by Brooks Riley

We are born into a noisy world. For most of us, it starts right off with the cries and whimpers of our own Mum as she tries to help us tunnel our way out of the womb. What from inside may have sounded like the couple fighting next door, explodes into the full-blown cacophony of voices and diverse environmental clicks and clacks of the natal experience, once you’ve made it through the birth canal to the outside.

You can’t really see all that well yet, so what you hear is what you get: Voices, ‘Ooh, aah’, ‘it’s a girl,‘ the clatter of instruments the doctor is using, the slap on your bum to get you breathing, your own voice too, adding clarion outrage and high-decibel relief, and then the squeak of rubber-soled shoes as the nurse carries you to your mother’s arms or your first bed ever. I was spared much of the clatter, my mother opting for anesthesia, allowing me to emerge into a deceptively tranquil world.

In the realm of sound, music gets the most attention, deservedly so. Music is nothing short of a human triumph, the bending of sound into methodical systematic arrangements that manage both to please the ear and to give the listener’s brain a rush of emotion that it might otherwise never have experienced. It’s right up there with language as a supreme accomplishment of the species, but its greatest achievement may be its uselessness. Music is an evolutionary luxury, serving no known purpose in the survival of the species no matter how often you hum along to ‘I will survive’.

Noise, belonging to sensual imput without intent, is etymologically compromised, left well behind in the rush to music. As distinct from the word ‘sound‘‘, the word ‘noise’ means that what is being heard is unpleasant or annoying (the word stems from ‘argument ‘and ‘nausea’). As a single word with an article, however, as in ‘a noise’, it is neutral, a sound that may very well be satisfying to the ear after all.

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by Dave Maier

Carolyn Ives Gilman’s 2015 novel Dark Orbit is intensely concerned with the extent to which reality outstrips or transcends our knowledge and/or sense perception. Indeed, the jacket copy tells us that one character’s “most difficult task may lie in persuading the crew that some powers lay [s/b “lie”?] beyond the boundaries of science.” I generally don’t like this sort of talk, which smacks of obscurantism. Naturally if you construe “science” narrowly enough – identifying it with this or that set of procedural or substantive commitments – some aspect of reality will probably remain opaque to “science” so construed; but that doesn’t tell us much.

While some of its characters haven’t quite thought all this through, Dark Orbit itself is quite thought-provoking and well worth reading for this and other more conventional sci-fi reasons (like that it’s a cracking read). I found particularly interesting the conceptual difficulties the characters run into when dealing with the nature of the senses and their relation to the reality beyond our heads. Naturally this discussion may involve some **SPOILERS**, but not, I claim, anything particularly serious.

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by Humera Afridi

I have just finished reading The Morning They Came for Us by Janine Di Giovanni and, in its wake, Dreaming of Baghdad by Haifa Zangana. I can't recall the last time I had such a powerful and visceral reading experience—needing to physically move my body into air and sunlight, taking myself from the quiet of my living room to a bench at a pier in Manhattan where I gained solace in uninterrupted views of the boundless sky and and the oddly comforting presence of insouciant yachts docked in the marina. I looked up from the harrowing accounts on the page to the bustle of the Farmer's Market and the fountain where Uversa, the self-professed Oracle of Union Square, unveils the future in artful tarot cards. I felt dizzy, disoriented, and, at the same time, reassured.

Ensconced in the knowing that the world familiar to me still reliably exists, I wondered, but, for how long? I read first one book and then the other, compulsively. I am acutely aware that my position as a reader of these books is privileged, precarious—vicariously experiencing the trauma of ongoing wars, through the written word, and at a safe distance, on the shores of a country that has its own dubious hand in the strife-riven lands of these magnificent narratives. Here I am, a person in command of her body, with the freedom to move, in safety, to places of her own choosing, needing the assistance of the sky and deep inhalations of fresh air to get through descriptions of unspeakable torture and imprisonment.

I looked at my surroundings with new eyes. Every person bumping past me in the crowded public spaces in which I chose to read these intimate portraits of war—amid chatter and laughter, and freshly harvested bunches of tender dandelion greens—carries within them a hidden world. How many of these hands, these feet, passing me have touched the skein of war? How many harbor memories of trauma, of elsewheres that shadow them here, in the present of this life, in this city, in this square?

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by Sarah Firisen

People are awful. You only need read the daily headlines to realize how awful so many of us are to each other. Intolerance, prejudice, ignorance, sit behind so many of the evils that men (and women) do to each other. But as bad as things are, they are mostly so much better than they ever have been. You don’t need to go back far in history to realize how much more tolerant and open minded we have tended to become as a species. The further back you go, the worse it is. What has made things, relatively speaking better? Well, not surprisingly, exposure and engagement tend to breed tolerance. We fear and suspect the unknown.

