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 »

by Niall Chithelen

It’s getting colder now in Beijing, and I can’t help but feel for the clothing left outside to dry. They had to hang through the night and on through the weak sunrise, doing their best to catch the wind before the temperature drops again. How do they feel being out there for passers-by to see, all exposed, caught up in the dust and very small toxic particles?

I wonder if they catch cold when the temperature drops and they’re still damp. They might huddle together for warmth, but then they’d have to stay out longer, and no one wants that. Is it wrong to forget about them, or retrieve them late, only when it is convenient? Not for the fabric—which I have no idea about—but, you know, morally. They’ll survive, sure, but maybe they deserve better.

by Nickolas Calabrese

A few months back my boss and I had lunch with the person who, wearing a t-shirt that read “black death spectacle”, stood in protest in front of a painting of Emmett Till by Dana Schutz called Open Casket at the last Whitney Biennial. Shortly after his gesture another artist penned an open letter about how Schutz’s painting uses “black pain” as a medium, and how this use by non-Black artists needs to go. I’m not sure what the ethical verdict is (of whether or not Schutz made a gravely racist error), or whether the artist’s letter voiced an instance of over-reaching aesthetic censorship, nor will I make any attempt at trying to resolve that issue here; it would take far more space than what is available and is not my aim. Consider reading Aruna D’Souza’s recent book Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts for a thorough treatment (which, not so incidentally, the above mentioned protestor provided images for).

What I am interested in, however, is the broader idea of pain as a medium. That pain can be an aestheticized form is completely fascinating, and yet it has been employed since at least the Bible. We’re talking here about both physical and mental pains. How does one explain the benefits of painful aesthetics – of horror, of discomfort, of terror, of anything undesirable in real life; generally speaking, of pain – if pain is intrinsically undesirable for most people? Well I understand pain to be valuable as a tool for education and experience because pain, more than pleasure, has the tendency to traumatize the people who suffer it. In other words, it makes a lasting impression. Pleasure leaves an impression too, but it doesn’t traumatize, and that seems relevant to this discussion. Read more »

by Lexi Lerner

“All the greatest hits from the past forty years have the same four chords,” Axis of Awesome taught us a decade ago. “You can take those four chords, repeat them, and pump out every pop song ever.”

The band has since released multiple versions of its famous four chord medley, cataloguing more than 80 chart-toppers that follow pretty much the exact same structure. Amongst them: “Let It Be” by the Beatles, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” by Elton John, and “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

While they may have lifted the veil for some lay listeners, Axis of Awesome did not invent the music theory behind the four chord song. In fact, that progression has served as the backbone of popular music since the thirties, and its prevalence has only increased with time.

Recall such recent four chorders as “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi with Daddy Yankee, “Edge of Glory” by Lady Gaga, “Someone Like You” by Adele, “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” by Taylor Swift. Roll your eyes if you must, but these were seminal to the Billboard Top 100 when they came out. The trend has its fingers in far more pies than just pop music; there are four chord songs as indie folk as “The Sounds of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel, and “Lying to You” by Keaton Henson.

Music wasn’t always like this; Brahms and Wagner and Strauss would all sob at what earns airplay these days. So when the permutations, instrumentation, length, and knowledge of music are more boundless than ever, why do we settle for the same four chords? And if most songs are built on that, what makes certain ones destined for mixtapes and wedding dances and long car rides and summer soundtracks? Why do we consider anything to be special? Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

Ever since my childhood I have been excited, even electrified, by movies. In my college days in Calcutta, in search of alternate experience beyond Indian and Hollywood movies, I used to frequent the local Film Society events, showing some commercially unavailable European fare. Short of funds these Film Society outfits mainly went for movies they could procure at low cost. The East European consulates in the city were particularly generous in making available films from their countries.

Most of them involved grim, but occasionally gripping, stories of life struggles under Nazi occupation and oppression, laced with heart-warming episodes of small triumphs or tragic acts of heroism. It was only much later that I realized that some of these stories were also muffled and indirect protests of the directors against the then Soviet domination in their countries. This was the case, for example, in some of the films of the great Polish director, Andrzej Wajda (whose early films like Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds I had seen several times in Calcutta). His father was among the thousands of Polish officers killed in Katyn forest by Stalin’s secret police in 1940. (Wajda finally made a film about the Katyn massacre much later in his life, when he was in his 80s).

