I recently found myself marooned with a large group of astronomers in a remote 11th century abbey in Tuscan countryside. Despite the picturesque beauty of the landscape not to mention the abbey's splendid library; still the days (I must admit) stretched on and on…

I guess it's true that google is making me stupid, but I discovered that it is a lot harder for me than it used to be to read for hours on end. And without any wireless nor any real means of getting myself back to civilization, I decided to hatch a means of escape. It wasn't all that hard actually, it was just a matter of reminding him (the astronomer with the driver's licence) that located not all that faraway from the abbey was what has been called “the best picture in the world.”

Has anyone else read that wonderful essay by Aldous Huxley called “The Best Picture?”

It is a brilliant essay –and the title says it all. But, wait, you ask, how can there be such a thing as “the best picture” in the world? Isn't it an absolutely ludicrous suggestion to make?

Of course it is, and this is not lost on Huxley–for as you can see in the essay, he addresses this absurdity immediately:

The greatest picture in the world…. You smile. The expression is ludicrous, of course. Nothing is more futile than the occupation of those connoisseurs who spend their time compiling first and second elevens of the world's best painters,eights and fours of musicians, fifteens of poets, all-star troupes of architects and so on. Nothing is so futile because there are a great many kinds of merit and an infinite variety of human beings. Is Fra Angelico a better artist than Rubens? Such questions, you insist, are meaningless. It is all a matter of personal taste.And up to a point this is true. But there does exist, none the less, an absolute standard of artistic merit. And it is a standard which is in the last resort a moral one. Whether a work of art is good or bad depends entirely on the quality of the character which expresses itself in the work. Not that all virtuous men are good artists, nor all artists conventionally virtuous. Longfellow was a bad poet, while Beethoven's dealings with his publishers were frankly dishonourable.But one can be dishonourable towards one's publishers and yet preserve the kind of virtue that is necessary to a good artist. That virtue is the virtue of integrity, of honesty towards oneself.

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The Horses of Chauvet

the horses of Chauvet
lope through a cave
eloquently old and new

true and lush
as the love and lust
our progenitors knew
and craved
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by Jim Culleny
6/28/15
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Chauvet Cave

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by Emrys Westacott

My Facebook profile describes my political views as “very liberal.” In the US this is a shorthand way of indicating that I support gay rights, government-run health care, stricter gun laws, abortion rights for women, abolition of the death penalty, reduced military spending, environmental protection, campaign finance reform, the United Nations, Charles Darwin, the Toyota Prius, and higher taxes on people richer than me.

When I get together with other very liberals—which is quite often, since I'm married to one—a favorite topic of lamentation is the blindness of our political opponents. Why don't they get it? Why don't they see that we'd all be better off if we spent more on education and less on weapons systems; that if they really want to see fewer abortions they should support rather than oppose sex education in school and universal healthcare; that violent crime in the US is more likely to be reduced by having stricter gun control laws than by increasing the number of executions.

Our discussions of such matters follow a predictable course. After a round of annoyed tongue clicking, irritation gradually mounts until we reach a crescendo of infuriation and incredulity, from which we subside, with much headshaking, onto the soft but comfortless pillow of our usual answer. Why don't they get it? Because, to quote Samuel Beckett, “people are bloody ignorant apes!”

I believe something like the same kind of incredulity characterizes the view that many Europeans have of American politics. Whether the issue is denial of climate change, teaching creationism, resisting even minimal gun control, or opposing a more efficient health care system, the first impulse is to shake the head and ask, “How stupid can you get?”

As an explanation of why millions of people don't agree with me, the “ignorant ape” hypothesis has the virtue of simplicity. But I can't help feeling that it lacks depth. After all, in other areas of life conservatives aren't any more stupid than me or my fellow VLs. They make perfectly good parents, neighbors, and colleagues. So why do our wonderfully cogent arguments have so little purchase on their thinking?

I believe one key reason is that when it comes to political topics and stances, rational cogency often counts for less than symbolic meaning. In any debate, on any topic, the ideal is for the outcome to be determined entirely by the force of the best evidence and arguments. Indeed, submission to the argument is largely what we mean by scientific or scholarly objectivity. But submission to the argument seems to be less common in politics than in most other spheres. Instead, it is the symbolic significance of a political position that often decides whether a person endorses it or rejects it. This is true in every society; think for, instance, of the headscarf controversy in France. But it is perhaps more true in the US than in most other developed countries because for some reason symbols seem to play a bigger part in American political culture.

