by Bill Benzon

Well, it wasn’t quite like that.

For one thing, they weren’t really trumpeters. They held the horns and blew through them, but not much came out. If those guys were trumpeters, then my name’s James Bond and I’m a secret agent who’s saved the world from countless psychotic megalomaniacal industrialists. Bond isn’t my name and I’m not a secret agent.

Chet the Jet

But I was part of a situation in which three trumpet players manqué did manage to escape from prison. Me and Chet the Jet—that’s what we sometimes called him, but only behind his back. Dr. Chester H. Wickwire was University Chaplain at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore back in the previous century. I’d been an undergraduate there and then took a job in the Chaplain’s Office. This was during the Vietnam era and I’d been a conscientious objector to military service and so had to perform alternative service, as it was called. The Selective Service System allowed me to work with the Chaplain’s Office.

We, Dr. Wickwire’s staff, sometimes referred to him as Chet the Jet. Just where and why that nickname, I don’t know. It had been in place for some time. But it was oddly apt. Dr. Wickwire couldn’t jet about anywhere. He’d had polio in his youth and needed two canes for support when walking, though he made do with one for short distances.

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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Paul Krugman has become our most original and insightful commentator on the American scene. In his essential NY Times column, he was the first pundit to attack George W Bush, way before 9/11 or the Iraq War. He called Bush Jr a liar, and said Bush fudged his economic numbers.

But lately, Krugman has been a disappointment, because of his persistent sneering at Bernie Sanders.

What's up with that? Bernie Sanders may be our first honest politician, a straight-up progressive, who is doing America the favor of moving Hillary over to the left. He is an authentic dyed-in-the-wool liberal who complained about income inequality decades before Occupy Wall Street made it part of the national conversation. He voted against the Iraq War. His prescriptions would turn us into a socialist democratic state with a strong social safety net and a better single-payer health system. He stands for a $15 minimum wage. Free community college tuition, paid for by a Wall Street transaction tax. Big infrastructure spending for more jobs. Money out of politics. Break up the big banks.

What's not to like about Bernie?

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by Matt McKenna

Here’s the concept: two powerful white dudes fight each other until they’re forced to confront a common enemy, which more often than not is another powerful white dude. Are we talking about the plot of Batman v Superman or the sad reality of American presidential politics? Could be either, right? Well, both the movie and the current election cycle have left critics displeased and audiences entertained. Although Batman v. Superman has received only a 29% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, it has received a much better 71% from the audience. The primary election season has experienced a similar dichotomy between critics and the general audience: hardly a moment passes without a cultural critic decrying the base nature of this election cycle, yet audiences are tuning into election coverage on cable news channels in record numbers. Personally, I find the film much less offensive than the current (or any) election cycle if only because the film is fictional.

Batman v Superman is the narrative linchpin for Time Warner’s “DC Extended Universe,” which is an attempt to cash in on its ownership of the DC Comics characters the way that Disney has cashed in on its ownership of the Marvel Comics characters through developing a film franchise in which all the heroes fight on the same team in recurring, ever more expensive summer blockbusters. Therefore, although the film is called Batman v Superman, viewers shouldn’t be surprised to find out that Batman and Superman eventually stop fighting each other so they can go after the “real” bad guy, which (spoiler!) is exactly how the United States’ primary election process will play out. For all the jabs Republicans Ted Cruz and Donald trump take at each other, they will ultimately join forces to attempt to defeat the Democrat candidate in the general election. The same goes for Democrats Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, who will somehow forget all their prior complaints and support each other in defeating the Republican candidate.

If Batman and Superman becoming buddies sounds a lot like presidential primary opponents supporting each other in the general election, then the similarity between Superman’s struggles and Donald Trump’s campaign will be downright obvious with the one major discrepancy being that Superman is famously known for his good haircut.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

We have never embraced political conservatism. However, we also think that the conservative tradition in American politics is intellectually formidable. We find the best representatives of that tradition to be rigorous, insightful, and philosophically astute. They are political commentators for whom ideas matter. In their best work we find proposals and principles that we think are incorrect, but never merely stupid.

