by Alizah Holstein

Here are some books that have long been available for consultation on Level 2 of Pusey Library, which is not exactly a library in itself but an underground extension of Widener Library at Harvard. The Erotic Tongue: A Sexual Lexicon; The Erotic in Literature: A Historical Survey of Pornography as Delightful as it is Indiscreet; Eros: The Meaning of My Life; and Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics.

You might choose a Paris café to read your Foucault, but Pusey Level 2 in fact seemed to me back then, in the 1990s, like the ideal place for Ivy League eros. It was fitting for New England, I thought, perfectly representative really, that scholarship on erotica be consigned to a distant and wholly underground location. In our eleventh-grade French class, our teacher liked to say, “Symbolisme, mes amis,” while we watched Hiroshima mon amour with our eyes peeled for symbols.

At that time I worked at Widener, and it too was rife with symbols. To get to Pusey book storage from the circulation desk, you take a tiny, rickety elevator down to Level D, the lowest level, always empty, which you traverse in dim light, passing incidentally by the Dante section, also consigned (fittingly?) to the library’s lowest rung, and where I also liked to fritter away time. Passing Dante, you push open a set of heavy doors. The wind from the corridor beyond pushes against you, a strong headwind. Which should be noted is a feature of the bottommost pit of Dante’s Inferno—Lucifer, the fallen angel, bats his wings and creates a windstorm, which freezes the water of the lake in which he stands, icing himself stationary, for being motionless is the very definition of Hell, in Dante’s terms, motionlessness being the absence of motion—and motion, of course, is movement, which entails both sensuality and intellect, which when harnessed together, lead to a higher understanding of love and virtue. In Dante’s terms at least.

I always found this deserted wind tunnel between Widener and Pusey a heady space, a liminal place where my physical body felt freed and my mind full of hope and idea. But this might be because when I worked at Widener in the 1990s, I was eighteen, and as a circulation desk employee, I was corralled behind a desk for hours a day. Or maybe it was because real freedom of any kind was still a thing so new that even in its most mundane form—a break from work—it tasted sweet.

Also sweet was the feeling of having a theory. In this case, that Harvard librarians placed the university’s collected monographs on eroticism in Pusey’s moveable stacks because the underground location symbolized their suppressed sexuality, and that that location furthermore was accessible through an obviously Freudian tunnel. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

The year was 1960. Kennedy, U-2, the Twist. Our family now included two parents and nine children. The house was too small for us. Our father searched the inner-ring suburbs for something bigger. He got a deal on an enormous house nobody else seemed to want. The seller was an Italian-American grocery magnate. He was willing to let it go for a handful of cash.

The Neighborhood

The surrounding neighborhood was as suburban fantasy land , built in the 1910s and ’20s for wealthy urbanites with literary tastes—Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen. Cotswold cottages, Tudor manors, and Georgian palaces lined the streets, nestled among mature trees and manicured lawns. Our new house, though, was no Austen idyll. It was pure Charles Addams: dark, brooding, with lancet arches and steep gabled roofs. Heavy chimneys loomed over a dour brick façade. An earthen bridge spanned a ravine with a shallow creek (pronounced “crick” in our part of the world) to reach the front door. Unlike some haunted houses, 2910 Berkeley Boulevard did not have a deceptively benign presentation. It laid its dark, heavy essence on you at first glance.

Exploration

Deed in hand, my father piled us into the station wagon to let us explore our new home. We tumbled out of the tailgate and swarmed over the property: a child’s paradise. Woods to explore; a creek to splash in; and a salamander under every rock. Inside, we raced up and down the grand staircase. Tested the banister for slide-ability (too wobbly). And fought over who would get what bedroom. Further upstairs, we found the old servants’ quarters. More bedrooms. A ballroom lined with benches. And an ominous closet. Read more »

by TJ Price

1.

It’s no secret that every society thinks its days are the last days. “But there’s something different about these days,” each cycle of humanity insists, and circumstances provide the breeding ground for our justifications in believing such. In these days, there’s unprecedented amounts of strife and calamity, as evidenced by the ever-more-definite probability of climatological oblivion and global political unrest with the rank scent of war in the wind—not to mention that the lower classes don’t trust the upper classes, but now the upper classes have learned how to hide better from the guillotine. 

