by Richard Farr

My sister and I live five thousand miles apart, but since we both reside in the early twenty-first century it’s easy to stay in touch. Of the many channels available to us we use WhatsApp messages mostly, with a call once a week or so. You might wonder then why we have chosen to revive the old old habit of writing letters to one another. The answer is not far to seek — it’s inefficient.

Fifty-some years ago, growing up in rural England, our parents had a black GPO 700-series telephone that weighed as much as an iron kettle. A settled part of the Christmas ritual was to book a call in advance with the International Operator, gather around at the appointed hour, and spend not a second more than three minutes very expensively exchanging the season’s greetings with our cousins in Ottawa.  

Nobody wants to go back to that, but in leaving it behind we lost something. As we have learned from the instant availability of all music, freedom from constraint has costs. We anticipated those special moments of communication, viewed them from various angles, and discussed them in advance. So it is with writing: we used to think about it. Now we drop texts and emails by the bushel, like overloaded September trees. Our devices have made it easy for us to “communicate” almost literally without a thought. 

People who write for a living, and therefore need to write with care, often report that their work is frustrating, irksome, paralysingly difficult, and at the same time comforting, exhilarating, and as optional as oxygen. Somerset Maugham: “We do not write because we want to. We write because we have to.” Red Smith: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit sown at the typewriter and open a vein.” George Orwell: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” 

Orwell is only half correct about my demon. I can’t resist it, but I understand it pretty well. Many aspects of the world and my place in it are puzzling to me; itching for enlightenment, I’m forever attempting to think about them. But I’m bad at thinking: trying to think is a recipe for staring out of the window. The subject could be what’s happening in the Middle East, whether we have free will, or why Chapter Fifteen of the novel I’m working on has become so truculent and unbiddable. In each case, it’s only when I put my head down and write (and write, and delete, and rewrite) that actual thinking occurs. On a good day, careful, intricate writing allows me to approach careful, intricate thinking. Not often. As the historian David McCullough put it, “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

Good writing can be casual, though, and the written personal letter is a gloriously special form because of the opportunity it offers us — unlike the two years on a novel or the two minutes on an email — to find a line between casualness and care.   Read more »

by TJ Price

“What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.” —Gilles Deleuze

I struggle sometimes to write this column. See, it forces me to confront an essential question, which is: what exactly do I have to say? Which of course then leads to what exactly do I have to say that is worth saying? My typical form of writing originates from the headwaters of poetry—when it comes to critique or feedback, I prefer the analysis of syntax over plot structure and debate regarding semantic choice over character development. But when I consider this column space, the blankness of it is daunting. Because of its placement in the larger magazine, it is something which I know will be read, or at least scrolled past, so I have to recalibrate my thinking to encompass getting attention.

One of the themes I have been working with a lot lately in my fiction writing is this very thing: drawing attention to oneself, akin to the Lacanian theory of the Gaze, but extrapolated outward, in the direction of cosmic horror. I am aware that this is not a feeling many others share. Some folks even thrive on attention, craving the spotlight, sometimes to the extent of elbowing others out of the way. This feeling is anathema to me—I recall the cartoons of my youth, in which the hapless creature, suffused with pride, looks down to see the big black X painted on the ground they stand. This mark, of course, is quickly blotted out by the rapidly-expanding shadow of something enormous, plummeting from an unknown point above. Then, cue the quick-cuts: wilting ears, constricting pupils (maybe a little umbrella,) followed by the decisive and inevitable sound of a discordant piano exploding on impact, the woozy creature’s teeth replaced by tinkling ivories.

To me, being noticed is terrifying enough when it’s just another human on the other end of the Gaze. I don’t speak of casual interaction in neutral spaces, a soft frisson of recognition and dismissal, though—for me, to be noticed implies a certain level of interest or fascination. A sort of hunger, even. It’s the cruel potential for envy or jealousy that frightens me, I think. Envy coupled with power. Read more »

A windy day in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Brooks Riley

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by Alizah Holstein

Think of a Roman monument. What leaps to mind? The Pantheon? The Colosseum? The Arch of Constantine? Maybe even the aqueducts? I’ll wager that when you thought of the word “monuments,” your imagination traveled upwards instead of down. For what is a monument if not a tall, grand thing, large, and to some perhaps, looming? I do recognize it’s possible—though unlikely—that you conjured the catacombs. And it’s even less likely that you thought of roads.

