by Mary Hrovat

Nature has filled the world with “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” in the words of Charles Darwin. We humans, faced with this abundance and variety of creatures, have used our imagination to the full in giving them descriptive and often evocative names. Some animal names are fairly straightforward; the name big hairy armadillo lacks nuance, although it makes up in charm what it lacks in subtlety. In other cases, though, we’ve come up with epithets that would make a poet proud: the tawny-crowned greenlet, the sharp-shinned hawk, the pricklenape lizards.

Creativity comes into play even in simple descriptions of size and shape. For example, a flat-shelled tortoise is called the pancake tortoise. The least auklet, with its doubly diminutive name, is the smallest auk species, and the smallest owl species is called the elf owl. The Barbados threadsnake (the smallest snake species) is roughly four inches long on average and about as wide as a thick strand of spaghetti. The bumblebee bat is also known as Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, one name reflecting its place as the smallest bat species, and the other describing the shape of its nose. The giant pocket gopher may sound oxymoronic, like jumbo shrimp, until you learn that it’s not somehow a gigantic gopher that fits in a pocket but a large gopher with cheek pouches that it uses to carry food. Read more »

Your Love’s Horizon is What I Want

by Muhammad Iqbal

Your love’s horizon is what I want
The simplicity of what I want

Let’s bestow heaven on the pious
Seeing you face to face is what I want

Promise me you’ll reveal yourself
Tease me. Test my patience. That’s what I want

I’m a small man with a playful heart
“You can’t behold,” is the command I want

Friends, I’m a guest in this gathering
Snuffed like a candle at dawn is not what I want

There, I’ve told our secret in public
I’ve no manners. Scold me. That’s what I want

Translated from the Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

by Jeroen Bouterse

“For many years now a division has been established in our universities between the sciences and the humanities. This division is probably more absolute now than it has ever been before.”[1] Thus complains, in 1946, the British Marxist scientist John Desmond Bernal.

It is a worry that seems to anticipate C.P. Snow’s later cri de coeur about the ‘two cultures’. Indeed, the two scientists knew and respected each other; Snow called Bernal “quite obviously and with no fuss about it, a great man”.[2] More interesting than the question of priority, however, is the question why Bernal made this observation when he did, and with this sense of urgency.

Bernal was a radically left-wing thinker, especially interested in the role science could play in social progress. In his twenties, he wondered whether scientists should take a leading role in a progressive society or whether such leadership would not always come at the risk of class distinction – the risk that scientists would, in the end, be loyal to ‘science’ itself, instead of to humanity.

For such a class-conscious thinker, Marxism provided a fitting intellectual home; and indeed, when a Russian delegation led by Nikolai Bukharin visited London in 1931 to participate in an international conference on history of science, Bernal was favorably impressed by the ideologically Marxist perspective it provided on science. “Is it better”, he wondered in a review, “to be intellectually free but socially totally ineffective or to become part of a system where knowledge and action are joined for one common purpose?”[3]

Bernal would not be the only left-wing thinker of his time to see the Soviet Union as a shining example, offering a better response to economic crises than capitalism ever could. Read more »

by Joshua Wilbur

The Palio di Siena is a gorgeous paradox, a horse race with practically no rules in a city enamored with ritual.

Representatives from the contrade, or neighborhoods, of Siena, Italy have competed in this unique spectacle since the 17th Century. Twice a summer, first in July and again in August, Tuscans and tourists gather in the stifling heat to watch a ten-horse, three-lap sprint lasting no longer than two minutes.

More than a race, Il Palio (“the prize”) is an expression of its people, an exercise in uninhibited passion, remnant barbarism, group solidarity, and shameless corruption. I’m fortunate to have extended family— cousins, cugini—who live in a village just outside of Siena. Last week, with my cousins as guides, I experienced the Palio for the first time. 

On the day of the Palio, our group of family and friends (an even mix of Americans and Italians, plus a Canadian and a Cypriot) headed to the Piazza del Campo, where the race is held. Il Campo (“the field”) is one of the most impressive “squares” in Italy— in part because it’s a large, imperfect circle. The race rumbles along the piazza’s edge, past shops and restaurants obscured, for a few days, by wooden bleachers. A dense layer of clay, sand, and tuff is laid over the uneven brick sidewalk, protecting horses and riders from even worse potential injury. Read more »

Burnet moth on flowers on my balcony in July of 2018.

by Gabrielle C. Durham

Whether we’re glancing through a play from high school before donating it or wandering through an antique shop, sometimes we see a word that doesn’t look quite right. Sometimes, misspelled words are a result of advertising campaigns, and other times they are alternate spellings in English. We all know English has some demented rules of orthography (even the word “orthography” can inspire chuckles; “proper writing” in English? Is that a joke?). You’re not alone if you have to remind yourself about “i before e except after c” and its numerous exceptions.