We are all distracted from what matters, if we’re to believe the headlines and the studies, by inessential, vain pursuits. We spend hours of our lives moving our thumbs up and down over screens, or else sitting in front of one kind or another. Now, there’s the threat of Large Language Models—so-called “AI”—to contend with, too, which routinely and with ever more speed replaces us on a functional level. Though it is fairly clear this new technology is not universally reliable, it perhaps says something about us that we are so eager to embrace even a flawed substitute for human work.

I’m with Wordsworth when he says, in his now-famous sonnet, 

“The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours:
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Now we do not only give our hearts away, but also our brains, perhaps even (to wax dramatic) our souls. We seem determined to shed ourselves in favor of a desiderative mode. I think that we are tired, all of us—exhausted. We have sliced ourselves to ribbons on the cutting edge. I see the signs and symptoms all around, from a slackening of empathy and a rise in frustration with the systems in place to outright violence and sanguine disregard for the lives or wellbeing of others. Society has never been a place where one can call oneself totally safe, but now it has become necessary to protect oneself in addition. 

We shoulder carapace on top of exoskeleton. We develop weapons fashioned from whatever sharp edges we can. Knives. Keys spiking out between fist-clenched fingers. Words. Anything to threaten, to ward off.

To empathize is to reveal, and to reveal is to be made vulnerable. So down comes the portcullis. Up goes the bridge. The alligators snap in the moat, their tails frothing the water. Read more »

Airplane shoots out from behind a mountain in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by John Allen Paulos

As atrocious, appalling, and abhorrent as Trump’s countless spirit-sapping outrages are, I’d like to move a little beyond adumbrating them and instead suggest a few ideas that make them even more pernicious than they first seem. Underlying the outrages are his cruelty, narcissism and ignorance, made worse by the fact that he listens to no one other than his worst enablers.  On rare occasions, these are the commentators on Fox News who are generally indistinguishable from the sycophants in his cabinet, A Parliament of Whores,” to use the title of P.J. O’Rourke’s hilarious book. (No offense intended toward sex workers.) Stalin is reputed to have said that a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Paraphrasing it, I note that a single mistake, insult, or consciously false statement by a politician is, of course, a serious offense, but 25,000 of them is a statistic. Continuing with a variant of another comment often attributed to Stalin, I can imagine Trump asking, “How many divisions do CNN and the NY Times have.”

I note that his brutish actions and policies are supplemented almost hourly by his scrofulous postings on his Truth Social platform. They, in effect, constitute a kind of denial of service attack on news coverage by reputable platforms and sites. A so-called “denial of service” attack is employed by hackers to overwhelm a website with so many requests and bits of information that the site can’t respond and shuts down. It may be a bit of a stretch, but we’re a bit like the websites that shut down when overwhelmed. Our attitude too often is that the relentless stream of nonsensical rants spewing out of Truth Social is “just” Trump talking, rather than that it’s methodically Trump undermining American democracy. The belief that “He’s all talk, don’t worry” is Intended to be reassuring, but it may be the most dangerous counsel of all.

All the more reason to find anodyne advice dangerous is provided by Brandolini’s Law of Refutation. It’s a profound idea whose formulation is due to the Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. Sometimes described as the bullshit asymmetry principle, it states, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” (Brandolini wrote that the principle was inspired by the late Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow.) It might also be thought of as implying that insanity, inconsistency, and untruths are the likely destinations of political discourse if we don’t expend the considerable energy needed to insure sanity, consistency, and truth. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

‘Philosophy is a prolonged meditation on death’, so starts what may well be Mark C. Taylor’s 35^th book, After the Human. A Philosophy of the Future, published by Columbia University Press. I must admit that I didn’t know Taylor’s work before reading this book, though this is perhaps unsurprising, as for most of his career Taylor seems to have focused on the study of topics and thinkers that are not particularly close to my own interests. This remains somewhat the case in After the Human: there is some discussion of Descartes and Kant – so, yea! – but there is far more of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida – a big nay.

At the same time, Taylor devotes the bulk of his book to arguing that cognition is widespread in the world, from humans and other animal species to even plants and computer programmes, and all things cognitive are clearly up my street (by cognition Taylor means information processing tout court; more below). And yet most of the discussion keeps coming back to Hegel and co., even though most of the evidence, and some of the arguments, pertain to cognitive science proper and engaging with some of the contemporary literature in the philosophies of psychology and cognitive science would have been more fruitful considering the final result on display. I think this constitutes a missed opportunity.

