by Ben Schreckinger

Christmas is Wednesday, and as the recent (and absurd) controversy over the color of Santa’s skin indirectly reminds us, the holiday is an amalgam of various pagan and Christian traditions drawn from a diversity of times and places. In addition to the Gospel stories of Jesus’ birth, they include the hagiography of the 4th century Lycian bishop St. Nicholas, Roman Saturnalia, and the Scandinavian-Pagan Yule. It is remarkable that like a time capsule, this Christian holiday serves as a vessel in which parts of various pre-Christian belief systems, otherwise long-ago lost, stand preserved.

Their preservation is testament to the tenacity of human spiritual beliefs and traditions, which often manage to outlive the environments that first produced them. Far more fragile than beliefs are human institutions, whose shelf-lives only very rarely exceed a few centuries. The birth of Jesus represents the turning point Western history between its pagan and Christian periods, which are embodied by the institutions of the Oracle at Delphi and the Roman Catholic Church, respectively. The real Christmas miracle is that between them, these two institutions represent a continuity that spans the history of Western civilization, from about 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus right up to the present day.

To examine the two side-by-side tells us something about how Western civilization has evolved: from an individualistic, agonistic world into an organized, hierarchical one. It also teaches us about how human institutions live and die, giving us reason to suspect that the church will outlive every national government currently in existence.

The Oracle at Delphi was the product of an agonistic, individualistic world. Of those that sought its prophecies it made only one demand: “Know thyself.” The guidance it offered was ambiguous and could be a double-edged sword. In perhaps the most famous myth attached to the oracle (or the most famous moment in its history, if you believe Herodotus), the 6^th century Lydian King Croesus sought guidance on whether to pursue an invasion of Persia. “If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed,” came the prophecy. Croesus attacked, but it was Lydia, not Persia that was destroyed.

The story epitomizes the Greek relationship to the divine, at the intersection of which sat the oracle. The gods were not benign protectors of humanity, but powerful supernatural beings with all the flaws and complex motivations of people. Their word was not meant to be taken at face value. They were just another force in the cosmos that a person had to contend with, sometimes friend, sometimes foe, sometimes something in between.

Compare that to the paternalistic embrace of the Roman Catholic Church. By the time the institution had matured in the early medieval period, there were few things it wanted less than for all the members of its flock to know themselves. The parish priest was their father, and the clergy claimed the exclusive right of exegesis — no one else was permitted to interpret holy texts. It called for obedience, rather than self-knowledge. This difference, too, of course reflects the orthodox Christian relationship between humanity and the divine, in which God is a benign father.

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by Mara Naselli

Narrative omniscience in storytelling has often been described as God's point of view, but we can hardly take for granted God's existence anymore, let alone what we know of God's scope of vision. If we cannot imagine God's all-seeing, all-knowing perspective, then what becomes of the nature of omniscience in storytelling? There is a reason it has become an increasingly rare point of view in contemporary literature.

What can an author know of her characters? James Wood notes Muriel Spark raises this very question in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a short novel about a schoolmistress and her young charges, published in 1961. The story is set in the 1930s. Fascism is taking hold in Europe. Spark's superb control in the storytelling reflects the tyrannical authority of Miss Brodie herself. Miss Brodie is “a fascist and a Scottish Calvinist . . . , predestining the lives of her pupils, forcing them into artificial shapes. Is that what the novelist does too?” writes Wood. “That is the question that interests Spark. The novelist adopts Godlike powers of omniscience but what can she really know of her creations? Surely only God, the ultimate author of our lives, can know our comings and our going. And surely only God has the moral right to decide such things.”

There is much we don't see in Spark's novel except through the slow reveal of the characters' own blindnesses. Think of works like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot or Endgame. These characters are drawn sparely, but are still affecting and evocative. The austerity of context has become a hallmark of modernist literature. Its close narrative distance erodes the omniscient view. As a counterexample many have pointed to George Eliot's Middlemarch, published in 1872. This study of provincial life, as it was called, set in the 1830s amidst significant political and cultural change, is so richly drawn that no hillock, no hovel, no character's position or innermost aspiration goes unnoticed. The novel is chockfull.

Indeed, the narrator in Middlemarch speaks with a certain omniscience, but it is not distant and removed. It is not Godlike, in the usual sense. Zadie Smith calls Middlemarch a riot of subjectivity. The narrator in Middlemarch speaks as if she is there, moving from within one character's consciousness to another. And though we see the characters with a certain kind of fullness—access to their most inner thoughts and blindnesses—there is a lot we don't know about them, too. Perhaps there are different kinds of omniscience. And perhaps God, or at least our culturally and historically shaped notion of who God is and where God is, has something to do with it.

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by Michael Lopresto

Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to “dear, kind God”!

–Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

How is belief in God possible? Is it coherent to acknowledge the immense suffering of a child, on the one hand, and to believe in God on the other? The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga compares God creating a world in which some people suffer to a mother insisting her child “take piano lessons or go to church or school,” to help make sense of a moral justification for God creating a world in which evil exists. A mother can justifiably insist that her child does something that he doesn't enjoy, like go to school, because the mother is in a better position to know what is in the best interests of her child. But the speed with which theists like Plantinga extend the routine acceptability of making a child go to school, to the horrendous evil we find in the actual world simply defies belief.

