by Michael Liss

Are opera singers dumb?

As a child, dragged to the Metropolitan by opera-obsessive parents in order to practice sitting absolutely still for three hours, I sometimes wondered about this. Certainly, on stage, there was a lot of dumb going on. What intelligent person could possibly trust evil Baron Scarpia to keep his word, or would sing full-out when dying of tuberculosis, with only a delicate, tuneful cough to show the gravity of the situation?

Opera singers were like Rat Pack Era movie-stars—they dressed well, they smoked and drank, they seemed always to be alighting from planes surrounded by Rolleiflex-bearing photographers. I heard a great story about Franco Corelli, the “Prince of Tenors,” who, when irritated by a soprano lead, would have a pre-performance meal laced with garlic. Did wonders for the love scenes. To an eight-year old that sounded pretty darn smart.

Yet, if you ask many musicians, they will tell you that the average opera singer just isn't that bright. I had a conversation a few months ago with a classically trained instrumentalist who is now a cantor. In his conservatory, the pure vocalists were looked down upon as lesser beings. He used the example of a Stradivarius. If he were suddenly to hand me this most cherished of instruments, I would scrape the bow across the strings and produce a sound similar to an alley cat. Without learning how to play, how to sight-read, without hours and hours of daily practice, I would never have the ability to make music. That was a musician's burden–endless efforts towards perfection, and the instrumentalists paid it. But the singer, through some completely random mixing of DNA, almost as God's afterthought on a busy day, got the Strad implanted, and all she needed to do was open her mouth and beauty would pour out.

This “Strad Complex” is not confined to instrumentalists and vocalists. There is the brilliant scene in Amadeus when the desperate Constanze brings Mozart's music to Salieri. Look at F. Murray Abraham's face as he leafs through page after page—it's just eating at him. In the space of a few moments you see incredulity, envy, opportunism, but, above all, an anguish that can only come from being talented enough to grasp that, on his best, most creative day, he can't even approach what this silly little man-child writes as a first (and only) draft.

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by Bill Benzon

What then are we to make of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, an event as preposterous as the title of this essay? However fervent his supporters were, and are, it appears that, come Election Day, not even Trump thought he would win. And now he’s stuck with having to govern. He’s caught the tiger by the tail and now he’s got to hold on to stay alive.

To be sure, I wasn’t at all happy voting for Hillary, for she seems to be more of the same. Obama is in many ways an admirable man and leader, but he’s also the Drone president and, though he did something about health care – Thank you, Obamacare! – he also seems to be out of the Clintonist triangulation Wall Street school of governance. Of course, Hillary is also a Clintonist, and even more of a hawk than Obama.

No, Hillary did not fill me with joy. I felt the Bern.

But Donald Trump? I cannot comprehend. Hence the term “singularity” in that preposterous title. The term is best known in the context of computing and artificial intelligence, where The Technological Singularity is when the machines become self-aware, bootstrap themselves into Superintelligence, and take over the joint, lock stock and barrel o’ monkeys. I think that’s nonsense, but the machines surely have been busy.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Still reeling from the unexpected outcome of the US presidential election, commentators understandably have begun diagnosing the political and intellectual condition of the country. One assessment that has been gaining traction especially among Left-leaning intellectuals is that, in electing Mr. Trump to the Presidency, the United States has embraced a “post-truth” politics. Though quickly becoming a predominant theme of political commentary, as yet the term does not have a unified meaning. Arguably, it refers instead to a several related but distinct phenomena. But if the term is going to serve any useful diagnostic function, it is necessary to disambiguate its central uses.

Most commonly, “post-truth” is employed to mark the fact that apparently a large segment of the electorate holds that although Ms. Clinton's alleged dishonesty disqualifies her for office, Mr. Trump's dozens of demonstrable lies, deceptions, and whole-cloth fabrications are acceptable, if not positively admirable. That is, our politics has become “post-truth” in that lying and dissembling no longer necessarily count against a politician. But when one regards lying as disqualifying only for one's political opponents, one reveals that one's concern isn't really with truth telling at all. One is appealing to truth in a strictly opportunistic way.

A second deployment of “post-truth” is closely related, though more radical. It concerns the newfound force of unrelenting denial. When caught in a lie or fabrication, Mr. Trump's leading tactic is to flatly deny that he ever said the lying or fabricated thing that, provably, he said. This goes beyond President Bill Clinton's infamously tortured semantics concerning “the meaning of ‘is'.” Here, Trump embraces the view of Humpty Dumpty, whose words mean whatever he at any moment declares them to mean. When meaning is fixed wholly by the speaker's will, what the speaker has said is no long evaluable by anyone but the speaker himself. Hence our politics is post-truth not only in that lying, and even asserting falsehood, is conceptually impossible. There could be no such thing as lying for those who, like Carrol's egg, refuse to be mastered by words, even by their own words.

