by Bill Murray

Hyvä asiakkaamme,
Ethän käytä huoneiston takkaa.
Se on tällä hetkellä epäkunnossa
Ja savuttaa sisään.

Dear customer,
Please don’t use the fireplace. It is for the moment out of order and the smoke comes into the apartment.

Now wait a minute. We might need that fireplace in Lapland in December. Just now it’s three degrees (-16C) outside. The nice lady couldn’t be more sympathetic, but they just manage the place. Fixing the fireplace requires funding that can’t be organized until we are gone.

She promises we’ll stay warm thanks to a magnificent heater, a sauna and the eteinen, one of those icebox-sized northern anterooms that separate the outside from the living area. I have fun with the translation, though. I imagine that fool Ethän has busted the damned fireplace again.

• • •

Welcome to Saariselkä, Finland, where it’s dark in the morning, briefly dusk, then dark again for the rest of the day. The sun never aspires to the horizon. Fifty miles up the road Finland, Norway and Russia meet at the top of Europe.

But look around. It’s entirely possible to live inside the Arctic Circle. It takes a little more bundling up and all, and you need a plan before you go outside. No idle standing around out there.

There are even advantages. Trailing your groceries after you on a sled, a pulkka, is easier than carrying them. There’s a word for the way you walk: köpöttää. It means taking tiny steps the way you do to keep your balance on an icy sidewalk.

Plus, other humans live here, too, and they seem to get along just fine. Infrastructure’s good, transport in big, heavy, late model SUVs, a community of 2600 people, all of them attractive, all of whom look just like each other.

I imagined “selling time shares in Lapland” was a punch line, but it’s an actual thing. A jammed-full Airbus delivered us from Helsinki, one of three flights every day to Rovaniemi. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Zeal Greenberg is one of the most amazing men I’ve ever worked with. I emphasize “worked with”.

I’ve discussed Disney’s Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 over dinner with Steve Martin. I took Malcolm Forbes’s photo with one of his fans, who then took a photo of me and Forbes. He and his motorcycle club, the Capitalist Tools, were at the Americade rally in Lake George on July 4th weekend. And I once told Sheldon Glashow (physics Nobel 1979) I thought that physicists’ search for a “theory of everything” was ill-conceived and a bit hubristic – I didn’t see that their theory of everything would help much with the problems that most interested me. Unfortunately the meeting we were attending started before I was able to explain myself and, alas, we didn’t get back together afterward.

I didn’t WORK with these folks.

Met them, chatted with them, but I never collaborated with them on a common project. I worked closely with Zeal for years early in the millennium.

I’m tempted to say that you couldn’t imagine a stranger and more unlikely pair. But that’s not true. Of course you could. But still… I’m a Ph. D. and rather Old School WASP in my sense of self-presentation. Zeal never went to college, started out as a schmatta salesman, and lives and breathes sales and marketing. But we had a common desire, to change the world. I was happy to help him pursue his vision. Read more »

by Evert Cilliers aka Evert Eden

It was the most riveting TV of the 21st century.

And why?

Because we saw two American faces under the greatest strain.

Something you only see acted out in the final moments of some grand fictional drama. Something Eugene O’Neill might’ve written.

But here it was for real: an actual live event starring two actual live humans.

How do you think you would have acted under such trying circumstances? Who do you think showed most clearly that admirable Hemingway quality of “grace under pressure”?

Let’s explore.

There was the face of the woman.

Doctor Christine Blasey Ford.

Polite, modest, personable, reasonable, soft-spoken, civic-minded, rational, scientific (“hippocampus”).

And so female: accommodating, seemingly fragile but steely, and terribly anxious to please.

“Collegial” as she put it. And doing her best to be, in her own words, “more helpful.”

She was other-directed: how can I help you? Read more »

by Gerald Dworkin

Three years ago I posted on this site “California Dying” about my experience in working for an assisted-dying bill in that state. That bill passed and while it has been involved in litigation by its opponents on a tactical issue of whether it was  the right type of issue for a special session of the legislature, it is anticipated that it will survive intact. Since I have a residence in California I am eligible for such assistance should I need it.

Since I live the other six months in Illinois I am now working to achieve a similar result in that state. Medical Aid in dying is now legal in California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Vermont, Hawaii and DC. It is legal In Montana in the sense that physicians are immunized from prosecution as long as they have patient consent but there is no regulatory system in place. It is the law in all of Canada.

Another important development is that a number of state medical societies are shifting from the AMA’s stated opposition to assisted dying, to a neutral position.

In 2015 the California Medical Association shifted to a neutral position.

“CMA has removed policy that outright objects to physicians aiding terminally ill patients in end of life options. We believe it is up to the individual physician and their patient to decide voluntarily whether the End of Life Option Act is something in which they want to engage.” Read more »

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 »