And this is as it should be. The entire system of American democracy is based on the premise that reasonable, intelligent, and well-informed citizens of integrity and good-will might nevertheless disagree deeply and sharply about fundamental moral, social, and political matters. Many of the most familiar political and constitutional mechanisms of our politics are aimed at managing such reasonable disagreement among citizens in a way that all disputants could be expected to recognize as even-handed, fair, civil, and rational. What's more, reasoned yet deep disagreement among intelligent and sincere citizens is not some unfortunate obstacle that democratic citizens should wish could be surmounted; working through such disagreements while sustaining conditions of civility and stable governance simply is what modern democracy is all about.

In this way, a modern democratic society needs there to be combating traditions of political commitment. Those who tend to find conservatism lacking need there to be stalwart defenders of conservative views that are articulate and smart. And the same goes for those who tend to reject various forms of liberalism and progressivism; they need there to be formidable exponents of the views they oppose. As we have written in previous 3QD posts, and have argued in our book Why We Argue (And How We Should), the only responsible way to oppose a view is to oppose the best version of it, and this requires one to know the best arguments in its favor. To put the point dramatically, modern democracy is an intellectual ecosystem that thrives only under conditions of civil disagreement among sincere and intelligent citizens. Were one of the many longstanding and noble traditions of democratic political thought to disappear from the public debate, the entire system would suffer.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

On March 15th it was announced that Andrew Wiles won the 2016 Abel Prize. Established in 2002, the Abel Prize has become arguably the most prestigious prize in mathematics. In contrast to the Fields medal, which is awarded to those under 40, the Abel prize set itself as the prize which recognizes long term contributions to mathematics.

In keeping with tradition (see here: 2015, 2014) we're taking the opportunity to check out the math of behind the Abel Prize. This is the rare instance when the prizewinner's work appeared in the New York Times and may well need no introduction. Wiles won for

…for his stunning proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory.

— from the Abel Prize Announcement

Fermat's Last Theorem (FLT) is the claim that, for any n greater than or equal to three, there are no integer solutions to the equation

That is, you can't find numbers a, b, and c from among 0, 1, -1, 2, -2,… which can be plugged into

and have the same number on both sides of the equal sign. The same goes if the six is replaced with a 3, or 2016, or 187,201, or any other number greater than or equal to three.

If you haven't heard of FLT before, it's hard to see why anyone should give a rat's rear end about whether nor not there are integer solutions to this equation. On the other hand, Fermat conjectured FLT in 1637 and here we are in 2016 giving Wiles the Abel Prize for proving that yes, indeed, there are no such solutions. Something interesting must be going on.

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by Misha Lepetic

“She was Dolores on the dotted line.”
~ Nabokov

Artificial intelligence – or rather the phenomena that are being shoved under the ever-widening rubric of AI – has had an interesting few weeks. On the one hand, Google's DeepMind division staged a veritable coup when its AlphaGo AI soundly thrashed the world #1 Go player Lee Se-dol in the venerated Chinese strategy game, four games to one. This has been widely covered, and with justification. Experts will be poring over these games for years, and AlphaGo's unorthodox gameplay is already changing the way top practitioners of the game view strategy. It is particularly noteworthy that Fan Hui, the European Go champion who went down 5-0 to AlphaGo in January, has since then joined the DeepMind team as an advisor and played AlphaGo often. This is not a Chris Christie-style capitulation, but rather an understandable fascination with a style of play that has been described as unearthly. It's no exaggeration to say that the history of the game can now be clearly divided into pre- and post-AlphaGo eras.

Which isn't to say that this shellacking has beaten humanity into quiescence. Earlier this week, we exacted some sort of revenge by appropriating Microsoft's latest entry into social AI, the Twitter bot @TayandYou, and transformed it into “a racist, sexist, trutherist, genocidal maniac”. If we were to consider @TayandYou and AlphaGo to be birds of a feather, which is of course sloppy thinking of the highest (lowest? most average?) order, that would be a small consolation indeed, and not much different from stamping on an ant after you just got mauled by a bear, and still feeling good about it. But comparing @TayandYou and AlphaGo does lead to some useful insights, because one of the principal issues confronting the field of AI is the idea of purpose. This month, I'll look at the case of @TayandYou, and follow up with AlphaGo in April, since come April no one will remember @TayandYou, whereas with AlphaGo there's at least a chance.

