by Thomas R. Wells

Academics have a privileged epistemic position in society. They deserve to be listened to, their claims believed, and their recommendations considered seriously. What they say about their subject of expertise is more likely to be true than what anyone else has to say about it.

Unfortunately, some academics believe they have a right – or even a duty – to use their privileged position to shape society in the right way. They join organisations and campaign systematically for specific laws, policies, and political candidates. They tell their students who to vote for and help them organise protest marches. They launch boycotts of companies and countries they disapprove of.

Such activism is an abuse of academics’ privileged status that undermines the respect that academic expertise should command and the functioning of academia itself.

I

Academics’ expertise derives from their membership of specialized epistemic communities (what I have elsewhere called ‘truth machines‘) that develop methods to investigate particular issues or features of how the world works, whether that be the effects of international migration on labour markets or the geo-physics of climate change. The outcome of this is not that academics are guaranteed to be correct (just look at the history of science). It is that they have access to the best understanding of the topic that those people in the world most dedicated and able to investigate it have yet managed to figure out. Read more »

by Michael Liss

The day before Thanksgiving I got this wonderfully understated text from a close friend:

A ???? ate our ???? last night. (I forgot it on the patio while it was brining.)

There is a lot that’s packed in there. He followed it up with a picture of the now-overturned and empty brining vessel, and a quite stunning shot of bear tracks in the snow leading away from the patio. Unless a local who knew of his remarkable culinary skill with fowl decided to approach the house wearing bear-claw flip-flops (to throw him off the scent, as it were), there was definitely a visitation from a neighborhood ursus americanus.

Fortunately, he resides in a rather bucolic part of a rather bucolic college town, which enables him and his family to live a bucolic life…, but they have access to several Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and similar establishments when these unexpected encounters occur. The turkey in question was, in absentia, bid a respectful adieu, and quickly and calmly replaced. My friend happens to be unflappable. I, on the other hand, am more urban, and have more flap about these kind of things, so I asked a follow-up question. As the brined bird and the bear claw were really close to the back door, was he prepared to exercise his 2nd Amendment rights, if hearth and home were threatened. I’ll leave the answer to that one to the imagination.

Wild game and guns, a perfect lead-in to the Midterms and the Whole Foods-Cracker Barrel Old Country Store split that pollsters identified. Cracker Barrel has exactly one location in each of Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, two in Connecticut, eight in Massachusetts (take that, Michael Dukakis), and none in Vermont. By contrast, it has 39 in West Virginia, with nary a Whole Foods in sight.  In January (numbers from Dave Wasserman, the U.S. House Editor of the non-partisan Cook Political Report), House Democrats will represent 78% of Whole Foods communities and 27% of Cracker Barrel ones. Apparently, my people are better with organic duck breast pate than chicken-fried steak.

OK, I’ve had my fun, so let’s get down to the actual meal. There were a couple of bumps (like the Senate), but, on the whole, the Democrats did quite well in November—at current count, they flipped a net 40 Congressional Districts, 400+ State legislators, 7 Governors, and an assorted contingent of State Treasurers, Secretaries of State, Commissioners and other sub-luminaries. Read more »

by Robert Fay

Near the end of Italy’s greatest 20^th century novel, The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, the elderly Prince Salinas is slumped in an armchair on a Sicilian hotel balcony looking at Mounte Pelligrino. The Prince knows he’s dying, but even more poignantly, he understands centuries of Salinas aristocratic mores and traditions will soon die with him. It is 1881 and a unified, republican Italy has recently displaced the monarchial customs and feudal relationships of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Prince has witnessed the complete collapse of his world within two decades. And though he has an heir, his grandson Fabrizietto, the boy is “odious” and incapable  of protecting the sacred Salinas patrimony. He is a product of this new, republican age, “with his good-time instincts, with his tendency to middle-class chic.”

