bertrand Russell, logician, philosopher, Nobel Laureate in literature, and tireless peace activist. And, yes, I know, Gloria Steinem went undercover as a bunny in a Playboy Club and wrote about how women were mistreated and exploited.

It’s complex.

Women’s birth control pill became available in 1960. California passed the first no-fault divorce law in 1969 and other states followed. With its decision on Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973. During the 1970s women increasingly flowed into the workforce. The net effect of these events is that women were no longer so dependent on men.

Mary McCarthy published The Group in 1963 and it became a best-seller, then was made into a movie. It was about the sex lives of “good” girls, eight recent Vassar graduates. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in the same year and went on to form the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. Thus second-wave feminism was born. The civil rights and anti-war movements led younger women to form their own organizations.

Thus the sexual revolution was born. Read more »

by David Winner

I’m the comic relief here, not much else is funny.

After the inauguration, I began to feel the siren call of the southern border: so mystified, so lied about, so central to our recent political troubles. And despite all the real horrors (the deportations and detainments) and invented horrors (undocumented people wreaking havoc), I had no sense of what going there would be like. My only experiences at the southern border happened when I was in in grad school in Tucson in the early nineties, and it is to Tucson that I have decided to return. Thirty years ago, Greyhound buses, replete with norteños and multiple stops at random-seeming street corners, would make the hour-long journey to the border. There was nothing stressful, nothing fraught about either going to Mexico or returning to the United States, but the acceleration of cartel violence and the Trump administration and its horrors may have turned everything upside down.

April 3, 2025, spring break from my college teaching job, I’m in an Airbnb in Tucson, fretting about my international journey the next day.

During the relatively benign Trump One, I found myself going through customs at Kennedy Airport with a group of Warsaw passengers. Homeland Security aggressively searched their bags for contraband kielbasa. “We didn’t bring any,” said one of them, “we can get it in Brooklyn.”

Recently, during the first several months of Trump 2.0, an Australian living in the U.S. on a work visa got detained and deported after a brief trip home to bury his mother’s ashes. A German on a tourist visa went with a friend and their dog over to Tijuana for cheaper veterinary care only to get detained on the way back, weeks in an ICE facility before finally getting deported. Even when a judge saw the legal birth certificate of an American citizen of Latino origin detained in Florida, he could not release him from ICE custody. Worst of all, obviously dystopic, are the El Salvadorans and Venezuelans (most of whom appear to have been non-gang members living legally in the United States) being kept in barbaric conditions in a concentration camp in El Salvador where Trump has threatened to send American citizens who he calls “homegrown” terrorists.  Other prisoners, some with green cards, are being kept in subhuman conditions in Alligator Alcatraz in the Everglades.

As a white citizen, I will probably be okay, but I’m sixty years old and rather a delicate flower. I wouldn’t last a minute in ICE custody. But after all the rhetoric of the election and all that has happened since Trump took office, I wanted to visit the place that compelled so many to vote for him and glimpse his “big beautiful” wall for myself. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

“Peaches are $8.99 a pound!” my friend texted me yesterday.

Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

On a sunny Saturday towards the end of last month we took a train to Moutier in the west of Switzerland, half an hour from the French border, to attend an opera in a shooting range. We had tickets to hear my friend Annina Haug sing the role of Fenena in Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco at Stand’été, an annual festival of the arts held in the local stand de tir, now decommissioned, a pleasantly eerie, Charles-Addams-like structure on a hill above the municipality. We were also keen to visit the little town itself, which had recently voted to secede from the canton of Bern and join the neighboring canton of Jura as an exclave.

The opening day of the Stand’été’s 2025 edition fell on June 21, the date of this year’s Summer Solstice—the longest day of the year, and a clement midsummer—; but the festival organizers, not taking any chances, had erected marquee tents over the picnic tables set up in the forecourt of the performance venue. And when it suddenly began to hail out of a clear blue sky as we munched fish and frites before the opera began, I was inclined to respect the locals’ perspicacity. We finished our dinner and hurried inside, to take our seats for a marvelous production by the Compagnie Opéra Obliqua, under the direction of Facundo Agudin.

Verdi’s first great success, Nabucco is based on a combination of Biblical accounts. The libretto, by Temistocle Solera, pits Jerusalem against Babylon, Jehovah against Baal, Hebrew against Assyrian. The plot is convoluted: King Nabucco (short for Nabucodonosor, the Italian form of the name of the historical Nebuchadnezzar) is besieging the Jewish capital, where the Hebrews are holding his daughter Fenena hostage. When Nabucco enters the city and its inhabitants attempt to use their pawn to keep him at bay, the princess is instead released by the traitorous Ismaele, a Hebrew soldier with whom she has been having an affair. Read more »

Border between road and sidewalk in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, with some tenacious weeds.

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by Charles Siegel

Americans learn about “checks and balances” from a young age. (Or at least they do to whatever extent civics is taught anymore.) We’re told that this doctrine is a corollary to the bedrock theory of “separation of powers.” Only through the former can the latter be preserved.  As John Adams put it in a letter to Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, later a delegate to the First Continental Congress, in 1775: “It is by balancing each of these powers against the other two, that the efforts in human nature toward tyranny can alone be checked and restrained, and any degree of freedom preserved in the constitution.” As Trump’s efforts toward tyranny move ahead with ever-greater speed, those checks and balances feel very creaky these days.