Cultural critic Robert Hughes described roads as Rome’s greatest physical monuments. Their network extended some 50-75,000 miles and they were the sine qua non of Rome’s expansion. I should add a minor but nonetheless relevant detail here: some of my happiest moments have been spent on Roman roads. As were some of yours, in all likelihood, if you have ever felt ebullient in Rome or on the Italian peninsula, or indeed in Spain or France or England or Germany or the Balkans or Greece or Turkey or Syria or Israel or Gaza or Egypt or Algeria or Morocco.

Let me put another question to you. What is your favorite Roman road? If you’re a pilgrim, you might say the Via Francigena. And should you offer the Via Flaminia, Via Aurelia, or Via Aemilia or some other ancient equivalent, I imagine you have your reasons. But if you are a romantic like me, the only possible answer is the Via Appia, which is, after all, the regina viarum, the queen of roads. Think of cypress trees, ancient, crumbling tombs, jasmine and pinecones and fields of wildflowers. Think also of tourist traps, gladiator impersonators, a War World II massacre site, and prostitution. Think of paradox as the defining feature of the human condition. Still, even its name is beautiful: Via Appia. Look at all those a’s and i’s, like a palindrome just off its center, the V and A the very valleys and arêtes through which the road cuts. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

We might know more about biodiversity than ever before, yet we see it less. When life is talked about as “carbon sinks,” “pollinator services,” or “extinction curves,” it flattens into numbers: computable but unfeeling. But the loss we face isn’t just biological. It’s perceptual. We no longer notice life. Our first loss, then, may not be biodiversity itself, but our ability to see it. And nowhere is this blindness more widespread, or more foundational, than with plants.

Plant blindness is not simply a lack of interest in flora but a systemic failure to perceive the living structure of the world around us. We might pause for a flower’s scent or color, but how often do we notice the complex strategies behind its form?

Let’s begin, then, not with the abstract notion of biodiversity, but with the particular of flowering plants. At first, they had no roots, relying on fungi to supply water and nutrients in exchange for sugars produced by the plant through photosynthesis. With time plants started to develop their own roots systems but still lacked flowers. They were mostly ferns and conifers like pines.

In a baffling new evolution angiosperm (flowering plants) appeared about 170 million years ago. Flowers are the product of natural selection to attract and use pollinators to reproduce. They use scent, color, shape and sometimes temperature to signal to pollinators. Smell for instance is a primary attractor for many pollinators. In Europe, flowers that rely on bees and butterflies often emit sweet scents. But not all strategies are pleasant to us.

The Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower, smells like rotting meat to attract flies. The Titan Arum goes further, heating itself to human body temperature to volatilize more effectively corpse smelling compounds detectable hundreds of meters away. The temperature also imitates that of a body, an attractor in itself for carrion beetles. Read more »

Sughra Raza. The Visitor. Mexico, March 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Katalin Balog

It was the first day of a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in 2016. We were about to participate in a ritual of chants and burning sage. Before we proceeded outside, the head teacher asked all of us to invite someone we would like to share this moment with. Instantly and vividly, my grandfather appeared in my mind. I found the defiance embodied in this choice shocking. My grandfather was the rock of my childhood. Kind, optimistic, a fountain of knowledge about the world, a lover of poetry and music, he was the undisputed authority in the family. He was a heir of the Enlightenment, and he would have been horrified by my association with religion, even the nontheistic Buddhist variety. At that moment, I realized that when the chips were down, I would choose my Enlightenment heritage over the enlightenment Buddhism promised. I was at this retreat (and later joining a synagogue) in an effort to recover parts of my soul that my secular rationalist upbringing made me feel I was missing. My being here was my rebellion against this very Enlightenment heritage.

But once here, feelings of unease increased with every chant about the “basic goodness” of humans, with every question waved away with impatience, with every forced debate on topics the leader of the organization set for his ostensibly grown-up disciples, with the disapproving jibes about “too much thinking”. The dissonance became too much, and by the end of the retreat – six long weeks later – I was out, no longer a disciple.