Now, this idea of AIs lacking a purpose may seem like a daft claim. After all, the softwares in question were created by teams of computer scientists backed by wealthy corporations (artificial intelligence is the sport and pastime of what passes for kings these days). And in the popular consciousness AIs are implacably possessed of purpose, usually to the detriment of the human species. There seems to be little chance that there could be any ambiguity about such a basic question. Still, the extraordinary flameout of @TayandYou beckons the question of what, precisely, any specific AI is for. For what was really at stake with @TayandYou will, I think, be very surprising.

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by Tamuira Reid

My mother loves the ocean. It sings to her, she says. When we lived in Manteca we didn't have an ocean. The only place you could find water was in the swimming pool.

She says if it's not singing than it's telling her stories. She says she sees faces in the waves. She doesn't know any of them though.

***

I was nine when my parents divorced and we moved to Santa Cruz. We played in the white wash for hours, the salt sticking to our legs in sheets. My mother watched from her perch further up the shore. She didn't like to get wet.

“Can you believe it? Two blocks from the beach.”

“It's an apartment, mom. And it's green.”

She danced around the tiny two-bedroom apartment with my little sister on her hip. When she tugged on the mini-blinds, they scrolled up, the kitchen filling with an obnoxious light. Everything was bright in this town; there was light everywhere.

“Come on you guys. It's not that bad. Look – you've got a beach for a front yard, for Christ's sake.”

“I miss my dad.”

Maeghan started to cry. I decided the sound of the ocean scared her. My mother tried to quiet her, gently kissing the top of her head. Everyone was tired. She looked out the window at the U-Haul parked sideways across the front lot. Our old life had been reduced to nothing more than a sofa and some chairs.

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by Jalees Rehman

“Let others praise ancient times. I am glad that I was born in these.”

– Ovid in “Ars Amatoria”

When I struggle with scientist's block, I play 1980s music with the hope that the music will inspire me. This blast from the past often works for me. After listening to the songs, I can sometimes perceive patterns between our various pieces of cell biology and molecular biology data that had previously eluded me and design new biological experiments. But I have to admit that I have never performed the proper music control studies. Before attributing inspirational power to songs such as “99 Luftballons“, “Bruttosozialprodukt” or “Billie Jean“, I ought to spend equal time listening to music from other decades and then compare the impact of these listening sessions. I have always assumed that there is nothing intrinsically superior or inspirational about these songs, they simply evoke memories of my childhood. Eating comfort foods or seeing images of Munich and Lagos that remind me of my childhood also seem to work their muse magic.

My personal interpretation has been that indulging nostalgia somehow liberates us from everyday issues and worries – some trivial, some more burdensome – which in turn allows us to approach our world with a fresh, creative perspective. It is difficult to make such general sweeping statements based on my own anecdotal experiences and I have always felt a bit of apprehension about discussing this with others. My nostalgia makes me feel like an old fogey who is stuck in an ossified past. Nostalgia does not have a good reputation. The German expression “Früher war alles besser!” (Back then, everything used to be better!) is used in contemporary culture to mock those who always speak of the romanticized past with whimsical fondness. In fact, the expression nostalgia was coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer. In his dissertation “Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia oder Heimweh“, Hofer used nostalgia as an equivalent of the German word Heimweh (“home-ache”), combining the Greek words nostos(homecoming) and algos (ache or pain), to describe a medical illness characterized by a “melancholy that originates from the desire to return to one's homeland“. This view of nostalgia as an illness did not change much during the subsequent centuries where it was viewed as a neurological or psychiatric disorder.

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by Andy Martin

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but there is a curious correspondence, almost an alignment, between Lee Child's Make Me and Jonathan Franzen's Purity, published in the same month, September 2015. Both have at their core, a murder story. I think there is only one in Purity, whereas there are approximately 200 more in Make Me. Industrial-scale. Jack Reacher has to solve that puzzle. Whereas in Franzen the murderer himself has to go and blab about it. He can't shut up about it. So the two writers must have been in touch recently – I like to imagine – just to compare notes and pass on a few tips.

JONATHAN FRANZEN RE-WRITTEN BY LEE CHILD

Begin with a backhoe. Obviously. Look at pp. 134-5 [of Purity]: Andreas spends far too much time digging. With a shovel. Get some decent machinery in there. Why struggle? Dig the hole deeper, shove the guy in, cover it over. Job done. Don't sweat it. And look, you postpone the murder till after page 100. Which is too long. Postponement is one thing, but you are going to lose a helluva lot of readers that way. (And then you take pages and pages just to do it! What is your problem?) You either need to kick off with the murder and then Andreas is the bad guy who must be hunted down (by the way, your solution for what happens to him… why the hell would he do that?) or… and this is more promising: what if he has a far better reason for knocking off this guy than… oh yeah, his girlfriend asks him to. ‘Hey, Andreas, would you mind if…?' Come on!