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Introduction by Bill Benzon

This month I've decided to turn things over to my good friend Charles Cameron, whom I've known for somewhat over a dozen years, though only online. He's a poet and a student of many things, most recently religious fundamentalism and its contemporary manifestations in terrorism. He characterizes himself as a vagabond monk and he blogs at Zenpundit and at Sembl. When he was eleven he applied to join an Anglican monestery and, while they didn't take him in, that act did bring him to the attention of the remarkable Fr. Trevor Huddleston, who became his mentor for the next decade. Thereafter Cameron explored Tibetan Buddhism, Hindu mysticism, and Native American shamanism. He's been around.

But it's his connection with Trevor Huddleston that got my attention, for Huddleston managed to broker a gift between two trumpet-player heroes of mine. At one point in his career he was in South African, where a young Hugh “Grazin in the Grass” Masekela was one of his students. On a trip to America, Fr. Huddleston met Louis Armstrong and got him to give Masekela a trumpet.

To the bridge builders…

Pontifex as Bridge Builder: the Encyclical Laudato Si'

by Charles Cameron

I propose that in his recent encyclical Laudato Si', Pope Francis is exercising his function as Supreme Pontiff, or @pontifex as he calls himself on Twitter – a pontifex being literally a bridge builder. It is my contention that in his encyclical he bridges a number of divides, between Catholic and Orthodox, sacramental and social, liberal and conservative, religious and scientific, even Christian and Muslim, traditional and of the fast advancing moment, in a manner which will impact our world in ways yet unforeseen.

It is my contention, also, that his pontificate provides the third step in a momentous journey.

The first step, as I see it, was taken by Christ himself in the Beatitudes – blessed are the poor in spirit, they that mourn, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers – and in his doctrine of forgiveness, not once only but a myriad of times. The second was taken by Francis of Assisi, in his Canticle of Creatures – praised be you, my Lord, with all your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, through Sister Moon and the stars, praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us.. blessed those who endure in peace.. – and in his crossing the front lines of war during the crusades to greet in peace the Sultan Malik Al-Kamil in Damietta, Egypt. And in taking the name Francis, in washing and kissing on Maundy Thursday the feet of both male and female, Christian and Muslim juvenile offenders in prison, and in issuing this encyclical, I would suggest Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, is taking the third step.

The line, the transmission, is of sheer humility. It begins with the Founder of the line, Christ himself, lapses, which all high inspirations must as routine replaces charisma, only to emerge brilliantly a millennium later in the saintly maverick, Francis, lapses again though still fermenting in the imagination of church and humankind, and now at last shows itself once more, in that most unexpected of places: in the heart of the bureaucracy, at the head of the hierarchy, atop the curia, simple, idealistic, practical – a pontifex building bridges.

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by Matt McKenna

Welcome, dinosaurs, to the pantheon of horror film monsters including zombies, sharks, and aliens that have been subjected to the sci-fi trope of genetic-engineering-gone-too-far. To be fair, it's hard to blame directors of horror sequels for invoking this narrative cliché–how else are they expected to make their follow-up films interesting? Must they be forced to produce another movie in which the exact same monster plunks around and kills yet more people in precisely the same fashion as it did in the original? Of course not. Sequels have to be spiced up somehow, and the best way to do that is to make the scary monster scarier. And to make a scary monster scarier, a director has but two options: either add more scary monsters (e.g. there is one alien in Alien, but there are many aliens in its sequel) or dial up the intelligence of the scary monster (e.g. the shark is a simple killing machine in Jaws, but it becomes emotionally complex and vindictive by Jaws IV). Genetic engineering comes in as the convenient means by which one of these methods is enacted. It was therefore only a matter of time before Hollywood created a blockbuster film about scientists creating a gifted and talented dinosaur rampaging about eating people. Jurassic World is that film, it's not bad, and it's also a strikingly good metaphor for the current state of the World Wide Web.

In Jurassic World, the dinosaur-filled theme park of the first film in the franchise has reopened after having miraculously recovered from the disaster that occurred decades prior. To no one's surprise, history repeats itself when a dinosaur escapes and eats a slew of park guests. However, this escaped dinosaur isn't just any old dinosaur–it's a genetically modified ultra-huge and hyper-smart murder monster. As expected, the second and third act of the movie consists mainly of the human characters yelling “run” and “go” and really just a lot of yelling in general as CG dinosaurs wriggle around and eat things.

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by Sue Hubbard

Siena

It’s Easter and the museum is empty. Nothing but relics

and saints’ bones – a thumb, a foreskin – it’s impossible to tell,

in their ornate reliquaries, what things are – and holy of holies,

a sacred nail. There’s also a gilded gospel from Constantinople

enamelled in cobalt blue. Tiny Byzantine figures: cobblers,

farriers, bakers and monks stuck forever In the 11^th century.

