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 »

by Dwight Furrow

In a culture oscillating between dietary asceticism and culinary spectacle—fasts followed by feasts, detox regimens bracketed by indulgent food porn—it is easy to miss the sensuous meaningfulness of ordinary, everyday eating. We are entranced by extremes in part because they distract us from the steady, ordinary pleasures that thread through our daily lives. This cultural fixation on either controlling or glamorizing food obscures its deeper role: food is not just fuel or fantasy, but a medium through which we experience the world, anchor our identities, and rehearse our values. The act of eating, so often reduced to a health metric or a social performance, is in fact saturated with philosophical significance. It binds pleasure to perception, flavor to feeling, and the mundane to the meaningful.

American culture harbors a long-standing discomfort with pleasure born of its Puritanical roots and sustained by the contradictions of consumer capitalism. Even as we chase pleasure through consumption, we cloak it in guilt or dismiss it as indulgence. This ambivalence has moral, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. The dominant message is clear: enjoy, but not too much; indulge, but repent.

But this suspicion of pleasure misunderstands its role in life. Pleasure is not a passive sensation, an add-on to more “serious” pursuits. Rather, pleasure is a mode of attention, a reinforcement mechanism fundamental to cognition, agency, and sustained activity. The human brain is wired to experience pleasure from a bewildering range of sources and for good reason: Pleasure is a fundamental motivation. We are much more likely to engage in beneficial behaviors if we enjoy them. (Or course the same is true of harmful behaviors but the point about pleasure as motivation still stands.)

Indeed, pleasure motivates and sustains the very activities that give life meaning. When we speak of “flow,” of deep absorption in physical, creative or intellectual tasks, we are describing a form of pleasure inseparable from the activity itself. The distinction between pleasure and happiness matters here. Happiness is a long-term orientation toward life, a disposition of coherence and fulfillment. Pleasure, by contrast, is episodic, but no less essential. A life bereft of pleasure may be, under some circumstances, productive and ethical as well, but it is likely to be empty. Thus, we ought not treat pleasure as a luxury. It is part of the infrastructure of a life well-lived. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

Since 1914, the Federal Trade Commission ‘s mission has been to enforce civil antitrust and unfair competition/consumer protection laws. The question is whether this mission has been supplanted—whether the FTC under Trump 2 .0 is becoming the Federal Political Truth Commission.

My Background: The FTC Investigates the Movie and Record Industries

Many years ago I started my legal career as a lawyer for the FTC. In that role, I proposed investigations into the motion picture and record industries which were opened by the FTC.

The  publicly announced FTC investigation of the movie industry focused on possible collusion in the US  between a handful of major motion picture companies that dominated the motion picture markets in the US  and abroad. Not too long afterwards I recommended and got approval to investigate a  proposed merger between two of the top six record companies in the US that would have resulted in the largest record company in the world.

While the motion picture investigation did not result in litigation, the record merger investigation did lead to litigation by a small team of  FTC lawyers (including myself) that blocked the merger.

Antitrust and the Value of  Media Diversity

In pursuing these investigations, I discussed traditional antitrust concerns about reduced competition and collusion. But I also pointed out that the products were unique—they just weren’t commodities like cement or steel.  These were products of expression and culture. Antitrust focuses on how consumer choice is reduced by anticompetitive conduct. Here we did not face just a reduction in choice regarding widgets, but in ideas and expression.

But there never was any discussion on content—never was it suggested that certain kinds of movies or records were better than others, that some should be promoted, others not. Never were ideological slants or views considered or discussed. The point was always about protecting or expanding the range of consumer choice.

This idea of the antitrust value of diversity in media was not new. In fact, the Supreme Court in 1943 underscored the value of diversity and quantity in radio broadcasting when it held that the Federal Communications Commission could consider antitrust  concerns in regulating radio broadcasting networks. Then NBC owned two radio networks, one called the “red network” and the other the “blue network.”  Per the Supreme Court decision, the FCC  ordered the divestiture of the blue network. This network became ABC, the American Broadcasting  Company. Although the Supreme Court endorsed consideration of antitrust values to widen the scope of  what was available to listeners, it drew the line on government going after the content of expression. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

RIP Pocket (aka Read It Later) 2007-July 8, 2025

The recent announcement of Mozilla’s shutdown of the Pocket app caught me by surprise. It felt as if the rug was being pulled out from under me—the rug being a motley weave of all the online articles and stories I’ve ever wanted to read later but never did. What would happen to all those pieces saved on impulse for a rainy day?

For those who don’t use it or even know of it, Pocket was a bookmarking service for links you wanted to save and come back to at a later time. Pocket saved it all for you with an easy click, in a pleasant layout and a user-friendly reading format that didn’t require returning to the original site.

Before Pocket, I bookmarked everything on the browser, hoarding unwieldy lists of links that turned the browser into a digital dumpster. Pocket came along to eliminate the constant need to manage browser bookmarks.

Using Pocket, I amassed thousands of saves, going back years—a bottomless bucket of ‘wanna reads’, most of which have remained wanna reads. Early on, I noticed that I rarely opened a Pocket save unless it had to do with whatever subject I was researching at that moment—leaving all the rest unread. Why? I always found an excuse to postpone a visit to my candy store of saves, and fought an eerie sense of guilt by always promising myself to take the time to do so—someday. The truth is, I was no longer interested in many of those stories. Some were too dated. Others simply lost their appeal.

Now, the thought of losing them feels like losing a part of oneself that had once existed. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

Virtue wasn’t always gentle.

In ancient Rome, virtus was a word of force and visibility. It came from the Latin word vir, meaning “man,” and encompassed ideals of military bravery, civic leadership, and public excellence. A virtuous man was someone who acted decisively in the public sphere—whether in war, politics, or the courts. Virtus was not about goodness in the moral sense. It was about fulfilling one’s public role with courage and competence. The term belonged to action, and it was earned through what one did, not what one avoided.

But like many powerful words, virtus changed as it traveled. As Latin gave way to the languages of medieval Europe, and Christianity replaced classical philosophy as the dominant moral framework, the term began to morph. Virtus became vertu, and then “virtue.” Its meaning narrowed, softened, and interiorized. Instead of valor, it came to suggest moral purity, humility, and patience. Instead of a call to public greatness, it became a standard of private behavior—especially for women.

By the late Middle Ages, “virtue” in women had become nearly synonymous with chastity. It was a euphemism for sexual propriety, and a woman’s moral worth was often judged not by her integrity or courage, but by whether she had preserved her virginity, and later, her marital fidelity. Her virtue was not something she earned through action, but something she was expected to carry—like a fragile inheritance, one that could be irreparably lost. The woman who guarded her virtue was good; the one who “lost” it, no matter the context, was fallen.

The consequences of this shift weren’t merely symbolic. They shaped how women were viewed, valued, and remembered. A woman’s virtue could determine her marriage prospects, her reputation, and her legal status. It was both an irrevocable statement of her morality  and a form of social capital. And over time, traits such as restraint, silence, and obedience became associated with female virtue.

This didn’t mean women completely lacked agency or complexity. They made difficult moral decisions constantly—often in conditions of constraint. But there was scant moral language to describe and give credit to those decisions or actions. Only when a woman’s strength came in the form of patience or sacrifice, was it sanctified. However, when it came in the form of autonomy or ambition, it was seen as far from praiseworthy.

You can see this dynamic clearly in the story of Penelope, queen of Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey. Read more »