I also think that in the end the book fails to deliver what it promises – a philosophy of the future – and instead God sneaks up on us quite unexpectedly at the very end, for no apparent reason (I should add that religion is one of Taylor’s areas of expertise, though it doesn’t feature all that much in the book). Before getting to the actual contents of the book, though, I would say that the volume could have done with a different style of argumentation.

The book is fairly eclectic, with various personal recollections intermixed with plenty of long quotes from a great number of thinkers and scholars. It is quite hard to keep up with, and keep track of, Taylor’s myriad references, points, and asides, and the presentation clearly could have benefited from a bit of signposting (oddly enough, though, the book is quite repetitive at times). In addition, and this may well be a personal shortcoming, I fear I missed out on a number of important points here and there, especially in relation to the many quotes from Hegel and company. I didn’t feel like a great many of these quotations helped the reader much or were added for the elaboration of a particular argument, but rather they were in there for exposition purposes and one needed to be acquainted with the ideas referred to already in order to understand them – and to understand how they fit in within the overall story Taylor wants to tell. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Mary Hrovat

After my power went out during a recent round of severe storms, I turned on my battery-operated Realistic Weatheradio. I bought this cubical radio at Radio Shack many years ago, and it sits on a bookshelf in the living room, largely ignored until extreme weather happens along. It can be tuned to one of two wavelengths on which the National Weather Service broadcasts a loop of information on current and predicted weather conditions. It has a large, obvious on-switch; the two dials on the bottom are labeled “Tuning” and “Volume.”

When I turned the radio off after the storms had moved on, it occurred to me that it would probably look very old-fashioned to young people; I was thinking of my grandchildren and nieces and nephews. The sides are covered in wood veneer, a nod to the fact that radios used to be pieces of wooden furniture. I wondered if anyone else still uses a radio that you tune with a dial. For some reason, the radio was defamiliarized so that even to me it seemed to be slightly out of place in time. (I feel that way myself sometimes.) And it unexpectedly conjured an entire lost world.

I looked up the Weatheradio and learned that it was sold between 1982 and 1992. Realistic was a house brand of Radio Shack, which for many years sold consumer electronics. It was a standard fixture of malls in my youth, like Orange Julius and WaldenBooks. In 2015, the company declared bankruptcy, in part because it couldn’t compete well as the market for electronics—in fact, the nature of consumer electronics—changed dramatically. It changed hands several times and is currently an online business called RadioShack (losing a space in its name, among many other things). The only actual radios it currently sells are four models of a vintage three-band radio (AM, FM, shortwave). (So I guess there are other people who tune their radios using a dial.) It’s a familiar story, and it encapsulates one of the ways the world has changed in my lifetime.

I can’t remember when I bought my radio, but my life has also changed considerably since the decade it was on the market. Seeing the weather radio as a vintage object brought home to me how many things that used to be familiar have vanished. I don’t miss Radio Shack, or malls, and I don’t particularly mind that some of the more recent technology I use is now considered vintage. But sometimes it feels as if the world has moved on and left me behind. I’ve always been a bit of an oddball, but the world I learned to adapt myself to was the one I grew up in, and that world is largely gone. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Seeing is Believing. Vahrner See, Südtirol, October 2013.

Digital photograph.

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by Richard Farr

It’s a ritual now. Every Sunday morning I go into my garage and use marker pens and sticky tape to make a new sign. Then from noon to one I stand on a street corner near the Safeway, shoulder to shoulder with two or three hundred other would-be troublemakers, waving my latest slogan at passing cars. 

Others are waving the Ukrainian or Canadian flag. Or Hire a Clown and Get a Circus. Or Support Our Troops: Fire Hegseth. In my small town we’re perhaps 2% of the population — not yet one of those mass movements to which the future’s textbooks will devote a chapter, but we are fearful enough to need the hope of that outcome. With America’s vaunted institutions and much-hyped freedoms on fire, we desperately want more people to (as one of my own signs says) Join Us Before It’s Too Late. 