Once this maze of crypts housed weary pilgrims and the sick.

Wet nurses suckled abandoned infants for a fee.

Sorore, the shoemaker-founder, so my guidebook tells me,

died back in 898. Being here, certainly, gives you time

to contemplate the brevity of it all. To wonder where

this strip of cloth, a fragment of the Virgin’s belt, has been

these many years, and whether all truth contains

a contradiction – so even though I know there’s

no heaven, if I stand here long enough,

I’ll, maybe, learn the art of prayer.

by Alexander Bastidas Fry

When we face difficult questions vague answers can offer a feeling of clarity that binary answers cannot. The laws of nature and the foibles of humans do not always allow strict classification into true and false. Even when such a dichotomy exists how do we find the absolute truth? And what is more, how do we know the right question? Everything and everyone seems to have an answer and a question. During moments of introspection, the full moon may even ask you a question, or offer an answer with clarity. The moon is an object that is utterly real and tangible, but it is never quite present or reachable. It alludes to a bright idea that has no consequence. Take this old story,

A monk sat in the forest with three students. He took out his fan and placed it in front of him, saying, “Without calling it a fan, tell me what this is.”

The first said, “You could not call it a slop-bucket.” The master poked him with his stick.

The second and third students were actually rocks that the master had mistaken for students, because it was getting very dark. Suddenly, the master and his pupil felt afraid and alone.

In the distance a wolf howled.

The Zen tradition of paradoxical or even seemingly nonsensical stories like this, a koan, is to provoke doubt in understanding. Or to provoke true insight. Either way we would be fools to not take wisdom offered when there are wolves in the distance, sharks circling, or clouds gathering. Old Buddhist, Zen, and Sufi stories are searching for wisdom or answers to threats hidden in that shadows. But often the stories show all the search is for naught, there is nothing in the shadows. Indeed, many of the reoccurring themes and animals in those stories are not situations we encounter today. In the city there are troubled people on the corner and parking tickets. As I look out the window I see someone getting written a parking ticket. I think that a sort of modern koan is that parking signs that are always written in the negatory; statements which do not state what is permitted, only things which are un-permitted. The modern world casts new-old spells on people. What wisdom do we need in the modern world?

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by Jalees Rehman

Anti-Semitism and the holocaust are among the central themes in the modern German secondary school curriculum. During history lessons in middle school, we learned about anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews in Europe during the middle ages and early modernity. Our history curriculum in the ninth and tenth grades focused on the virulent growth of anti-Semitism in 20^th century Europe, how Hitler and the Nazi party used anti-Semitism as a means to rally support and gain power, and how the Nazi apparatus implemented the systematic genocide of millions of Jews.

Image of a Hitler Youth meeting from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia

In grades 11 to 13, the educational focus shifts to a discussion of the broader moral and political context of anti-Semitism and Nazism. How could the Nazis enlist the active and passive help of millions of “upstanding” citizens to participate in this devastating genocide? Were all Germans who did not actively resist the Nazis morally culpable or at least morally responsible for the Nazi horrors? Did Germans born after the Second World War inherit some degree of moral responsibility for the crimes committed by the Nazis? How can German society ever redeem itself after being party to the atrocities of the Nazis? Anti-Semitism and Nazism were also important topics in our German literature and art classes because the Nazis persecuted and murdered German Jewish intellectuals and artists, and because the shame and guilt experienced by Germans after 1945 featured so prominently in German art and literature.

One purpose of extensively educating Germany school-children about this dark and shameful period of German history is the hope that if they are ever faced with the reemergence of prejudice directed against Jews or any other ethnic or religious group, they will have the courage to stand up for those who are being persecuted and make the right moral choices. As such, it is part of the broader Vergangenheitsbewältigung (wrestling with one's past) in post-war German society which takes place not only in schools but in various public venues. The good news, according to recent research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, is that Germans who attended school after the Second World War have shown a steady decline in anti-Semitism. The bad news: Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a bigger challenge for Germans who attended school under the Nazis because a significant proportion of them continue to exhibit high levels of anti-Semitic attitudes more than half a century after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

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““The best evidence we have suggests that early Earth was completely covered by oceans…(but) if you link two amino acids together to make a protein, you have to remove water.” And that would have been impossible if the amino acids were immersed in an ocean. Life needed some land—literally a beachhead—to get started.” —Tim Folger , writer, National Geographic, Discover, Scientific American