I was thinking about words that may or may not have been commonly used in writing or speech at some point, but more typically now receive a raised eyebrow. It very well may be that you are on a one-person campaign to keep “erstwhile” thriving in the vernacular, and good on you, mate. It may be a little lonely, though. “Erstwhile” has meaning as an adverb meaning formerly and as an adjective, it means one-time or previous, as in an erstwhile partner. This coinage goes back to the 16^th century, but its two parts originated centuries earlier. Has it had a good run? Should it be up for retirement now? It does seem to maintain a legalistic meaning, so maybe the old boy retains some vital essence.

A related word that makes me smile is “umquhile,” also meaning previous or former, usually when talking about someone who has died. Its roots are Scottish, which has pronunciation conventions that continue to elude me. Chances are, no one has any idea what you are writing about if you use this delightful peacock of a word. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

In a few more months I’ll be teaching my course in the history of 20th century analytic philosophy. In that course we begin with Frege and Russell and end with topics covered in the 1980s and ’90s that interest the students. This means that the course covers a wide range of subject areas in philosophy. We begin with philosophy of language, but we can conclude the semester with political philosophy or analytic feminism or the metaphysics of race.

Because of the richness of analytic philosophy in the 20th century, there is of course no way that a one-semester undergraduate course could cover its entire scope comprehensively. This is particularly true if the instructor has the goal of not just doing intellectual history, but actually doing philosophy: formulating the arguments that philosophers gave for their positions and evaluating those arguments.

So one of the challenges of teaching a course like this is striking a balance between covering of some of the major discussions and movements in 20th century analytic philosophy and providing opportunities for students actually to engage with the arguments that make 20th century analytic philosophy so rich.

Another challenge with which I’ve wrestled is what to do about some of the flawed people who create beautiful philosophical arguments. With the rise of the #metoo movement, this challenge is one that has assumed a new urgency. But the challenge is actually not a new one. Consider, for example, the case of Frege, one of the giants of late-19th century philosophy who is now widely regarded as one of the forefathers of 20th century analytic philosophy. Read more »

Flight From Gravity

…………… a story, a poem
a recollection of 77 summer solstices
bundled into a single thought of when
a young carpenter with muscles, sweating,
carries a 2 by 10 joist from lumber pile to house,
its skeleton being assembled in the sun,
a thought that segues into a later solstice
down the line, along the way,
a solstice of love and its making,
a tale with math & science thrown in:
physics, geometry, stuff he’d read somewhere,
picked up, stuff that fits and shifts,
some good
……………..and not so—

flight from gravity
.
Jim Culleny
5/13/19

by Shawn Crawford

C.S. Lewis, the Evangelical icon who would be thoroughly nauseated by Evangelicals, once wrote we should not kid ourselves into believing the Reformation had anything to do with religious freedom. Once he escaped the stake, John Calvin had no problem watching Michael Servetus burn. Although he did ask for a beheading instead. Full of tender, predestined mercies was Calvin. The Reformation makes much more sense when viewed as a political and theological battle over who gets to light the matches.

But for true clarity, we must of course turn to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When the crowd wants to burn a woman as a witch (“She turned me into a newt. I got better.”), the question never arises as to the legitimacy of burning witches or even their existence but whether the mob’s superstition or Sir Bedivere’s “science” (If she weighs the same as a duck, she’s made of wood, and therefore a witch) should determine the case. The lighting of matches gets turned into a question of process; let’s make sure we’re burning people for the right reasons.

Both situations, one historical and one fanciful, existed because a worldview, that certain sins (heresy, witchcraft) must be eliminated through the death of the transgressors, had triumphed and stood beyond question. Only later would a debate arise as to whether we should be killing people over matters of faith and religion. That debate continues in certain cultures. Read more »

Sughra Raza. For Pride’s Sake. January 2017, Guangzho.