The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the precariousness of one's own lot in life, more palpable—the feeling that “there but for fortune go I.” —Michael Tomasky

And for the most part, what has brought us increasing exposure and engagement with each other has been advances in technology; from better boats, to planes, to computers and the Internet, it seems that while exposure to “the other” often aggravates fears, eventually, the ever adaptable human being learns that other people are far more similar to us than they are different. As we become exposed to people of different religions, cultures, beliefs, sexual orientation, it becomes harder and hard to see them as “the other”. There’s nothing radical or surprising about this. While there were clearly many complex issues at play, there seems to be real evidence that one of the major factors in the radical change in attitudes towards homosexuality in the US can be put down to the TV show Will and Grace, which, if nothing else, exposed gays to be much like the rest of us: self-absorbed, looking for love and acceptance and really in need of best friends who get us no matter how self-absorbed we become.

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by Bill Benzon

Martha Mills came to Mississippi as a young civil rights lawyer, looked racists judges, lawyers, and Ku Kluxers in the eye, and never backed down–in court or out. Small in stature, huge in guts, as far as I was concerned she was the smartest, bravest, and just plain toughest of that corporal’s guard of dedicated lawyers committed to giving life to the law.

—W. Hodding Carter III

The 1960s were tumultuous years in American politics. The nation blundered into a disastrous war in Vietnam that sparked years of protest and deprived Lyndon Johnson of a second full term as president. His boss, John F. Kennedy, and been assassinated in November of 1963, leaving Johnson to pursue that terrible war, but also to work with Kennedy’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. They brought the civil rights movement to fruition with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when Robert was a U.S. Senator. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, 1968, only two months after Martin Luther King was assassinated. King’s assassination fulminated race riots across the nation.

On February 7, 1969, The New York Times ran a story on page 20:

Woman Lawyer, 27, Jailed on Contempt In Grenada, Miss.

Special to the New York Times

GRENADA, Miss., Feb. 6–A 27-year-old woman lawyer was jailed for three hours here today after being held in contempt of court by Circuit Judge Marshall Perry when she attempted to file a bill of exceptions to a case involving a Negro civil rights worker.

Miss Martha M. Wood, an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, based in Jackson, was released under $300 bail.

An offense that merits release after only three hours in jail and with bail at $300 can’t have been much of an offense. And it wasn’t. But it involves a kind of
intricate legal obfuscation that defies easy summary and that is characteristic of race relations in the United States, then and alas now. If the prospect of summarizing it brings me to the edge of extreme annoyance you can imagine what it did to those who suffered through and by it, day after day.

Such is the texture of the story that Martha Mills recounts in a memoir of her years as a civil rights attorney, Lawyer, Activist, Judge: Fighting for Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi and Illinois (2015). In this particular case the obfuscation was also the occasion of a little theatrical detail in the manner of arrest: “The deputy grabbed my arm roughly and hauled me out of the courtroom. As soon as we were out of the courtroom, however, he dropped my arm, apologized, and said he had to do that for the judge” (p. 277). You gotta’ love it, the delicate egos of those racist judges. The Lord does indeed move in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

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by Matt McKenna

Sully isn't a movie about a pilot’s heroic skill to land a plane on the Hudson river and save the lives of the hundred-fifty-five people onboard. Instead, it is a movie about the decision by a pilot to land the plane on the Hudson River and what it must feel like to be both praised and second guessed for that decision. The movie is therefore an analogy for living in the aftermath of any tough choice made in public, and has there ever been a choice made in public tougher than Apple CEO Tim Cook’s choice to remove the headphone jack from the new iPhone?

Sully is based on the real life story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger who, after having a bunch of birds slam into both engines of the airliner he was flying, lands the aircraft on the Hudson River. Miraculously, everyone on the flight survived. Understandably though tiresomely, the movie repeatedly revisits the moment the birds hit the engines, probably because it's one of the few dramatic events in an otherwise pretty thin story. Not that I mind a short movie, but even after showing a dozen views of the plane splashing into the river, Sully still clocks in at only ninety-six minutes. And outside the water landing, the story that does exist is mostly fictional including the comically evil antagonists of the film, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigating the incident. For unexplained reasons, the NTSB desperately wants to prove that Captain Sullenberger should have turned the plane around to land back at LaGuardia Airport instead of dropping it into the Hudson. In reality, the NTSB didn’t try to prove that at all, but it’s hard to blame screenwriter Todd Komarnicki for adding this twist since it is the film’s only source of drama after the landing itself.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