Lampedusa’s narrator describes the Prince’s loss this way: “for the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories. And (the Prince) was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from other families. Fabrizietto would have only banal ones like his schoolfellows, of snacks, of spiteful little jokes against teachers…”

Trying to elicit sympathy for elites is generally a fool’s errand, but Lampedusa is such a master, that any unprejudiced reader of The Leopard will surely be moved by the enormous humanity of the Prince. He is undoubtedly a snob, but his snobbery is like the egoism of a fighter pilot or the boastful pride of a mother, which is to say, it is in inseparable from their mission, their vocation. The power of this portrayal undoubtedly stems from the personal pain and loss in Lampedusa’s own life. He was born in 1896 to an aristocratic family and in 1943 his beloved family estate in Palermo—the seat of the Lampedusa family for centuries—was destroyed by U.S. Army Air Corps bombers during World War II. It was a loss that Lampedusa could never reconcile himself to. He had believed he’d die in that house, just as all ancestors had.

There is an echo of Lampadusa’s fate in the life of fellow aristocrat and novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who lost his ancestral estate(s) in Russia to war and politics. The Nabokovs had roots dating back to a 14^th Century Tartar prince, but the cadres of the Bolshevik Revolution cut those ties in 1918, seizing the family’s properties and forcing them into exile. Nabokov never got over this loss. In a 1964 interview with Playboy he explained why he’d never bought a house in America, despite being a resident for 20 years, “…the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me. I would never manage to match my memories correctly—so why trouble with hopeless approximations?” Read more »

Rose in Winter

…… —for my mother, Mary Mraz Culleny,
……… b. December 8, 1917
.

a cathedral steeple’s being launched,
snow swirls around its nave

so much stone to be sent aloft
on the tiny spark of a solitary rose

so much weight to be thrust into something other
by the flame of a delicate rose

from cold to colder it ascends
by the blaze of a redhot dot of life
on a stem

from breath to unbreath it’ll rise
by the spit fire of a steadfast
solitary rose
.

Jim Culleny
12/09/18
Photograph by Abbas Raza

by Richard Passov

Our uniform was a shirt tucked into jeans. Sandi stretched the smallest size over well-proportioned breasts, her black bra peeking through a run of buttons. Mine hung long in the sleeves and fell over my waist.

I was trying to work my way through college in the kitchen of a teaching hospital on the campus where the ARPANET, precursor to the internet, was sending single word messages between the five nodes across the country capable of receiving messages. I was also trying to stay away from drugs. But when Sandi, in tight jeans, smiled over her shoulder, I chose to follow.

“You cool, right?” she asked.

We went through the seating area, out the front door, around to the right, into a curve in the architecture where some thoughtful gardener had planted the rose bushes that Sandi used as a shield. “Here,” she said, after taking a hit from a joint.

The dope tasted like street dirt I had undercut in South Central. A soft weight came over me. My host brought her palms together then shimmied to silent music.

When she stopped and looked past me, I turned to see a young black man with a small head wearing a ribbed wife beater over beady muscles. His colors, stuffed into a back pocket, crept around his leg.

“Hey Pea,” she said walking to him. “You know I like it when you come see me while I working.” Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

The gap between the gravity of climate change and the average person’s ability to mitigate the crisis is utterly dispiriting. If individual action is required, we feel powerless because it defies logic that using a gallon of hot water plus soap to prepare a mayonnaise jar for the recycling bin will save the planet. If government action is required, we feel powerless because most governments are either falling short, or in the case of the United States, actively denying that there is a problem. It is enough to cause climate-change burnout.

I recently attended a talk given by the head of a local environmental group on the connection between people’s diets, especially the consumption of animal products, and climate change. The current situation is irrational when you consider sheer numbers. In the relatively near future, considering the planet is projected to hold 10 billion people by 2050, it won’t be a question of whether we can continue to eat this way, but to what degree we will have to cut back on animal products. At this time almost half of Earth’s land surface is occupied by the industrial livestock system. Cows, chickens, and their ilk require a huge amount of food and a surprising amount of water when you factor in cleaning their dwellings and disinfecting equipment. Instead of feeding humans directly, we feed a large portion of what we grow to animals to fatten them up. Immense amounts of water and fertilizer are used to grow grain to feed animals. Twenty billion food animals certainly do eat and drink a lot, and make a huge mess besides. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Sometime in 1993 Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, known as IZ to his many fans, calls his producer at 2AM and sets up a recording session ASAP. He records a handful of tunes, just his voice and ukulele, one tune after the other, all single takes, and goes home. One of those takes was a medley that inserted “What a Wonderful World” into “Over the Rainbow.” The medley was issued on Kamakawiwo’ole’s 1993 CD, Facing Future. In 1998 the medley was on the soundtrack of Meet Joe Black. In 2005 Facing Future went platinum (1 million or more units sold), the first Hawaiian album to do so. (Record label site for Kamakawiwo’ole.)

