by Bill Murray

Today’s modest topic is the future of the West. Will it end in a bang, whimper or maybe just sort of muddle through in some zombie stagger? Whatever happens, a quarter of the way through the American Century, the standard of liberal democracy we hoisted as global inevitability twenty years ago hangs by the scruff of the neck and its enemies are eager to boot it straight into irrelevance.

Let’s consider each side of the transatlantic alliance. The NATO summit, the yearly expression of North Atlantic muscle held last week in the Hague, illuminates the Europeans.

And to set the table, when you have five minutes, listen to John Cage’s 4’33”. Not many musical compositions can capture the spirit of an allied summit, but this one does.

THE EUROPEANS: Shortly before ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning in June, Mark Rutte entered the World Forum Convention Centre auditorium in The Hague to open the NATO summit. He might have chewed his nails in the limo; he surely dreaded this meeting of the most powerful leaders on his continent, with the North American they depend on.

The Americans created the alliance he leads. The Secretary General’s mission was to keep the founders of NATO from taking their troops, weapons and military capabilities and going home.

Rutte labored since he took the job to make this meeting a success. In June alone he visited Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden and attended the G7 in Canada, trying to pull together and hold tight to NATO cohesion. Now, on a mild summer day with a gentle wind off de Nordsee, the longest-serving prime minister in Dutch history welcomed the allies to his hometown. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

One of the last of the traditional wood craftsmen in New England was born in the nineteen-fifties outside Boston, appropriately, historic home of many spindle turners and chair caners, lumber joiners and paint-stainers. His most vivid memories of the period involve his grandmother’s house in Cambridge, including the smell of cabbage from her tenants boiling dinner in their kitchenettes. After his parents’ marriage and his birth, the family lived on the first floor of her house for several years before moving further out of town. Unbelievably, even though he would have been only around two years old at the time, he remembers the fancy wallpaper that was still in the room and all the original woodwork having been painted white from earlier owners who had tried to un-Victorianize the old house.

Throughout his childhood he would frequently visit his grandmother’s house, and he can describe the layout of the place even though he was less than eight years old at the time. The structure was a late nineteenth century three-storey, mansard-roofed tenement building that was originally a single-family home with a carriage shed. The second floor consisted of three great rooms with double doors that his grandmother shared with tenants. His father had built a wall to make a little room four feet wide between two big rooms to function as a kitchenette for one of the tenants. The room he stayed in as a boy on the third floor was only large enough to accommodate a three-foot wide bed, an armoire, and a chair. He understood at the time that the room’s small size corresponded to the layout of the bathroom below and that the diminished ceiling was caused by the pitch of the mansard roof above. He claims to be able to draw the entire house from memory to this day. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

As the days get longer and warmer and more humid, and the early spring flowers start to bloom, and the flowering trees show their finest… there’s an anticipation in the air…Then suddenly one morning you hear it—the birdsong is back. After a winter of silence you can now hear the birds. The migratory birds are returning from the south.

The towns that lie at the southern end of Lake Michigan have a special significance for migratory birds, because we are along the main flyway. As the migratory birds fly north they come upon a large body of water they must cross—lake Michigan. Tired of flying almost non-stop, eating insects that they catch on the wing, avoiding predators, they stop. They stop at an area with an abundance of trees, and they find wetlands, fields, gardens, and even birdfeeders remembered from last year. Refreshed, some resume flying around or over the lake headed to their ancestral homelands; others decide to remain in the area and breed. Because birds of the same species tend to move north at about the same time they arrive within a few days of each other. Because of the relatively large number of birds of the same species, finding a mate is straightforward.

This year I was fortunate to have several birdhouses and feeders under the eaves in front of the house, near a window where I generally sit and do my writing. I was able to follow the nesting and breeding behavior of several species of birds—the black-capped chickadee, the house sparrow, and the ruby-throated hummingbird. These birds are known as altricial birds, which are born blind and featherless, as are most of our songbirds. Other birds, such as fowl and waterbirds, fall into the precocial category: they are born with feathers and eyes open, and are independent and mobile a few days after hatching. I was interested in parental behavior and the division of labor between the sexes in caring for altricial birds, as they require a lot of care before they are able to live independently. Read more »

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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