Digital photograph.

by Abigail Akavia

Short Talk on Why Some People Find Trains Exciting / Anne Carson

It is the names Northland Sante Fe Nickle Plate Line Delta Jump Dayliner Heartland Favourite Taj Express it is the long lit windows the plush seats the smokers the sleeping cars the platform questions the French woman watching me from across the aisle you never know the little lights that snap on overhead the noctilucal areas the cheekwary page turning of course I have a loyal one at home it is the blue trainyards the red switch lights the unopened chocolate bar the curious rumpled little ankle socks speeding up to 130 kilometres per hour black trees crowding by bridges racketing past the reading glasses make her look like Racine or Baudelaire je ne sais plus lequel stuffing their shadows into her mouth qui sait même qui sait.

I have been married for ten years this week. 

We check online and learn together that the traditional material for tenth anniversary gifts is tin. This keeps us entertained for a while, cracking jokes about our marriage as a rusty tin can. Our average age is forty, far from officially old, but officially not-young. The morning of our anniversary goes up in prosaic flames of frustration, as we try—mostly fail—to contain the screams of a three-and-a-half year old who has been offered his breakfast muesli in the panda-bear-bowl instead of the cloud-bowl; whose commandment “the dinosaur t-shirt” was misinterpreted to mean the black shirt with the white dinos instead of the other way around (white shirt, black dinos). Ritual morning miscommunications like the itch on a leg covered with a dozen two-day old mosquito bites.

Almost fourteen years ago, you went to Germany for a year of studies. The summer before the academic year started, we traveled together in Europe. My mother was not ready to have her youngest daughter away for so long with a man she—my mother, that is, but she probably thought I also—didn’t really know that well. And so I found myself playing the age-old part, shouting at her “I am going to marry this man” with the conviction of a young person unaware of how young (and ridiculously archetypal) she sounds, years before you and I actually talked about marriage. But your mother was with us at the airport saying goodbye, because you were leaving for longer than just the summer.  Read more »

by Amanda Beth Peery

MOTEL IN AN OASIS TOWN

Jungle-blooms unfold shiveringly
out of sun-baked stretches and creases in the streets
where round-hipped women wear second-hand silk dresses
over bodies that have been
worn and worn again.

In the motel, we leave handprints
griming the glass behind factory-weave curtains.
We leave handprints just to leave something
like roamers heading to another country
where I’ve heard the land
is so open it can make a man
soul-sick for a horse.

If we try to walk there, we’ll fall into the swarm of blossoms
tripped by thin tendrils of roots unfurling
before we even reach the edge of town.

If we know just one just god
one cruel god, we too will be worn down
in this rented room with its two bibles beside
a TV remote with rubbed-off buttons
in a broth of stale-conditioned air.

Where the cold knifes in below our collarbones at night
long after the whiskey that’s half melted ice
by the leaf-strewn pool on Friday afternoon—
where the proprietress rasps can you hear the beasts out back—
yowling with pity—

and a guest says, don’t I look like something
in this dress—don’t I feel a new life
churning in me, like a brand new galaxy
where blue stars are sparking up in clusters, even as we speak.
And can you hear the animals out back—howling with glee.
While the jungle blooms unfounded, blooms outward into the desert—

by Emrys Westacott

When I studied philosophy as an undergraduate in the UK in the late seventies, Nietzsche was pretty much off limits. None of his texts were included on any of the course syllabi. We devoted an entire term to Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, but not even during a year-long course on Phenomenology and Existentialism was Nietzsche so much as mentioned. Such was the analytic insularity of academic philosophy in Britain at the time.

Things have changed since then. Today, in any book store with a genuine philosophy section, the shelf space occupied by books by or about Nietzsche is likely to be greater than that devoted to any other thinker. There are now reliable English translations of all his published works along with his notebooks and letters. And philosophy students will usually have many more opportunities to encounter his texts in the course of their studies.

Exactly why Nietzsche’s star has risen so high over the last few decades is a complex question. Many factors could be cited. His notorious association with Nazism was shown (by Walter Kaufmann and others) to be largely based on a misrepresentation. His seminal ideas about morality, religion, human nature, art, culture, truth and knowledge increasingly seemed to chime with the times. A broadening conception of philosophy within academic departments made room for a writer who had previously attracted the attention of literati rather than philosophers.

