by Timothy Don

One of life’s great and illicit pleasures is spying on others. Put it on the list with smoking, gossiping, flirting with a stranger, ordering a cocktail at noon, calling in sick to lie abed for the day—all those small and tasty morsels we surreptitiously nibble when no one is looking that satisfy hidden and obscure appetites. Who does not remember creeping around as a child, poking into the corners of mother’s closet, uncovering brother’s stash of candy, cracking sister’s diary, the thrill of anticipation while easing open father’s desk drawer, the jolt of discovering a secret that someone we know has secreted away? Almost from the moment we realize how strange and foreign others are, especially those to whom we live in closest proximity, we peek and we prod and we dig. We spy on them. We know we shouldn’t, it’s wrong to sneak around, to rifle through papers, to examine dirty laundry, but…let’s take a peek. A small peek. Just a quick peek. It is an undeniable and delicious indulgence to do so.

The pleasure of spying is an erotic one, and not because it is prohibited or because the secrets one learns are sexual in nature. Recall that pornographic sex becomes boring the moment it has penetrated the last crevice, fleshed out the last secret, and left nothing to the imagination. There is no writer that will put you to sleep faster than the Marquis de Sade. Trust me. Spying, like knowledge, is erotic, precisely because it is always unfulfilled. One never actually gains the knowledge that would satisfy the appetite that seeks it. The pleasure lies in the expectation of discovery, not the thing discovered. How quickly one finds that, having reached over the wall and plucked a secret from someone else’s garden, the secret begins to wither and dry, to lose its luster and allure.

Spying, intelligence gathering, learning, gaining knowledge—these are not only synonymous acts. The charge they deliver is the same, and it is erotic. This is why the popular imagination so willingly and uncritically associates Commander James Bond, secret agent, with beautiful and accommodating women, even though we know that most spies are probably flabby, paper-shuffling, number-crunching geeks. Bond is a spy, so he knows things, and his job is to learn more things, and that’s what’s sexy about him. The job itself is sexy because the job is never finished; there is always another secret to be discovered, a mission to be undertaken. It’s not about the running and the jumping and the fighting, the fast cars, the good suits and the fancy gadgets. It’s not the tools that get the girls. It’s the trade.

The artist takes part in this trade too. Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Democracy is many things: a form of constitutional republic, a system of government, a procedure for collective decision, a method for electing public officials, a collection of processes by which conflicts among competing preferences are domesticated, a means for creating social stability, and so on. But underneath all of these common ways of understanding democracy lies a commitment to the distinctively moral ideal of collective self-government among political equals. And this commitment to the political equality of citizens is what explains the familiar mechanisms of democratic government. Our elections, representative bodies, constitution, and system of law and rights of redress are intended to preserve individual political equality in the midst of large-scale government. Absent the presumption of political equality, much of what goes on in a democracy would be difficult to explain. Why else would we bother with the institutional inefficiency, the collective irrationality, and the noise of democracy, but for the commitment to the idea that government must be of, for, and by the People, understood as political equals?

To be clear, the democrat’s commitment to the political equality of the citizens does not amount to the idea that all citizens are the same, or equally good and admirable, or equal in every respect. Political equality is the commitment to the idea that in politics, no one is another’s subordinate. Put differently, among political equals, all political power is accountable to those over whom it is exercised. Accordingly, although in a democracy there are laws and rules of other kinds that all citizens are obligated to obey, no one is ever reduced to being a mere subject of legislation. In a democracy, even when a law has been produced by impeccably democratic processes, citizens who nonetheless oppose it may still enact various forms of protest, critique, and resistance. Under certain conditions, citizens may also be permitted to engage in civil disobedience. Once again, the democratic thought is that where citizens have rights to object, oppose, and criticize exercises of political power under conditions where government is accountable to its citizens, they retain their status as political equals even while being subject to the law. In this way, democracy is commonly thought to be the only viable response to the moral problem of reconciling the political power with the fundamental equality of those over whom power is exercised. Read more »

by Lexi Lerner

Like twins, light and heat are born from the same flame. Each has an attractive and destructive force. For light, it’s illumination and blindness. For heat, warmth and burning.

What you experience when you approach a flame is a matter of proximity and duration. How long will you keep your eyes there, keep your hand there? To be a guest in this house means to know your place.

Yet like moths, we cannot help but be drawn in. It sounds hedonistic, but oftentimes it’s sacrificial, to throw ourselves so passionately at what can enlighten or smite us.

Perhaps self-indulgence and self-sacrifice are of the same coin. Perhaps we transgress what nature warns us because it’s what our nature instructs us to do. Maybe we dream of limitlessness, to benefit ourselves or others. The sun spots, the burn blisters, melanoma down the line – mere slaps on the wrist, limitations of our anatomy. We need not be bound by that! We watch Icarus drown – even chide him while he’s sinking – and continue to play with fire.

It’s an endearing foolishness. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer established what we call today the porcupine dilemma: we want to huddle closely in winter, but can’t because of our quills.