Theodicy is the project of giving a moral justification for the evil that God has created or has allowed to occur. Will God be acquitted in the tribunal of morality? This project was founded in its modern from by the great German philosopher G. W. Leibniz, and continues today with philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen. The typical justifications given are that free will is valuable and therefore justifies the suffering we inflict upon one another, and that various evils are logically necessary means to get to greater goods. It is often thought that to save belief in God from being positively irrational, an intellectually satisfying answer must be given to the problem of evil. When posed with the question of why it is that God would allow someone to murder an innocent person, the theist might say that free will is an intrinsic good, and that giving humans free will means that they may freely choose to do the wrong thing; or that transgressions such as murder make possible higher goods, such as forgiveness and compassion.

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by Fausto Ribeiro

Let us imagine for a moment the following story: a man is sitting at the edge of a cliff, marveling at the immensity below and all of its beauty – a resplendent lake, enormous mountains, a vast field covered with trees, maybe a small village with a few lovely houses whose chimneys release a white, innocent smoke. There is a notebook on the man's lap; in it, with a worn-out pencil, he registers in the form of poetry his impressions about that which he has the good fortune of witnessing. A beautiful woman then approaches from a nearby trail and sees him; upon realizing what this stranger is doing, she is immediately overcome with a great emotion, an expectation so ravishing that her hands start to tremble slightly: here is a man who writes poems about nature's enchantment, about it's mesmerizing beauty! Instantly the woman conceives in her mind a whole image of who this man is, of his values, of his rich inner universe. She passionately contemplates, above all, the possibility of a real connection between the two of them. Nervous, she walks slowly in his direction and touches him gently on the shoulder, in the hope of initiating a conversation that would confirm her expectations. When he turns to face her, however, she suffers a shocking disappointment: the man is ugly; his features clearly violate the universal principles of beauty neurologists affirm exist.

Automatically, in a snap, before any words are said, the whole mental edifice built by the woman crumbles, and while flushing awkwardly, she pronounces a few random sentences about the amazing view, about the lake, about the low probability of rain for that afternoon. The man answers with some other banalities, courteous but tense in light of the unexpected encounter with a woman so much more beautiful than him, so out of his usual reach. A brief silence imposes itself, and the woman glances furtively at the man's notebook. She reflects for a few seconds. When the silence becomes unbearably uncomfortable, she – already taking a few steps backwards – mumbles as a goodbye a prefab phrase about how nice it was to have met him, to which he responds politely, struggling in vain not to show how disappointed he is with the abrupt end of a conversation that had already provoked in him, so soon, the beginnings of an embarrassing arousal.

The woman then walks away in quick steps, unconscious that her brain is already working to set up the mechanism of defense that will prevent her from making the unfortunate meeting the object of any posterior rumination. In a few minutes, maybe a few hours, she will have forgotten about the man's existence. Nevertheless, the ruins of the hope that had illuminated those brief moments before she saw the man's face will remain dammed up in the grey area between her conscious and her unconscious self, being yet one more grain of sand in the mountain of repressed anguish to which, throughout her life, she will give many different names and prescribe many tentative solutions.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Science is beautiful. Or so they say. When Werner Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, made his major breakthrough, he wrote “the whole area of internal relations in atomic theory is unexpectedly and clearly spread out before my eyes. What these internal relations show in all their mathematic abstraction, is an incredible degree of simplicity, a gift that we can only accept with humility. Not even Plato could have believed that it would be so beautiful. In fact these relations cannot have been invented: they have existed since the creation of the world.” Such pronouncements are not rare; the splendor of theories and the elegance of equations has been extolled by generations of scientists. Unfortunately, however, these sentiments aren’t always shared by the general public, most of whom assume that this particular form of beauty lies only in the eye of the (highly educated) beholder – a tragic misconception which precludes many from claiming the profound relationship with the universe that is their birthright.

It is true that the deeper we delve into any subject the more subtle our appreciation of it becomes, but just as we do not need a degree in Art to enjoy a painting, or a degree in Music to enjoy a song, a formal degree is not a prerequisite to experiencing the joy and wonder of science. Scientists find aesthetic pleasure in their subject, not just because they know more than the lay person, but because they have imbued what they know with meaning. They are aware of the context in which statements are made, and of the connections that exist between one idea and another; through long years of practice, they have trained their ears to hear the beautiful and passionate harmonies that lie implicit in apparently bland scientific laws.

To those of us who lack such associations, the very same statements fall flat. They do not evoke emotion, any more than a printed musical score would. But if someone plays the composition, that is another thing entirely; suddenly, the monochrome pattern of notes weaving through staff lines becomes a living entity, with a story and a soul. When non-scientists read textbook passages, or newspaper articles distilling the latest discoveries, it is only natural that they remain unmoved. Most people lack the experience, the mental images and the knowledge networks which would allow them to create meaning from a string of facts; in the absence of such connections, statements that should rightly inspire awe, dwindle into mere trivia.