In this post I want to take a look at that medley and its subsequent history. The two songs in the medley are standards – a term of art in discussing pop music of the Big Band era and more recent music of that kind. Judy Garland recorded “Rainbow” for The Wizard of Oz at the height of the big band era, 1938. It became an instant hit and has been recorded hundreds of times. Armstrong recorded “Wonderful” in 1967, when big bands had been thoroughly eclipsed by rock and roll. It became a hit in the UK, but not in the USA. Armstrong’s recording got a second chance when it was used on the soundtrack of Good Morning, Vietnam in 1987. Though not the first, Kamakawiwo’ole’s cover of the song was one of the earliest.

Read more »

by Bill Murray

In the middle of the night of March 24, 1992, a pressure seal failed in the number three unit of the Leningradskaya Nuclear Power Plant at Sosnoviy Bor, Russia, releasing radioactive gases. With a friend, I had train tickets from Tallinn, in newly independent Estonia, to St. Petersburg the next day. That would take us within twenty kilometers of the plant. The legacy of Soviet management at Chernobyl a few years before set up a fraught decision whether or not to take the train.

Monitoring stations in Finland detected higher than normal readings. The level of iodine-131 at Lovisa, Finland, just across the gulf, was 1,000 times higher than before the accident, according to the German Institute for Applied Ecology.

Russian authorities reported the accident in the media, and I think they felt self-satisfied for doing it, but Russian credibility had burned down with Chernobyl’s reactor 4. Any more, people thought the Soviets, as Seymour Hersh said about Henry Kissinger, lied like other people breathe. And as usual, solid information was hard to come by.

A news agency in St. Petersburg reported increased radiation, and the Swedish news reported panic in St. Petersburg. A lady in Tallinn that day told me her mother had called from St. Petersburg and they were closing the schools and sending children home to stay indoors. The Finnish Prime Minister fussed that seven hours passed before the Russians told him. It was frightening.

No one believed the plant spokesman when he said on TV, hey (big Soviet smile), no problem. No one trusted the Russians. Read more »

by Timothy Don

I met Rene Magritte a few weeks ago at the Starline Social Club in Oakland. A surprisingly jolly fellow, it turns out he’s working these days as a pedicab driver in San Francisco. Surrealism isn’t my jam, but when he offered me a pickup the next morning at the BART and mushrooms and tickets for two to the retrospective of his work at SFMoMA, well—I had to accept.

There are many things one could say about the SFMoMA. It’s massive, it’s powerful, and it’s complicated. I have a sneaking suspicion that it operates as a kind of Leviathan in the Bay Area that sucks aesthetic energy into its great maw, gobbling up the local, less well-endowed swimmers and forcing an evacuation of the surrounding area that threatens to leave the gallery and studio scene like a bleached-out coral reef bereft of any but the largest predators. The regular reports of artists fleeing the Bay Area and moving to Los Angeles would seem to bear this out, as would the wriggling, lamprey-like presence of a Gagosian outpost since 2016 across the street.

That said, the collection SFMoMA contains is nothing short of incredible. Bracketing for the time being the delicious irony of the Fisher holdings—one of the world’s most extensive collections of post-war and contemporary art, a collection of some of the most sublime works of 20^th century art, built from a fortune made by erasing the distinction between high and low culture (The Gap), valued at well over a billion dollars—visiting SFMoMA is an eye-widening, jaw-dropping experience. It has everything, all of it, and it is informed by a profound and generous curatorial intelligence. Each visit promises new understandings, a renewed interest in old favorites (“Here’s a room full of Paul Klee!”), and a reminder of what art and artists can do: the limitless reach of human creativity. It doesn’t engage in easy juxtapositions or cheap didactics. It just quietly and seductively invites you to join the conversation. There are some very smart people working there.