These days there is a nearly constant clamor among academic philosophers for more public philosophy. We've already expressed puzzlement about what public philosophy is and what public philosophers are trying to achieve. It's likely that our puzzlement has been dismissed among public philosophy enthusiasts as nothing more than the imposition of the norms of academic philosophy on to an alternative vision of philosophical activity. Clarity about public philosophy is apparently not on the public philosopher's agenda. Perhaps the idea is that we can find out what public philosophy is only by publicly philosophizing? Fair enough. But there's still a question about how to we are to publicly philosophize. What are we to begin doing that we're not already doing? Presumably, public philosophy is in part the project of bringing philosophical insight into public discussion. How can this be practically pursued? Two related paradoxes arise.

To begin, consider the fact that so much of what is called public philosophy is politically oriented. Some candidate's pronouncements may come under philosophical scrutiny, a conceptual argument for one policy or another gets given, problematic assumptions are laid bare, hidden premises are challenged, or certain norms are critiqued along some theoretical line or another. That's the philosophical part, and it is nothing new; it is the kind of thing has been done by academic philosophers since the inception of academic philosophy. The distinctively public component emerges as the commitment to philosophizing about public matters in a mode that is accessible to the public itself rather than only to academic philosophers. Public philosophy, then, is philosophy about social and political matters that is for public consumption. Put otherwise, public philosophy is political philosophy intended for uptake by the public.

So far, so good. But notice that the need for philosophical examination, critique, and elucidation is most pronounced when matters are deeply conflicted. Philosophy does its work when intellectual materials stand in need of clarification, when disagreements prevail and there is no clear or obvious way of finding a resolution. In this way, philosophy is driven by conflicts that appear to be intractable. It is the controlled attempt to rationally address conflicts that look like impasses. And the deeper the conflict, the more urgent the need for philosophers to go to work.

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by Misha Lepetic

The Spectacle is not a collection of images,
but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
~ Debord

Now that Pokémon Go has had a few weeks to work its way through our collective psychosocial digestive tract, we can begin considering the effects of this latest, and by far most successful, manifestation of augmented reality (AR). Because it has been so successful, it's worth asking the big questions. Does Pokémon Go really make us more social? Does it make us better as individuals, or as a society? What gets amplified, and what gets obscured? (Hereis a brief overview of how Pokémon Go works.)

It's worth mentioning that augmented reality broke into the national consciousness in the form of a game. Educational tools have a limited audience and their effectiveness is difficult to measure. Workplace applications are either niche or still undercooked – for example, if we're to go by this recent video by AR darling Magic Leap, work seems to entail checking the weather and stock prices, at least until you're interrupted by your kid sharing his school report on Mt. Everest. After buying some spiffy orange boat shoes, there's not much left to do but look up and zone out to the jellyfish languidly passing across the ceiling. Clearly, this is a job that is safe from automation.

Games, on the other hand, are the perfect vessel for distributing a technology such as AR. Software is a contained system; it is built according to specifications and anticipates a gamut of interactions. There are rules – visible or invisible – that tell you what the system may or may not do. And engagement with the system is based on the fact that identity and progress can be established and measured, with performance compared and contrasted with other players.

All of this makes software ideal as the substrate for the gamification of, well, everything. If you've ever used Uber, you can see the available cars trundling along the streets in your vicinity. Once you complete your ride, you rate your driver. What's a rather lesser-known fact is that your driver rates you. Silicon Valley abhors a data vacuum, and a great way to get people to provide data about anything is to make a game out of it. The genius of this is that, consequently, people are really convinced that it's just a game.

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by Olivia Zhu

Grumbling and stumbling in the night: this is Philip Larkin’s self-introduction in “Sad Steps,” dissatisfied with his aging and driven awake by a compelling need to urinate. Over the course of the poem, however, his evident discomfort with growing old is replaced with first a burst of poetic dynamism before ending with a settled acceptance of his lot. These transformations take place under the poem’s moon, an ever-present and unemotional image that prompts the speaker to confront, correct, and ultimately console himself. His psychological shifts are paired and illustrated with corresponding changes in the poetic language, ranging from the types of phrasing to the use of punctuation to descriptions of distances. Larkin communicates his increased contentment with his varying portrayals of the moon and his environment, clarifying that he understands not merely the inevitability of growing old, but also the linguistic lessons that can only be learned with age.