Stepfather? What about Godfather? What if you have Andreas, with all his skills, and his team of hackers, crack the mystery of this bad guy who must be channelling funds to Al-Qaeda while running drugs and girls and degraded nuclear material (probably polluting the environment too) and finally, and here we come to a climax, nailing this woman Pip, who is an ex-FBI agent (maybe abducting her, locking her up, and sadistically abusing…) And so Andreas is fully and righteously justified in offing him. No anxieties, no remorse. Maybe Pip could help bury him. A woman driving the backhoe. Which would be a breakthrough. Good revenge motive.

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by Yohan J. John

There is a story that I think anyone interested in human knowledge ought to know. It comes in many forms. Here is one version, incarnated as a joke: 'A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is.”'

A parable featuring the Seljuk Sufi mystic Nasrudin Hodja may be the earliest form of the story: 'Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground. “What have you lost, Mulla?” he asked. “My key,” said the Mulla. So they both went down on their knees and looked for it. After a time the other man asked: “Where exactly did you drop it?” “In my own house.” “Then why are you looking here?” “There is more light here than inside my own house.”' The Indologist Wendy Doniger quotes this parable in her book The Hindus: An Alternative History, as a way to prepare the reader for the disappointing realization that the “available light” on Hinduism — the hymns, the histories, the archaeological remains — tends to illuminate the perspectives of dominant groups, relegating to the shadows the viewpoints of women, lower castes, and other marginalized groups.

Noam Chomsky has a characteristically dry and precise version of the story: “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.”

So historians, mystics, scientists and drunks have something in common: they all tend to seek the truth where the process of seeking is easy, rather than where truth is. Responses to this problem vary. The mystic is most likely trying to remind the listener of how limited human knowledge is, and how often we look for solutions in precisely the wrong places. The humanities professor Doniger uses the problem as a justification for reading between the lines: using the available light to speculate about what may lie in the darkness. And the cognitive scientist Chomsky seems to be using the problem to justify why scientists answer questions that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the questions they originally set out to answer.

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by Saurabh Jha

It is possible that in a few months only Nate Silver's prediction models will stand between Donald Trump and the White House. I will leave it to future anthropologists to write about the significance of that moment. For now, the question “What will President Trump be doing when he is not building a wall?” has assumed salience.

This is relatively easy to answer when it comes to health policy. Just ask what people want. Seniors don't want Medicare rescinded. Even the most ardent free market fundamentalist group, the Tea Party, want Medicare benefits; as one of their ranks warned Obama, without a trace of irony, “Government, hands off my Medicare.”

Trump will protect Medicare. Even raising the eligibility age for Medicare is off the cards as far as he is concerned. He has promised that no one will be left dying on the streets. That people no longer die on streets, but in hospitals, because emergency rooms must treat patients regardless of their ability to pay, is irrelevant. The point is that Mr. Trump knows that the public values healthcare. And Trumpcare will show that Trump cares.

But it gets complicated. Yes, the public wants top notch healthcare for themselves. No, the public don't want to die on the streets. Yes, the public wants the government to look after them. The problem is that the public doesn't really want to pay for these services. Not much at least.

How will Trump manage these contradictory desires? Trump recently released his healthcare manifesto. Here are its Seven Pillars:

1. Repeal Obamacare
2. Allow purchase of insurance across state lines
3. Allow people to deduct insurance from taxes
4. Expand Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)
5. Require price transparency for medical goods and services
6. Block-grant for Medicaid to the States
7. More free market for pharma

Trump's first test will be repealing Obamacare. It is clear Mr. Trump doesn't like Obamacare. He says about Obamacare that “people have had to suffer under the incredible economic burden.” What will he do about people with pre-existing conditions who insurers must cover by law thanks to Obamacare? Will we return to the days when insurers can turn down patients based on their risk, or yank the premium so high that they cannot afford insurance?

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by Paul Braterman

As in Alcatraz; Alcove; Alfalfa; Alcohol; Alkali; Alizarin; Almanac; Alchemy; Alembic; Algol; Almagest; Algebra; Algorithm; Alhambra

The syllable Al- is Arabic for “The”, and is attached to the beginning of the word to which it applies.