Beachhead

though landbound, we were all once ships
we understand the sea which undulates within us
we’re bobbing on its swells of time
swept by winds that touch and grind us

few think we’re flawlessly designed
there are breaches in our hulls
we come perilously close to rocky spits,
adrift, each one looking for a beachhead
longing for a place that’s still
while everything around us shifts
the patch of earth by which god’s seas are parted
where future past and present sit
where love and luck may then be started
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by Jim Culleny
6/19/15

by Misha Lepetic

“I see your infinite form in every direction,
with countless arms, stomachs, faces, and eyes.”
~ Bhagavad-Gītā 11 16

About ten days ago, someone posted on an image on Reddit, a sprawling site that is the Internet's version of a clown car that's just crashed into a junk shop. The image, appropriately uploaded to the 'Creepy' corner of the website, is kind of hard to describe, so, assuming that you are not at the moment on any strong psychotropic substances, or are not experiencing a flashback, please have a good, long look before reading on.

What the hell is that thing? Our sensemaking gear immediately kicks into overdrive. If Cthulhu had had a pet slug, this might be what it looked like. But as you look deeper into the picture, all sorts of other things begin to emerge. In the lower left-hand corner there are buildings and people, and people sitting on buildings which might themselves be on wheels. The bottom center of the picture seems to be occupied by some sort of a lurid, lime-colored fish. In the upper right-hand corner, half-formed faces peer out of chalices. The background wallpaper evokes an unholy copulation of brain coral and astrakhan fur. And still there are more faces, or at least eyes. There are indeed more eyes than an Alex Grey painting, and they hew to none of the neat symmetries that make for a safe world. In fact, the deeper you go into the picture, the less perspective seems to matter, as solid surfaces dissolve into further cascades of phantasmagoria. The same effect applies to the principal thing, which has not just an indeterminate number of eyes, ears or noses, but even heads.

The title of the thread wasn't very helpful, either: “This image was generated by a computer on its own (from a friend working on AI)”. For a few days, that was all anyone knew, but it was enough to incite another minor-scale freakout about the nature and impending arrival of Our Computer Overlords. Just as we are helpless to not over-interpret the initial picture, so we are all too willing to titillate ourselves with alarmist speculations concerning its provenance. This was presented as a glimpse into the psychedelic abyss of artificial intelligence; an unspeakable, inscrutable intellect briefly showed us its cards, and it was disquieting, to put it mildly. Is that what AI thinks life looks like? Or stated even more anxiously, is that what AI thinks life should look like?

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by Jonathan Kujawa

The mathematics of the everyday is often surprisingly deep and difficult. John Conway famously uses the departmental lounge of the Princeton mathematics department as his office. He claims to spend his days playing games and doing nothing with whomever happens to be in the lounge, but his conversations about seemingly mundane questions has led to no end of delightful and deep mathematics. Chatting with math folks about the everyday can quickly lead to undiscovered country.

A much loved tradition among any group of mathematicians is talking math in the department lounge at afternoon tea. Nearly every department has such a tea. Some are once a week, some every day. There may or may not be cookies. What is certain, though, is that everyone from the retired emeriti to undergraduate students are welcome to stop by for a revitalizing beverage and a chat. More often than not it leads to talk about interesting math. You can begin to imagine why John Conway hangs out in the Princeton math lounge and Alfréd Rényi joked “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems” [1].

You might think the conversation swirls around the work of the latest winners of the Abel prize or folks trying to impress by describing the deep results of their morning's efforts. There is some of that. But just as often the conversation turns into an energetic discussion about the mathematics of the everyday. Several years ago I was involved in a heated discussion about whether or not the election laws of the State of Georgia could allow for a certain local election to become caught in an endless loop of runoff votes. The local media's description of the electoral rules seemed to allow this absurdity. Of course the argument could easily be resolved with a quick Google search, but where's the fun in that? A search was done, but not until all possible scenarios were thoroughly thrashed out and a nickel wagered.

My colleagues, Kimball Martin and Ravi Shankar, asked themselves an innocuous tea-time question: “How often should you clean your room?” Easy to ask, the question is surprisingly difficult to solve. In math problems come in three flavors: so easy as to be not very interesting, so hard as to be unsolvable, and the sweet spot in the middle where the questions are both interesting and solvable. When to clean your room turns out to be a question of the third kind.