The tension I was experiencing was a small manifestation of the central problem of modernity. Can the common-sense, first-person, subjective view of ourselves as souls or subjects be reconciled with a scientifically informed, objective perspective? Can reason be overridden in the name of mindfulness, of systematic attention to subjective experience? This question preoccupied two very different thinkers of the 19th century, Auguste Comte and Søren Kierkegaard, who, though they seem to have been unaware of each other, lived at the same time and have come to very different conclusions. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

This is a question I was considering whilst reading this recent paper by Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone on the origins of a well-known visual illusion (a preprint is freely accessible here). It is an issue I have often thought about, and about which I have always wanted to write something. It is a question that attracts the attention of most scholars who study human behaviour, and most scholars will have a particular idea as to what their “first principles” are when it comes to constructing a theory of cognition.

Where does one start from when building up an account of a given cognitive phenomenon, though? Are there any initial assumptions in this kind of theoretical process? I think it is fair to say that in most cases one’s first principles can go some way towards explaining what kind of theory one favours to begin with, though this is not always explicitly stated; an enlightening case in this respect is the study of language acquisition, as I shall show later.

Let’s keep to Amir & Firestone’s study for a start. The paper focuses on the Müller-Lyer Illusion, shown in graphic A below, taken from their paper, an illusion that goes back to 1889 and is named after Franz Müller-Lyer, who devised it. Why is it an illusion? Well, because the two lines are of the same length and yet one typically perceives the top line to be longer than the bottom line, even after being told that they are of the same length – and even after checking this is so with a ruler. The Müller-Lyer Illusion seems to be unaffected by what one knows about it, and thus would be a candidate for a perceptual process that is more or less autonomous – it simply applies because of how our visual system works.

Or does it? A typical rejoinder has been that culture can shape the way we perceive the world in rather significant ways, and as a matter of fact not everyone is as susceptible to the Müller-Lyer Illusion as the western, educated population that is usually tested in cognitive psychology labs (this cohort is sometimes referred to as WEIRD; google it). Indeed, many cross-cultural studies have concluded so, and as a possible explanation it has been argued that the Illusion arises in populations who have been brought up in carpentered environments, shown in graphic B above – lacking this background, the Illusion is not as robust. Thus, the Müller-Lyer Illusion would be a product of experience and its observers might just be the exception rather than the rule. Read more »

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by Eric Schenck

At a Christmas market in Germany, I told my German girlfriend’s mother that I masturbate with my family every December.

Of course (I swear), this was a mistake. What I was trying to say is that my family and I do a gift exchange every year. What I actually said? That we do a fair bit of masturbating together.  

As I learned that snowy evening, the words are practically the same in German:

• “Wechseln”: exchange
• “Wichsen”: masturbate  

Just a few letters off, and an entirely different world of meaning.

My girlfriend Janina knew what I was trying to say. But Gitta? She looked at me like I was a monster, like her daughter had picked the biggest piece of shit in the world. 

Do I masturbate with my family every Christmas? I do not. But the story does make me laugh. And if you’re serious about learning a language, you need to laugh, too.

Over the last 15+ years, I’ve learned four of them:

• Spanish
• Modern Standard Arabic
• Egyptian Arabic
• German

Here are some things about each one that have me laugh (or at least awkwardly smile)… Read more »

by Derek Neal

The File on H is a novel written in 1981 by the Albanian author Ismail Kadare. When a reader finishes the Vintage Classics edition, they turn the page to find a “Translator’s Note” mentioning a five-minute meeting between Kadare and Albert Lord, the researcher and scholar responsible, along with Milman Parry, for settling “The Homeric Question” and proving that The Iliad and The Odyssey are oral poems rather than textual creations. As The File on H retells a fictionalized version of Parry and Lord’s trips to the Balkans to record oral poets in the 1930’s, this meeting from 1979 is characterized as the genesis of the novel, the spark of inspiration that led Kadare to reimagine their journey, replacing primarily Serbo-Croatian singing poets in Yugoslavia with Albanian bards in the mountains of Albania.

This anecdote is repeated in almost every article one finds on the novel, scholarly or popular. Perhaps it is simply too good of a story to pass up—the American meets the Albanian, who, trapped in a communist dictatorship, knows nothing of the research and scholarship going on outside his country’s borders. On one of the few trips when he’s allowed to leave the country, a special privilege granted to culturally important Albanians, he meets an American who enlightens him about the history of his own country, but they’re only given a few minutes before the Albanian has to return to his isolated nation, forced to reconstitute the conversation in novelistic form.