Like English today, or Latin in Renaissance Europe, the dominant language of learned discourse for several centuries was Arabic. Arabic-speaking scholars translated the great works of the Greek philosophers and scientists, as well as studying them in the original, did likewise for the texts of Indian mathematics (from which we derive our modern “Arabic” numbering system), and made important discoveries of their own. Spain was where the worlds of Islam and of Western Christianity met, fought, and mingled for more than seven hundred years, and it is mainly through Spanish that Arabic words have entered the English language.

Alcatraz, an island in California famous for its prison (left), was named by the Spanish explorers for the pelican (Arabic al-qadus, the water carrier), which they wrongly believed to carry water in its bill. In a further misapplication, the word has passed into English as the name for a completely different bird, the “Albatross”. Alcove (al-qubbah, the arch) reminds us of the glories of Moorish architecture, as in the Alhambra (or the red house) in Granada. This building was decorated with abstract designs (Arabesques)

great intricacy, whose patterns show so subtle a use of geometry and symmetry that they are studied by mathematicians even today. Alfalfa (from the Arabic name for the plant) is grown for hay in dry climates, such as that of Spain. The syllable al also occurs in numerous place names. The Algarve to us is the south of Portugal; to the Iberian Arabs, it was al-Gharb, the West. A very common combination is with wadi, valley, as in Guadalquivir (al-wad al-kebir, the Mighty River, the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific (named after a town in Spain, wad-al-Kanat, valley of merchant stalls), Guadalajara (wad-al-Hajara or valley of stones) in Spain and Mexico. There are even a few Arabic-Spanish or Arabic-Latin hybrid names, such as Alicante (al– tacked onto the Roman name Lucentum, or City of Light) or Guadalupe (wad-al-lupus, valley of the wolf) But most of the Arabic al- words in common English use refer to the Arabic achievements in science and mathematics.

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by Claire Chambers

Since 1855, both orthodox and non-practising Arab Muslim writers have produced an exciting, politicized, and high-quality body of artistic work. Among other aims, it seeks to portray the concerns of British-based members of the transnational faith group, or ummah. My research indicates that, particularly in the years following the riots in northern England in 2001, the attacks on America later that year, and the onset of the so-called War on Terror, British literature, film, and media have become increasingly preoccupied by Islam. In fiction at least, the strategies for representing Muslim communities are beginning to undergo significant alteration. Following the turning point of the Rushdie affair and accelerating since twenty-first-century wars of questionable legality, a surge in Islamophobia, the Arab Spring/Winter, and the refugee crisis, growing numbers of writers are representing specific British Muslim communities in a more nuanced way than had been attempted previously. Non-Muslim authors such as Martin Amis, John Updike, and Ian McEwan zero in on the figure of the terrorist. Arab Muslim writers tend to look at Islam in subtler ways, while often remaining highly critical of the religion's practices and accretions. Novelists such as Leila Aboulela and Robin Yassin-Kassab repudiate as distortions of the religion's pluralist history attempts to constrict Islam into an exclusive, singular identity.

The South Asian community constitute the biggest and most recognizable Muslim migrant population in Britain. However, Arabs, especially Yemenis, have also come to Britain in relatively large numbers since the late nineteenth century. In 2002, Caroline Nagel estimated that there were 200,000 Arab people in Britain, most of them Iraqi, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Moroccan. By 2011, when the British Census included 'Arab' as an ethnic category for the first time, numbers had risen to 230,600. This makes Arabs one of the largest immigrant communities from outside the Commonwealth living in Britain today.

Since the discovery that the 2005 London bombers (none of them from Arab backgrounds) were 'home-grown', cultural commentators such as David Goodhart and Trevor Phillips have argued that multiculturalism is to blame for alienation, a lack of community cohesion, and even terrorism. However, I follow Tariq Modood in arguing just the reverse, that more rather than less multiculturalism is needed, if Britain is to inculcate a genuine (and necessarily diverse) sense of citizenship in its populace.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Mud. Dirt. Sand. Land. Water. All up for lease–To let. All a reason for making a killing in Karachi.