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Richard & Louise Guy [1]

by Jonathan Kujawa

On the occasion of Richard Guy's 100th birthday.

Human beings have a talent for spotting patterns. No doubt this was handy in our early days. If both Ug and Oka were violently ill after eating purple berries from a particular bush, our clan was well served to notice and avoid those berries in the future. If anything, evolution encourages us to be overly quick to infer patterns. Better safe than sorry. No need for a double blind, randomized trial with a large sample size when life and death are on the line.

Our keen sense for what is random and what is not works both for and against us. After all, as we saw last month, it was Pick's keen eye for patterns which lead him to discover his beautiful formula. For an easier example, let's write down the first few numbers of the Fibonacci sequence:

1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,….

It only takes a minute to spot the rule used to generate these numbers. With a little more time we can even guess exactly which ones are even and which ones are odd [2].

Now imagine I tell you that I flipped two coins twenty-one times and got:

Coin A: TTTTHTTHHTTHTTTTHHHTT,

Coin B: HTTHTTHTTHTTHTTHTTHTT.

You would have to be an awfully trusting person to believe that both are fair coins and that I faithfully flipped and recorded the results. Our pattern seeking brain notices the regularity of Coin B. It violates our sense of what a “random” sequence of coin flips should look like. Mathematically we know each string of coins flips is equally likely. But even the most steely mathematician would be hard pressed to bet against Coin B next coming up heads.

A great icebreaker on the first day of teaching is to ask the students generate two lists of 100 coin flips: one by flipping a real coin and one by hand. Even though they do this while the instructor is out of the room, the instructor invariably can identify which is list is which. The secret is to look for long runs of heads, tails, or other patterns (like Coin B). Since all outcomes are equally likely to the coin it will happily generate strings of heads in a row. Human brains, however, notice such patterns and veto them in their effort to fake a random sequence of heads and tails. There is a running joke on this theme in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

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In Books

when words make love sentences are born
the world’s heft is changed by the weight of nouns,
the hesitations of hyphens and commas,
like the space between breaths,
tell the rhythm of what’s new and what’s been,
the dead stops of periods spell the end of what a breath holds,
adjectives, like the blood blush of infants
color clauses, articles wrap things in skin,
pronouns, unlike the particular names of new beings,
often identify the generalities of their forms by inclusion,
by saying, “We,” suggesting that mine and thine share,
and verbs are the darting eyes of fresh life,
the spastic gestures of unfamiliarity, the random smiles
that pass in the features of infants, sudden, uncalled-for
and of course the cautious steps of the old
reaching for footholds that once came naturally,
without thought, before the foreshadows of final words
.

Jim Culleny
12/1/16
.

by Daniel Ranard

you cannot
turn around in
the Absolute: there are no entrances or exits
no precipitations of forms
to use like tongs against the formless

—A.R. Ammons, in Guide

The world is usually grasped by its pieces. We may speak of a “holistic” perspective, but it's hard to understand all of a thing at once, or even to talk about it all at once. So we delineate pieces within the whole; we analyze the pieces and their interactions. For instance, to understand the recent political changes in the United States, it is uninformative to treat society monolithically. On the other hand, it's impossible to consider the disparate lives of every citizen at once. Instead, we delineate groups within the whole of society – political groups, racial groups, geographic groups – and discuss their interplay. Some delineations are more useful than others; it's probably difficult to understand the 2016 election in terms of cat- and dog-lovers. And all delineations share some degree of blurriness or arbitrariness: race is already a blurry construction, and though it may be crystallized in a bureaucratic form, the distinction only makes it more arbitrary. Through these delineations, we come to understand the otherwise formless and chaotic world and even to create our experience within it.

Imagine viewing all of human history as a video on fast-forward; observed all at once, you see only the tangled scurrying human beings. You cannot usefully describe what you see, nor guess what might happen next. But to the historian, history is not formless, though it may require hard work and ingenuity to find the right units of analysis. The traditional divisions of global society into self-described nation states and political institutions may serve you well, but new divisions may also be informative. In What is Global History?, Sebastian Conrad outlines the view that historians must not “accept political entities a priori as the boundaries of analysis, but instead trace the actual scope of entanglements and interconnections and work form there.” For instance, Marx chose to analyze history as an interplay of social classes. New perspectives might require more than the simple re-organization of people into different groups; historians might also invent new abstractions, such as the concept of capital, that help organize their observations.