Why do we care?  What “balance” is to be preserved? “Separation of powers” is a defining concept of our government. But the phrase itself does not appear in the Constitution. What does it mean?

There is no official answer, of course. But Congress has provided a definition: at its direction, every ten years the Library of Congress publishes the “Constitution Annotated,” a “comprehensive, government-sanctioned record of the interpretations of the Constitution” that appears on Congress’ website. According to the Librarian of Congress, then, “separation of powers” is a “well-known concept derived from the text and structure of the Constitution. The Framers’ experience with the British monarchy informed their belief that concentrating distinct governmental powers in a single entity would subject the nation’s people to arbitrary and oppressive government action. Thus, in order to preserve individual liberty, the Framers sought to ensure that a separate and independent branch of the Federal Government would exercise each of government’s three basic functions: legislative, executive and judicial.” The Constitution sets those powers out in Articles I, II and III respectively. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Herbert Harris

When we say, “I’m feeling self-conscious,” we usually mean we are uncomfortably aware of being the center of other people’s attention. We might worry about how we look, what we wear, or how we act. While we are, to some degree, concerned with aspects of ourselves, our main focus is on others and what they think about us. “Self-conscious” is an interesting choice of words that might reveal something deep about the nature of self and consciousness.

Two hundred years ago, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel introduced a groundbreaking idea: self-consciousness does not arise from introspection, but from mutual recognition. We become aware of ourselves as individuals not by looking inward, but by encountering another mind that perceives us as conscious, and by recognizing that mind in return. Hegel argued that this process of reciprocal recognition is the foundation of personhood. It is only through others that we truly understand ourselves. Hegel linked this movement from recognition to a broader concept of freedom. For him, freedom was not just the lack of constraints, but the achievement of autonomy through mutual recognition. According to Hegel, we become free not by turning inward, but by engaging in relationships that acknowledge and affirm our self-consciousness.

This insight has resonated across philosophy, psychology, and social theory. George Herbert Mead viewed the self as emerging from social roles and symbolic interaction. He emphasized how the self develops by internalizing others’ perspectives, especially through language and shared symbols, which create a ‘generalized other’ that shapes individual identity. Sartre described self-consciousness as an unavoidable confrontation with the gaze of the other. His concept of the ‘gaze’ illustrates how we feel exposed under someone else’s scrutiny and how their judgment influences our self-awareness. Frantz Fanon later developed these ideas, showing how the Black subject becomes aware of themselves through the racialized gaze of a white other, illustrating how power dynamics and social identity impact self-consciousness. Each of these thinkers extended Hegel’s idea of the self as socially constructed and relational rather than autonomous or private.

Although Hegel’s ideas have been highly influential, they would seem to have limited applicability to neuroscience-based explanations of consciousness. The primary explanatory frameworks in neuroscience are bottom-up, beginning with molecules and ending with complex neural network systems. But the Hegelian outside-in, top-down perspective might provide insights that both complement and inform neuroscience. Read more »

Gozo Yoshimasu. Fire Embroidery, 2017.

“Gozo Yoshimasu’s double-sided work on paper Fire Embroidery explores his response to the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He embarked on the project out of a deep sense of sympathy and commitment, in pursuit of “poetry possible after March 2011”, without exactly knowing where he was heading. He started scribing lines and letters on exceptionally large manuscript paper that he handcrafted every day. The new routine resembled the way that Buddhist monks copy sutras; Yoshimasu prepared the materials, his groundwork, and ran a pen across them day after day, “as though tattooing” on his mind.

The series as a whole includes manuscripts on which are extensive enumerations of letters and words repeatedly dismantled and rearranged in response to the voices and shadows of the deceased, recovered by painted color layers. This series appropriates tragedy through the act of interfering with and destroying the process of language production, while creating existential dreamscapes offering new flux or a peculiar prayer.”

More here, here, and here.

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by Daniel Shotkin

Conflict follows us everywhere. Terrible drivers, horrible friends, evil politicians—the list goes on and on. For me, most conflicts never really made much sense. I avoid clashing with people as much as possible. It feels self-righteous, almost cringey, to be in a state of dispute. Ironic, because my favorite club in high school was debate. Still, I know people who, far from avoiding conflict, thrive in argument. So why do we conflict?

On a basic level, almost every human can agree on a core set of moral principles. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These are fundamental truths present in every culture. The three Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism, and Confucianism all espouse that last point independently. Even cultural practices that are, to us, morally questionable (think human sacrifice, headhunting) can’t be chalked up to evil intentions. Can you really blame the Aztecs for wanting to appease Quetzalcoatl?

At the end of the day, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who acts without explicit good intentions. Look at a morally deplorable historical figure, and you’ll see that even they acted with “good” in mind. Regimes don’t declare war, restrict speech, or commit genocide for evil’s sake; they do so in the name of national security. Similarly, ask any two beefing high schoolers, and you’ll see that neither did anything, and even if they did, it wasn’t on purpose—and actually, it was the other one who wanted to start shit.

So, logically, we’re in agreement. Then why do we still conflict? Read more »