It’s frankly a miracle that on an interpersonal level we still attempt to fan each other’s inner flames, even with the risk of getting singed. Or that we cuddle at night when there’s nails and fists and teeth and kitchen knives and drawer guns and just the right words to end each other in a heartbeat. But that’s the point, isn’t it? That all that is possible… and yet we still. It wouldn’t be worth it if it weren’t really worth it. Read more »

by Amanda Beth Peery

I wanted to transform
The way people sometimes change
Into birds or trees—
Their skin begins to ripple
Like a current is
Bodying through them—
It puckers into stems
That feather out, or drip
Down into rust-colored leaves.

by Maniza Naqvi

I write this as Saturday begins to wane on the long Columbus Day weekend while I listen on the radio to the speeches given by senator after senator prior to the final confirmation vote for Bret Kavanaugh as Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States of America. The vote is scheduled for 3.30 p.m. October 6, 2016. I listen to their conflicted words in the Senate of the United States pleading yes or no, or yes and no. Conjuring images, I am reminded of that Roman mythology and the artists’ rendition of it, of the Rape of the Sabine Women.

The idea and basis of the State is illustrated by artists through a rendition of this mythology for its first founding. The idea of State as we know it is based on this concept and definition of family and marriage in which there are unequal members: some to be served and others to serve; some to consume while others to produce; some to own and others to be owned; some to rule and others to be ruled; some to be strong and continuously strengthened by all means necessary and others to be weak and be weakened by all means necessary. All this a must for the good of the State—and the spirit vested into it through this definition of family. Read more »

by Nickolas Calabrese

Recently the person whom I had been in a serious cohabiting relationship with for the past few years disappeared. Not in the Unsolved Mysteries kind of way, but in the “I just ghosted you because I can’t deal with breaking up with you in person” kind of way. She was spending a month working at an artisan’s residency in Seattle, when, one week in, she suddenly stopped responding to any correspondence. After a few weeks I finally spoke on the phone with R and she said that she simply had a change of heart and was now going to be living with her sister, shortly afterward arranging to have her belongings packed and moved by professionals. I didn’t see this coming – R never let on that anything was amiss, going so far as to mailing me a letter during that first week at the residency declaring her love and desire for marriage, kids, the whole nine yards. We rarely had arguments, everything was good. She had simply changed her mind. I was surprised.

Now I’m sure this sort of thing happens all the time. And it’s reasonable that she wanted something else out of life, something that I could not offer. But allow me to ruminate on this surprise for a moment. I was surprised because I had assigned my highest subjective commitment of trust to her, beyond anybody else. After all, you place trust in someone that you deem trustworthy. Trustworthiness is not an inherent quality to any given person, it is an evaluation that you yourself make about the apparent reasons for why you ought to trust another. But it is not without risk: whenever you choose to trust someone you take a gamble on whether or not your trust will be broken, which can result in being hurt emotionally or otherwise. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Here are some well-known facts. Human beings are limited beings. We take up a limited amount of space, we exist for a limited amount of time, and, in that time, we move around in a relatively confined area. When it comes to the substance of our lives we constantly make choices that limit our options going forward, and we must often choose one path over another in a way that sometimes (maybe, often) forecloses the other path forever. It’s hard to even conceive of what it could mean for us to not be limited in these ways. But here’s one conceivable way we could be less limited. What if there could be numerically more of us? What if, for example, instead of choosing between paths we could make copies of ourselves and go both ways?

Since we can’t do that, we might wonder why the question is even worth asking. I am tempted to say it’s because we might be able to do that one day (or that it may, in fact, be happening to us right now, though we don’t know it) – but, of course, that’s not why.  It may not be worth asking such a question. But if it is, it will be because it tells us something about ourselves right now.

So, would it be better if there were more of you?

That’s not quite the question I want to answer. It seems clear to me that the world would be a better place if there more Shakespeare’s and more Virginia Wolff’s, more Ada Lovelace’s and more Einstein’s, more Gandhi’s and more Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s – not to mention more Denis Johnsons’. I don’t mean that it would be better if there more people like, for other examples, Mac McCaughan’s or Martin Luther King, I mean the world would be better if there were numerically more of these particular people – or, if you prefer, if there were more (initially) exact copies thereof. Read more »

by Thomas O’Dwyer

Drumcliffe churchyard lies in the shadow of a flat-topped mountain, in the western Irish countryside of Sligo county, on the Atlantic coast. There are remains of a round tower and a carved Celtic high cross. It would be the perfect resting place for a country’s greatest poet – especially if the poet himself had chosen it.

“Bury me up there on the mountain, Roquebrune,” W.B. Yeats wrote to his wife Georgie before his death in France in 1939. “And then, after a year or so, after the newspapers have forgotten, plant me in Sligo.” The poet died in the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in the nearby town of Menton. His funeral cortege did indeed wind up a narrow hill to where Roquebrune cemetery looks out over the Mediterranean. But then came World War II, and the repatriation of the remains of one Irish poet was unlikely to be a priority for the Nazi-occupied French, or anybody else.