Mud, dirt, sand, land- look no further in Karachi or anywhere else for reasons for trouble. Trump cards, these, everywhere, up for grabs, for rent or lease or as it is said in Karachi: to let. Or, as the billboards scream all over Karachi: TOLET. Everything tolet. Perhaps, a Freudian nod to complicity by the scribe, as well as the reader, omitting the 'I', but managing still to point to the pervasive smell wafting all over the city the eau de toilet—or rather 'Ewwww dah toilet!!!' Something indeed is rotten.

Tee for Tolet. Karachi a city the size of a mid- sized country seems to be disappearing in to a golf hole— a vortex, a vortex of greed—into a TV screen, a swimming pool drain or down the tolet—toilet. The teeing off are teed-off if you do protest this too much. Protest the erasing of public spaces, the grabbing of public assets–and you're likely to be whacked or clubbed like a little white ball–and end up barred or down a hole. Players are quick to remind you that golf courses create green spaces and they don't use up water–only sewage water. Stinks?

The city, as a place to protest seems only to exist as pretty on the face of it—on Facebook. It appears pretty, as a dream—or as an idea of luxury—on gigantic billboards above its streets, but where on the streets themselves it more likely that idealism is shot to death and recycled as a cynical sickness: take for instance the poet's command—Bol! Speak! It was turned into a joke in this city. Here: ‘Speak!, means ‘Shut up!' Just as war means peace.

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Mother Writes to Indira Gandhi

The Hon’ble Mrs. Indira Gandhi,
Prime Minister, Murti Lane, New Delhi.
7 July 1975, Dear Madam,
How are you? What’s with this
Emergency? India’s star is
fading while you’re sexing guru Brahmachari?
A pilot bucklemeups in his sexjet.
Pompous rogue has intensified
wireless: whispering, murmuring:
shanti, ashanti. Indira Ji, please heed my plea:
empty the sky. Show your ire. Command him,
at once ceasefire. A woman’s
mind is no man’s land. I hang
my vaginarags out on a string — pale buntings
fluttering Kashmir’s fragrant breeze. My
husband remarried. She burps, yawns,
farts, is fertile and thick as two
planks. Will she leave him alone at dawn to write
his diary? Her two readymade children
call me, Big Mom: Bahdi Ami.
My husband says new wife will be
my caregiver. It’s tearing me apart, Madam,
and I’m again losing my mind. Faithfully
yours, Mrs. Maryam Jan, Raj Bagh
Srinagar, Kashmir ((India).

* * *

Indira Gandhi

Teen Murti Lane
New Delhi
30 July 1975

Dear Maryam Jan,

I am delighted to pen this in my own hand. “You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens,” says Rumi, but I wish I had said it, for after my husband died, I took solace in poetry to heal my bruised heart — a very hard thing to do, perhaps the hardest thing to do as I am learning myself. Many say I am mad. They have no clue about the fine line between madam and madness. You have your pilot, his sexjet. I have my guru who drives me insane. There is an insurgency in my own emergency with Brahmachari. Indians are unruly. Elite talk only of civil rights. No one thinks of responsibilities, for there are no rights without responsibilities. A dose of self-enlightened Madam Rule should give India pause. I wish I were there inhaling the fragrant breeze, for Kashmir is my ancestral home too.

Yours, Indira

* * *

By Rafiq Kathwari, winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, who would like you to read more epistles from his mother to the Prime Ministers of the World, here.

by Akeel Bilgrami

These lectures present a lifetime of reflection by a scientist of language on the broader implications of his scientific work. The omnibus title of the lectures, “What kind of creatures are we?” conveys just how broad the implications are meant to be. They cover an impressive range of fields: theoretical linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of science, history of science, evolutionary biology, metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of language and mind, moral and political philosophy, and even briefly, the ideal of human education.

Lecture 1 presents with clarity and precision, his own basic ideas in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science (both fields in which he has played an absolutely central founding role) recording the progress achieved over the years but recording much more strenuously how tentatively those claims to progress must be made and how a very large amount of work remains to be done even in the most fundamental areas of study. Changes of mind over these years are also recorded, some of the most striking of which occurred only in the last decade or so.

The lecture begins by motivating the question its title announces, “What is Language?” It behooves us to ask it because without being clear about what language is, not only will we not get the right answers to other questions about various specific aspects of language (perhaps cannot even correctly frame those specific questions), but because we won’t get close to investigating or even plausibly speculating about the biological basis and evolutionary origins of language.

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