The poet examines his assured aging first by casting himself as small in comparison to the world that surrounds him. The sky is “cavernous” and the moon is “high,” situating the speaker far below either. This very careful placement makes it impossible for Larkin—someone who has difficulty returning to bed at night—to have any effect on the heavens, let alone the passage of time. Critic Nicholas Marsh agrees, suggesting that the speaker’s realization of his physical size in proportion to that of the universe “reminds him of his own insignificance and mortality” (124). Moreover, the moon is incredibly powerful in “Sad Steps.” It is emotionally striking and compelling, certainly, but it is also described as a cannonball that “dashes through clouds that blow,” making it unlikely that the speaker would be able to resist its momentum and pull. Just as the moon wanes after it waxes, so must Larkin. He recognizes his youth “can’t come again,” so unlike youthful “others,” he is not “undiminished.” The period in which he was able to be strong is over, and all young people are aware of the “pain” of the prospect of growing older. The speaker has cast aside the “thick curtains” of the very beginning of the poem, no longer living in some form of denial, to stare openly on the moon and remind himself of who he is now.

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Don W. in Manhattan

—eating the dust of 2001

Dining in Soho alone, a man
served by a girl with lip studs, nose ring,
and serpent tattoo uncoiling
from deep cleavage,
sees the new man of La Mancha,
in dim light across the room,
seated with his back to the street:

This new La Mancha man
topples a pepper mill with his fork
gesturing to his wife, Sancha,
vowing he'll avenge New York

Sancha smiles and re-sets the mill in place
among constellations of pepper stars
strewn across formica space

Between them supper's done:
spent dinnerware, filaments of flaked filo
circling half a buttered bun,
remnants of dense moussaka,
and that pepper mill now standing like a dustbowl silo
near languid cubes in tepid water

Don Doble U, enemy of disorder,
sweeps a hand through this small universe
upending the pepper mill once more
and plows a thousand minuscule black galaxies
into his cupped palm
and dumps them on the floor

He takes his tined baton
between forefinger and thumb
and sets a cadence in the atmosphere
thumping on his different drum

Then Don (el hombre fútil),
maestro of mishap,
conducts the ice and water glass
into long-suffering Sancha's lap………………..
……………….
Jim Culleny; 2001

by Dwight Furrow

The question of whether food preparation can be a fine art turns on two issues:

1. Does food have the rich assortment of meanings typical of fine art? and

2. Does food express emotion in the same sense that music or painting does?

As I argued in American Foodie, both these questions depend on whether food can function as a complex symbol or metaphor. Food exemplifies or shows what it's trying to say via its flavors and textures, just as a painting displays its meaning in colors, lines, and brush strokes or a piece of music in its melodic/harmonic structure and timbres. As a conceptual matter these questions can be answered in the affirmative. However, the problem is that chefs must satisfy hunger, cater to taste preferences, and make a profit, and these practical constraints often limit their artistic aspirations.

Thus, when restaurants make an effort to highlight the artistic aspirations of their chefs, it is a special occasion, so I could not resist a trip to Chicago to sample the Art Menu of Rick Bayless and his chefs at his restaurant Topolobampo. Bayless is the acclaimed auteur of refined Mexican cuisine. Each summer his chefs create a tasting menu in which each dish expresses an emotion. The chefs then select works of art from the restaurant's collection of Mexican art that expresses the same emotion as each dish—all explained and depicted in a helpful brochure that is given to guests who order the menu. This is a fascinating experiment in cross-modal metaphor that if successful adds another data point favoring the artistic credentials of food.

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by Gerald Dworkin

From time to time my friends, knowing that I watch many television series, ask me what current show I recommend. I always start by asking if they have watched The Wire. If they say they have not, I suggest they watch all five seasons and then I will make suggestions about what to watch now.

The Wire, which ran from 2002 to 2008, was created, and largely written, by David Simon, a former police reporter on the Baltimore Sun. It is a systematic examination of the oppression of poor and black Baltimore citizens by five major institutions as they interact with the criminal justice system. These are drug trafficking, the seaport and its unions, city hall (politicians and bureaucracy), the school system, and the press.

The series is brilliant both artistically and sociologically. Using mainly unknown–at the time–actors, kids from the streets of Baltimore, as well as real-life characters from Baltimore, superbly written and directed, it exposes how these institutions not only oppress the poor but corrupt and compromise all those who act with power within these institutions.

This spring HBO introduced a new eight part series The Night Of, henceforth TNO. It was presented as a crime series with the crime being the murder of a young woman, and the person arrested for the crime being a young Pakistani college student, Naz. The show received quite favorable ratings although also some criticism as to pacing and some implausible plot points.