We try to take comfort from the fact that we occupy three corners of the intersection, greatly outnumbering the Trumpers, a dozen people blasting patriotic country music on the northwest corner. But we know the truth: the only consequence of our protests, at least until ICE comes to town and starts handing out free tickets to El Salvador, is that it buys us a little dignity, a little solidarity, a little courage in the face of disaster.

Some of us are “leftists,” which is American English for “centrist neoliberals who look back wistfully to the era of Barack and Hillary.” Some are “radical leftists,” which is American English for “people so naïve that they actually care about things like climate change, the minimum wage, Citizens United, Gaza, nuclear command and control, universal healthcare, starving Yemeni children, and Ukraine.” All of us are appalled that Donald Trump and his one-eyed yellow minions are vandalising central functions of the state, especially the ones that involve anti-corruption oversight. 

So that makes us the statists and him the anarchist, right? Read more »

…..Why Being?

What happens, happens before & after,
every time, without fail, always— yet, is singular,
is a one-note affair in a symphony of nows
each moment of which then becomes
before & after, simultaneously.

If this seems confusing, blame time,
or life, or God which, in particular,
has been a widespread explanation
of the fact-of-being during millennia
of befores & afters since the

beginning-was-the-word,
and the word was,
………………………… Now
and always is.

But this is not an explanation,
nor was it meant to be anything
more than a statement of fact,
that of the breadth and depth
of our life-long ignorance of,

why being?

Jim Culleny
6/1/25

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by Derek Neal

I first started reading Jon Fosse’s Septology in a bookstore. I read the first page and found myself unable to stop, like a person running on a treadmill at high speed. Finally I jumped off and caught my breath. Fosse’s book, which is a collection of seven novels published as a single volume, is one sentence long. I knew this when I picked it up, but it wasn’t as I expected. I had envisioned something like Proust or Henry James, a sentence with thousands and thousands of subordinate clauses, each one nested in the one before it, creating a sort of dizzying vortex that challenges the reader to keep track of things, but when examined closely, is found to be grammatically perfect. Fosse isn’t like that. The sentence is, if we want to be pedantic about it, one long comma splice. It could easily be split up into thousands of sentences simply by replacing the commas with periods. What this means is the book is not difficult to read—it’s actually rather easy, and once you get warmed up, just like on a long run, you settle into the pace and rhythm of the words, and you begin to move at a steady speed, your breathing and reading equilibrated.

So this is how the words work, but what do they say? After reading the first two books in the collection, which together are called The Other Name, the best way I can explain it is by quoting a passage from the book itself:

and that’s how it also is with all the paintings by other people that mean anything to me, it’s like it’s not the painter who sees, it’s something else seeing through the painter, and it’s like this something is trapped in the picture and speaks silently from it, and it might be one single brushstroke that makes the picture able to speak like that, and it’s impossible to understand, I think, and, I think, it’s the same with the writing I like to read, what matters isn’t what it literally says about this or that, it’s something else, something that silently speaks in and behind the lines and sentences (italics mine)

The narrator who is talking, an elderly painter named Asle who lives in rural Norway, spends much of the book like this, thinking about his paintings and trying to explain what they mean. He is unable to explain their meaning, however, because language and painting are two different things, and something gets lost in translation. What he says about writing takes things even further, suggesting that words don’t mean what we say they mean—“what matters isn’t what it literally says about this or that, it’s something else, something that silently speaks in and behinds the lines and sentences.” I would like to suggest that this is the true subject of Fosse’s book (or at least the first two that I’ve read), the idea that words do not mean what we say they mean, but something else, something behind the words.

Fosse’s challenge, of course, is to express this idea through language. How do we say one thing with words that mean something else? Read more »

by Barry Goldman

The brilliant and recently departed Jules Feiffer drew a cartoon many years ago called Munro. It was later made into an Academy Award-winning animated short. You can watch it here.

Munro was only four years old, but somehow he got drafted into the army. He went to see his sergeant and said, “I’m only four.” The sergeant said:

It is the official policy of the army not to draft men of four. Ergo you cannot be four.

We see this form of reasoning in many contexts. It is the official policy of the United States that we do not torture prisoners of war. Therefore, waterboarding, which has been used to torture prisoners since the 14^th century, cannot be torture.