These abstractions can be world-changing and world-making. That is, we live in the world of our chosen abstractions, which shape our narratives about ourselves and society. Although we choose these delineations and abstractions ourselves, I would not draw the radical conclusion that all choices are equal, or that the world is anything we make of it. Some choices are more useful, or maybe also more true or beautiful.

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by Olivia Zhu

A month ago, I wrote about haikus that wended their way through the Internet and found me. Really, truly—I hadn’t gone looking for them, had read them casually, and thought I might forget them. “And yet, and yet…” Chiyo-ni’s and Issa’s haikus kept nagging at me, so I looked for the translations that spoke most to me and wrote about them. Their mark lingers still, though, and when I passed by a used copy of Harold G. Henderson’s An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Bashō to Shiki in a bookstore, I had to pick it up.

Relatively speaking, it’s quite an old book on haiku. Published in 1958, it now appears to be out of print—so I really felt quite fortunate stumbling across as a clueless neophyte. It’s so old that inflation dictated I pay almost double the $1.45 that’s listed on the duck-decorated paperback cover, even in the book’s well-loved condition—still well worth it, of course. From what little I’ve read online, it seems likely that Henderson might have contributed to initial interest in haiku in America, as he helped found the Haiku Society of America and published some of the earliest English-language works on Japanese haiku.

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by Jalees Rehman

Less than one fifth of PhD students in the United States will be able to pursue tenure track academic faculty careers once they graduate from their program. Reduced federal funding for research and dwindling support from the institutions for their tenure-track faculty are some of the major reasons for why there is such an imbalance between the large numbers of PhD graduates and the limited availability of academic positions. Upon completing the program, PhD graduates have to consider non-academic job opportunities such as in the industry, government agencies and non-profit foundations but not every doctoral program is equally well-suited to prepare their graduates for such alternate careers. It is therefore essential for prospective students to carefully assess the doctoral program they want to enroll in and the primary mentor they would work with. The best approach is to proactively contact prospective mentors, meet with them and learn about the research opportunities in their group but also discuss how completing the doctoral program would prepare them for their future careers.

The vast majority of professors will gladly meet a prospective graduate student and discuss research opportunities as well as long-term career options, especially if the student requesting the meeting clarifies the goal of the meeting. However, there are cases when students wait in vain for a response. Is it because their email never reached the professor because it got lost in the internet ether or a spam folder? Was the professor simply too busy to respond? A research study headed by Katherine Milkman from the University of Pennsylvania suggests that the lack of response from the professor may in part be influenced by the perceived race or gender of the student.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

We are at the Original Pancake House. Walking through these double doors, a life-size mirror is always the first to meet me, but I am never shocked by the reflection as I am now. Does the wallpaper seem more ivory than before? Are the white tablecloths casting a glare? Am I more brown? I catch several glances in the mirror, of breakfast-eaters looking up to see who has entered. Complexion is the new currency. The Election season of 2016 has ended with rising fear and fading nuance. Shades of skin are suddenly coining new dialects of silence. Language, as we know it, is shedding gradations— those gray areas where subtlety of thought resides; nuance is becoming obsolete like discarded snakeskin, but unlike snakeskin, it will not regenerate on its own.

My husband and I discuss the menu in our usual English mixed with Urdu; he orders a German pancake and a vegetarian omelet. Years ago, when we came here for the first time, he declared that the German pancakes at this restaurant were authentic and reminded him of his mother. His mother is originally from Berlin where she met and married his father (a student from Pakistan) after she converted to Islam in the ‘60s. They moved to Karachi a few years later and have lived there ever since.

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by Yohan J. John

Ever since Donald Trump's shocking victory in the recent US Presidential Elections, I have gotten a kick out of reminding people of the following: next year we will mark 50 years since the Summer of Love. One response, which I imagine reflects a common sentiment among left-liberals, was a sardonic laugh followed by the line “So next year will be the Summer of Hate, eh?”

We may experience more than a summer of hate next year if our worst fears about Trump and the Republicans come to pass. The absolute control they will soon wield over all three branches of government give them the power to roll back half a century and more of progressive policy, if they so choose. So can we convince the Right, or at least some sections of their supporters, that a better solution to their grievances is possible? Is there anything we can do to breathe new life into the dreams of the 1960s hippies and radicals? Peace, Love, Equality and Good Music For All? Perhaps, but this will require a major reorganization on the part of the Left.