The Magritte exhibit was proof of that. It was exquisitely curated. But whether it was because I didn’t eat the mushrooms or because surrealism is a movement that appeared during the hour when the sun casts its shortest shadow, I found the curatorial effort behind the exhibit more compelling than the work itself. Sorry, but I was underwhelmed. Magritte (for my taste) is neither creepy enough, nor playful enough, nor philosophical enough to warrant bathing with. Spending that much time with that much of his work was a lesson in the limits of puns and dreams. There’s a reason that it appeals to children, and we are not living in child-like times. These are ugly, impoverished times. Wounded times. Magritte doesn’t help us negotiate them. So at the end of it, I went in search of some art that would explode in my face or deepen my emotions or fill me with awe. Give me some Kara Walker, please, or some William Kentridge. Like I said, SFMoMA has it all. Finally, I found myself looking at a bunch of paintings by Philip Guston. Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Popular political commentary from across the spectrum is replete with warnings social about “bubbles,” “silos,” and “echo chambers.” These are said to produce “closure,” “groupthink,” and an “alternate reality.” In turn, these forces result in the dysfunction of polarization, a condition where political officials and ordinary citizens are so deeply divided that there is no basis for compromise or even productive communication among them.

That polarization is politically dysfunctional might seem obvious. Where polarization prevails, the ground for compromise recedes, and so politics becomes a series of standoffs and bottlenecks. Yet politics still needs to get done. Hence democracy devolves into a numbers game of modus vivendi truces and strained compromises, resembling nothing like self-government among social equals.

In order to know what to do about polarization, we need a more precise view of what it is. It is helpful to distinguish (as we have elsewhere) between two different kinds of polarization: political polarization and belief polarization. The former refers to various ways of measuring the distance between political rivals. This distance can be conceived in terms of policy and platform divides or else in terms of inter-party antipathy. But in either case, where political polarization prevails, the common ground among politically opposed parties falls out, resulting in political deadlock. The latter, belief polarization, refers to a phenomenon to which we are all subject by which interactions with like-minded others transforms us into more extreme versions of ourselves. Read more »

by Amanda Beth Peery

There’s a door behind her ear—or
really in the fold
where the ear meets the skull
where a down of short brown hairs
nestles up to her ear-cup, the door
sometimes burns
and she drags one long fingernail
deep along the crease like an animal
scratching itself with a claw
to quiet whoever it is
who lives there—
she’s pretty sure it’s a door
but it could be a wall.

* * *

Here you have the ear parade
the hearing party
the masquerade
of ears that meet by the waterfront
under the train bridge where the waves
are at their reckless loudest—all
cloaked in deep fur muffs
or decorated with a little pretty lace
hanging from a hat
or jeweled with a flesh-tone hearing aid
like a prehistoric statue.

by Tim Sommers

I recently rewatched “12 Angry Men” with The Philosophy Club at the University of Iowa as part of their “Owl of Minerva” film series. The 1957 film has the late, great Henry Fonda as the lone holdout on a jury ready to convict a poor, abused 18-year-old boy for allegedly stabbing his father to death. Over one long, tense evening (shown in something close to real-time), juror #8 – none of the jurors are identified by name, only number – forces the rest of the jury to methodically reexamined the evidence. It’s not a courtroom drama, it’s a jury-room drama in which only 3 of 1:36 minutes of running time take place outside the sweaty, claustrophobic jury room. The film is intense, moving, and effective. Afterwards, I made the following remarks.

The number of jurors – the “12”, as they are starkly described in the 2007 Russian remake of “12 Angry Men” – is not entirely random. We have the Marquis de Condorcet, at least in part, to thank for that number. Condorcet was a moderate democrat during the French Revolution. He advocated universal suffrage and was an early advocate of universal primary education. He went into hiding after voting against the death penalty for Louis XVI, but was captured and died in his cell nine months later. Ironically, his warders had lost track of who he was by the time he died and he was identified only by the copy of Horace’s “Epistles” he had been carrying when he was arrested.

Condorcet had studied juries and concluded that, under the right circumstance juries and, by extension voting, is an extremely effective procedure for getting right answers. This was a consequence of his famous “Jury Theorem”. I won’t rehearse the mathematics here. But on an issue with two alternatives, where the decision is made independently by each participant, where there is also an objectively right decision, and each decision-maker has a greater than 50% chance of making that right decision a group of 5 or more people have a high likelihood of making the correct decision, a group of 12 has a higher likelihood of giving the correct verdict, and a group of a 1000 or more is nearly certain – out to several decimal places certain – to make the right call. In other words, if we think of a jury as a kind of procedure to determine the truth of a question, the more the better, but 12 makes a solid, practicable number. Read more »