It is ironic that what seems to be a piece of gossip, a possibly apocryphal tale, would attach itself to the story of The File on H, which ultimately deals with the implications of the transition from an oral world to a literate one. These types of tales change each time they get passed on from one person to another, but once they are set down in writing, they become fixed. The official account becomes codified—Kadare wrote this novel because of his conversation with Albert Lord in 1979. And maybe he did. But if this is the case, one wonders how his characterization of Lord and Parry’s findings, how his articulation of the difference in the oral worldview and the literate worldview, are so accurate in his novelization. Surely Lord couldn’t have told him of his in-depth findings on the composition of oral poetry in just a few minutes. What one forgets, however, is that the world Lord and Parry were discovering was already Kadare’s world. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

I am not a cocktail guy. The whole craft cocktail thing strikes me as precious, pretentious and silly. You want to have a drink? Fine, let’s have a drink. I’ll have an IPA or a scotch. Maybe a gin and tonic if it’s a particularly hot day. But stay away from me with your oregano tincture and elderflower liqueur. If I’m drinking wine with one of my wino friends, I like to pay attention to the first few sips. We can talk about the character of the wine for a minute or two. But then I want to talk about something else. I quickly run out of patience with conversation about artisanal anything. Look, I’m a crotchety old Midwesterner. Guys like me just don’t go for that stuff.

On the other hand, I am a big fan of the physicist, author and “natural philosopher” Sean Carroll and his Mindscape Podcast. So when Carroll interviewed Kevin Peterson, author of Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Drinks, I listened. And it was fascinating.

Peterson has an undergraduate background in physics and a PhD in mechanical engineering. He approaches the world of cocktails as a scientist. In Peterson’s view, a statement that one drink is better than another is not a matter of opinion. It can be objectively confirmed. Partly, this is based on his knowledge of the biology of the human sensory apparatus, and partly it is based on his extensive, painstaking accumulation of data. Peterson has digital thermometers and gram scales that allow previously unavailable precision measurement. And he has the kind of obsessive personality that will systematically test a thousand daiquiris. He proceeded methodically, varying only one element at a time and only by tiny increments. Testing ingredient ratios was only the beginning. He also tested small changes in temperature, dilution, and aeration. In the end, he says, he can draw quantitative, objective conclusions.

Peterson claims to have established, for example, that the proper distance to shake a cocktail shaker is 18 inches, and proper length of time to shake it is 12 seconds. His claim is that this is not just his opinion. He says it’s in the data. Read more »

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

In the early 2000s, a curious phenomenon emerged in Japan: some grown men began forming intimate relationships with inanimate pillows bearing images of anime girls, a phenomenon known as “2-D love.” When I first encountered this phenomenon, I wondered if people could grow emotionally attached to two-dimensional printed images, how much deeper might that attachment become when artificial intelligence advanced enough to convincingly simulate companionship? I speculated whether there would come a time when individuals might be tempted to retreat from the real world and instead choose to live alongside an AI companion who also served as a romantic partner. That brave new world has now arrived in 2025. Apps like Replika, Character AI, Romantic AI, Anima, CarynAI , and Eva AI enable users to create AI-powered romantic partners i.e., chatbots designed to simulate conversation, affection, and emotional intimacy. These platforms allow users to personalize their virtual partner’s appearance, personality traits, and the nature of their relationship dynamic.

Unlike the 2-D love phenomenon, today’s AI romantic partners are no longer a fringe community. Today, over half a billion people have interacted with an AI companion in some form. This marks a new frontier in AI and its venture into the deeply human realms of emotion, affection, and intimacy. This technology is poised to take human relationships into uncharted territory. On one hand, it enables people to explore romantic or emotional bonds in ways never before possible. On the other hand, it also opens the door to darker impulses, there have been numerous reports of users creating AI partners for the sole purpose of enacting abusive or perverse fantasies. Companies like Replika and Character.AI promote their offerings as solutions to the loneliness epidemic, framing AI companionship as a therapeutic and accessible remedy for social isolation. As these technologies become more pervasive, they raise urgent questions about the future of intimacy, ethics, and what it means to have a human connection.

Several recent cases offer a sobering glimpse into what the future may hold as AI romantic partners become more pervasive. Read more »

Shadow of the A22 Autobahn (a four lane highway) as it passes over the Stausee (a lake formed by a dam on the river Eisack) in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, on the longest day of the year. I was taking a short pre-lunch walk and shot this photo at noon.

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