And this reorganization needs to start right away. Liberal and left-leaning people all over the world are still reeling from the election shock, but we need to snap out of it and get to work. Our delusional confidence in the liberal media establishment lulled us into complacency. Now we are having to confront our biases and filter bubbles: one of the few silver linings in this ominous time.

The soul-searching on the Left is necessary right now. But there is a danger that social liberals will double down, continuing their losing strategy of framing all political debates in terms of identity politics: they will cry racism, bigotry and misogyny until they are blue in the face. This election should have proved that this is politically naïve in the extreme. The media was virtually unified in its revulsion of Trump. If months of decrying racism and misogyny during the election campaign did nothing to sway the electorate, what will protests (to say nothing of KKK-bashing internet memes) now achieve?

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Darwin's Surf
…. —ode to cells

Before metaphorical allusions
we are warm and wet.
Seas surge within us.
In little cytoplasmic bays,
tiny ships of golgi moor
near lysosome cays enclosed by
permeable breakwater membranes
that all rise and fall with nucleo tides
in ebbs and flows through generations
rendering noses pug or aquiline
and eyes skybright or in colors of loam;
tides that sculpt with Darwin’s surf
graceful geographies of bodies
that draw the tissue curtain
between what is and what’s not
over muscle and bone
inflaming passion, heat, desire
to close the current’s ring,
to come together again
immersed in what is warm and wet,
to touch, embrace, to recombine,
to love, to sing, to lose,
to remember to forget

.
Jim Culleny
11/18/16
.
Cytoplasm
Golgi
Lysosome

.

by Syed Tasnim Raza

Denton Arthur Cooley, founder and president and at the time of his death president-emeritus of the Texas Heart Institute (THI), died on Friday November 18, 2016. He had celebrated his 96^th birthday only three months earlier. Texas Heart Institute, founded in 1962, became a premier heart surgery center in the world, where Cooley is credited with performing 100,000 heart operations over 45 years. There were many highly skilled surgeons working at THI, who opened and closed the patients' chests and Cooley would just come in to do the main part of the operation. At his peak, he could complete 30 to 40 operations in a day!

Perhaps Cooley was the Henry Ford of heart surgery. While heart surgery was developed by many surgeons until it matured into the modern specialty as we know it in 1950's and 1960's, under the pioneering work of C. Walton Lillehei and John Kirklin both of Minnesota, it was Cooley who turned it into an assembly line operation at the Texas Heart Institute in the 1970s.

Heart surgery developed in fits and spurts, beginning with a simple suture of a stab wound of the heart by Ludwig Rehn of Frankfurt, Germany in 1896. One of the big steps, particularly in surgery for congenital heart disease, came in 1944 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where Helen Taussig, pioneer pediatric cardiologist, proposed and Alfred Blalock, the famed chairman of surgery there, performed the first Blalock-Taussig shunt (also known as the Blue-baby operation) as treatment for cyanotic infants born with Tetralogy of Fallot, until they could grow up and a more definitive corrective operation could be performed. Denton Cooley was present for the first history-making Blue-baby operation on November 29, 1944.

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by Katalin Balog

There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
(Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”)

*This essay, on the personal in politics, is written in lieu of the final instalment of The Brain’s I, a series I have been publishing here on the subjective/objective divide in our lives and thought. The Brain’s I, Part 4, will appear here after the holidays.

I am so glad this mess was not Leonard Cohen’s last impression of the planet. But the rest of us are left to grapple with the same thing that occupied much of his work: how to affirm living in a broken world. The world was not quite whole on November 7^th but we could still pretend, could still hope; November 8^th has made it official. A giant crack has appeared – though not at all the one we have expected, and the country and the world has jumped with two feet into the abyss.

It is impossible to write or think anything about the causes of Trump’s victory and the nature of his support that is not hopelessly one-sided and has “particular point of view” written all over it. Right now, what we see divides us. But beyond all the sound and fury, the one inescapable fact is that the election is the expression of the will and soul of a significant portion of America. No amount of rational analysis or soul searching can blunt the message this sends. It hurts.