Considered as a police procedural or as a mystery I think it is excellent watching although not in the same class as, say, the first series of True Detective, the first series of Broadchurch, Happy Valley, River, or the Fall.

However I am going to argue that viewing the series as the sixth episode of The Wire it is a brilliant success as a portrait of the criminal justice system– the institution that The Wire never got around to portraying in detail.

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Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
……………….. —Bob Dylan
.

Wabi-sabi

upon first hearing
I knew the perfection
Dylan wove that verse around
(as if anything on earth could be so flawless
as to deserve the divinity of that word)
which says:
………………...could be here now
and so well timed that all the angles
of Pythagoras and all the angels
of Einstein’s curly gravity
and all of Kepler’s mathic motions
and all of Shakespeare’s mythic tragedies
are met in streets laid in English Bond
as beautifully sublime as the Pietá
whose only imperfection
is in the brutal timeless tale it tells in stone
in which Michelangelo distilled so perfectly
the failed perfection of the world
.
Jim Culleny
3/25/16

__________________________________________________
Note:
Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art
of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature.
.

by Katalin Balog

This is the third of a series of four essays on the mind and the brain. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Conscious will is our curse and blessing. It can seem our highest faculty, to be used for good or ill; it also can seem as the source of a particular kind of disgrace – or rather, lack of grace. As Heinrich von Kleist points out in his short story “On the Marionette Theater“, the conscious effort to succeed can be the death of innocence and genuine charm; the ruin of the dancer and the actor; more generally, can cause any of us to seem stilted and inauthentic – as the political arena amply testifies.

Nevertheless, conscious will, our capacity to act or refrain from action voluntarily, is widely held to be our most human capacity, a condition of human dignity and worth. But there is reason to think that on the most natural understanding of what this capacity involves, there is no room for it in the scientific world view.

There are two, radically different ways to understand the mind: one is to look within, to understand oneself (and by extension, others) as a subject, a self; the other, to study the brain and behavior, in ways that are similar to our study of any phenomenon “out there” in the world. The first method is subjective, humanistic, and is essentially tied to a particular point of view. The second method is objective, it is based on observation of brain and body and it is accessible to anyone, irrespective of their personal idiosyncrasies or their point of view. Its best embodiment is the scientific method. How the subjective fits in with the objective is one of the most vexing questions both in philosophy and life.

In the first two parts of this series of essays, I have looked at how each side can – mistakenly – see the other as wrong or irrelevant. In this essay, I will continue to explore the conflict between the two approaches in our understanding of agency and the self. In the last part next month, I will argue for the need to better balance the role of the subjective and the objective in theory and practice.

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by Paul Braterman

Part 1 of this series, “Atoms Old and New: Atoms in Antiquity” can be read here.

The transition to modern thinking

“It seems probable to me, that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles… even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God Himself made one in the first creation.” So wrote Sir Isaac Newton in his 1704 work, Opticks. Apart from the reference to God, there is nothing here that Democritus would have disagreed with. There is, however, very little that the present-day scientist would fully accept. In this and later posts, I discuss how atoms reemerged as fundamental particles, only to be exposed, in their turn, as less than fundamental.

The scientific revolution and the revival of corpuscular theory – 1543–1687

In 1543, on his death-bed, Nicholas Copernicus received a copy of the first edition of his book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, in which he argued that the Sun, not the Earth, was thecentre of what we now call the Solar System. In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, commonly known as the “Principia”. With hindsight, we can identify the period between these events as a watershed in the way that educated people in the West thought about the world, and number the political revolutions in America and France, and the economic revolutions in agriculture and industry, among its consequences.

Before this scientific revolution, European thinking about nature still followed that of Aristotle. The Earth lay at the centre of the Universe. Objects on Earth moved according to their nature; light bodies, for instance, containe, air or fire in their makeup, and these had a natural tendency to rise. Earth was corrupt and changeable, while the heavens were perfect and immutable, and the heavenly bodies rode around the centre on spheres within spheres because the sphere was the most perfect shape. By its end, Earth was one of several planets moving round the Sun in elliptical orbits, the movements of objects were the result of forces acting on them, the laws of Nature were the same in the heavens as they were on Earth, and all objects tended to move in straight lines unless some force deflected them from this path. The Universe ran, quite literally, like clockwork. This mechanical world-view was to last in its essentials until the early 20th century, and still remains, for better or worse, what many non-scientists think of as the “scientific” viewpoint.

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