But more important than these, I believe, are three further reasons. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Photo taken while walking with Robin Varghese near Prospect Park in Brooklyn in May of 2015.

by Eric Miller

There is no hope for me but poetry. —Rafaël Newman

1. Toronto in the Seventies was still a filthy city. I was a teen then and because I dropped out of school I got to know the city very well at all hours and in all weathers. I would walk the day into the ground looking at buildings, birds and people. Sometimes I would stop to sketch one of these sights. Charcoal and India ink suited Toronto. Any picture blurred or ran right into its subject matter: grimy, monochromatic. What was my mistake and what was a demonstrable aspect of the scene was materially indistinguishable. When I stood still flakes of ash could be perceived falling at leisure from the sky. Seeping lake freighters corroded lengthwise alongside cracked concrete quays. Guano was caked deep under the Gardiner Expressway as on any Funk Island. I routinely got so tired I couldn’t worry about the future. Every pedestrian knows that the future can be outwalked quite easily on a daily basis. Anxiety does not have much stamina really. I was charitable enough to decant it regular cups of black coffee, but this beverage availed my happiness as much as my misgiving. I worked in the evenings. I was solitary to a degree retrospection finds shocking.

Despite the dirt, it remained a city filled with birds. Chimney swifts twitched, tacked to and fro, chattered, crowded their crescent flocks into the stems of old smoke stacks. Nighthawks stooped on café terraces with grimy, precipitous, monochromatic glamour: Torontonians by plumage, by nature. Their voices were mistakable for traffic sounds. Yet in ancient oaks and beeches, peewees and orioles, and even vireos, sang. Downtown ravines then hosted nesting wood thrushes, as they no longer do. Sometimes my family went netting smelt halfway between the harbour and the beaches. Night herons and bank swallows pursued their respective repertoires (static, antic) where nightfall anglers kindled red and saffron fires in black oil barrels. Gulls bawled like chickens educated in tragic theatre.

Just as I was dropping out of Jarvis Collegiate, I met a nervous person resettled from Vancouver, Rafaël Newman. Read more »

by Jessica Collins

The basic details of the story are known to almost everyone: a Malaysian Airlines flight simply disappeared one night in March 2014 and, more than five years later, the plane has still not been found.

An article by William Langewiesche in the July 2019 edition of The Atlantic revives the theory that the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 was a murder-suicide carried out by the pilot in command: Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

I’m not convinced, but then I’ll admit I’m not sure what to believe. I’m not an aviation expert, but I am a professional epistemologist, and it seems to me that the disappearance of flight MH370 is a fascinating practical case study in the evaluation of publicly available evidence and the assessment of rival theories. Many stories have been told about what happened to MH370, and some of them involve fairly wild conspiracy theories. Here I would simply like to weigh the pros and cons of Langewiesche’s account by comparing it to one of the other plausible competing accounts. It seems to me that there are problems facing both stories.

Let’s start with some more of the known facts.

At 12:42 a.m. on the Saturday morning of March 8 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, a Boeing 777, took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport bound for Beijing. At 1:19 a.m., just as the plane was about to enter Vietnamese airspace, the pilot-in-charge, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, signed off to Malaysian ground control with the words “Good night, Malaysian three-seven-zero”. That was the final radio transmission received from the aircraft. At 1:21 a.m. the last secondary radar signal was transmitted by the plane’s transponder, at which point the transponder either failed or was switched off. Read more »

by Holly A. Case

On Sunday, May 17, 2015, there was a Lutheran church service in Delmont, South Dakota. Just one. A week earlier—on Mother’s Day—there had been two, one at Hope Lutheran, another at Zion Lutheran. At around 10:45 that morning, during Sunday school at Zion Lutheran, a tornado had ripped through the town, taking out 40 homes and sucking the roof off of Zion Lutheran. A woman later told us there was a pipe organ “trapped” inside, as if it was a living victim of the storm.

Nine people were injured; no one was killed. “We have four solid blocks of nothing,” said Delmont’s mayor in an interview with a journalist a few days later.

Delmont was a town of roughly two hundred inhabitants pre-tornado. It has fewer than half that now. Sixty maybe. A week after the tornado, I and some of my family went to the Sunday service at Hope Lutheran. We figured most of the town would be gathered there since pretty much all of Delmont was Lutheran. We also presumed the differences between Lutherans to be insignificant. Read more »