I. Rebellion

Early in the day of the election I thought of the pain and confusion Trump supporters would feel upon his loss. I could anticipate their reaction because I knew I would feel the same if my candidate lost. I was nervous and a bit uncertain but still expected Hillary to win. Later, when anticipation turned into dread, disbelief, and a growing sense of defeat, I did not think of the joy of the victors with sympathy. A chasm has opened; they were now the enemy. I was consumed now with a flood of sadness, fear and anger and revulsion I could not imagine just hours before. I was gripped by the same emotions many of Trump supporters, apparently, have felt for years, maybe decades… Was this the bitter medicine we needed to wake up? Was it poetic justice for festering inequality as some on the left suggest? Should we simply tone down the blame, and outrage, recognizing in our newly kindled primal hostility the mirror of the negative emotions we condemn in our adversary, as Martha Nussbaum suggests? There is something to all of this. But it’s all so much more complicated.

There is no sugarcoating this. This is not an ordinary disappointment about the wrong policy, the wrong candidate, things not going my way. It cannot be overcome by more tolerance and commitment to social justice. Whatever the motives and struggles of many of Trump’s voters, his election is an epic cultural, moral and intellectual collapse on the collective level. Crudeness, racism and ignorance has won.

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A Dewdrop and The Stars

after Iqbal

“Tell a story,”
said the stars to the dewdrop,
“of a garden far from the heavens,
a vanished world
to which the moon sings of love.”

”O stars,” said the dewdrop,
“not a garden but a world of sighs:
the breeze visits only to return
and the rose, the garden’s flourish,
blooms merely to wither,

bears the pain, can’t pluck pearls
even from its own hem, is silent
as the nightingale wails:
the humming bird is imprisoned:
it’s an outrage!

The eye of the ailing iris is forever moist.
The box tree, free only in name,
is scorched by the heat of its own bawl.
Stars are sparks of man’s burning.
The moon naively believes revolving

cures her scarred heart;
the garden is air
a sad image on the horizon’s canvas.
I am the sky’s teardrop
secret of the sea is within me.”

by Rafiq Kathwari, @brownpundit, rafiqkathwari.com

by Carol A. Westbrook

Jurgis Daugvilla (1923-2008) was an artist, and a master carver of wood sculptures in the tradition of Lithuanian folk artists. He was a neighbor, and a friend of my husband, Rick, a third-generation Lithuanian. “Richard,” he would say, “Your house is at the crossroads of our town. You should have a Kryžius in your yard.”

“Kryžius” (pronounced “kree'-jus) means “cross,” and refers to the tall, totem-pole-like wooden carvings which appear as roadside shrines throughout Lithuania. The tradition goes back to pagan times, when they were used to mark sites of cult offerings, especially at crossroads and burial grounds. The monuments featured folk carvings, with peaked roofs for protection from the elements. When Christianity arrived at the end of the 14th century, the pagan monuments were topped with crosses, allowing for their preservation by converting them into emblems of faith. Every region in Lithuanian had its particular cross-making traditions, incorporating folk symbols,
pagan cults, geometrical shapes and religious icons.They were found throughout the countryside, but especially at crossroads and cemeteries, continuing in the pagan tradition.

Christianity did not halt this tradition, but politics did. Because of their significance as a national and religious symbol, many of these crosses were destroyed during the Soviet occupation, 1944-1990. The famous “Hill of Crosses” in northern Lithuania became a symbol of peaceful resistance, as crosses were added while the Soviets attempted to remove them, bulldozing the site at least three times. In 1990 there were 55,000 crosses on the hill, and today there are over 100,000. The Kryžius remains an important symbol of Lithuanian nationalism, and new ones have begun to re-appear across the landscape.

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by Max Sirak

We live in an uncertain world. We hate to admit it, but it's true. So true, in fact, physicist Max Born wrote, as quoted by Leonard Mlodinow, “Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality.” (The Drunkard's Walk) This idea probably sits poorly with most of us, quantum physicists aside, for two reasons.

The first is because causality, on a local level, the me-and-you level, is something easy to observe. I can take a full glass of water, knock it over, and cause it to spill. You can go turn on the stove, touch it, and cause your hand to burn. These and thousands of other experiences like them prove our agency in the world.

The second is because it's scary. It's a big, indifferent world out there. It sits in a bigger and more indifferent solar system, which in turn rests in an even bigger and more indifferent galaxy, which itself is part of a bigger and more indifferent universe, one of many in the grandest and most indifferent structure of all, the multiverse.

And, because of the salience of our experiences and the immensity of our universal setting, we don't feel great about uncertainty. Instead of making friends with this fundamental truth and learning the best ways to work with it, we actively strive to do everything in our power to rail against it.

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