The Stockholm Public Library

To have a chance in using math to answer a question you have to figure out what you're really asking. In the end Kimball and Ravi settled on the following scenario. Imagine you have a collection of objects which are all in order. For example, they could be books in alphabetical order on a shelf. After you've read a book you drop it on the large pile of books on your desk. From time to time you think of a book you'd like to read (let's say you'd like to reread the collected works of Shel Silverstein). Since the books in the pile are in no particular order, if the Shel Silverstein book is in the pile you have to go through the books one by one to find it. It's much faster to find the book when it's on the shelf. On the other hand, it takes time to put the books back on the shelf.

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by Kathleen Goodwin

Following the murders of nine members of the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by 21 year old Dylann Roof, many have noted the significance of Roof's being born in 1994. Despite growing up in “post-racial” America, in an allegedly “colorblind” generation, Roof is a white supremacist who adopted the symbols of some of the most patently racist and violent institutions in global history—namely the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and the white African colony of Rhodesia. Suddenly, the optimistic talk of millennials being open-minded and racism being a fading relic is ringing false. Survey data about those born after 1980 is now being dredged up revealing that white millennials are not considerably more tolerant than Generation X (born between 1965-1980), or even their parents, the Baby Boomers. Yet, the “stubborn myth” of the unprejudiced millennial persists despite plenty of available information to the contrary.

The main problem with this myth is twofold—the first is that millennials are a homogenous group of bike-riding, social media preoccupied, workplace disruptors. It doesn't take much reflection to realize that the “millennial” that the media is fond of writing about is actually a very small portion of the 65 million people born between 1980-1995. The vast majority of them can't afford fair trade organic coffee and in some demographic groups aren't college educated or stably employed. As Emily Badger writes in the Washington Post, “Often in the media (and I'll raise my hand here), we evoke the word ‘millennial' to describe a subset of people born after 1980 who hold college degrees and live in cities. We're not talking about 20-year-old single moms in small towns, or fast-food workers in the suburbs trying to get by on only a high school diploma.” Dylann Roof is a representative of the type of millennial that publications like the New York Times ignore in their coverage of the young adults currently living in major metropolises and being hired by Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Hence the surprise when Roof's values appear to conflict with widely disseminated views about the tolerance of his generation.

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by Justin E. H. Smith

I tend towards a fairly hardcore social constructionism about most mental-health diagnoses. I've read Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking, and I'm well aware of the historicity of ways of classifying and enacting whatever it is that's eating at our souls. World War I ends and young men stop fuguing; no one has come down with an attack of St. Vitus' Dance for some centuries now. These days PTSD is in fashion, the proximate causes of which range from surviving heavy combat in Iraq to having to read Ovid's Metamorphoses in a humanities survey course.

I'm not saying we aren't all feeling something, that we don't all have a current running through us that at one minute charges us up with the life force only to send us convulsing to the ground with its cruel and insupportable shocks the next. I'm saying that how we describe this current has much more to do with the way the people around us are chattering than with the way our own private neutrons are firing.

Except when it comes to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This, I maintain, is a real illness, like diabetes. I know because I suffered from it for a few years in my early twenties, and the experience of it remains one of the most basic autobiographical facts in my repertoire, the talking-point I pull out most readily when it comes to the difficult matter of who I am and what my whole thing is.

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by Tamuira Reid

It’s a hunch. It’s a diagnosis. It’s a long name that leaves you tongue-tied. It’s being horrified over the fact that PDD sounds more like an STD.

It’s blaming yourself. It’s blaming his father. It’s blaming God.

It’s watching a “normal” kid at the playground and wishing, for a split second, that he was yours. It’s hating yourself for wishing that.

It’s puzzles and foam boards and stacking cups. It’s medicine or no medicine. It’s shut-the-fuck-up-vaccinations-don’t-cause-this. But what does? It’s special schools. It’s special diets. It’s the word “special”. It’s cognitive testing. It’s being afraid that he is dumb. Afraid that he is trapped. It’s being afraid to project anything.

It’s sensory processing issues. It’s having to look this up. It’s flapping hands and toys arranged in lines. It’s the crooked smile. It’s a head banging against the wall. It’s his fists in my chest. It’s the word “pervasive”. The word “delayed”. It’s spending too much time in forum chat rooms with all the other mothers with bad news.

It’s dinosaur sheets. It’s trips to the moon. It’s Elmo and Dora and Thomas the Train. It’s trains. It’s trains, trains, trains. It’s taking the trains away. It’s play with this instead. It’s let’s do a puzzle. It’s feeling like a bad parent. It’s feeling like a bad egg donor. It’s feeling bad.

It’s tantrums on city sidewalks. It’s pulling his limp frame up and down Broadway. It’s silence where words should be. It’s classical music and music therapy and dance classes without much dancing.

It’s tears for no reason. It’s waiting rooms. It’s waiting.

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