Seventy years ago this autumn, this last wish of Ireland’s first Nobel Prize winner was finally fulfilled. His family and proud countrymen brought him home for a splendid state funeral in his beloved Sligo. Yeats had written of his desired resting place before his death in one of his last poems, Under Ben Bulben. “Under bare Ben Bulben’s head / In Drumcliffe churchyard Yeats is laid, / An ancestor was rector there / Long years ago; a church stands near, / By the road an ancient Cross.” For good measure, he added an epitaph, the same one carved on his tombstone. In 1948, on a typical Irish September day, half sunshine and half rain, W.B. Yeats was laid in his chosen place to rest in peace forever.

Or was he? Read more »

by Camilla Power

Modern Darwinism, neo-darwinism, aka ‘selfish-gene’ theory is often regarded as deeply politically suspect by social scientists. It’s viewed as a Trojan horse for capitalist ideology as soon as any evolutionary anthropologist or, worse, psychologist, tries to say anything about human beings. But the funny thing is that sociobiology, evolutionary ecology, whatever you want to call it (it keeps changing name because social scientists are so rude about it) has taken an extraordinary feminist turn through this century.

The strategies of females have now become central to models of human origins. Forget ‘man the hunter’, it’s hardworking grandmothers, babysitting apes, children with more than one daddy, who are the new fairytale heroes. Man the mighty hunter comes as a late afterthought. And these are not just lean-in alpha females but collectives in increasingly complex female coalitions, with the idea that the ‘social brain is for females’ extrapolated from primate studies.

Taken together, these models add up to a broad view that gender egalitarianism was not just part of the package but a fundamental aspect of what made us modern humans. They include Kristen Hawkes and colleagues ‘grandmother hypothesis’; Sarah Hrdy’s model of cooperative childcare as matrix of emotional modernity; Steven Beckerman and Paul Valentine’s ‘partible paternity’ model; the rejection of patrilocality as standard for hunter-gatherers by Frank Marlowe, Helen Alvarez, Mark Dyble and colleagues; and the ‘Female cosmetic coalitions’ hypothesis for the emergence of symbolic culture, by myself, Chris Knight and Ian Watts.

Responding to the seminal conference on ‘Man the Hunter’ in the mid-1960s, feminist anthropology of the 1970s began to examine critically whether women’s oppression was a true universal resulting from the sexual division of labour. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

Every October there’s a huge book fair in my town, where used books donated by the community are put up for sale in a large hall at the fairgrounds. It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s a high point of my year.

When I walk in and see table after table laden with books and inhale the unmistakable smell of the printed page, I almost always get a sense of the richness of the world and a feeling of optimism about my opportunities for learning about it. Even though I know that in addition to many treasures, the tables also hold things like the 1979 edition of What Color Is Your Parachute?, I still feel the thrill. It reminds me of when I was a teenager and didn’t realize how finite my life is. I was in love with history in particular, and with archaeology, with music and art and astronomy. But I also wanted to learn how to do things: draw, paint, play chess, grow vegetables. Growing up in a family where my mother was often too busy and my father was too distant to teach any of us much beyond the fundamentals of their religion, I thought books could teach me those things too.

The layout at the book fair is always pretty much the same. There are certain tables I visit first, and some I rarely check. I usually have a few specific titles or subject areas in mind: There’s an author I’ve become interested in, or a historical period I’m reading about. I always look for Paul Theroux on the Travel table. Over the better part of a decade, I slowly assembled all eleven volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization and the Norton Anthologies of English and American literature. Read more »

by Adele A Wilby

As the first African American president of the United States (US), Barack Obama is a uniquely historical personality. Each of us has our opinions, or will formulate opinions, as to the success or limitations of his eight years in office as a Democratic president from 2009-2017, and as to the person who is Obama. Helping us in the formulation of our views on Obama and his presidency, is Ben Rhodes book, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House.

Rhodes autobiography operates on two levels of analysis. On the one hand, Rhodes tells the story of his journey to becoming Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor and speech writer, amongst other positions, and the impact this experience had on his personal development. Plucked from relative obscurity while working in the offices of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre in 2007, Rhodes narrates the challenges, and indeed sacrifices, required of the individual who assumes such an important position in a president’s trusted inner circle. In particular, Rhodes’ story of his work with Obama highlights how, as a speech writer, he was an important figure in communicating Obama’s thoughts and policies to a national and global audience, and his book can be seen as a continuation of that role.

Arguably however, the more significant aspect of Rhodes’ experience was the opportunity his position afforded him to observe the workings, thinking and character of the decision-maker of US foreign and domestic policy, Barack Obama. Consequently, Rhodes provides us with deeper insights into the nuanced thinking and administrative style of Obama. Thus, his book makes an important contribution to many academic disciplines, and furthers our understanding of the personal and political dynamics that underpinned US foreign and domestic decision-making when Obama was at the helm of the US political establishment. Read more »