After Calcutta, when I went to Cambridge, England, as a student, for the first time I was exposed to what can be called an ‘abundanza’ of European art films. To borrow the words of the Irish writer John Banville, for me it was an “opulent pleasure garden where I sipped and sucked, dazed as a bumblebee in full-blown summer” (Banville had used these words to describe his ecstatic exploration of his lover’s female body). A couple of movie halls in Cambridge used to specialize in arranging retrospectives of these art films. Read more »

by Adele A Wilby

Many decades ago, I packed my bags and left the shores of Australia and headed to the United Kingdom (UK). My secondary years of education had taught me to believe that my journey to the UK would amount to a ‘return’ to the ‘motherland’. A ‘return to the motherland’? Really? That says more about the education system I was exposed to, than just how naïve I was. However, having learned after my arrival that the UK was not, in fact, my ‘motherland’, I did discern that it had more to offer in terms of being ‘in’ the world than the distant shores of Australia, and I decided to stay. Thus, after many years resident in the UK, I considered myself as someone familiar with the country, until, that is, a change in my life circumstances provided me the opportunity to know the UK, or more specifically, England, in a totally different way.

Acting on the advice of a friend concerned with what he considered to be my solitary life following the death of my husband, I joined the Ramblers’ Association in the UK. Involvement with activities of the Ramblers didn’t last too long; group walking was not my thing. I did learn however, that walking was something I relished; it literally, put a spring in my step. The more regularly I walked the more the country opened up to me, an England loaded with complexity, diversity, mystery, and an alluring, limitless beauty: the English countryside.

In many ways, the countryside is how England can be: cold and aloof, requiring time to get to know; a place where one can feel a sojourner in its midst; a place where its nuances and secrets take time to understand. But it is too a place that tolerates your presence, and, as long as you remain respectful, it will allow you to saunter and relish the attributes that it has to offer, undisturbed and secure. That, to me, is fair enough; I don’t ask for more. I have no wish to disturb its existence, or indeed, undermine any aspect of its life.

The UK is exceptional for its network of public footways and bridleways; walking routes where ramblers are permitted to cross farmers’ property, to pass through private driveways and gardens and around farm buildings, if that is where the public right of way takes its direction. Read more »

by Gabrielle C. Durham

We can agree that a verb in the present tense means that action is occurring now. What about the present progressive, which I used in the previous statement? That apparently confounds non-native English speakers because it means that an action is in the middle of happening. Friends have asked me, “What is the difference between I am playing tennis and I play tennis?” That example is actually a softball because the present progressive indicates that the first person is in the middle of playing a game and the simple present indicates the playing of the sport in general.

This feeling of verbal instability perhaps approaches the bewilderment I still feel with some verbs in Russian when deciding whether to use perfect versus imperfect (honestly, not that common an occurrence, put play along with me, please). I understand when Misha went by train to Novgorod yesterday, no sweat. It’s when he ate a 3-day feast beforehand that I start getting itchy palms. Yes, the verb is in the perfect, or completed, past tense, but that piggish boy just kept engaging in the activity for 72 hours. Would you use the perfect or imperfect past? You could make a persuasive argument for either. According to the Oxford Dictionary, we can break this use of tense down to aspect, which would be either continuous or perfect.

So what does tense tell us? Verb tense refers to when a subject performed an activity (the verb). Easy, peasy, right? Not really if you start talking about other things that happened in relation to that time. That’s where pluperfects and subjunctives, among other infernal entities, come into play. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

Before the second was defined in terms of the characteristics of the cesium atom, before leap seconds or leap days or Julian dates or the Gregorian calendar, before clocks, even before the sundial and the hourglass, there were sunrise, sunset, and shadows.

I’ve been thinking about timekeeping using shadows because a tulip tree in my backyard casts a shadow that traces a semicircle over the lawn on sunny days and moonlit nights, like the hand of a clock. The shadow is longest and most noticeable at this time of year, when the sun crosses the sky low in the south, and on summer nights around full moon. (The full moon crosses the sky low in the south in the summer, when the sun is riding high in the north.) However, I can see it year-round, given adequate sunlight or moonlight, although its appearance varies depending on the position of the sun or moon. I enjoy seeing this subtle demonstration of daily and seasonal cycles.

The gnomon on a sundial (the part that casts a shadow) was probably inspired by natural objects like this tree that cast useful shadows and roughly indicate the time of day. The first human-made gnomons were vertical poles or towers. For example, Egyptian obelisks, in addition to being tributes to gods or markers celebrating a ruler’s achievements, acted as gnomons, and their shadows marked the time of day for a city.

Sundials of various types were developed as these early timekeepers were refined by aligning the gnomon with Earth’s rotational axis and adding a dial that marks divisions in time. In addition, the natural or solar hours, which vary in length throughout the year if you’re not near the equator, were eventually replaced by hours of equal length. Thus was timekeeping made more useful but also distanced somewhat from its roots in solar time, particularly when clock time had to be coordinated across different regions and eventually across the globe. Read more »