Alternatively, the prisoners captured after 9/11, detained at Guantanamo, and waterboarded regularly cannot be “prisoners of war.” Instead, they are “alien enemy combatants” to whom the protections of the Geneva Convention do not apply.

This kind of reasoning can be difficult and complex and may require many years of rigorous training. Only a highly-trained and rigorous thinker like John Yoo, now the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, could produce a document like Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States. Try to read it and you will see.

My point is: This is what lawyers do. As the Devil’s Dictionary put it:

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

But there is a larger point that is both more important and less discussed. Even if there were a clear and unambiguous law, duly approved by Congress and signed by the president that said “Torturing prisoners is perfectly fine,” it would not be fine. If anything is wrong, torture is wrong. It doesn’t matter what Mr. Yoo or Congress or the President says. An atrocity enacted into law does not cease to be an atrocity. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Many people who have thought carefully about AI are anxious about certain uses of it, and for good reason.  Many are concerned that people (young people in particular) are increasingly offloading their critical thinking development and responsibilities to Chat GPT and other large language learning models.  We may fail to flourish as citizens, neighbors, and friends because we allow AI to do so many of the tasks that would otherwise prepare us for the challenges we’ll encounter in our lives.  That said, some applications of AI seem like they offer tremendous benefits.  For example, there is promising research being done into using AI models to understand non-human language.  Doing so will help us to better understand non-human consciousness.  This has the potential to change how we see and treat other animals and how we view ourselves as members of biotic communities.

Some AI companies, such as the Chinese company Baidu are looking to fulfill very human impulses. Their products focus on deciphering the communication of companion animals such as cats and dogs.  What pet caretaker wouldn’t be interested in knowing what their furry friends are trying to communicate?  Other AI applications focus on the communication patterns of big-brained animals such as sperm whales.  These creatures engage in an impressive amount of vocalization and there is good reason to believe that mapping whale sounds can tell us all sorts of important things about the mental and social lives of whales.  These scientific advances have the potential to finally pull us out the philosophical rut we’ve been in with respect to animal minds for the entire history of human philosophical engagement. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

My sister and I have always been close. But for the last few years, something has bonded us like nothing before: trashy television. We love nothing more than to watch reality TV shows and rejoice that we are not these people. 

90 Day Fiancé (hereafter affectionately referred to as 90 Day) is one of those shows. The premise is simple: people find each other (usually an American and non-American, typically online), develop some kind of virtual relationship, and then finally meet up in person. 

The name comes from the “K-1 visa”. This legally gives a foreigner 90 days to get married to a U.S. citizen after they have entered the country if they want to stay. For our delight at home, that’s usually when things go to shit. 

There are different versions of 90 Day, but no matter which one we watch, one truth remains: the show really is a master class in love. Not necessarily what you should do to ensure a healthy relationship – but what you should avoid at all costs.

What follows are 20 lessons in love that 90 Day Fiancé has taught me. I hope you learn as much as I have! Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The idea that ‘indigenous’ knowledge counts as knowledge in a sense comparable to real i.e. scientific knowledge is absurd but widely held. It appears to be a pernicious product of the combination of the patronising politics of pity and anti-Westernism that characterises the modern political left (dumb, but still preferable to the politics of cruelty that characterises the modern political right!).

My point is simple: knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be believed. The scientific revolution has provided a general approach – systematic inquiry – together with specialist methodologies appropriate to different domains (such as mathematical modeling, taxonomy, statistical analysis, and experimental manipulation and measurement). It is irrelevant that this approach first appeared in North-Western Europe and that many of the domain specific techniques were first developed and refined by white men from the ‘west’. What is relevant is that modern science allows a degree of confidence in factual and theoretical claims that has never been warranted before, and made this capability equally available to everyone around the world as the new standard for objective knowledge, i.e. knowledge that is reliably true no matter from what perspective you look at it.

If indigenous peoples have observational data and successful technologies to contribute to this kind of systematic inquiry into what makes an ecosystem resilient, or what plants might contain molecules with pain-relieving properties, or the history of climactic events, then that should be welcomed. But the test of whether these are an actual contribution must come from whether they survive scientific scrutiny, not the authenticity of their indigenous origins.

Read more »

Center of a peony in Vahrn, South Tyrol. Happy Spring!

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