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Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
…………….. —Robert Frost

Safe

I'm safe
I've locked myself in
You're with me and safe too

Through the barred window of this box
the world has changed, grown more lovely

I savor its barred beauty more
as I recall it close at hand

Now unattainable it seems exquisite
or, I see now how exquisite it has always been

But we're safe now from its predations
bounded and safe

look, out there, the honeysuckle,
remember its scent?
.

by Jim Culleny
12/10/13

by Grace Boey

A runaway train trolley is racing towards five men who are tied to the track. By pulling a lever, you could divert the train's path to an alternative track, which has only one man on it …

If you're gearing up to respond with what you'd do and why, don't bother. It doesn't matter whether you'd pull the lever: it's too late. The five were run over almost fifty years ago, because philosophers couldn't decide what to do. They have been – pun most certainly intended – debated to death.

Formulated by the late Philippa Foot in 1967, the famous “trolley problem” has since been endlessly picked apart and argued over by moral philosophers. It's even been reformulated – apart from “classic”, the trolley problem also comes in “fat man”, “loop”, “transplant” and “hammock” varieties. Yet, in spite of all the fascinating analysis, there still isn't any good consensus on what the right thing is to do. And, not only do philosophers disagree over what to do, a significant number of them just aren't sure. In a 2009 survey of mostly professional philosophers, 34.8% of the respondents indicated some degree of uncertainty over the right answer [1].

Philosopher or not, if you're in the habit of being intellectually honest, then there's a good chance you aren't completely certain about all your moral beliefs. Looking to the ethics textbooks doesn't help – you'd be lucky not to come away from that with more doubts than before. If the philosophical field of ethics is supposed to resolve our moral dilemmas, then on some level it has obviously failed. Debates over moral issues like abortion, animal rights and euthanasia rage on, between opposing parties and also within the minds of individuals. These uncertainties won't go away any time soon. Once we recognize this, then the following question naturally arises: what's the best way to act under moral uncertainty?

Ethicists, strangely, have mostly overlooked this question. But in relatively recent years, a small group of philosophers have begun rigorous attempts at addressing the problem. In particular, attempts are being made to adapt probability and expected utility theory to decision-making under moral uncertainty.

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by Bill Benzon

For as long as I can remember such things – back to my undergraduate years in the 1960s – humanists have been defending themselves and their work against all comers: politicians, scientists of all kinds, and disgruntled letter writers. And always the defense comes down to this: we provide a holistic and integrated view of what it is to be human in a world that is, well, just what IS the world like anyhow?

It's a mug's game and I refuse to play it. I was trained in the human sciences: hermeneutics AND cognitive science, history AND social science, and I've played jazz and rhythm and blues in seedy nightclubs, ritzy weddings, and outdoors before thousands. It's all good. It's all come into play as I've investigated the human mind through music and literature.

In this essay I look at literature. First I consider literary form as displayed in ring form texts. Then I review a historical problem posed by Shakespeare and the rise of the European novel. My general point will be that we need all our conceptual resources to deal with these problems. But let's begin with an analogy: how do we understand, say, a cathedral?

The Cathedral Problem

Cathedrals are made of stone blocks, mortar, pieces of stained glass, lead strips, metal fittings, wooden beams and boards, and so forth. You can go through a cathedral and count and label every block and locate them on a (3D) map. You can do the same for the doors and cabinets, the plumbing, heating fixtures, and wiring, and so forth. You will now, in some sense, have described the cathedral. But you won't have captured its design. That's difficult and those how focus on it often use vague language, not because they like vagueness, but because, at the moment, that's all that's available.

And so it goes with literature and newer psychologies: cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. My humanist colleagues keep hearing that they should get on board with the cognitive revolution and the decade of the brain. But it all sounds like trying to explain a cathedral by counting the building blocks, measuring the pitch of the roof, and analyzing the refractive properties of pieces of colored glass.

The advice may be well meant, but it isn't terribly useful. It takes our attention away from the problem – how the whole shebang works – and asks us to settle for a pile of things we already know. Almost.

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by Sarah Firisen

Maybe I’m just getting old. Having recently turned 45, I realize that what I’m about to write may very well just be an early sign that I’m about to turn into one of those older people who need a young person to help them use their phone/computer/toaster. Despite the fact that I spent almost 20 years as a techie, perhaps I’ve jumped the shark and should give up trying to keep up with technology and the changes it brings to society. Even as I shake my head in disbelief at the lack of civility that seems to have become acceptable, I realize that civility is in the eye of the beholder and that to my 13-year old, this is what society is. This is the Beatles and their long hair, Elvis and his overtly sexualize hip gyrations, dresses that showed ankles, or one of the many, many harbingers of the “end of life as we know it” that have been decried over the years by the older generations.

So if you think I’m just old and stuffy, spare me the comments telling me so. But honestly, I do think that there’s something unfortunate going on and I worry about the slippery slope it puts us on. Since my marital separation, I’ve been trying out online dating. I’ve had some good dates and some bad. Just like dating was 20 years ago. But one thing is not the way it was the last time I was single, the utter degradation of civil discourse.

I’ve been really shocked at what men (and I know that maybe women do this as well, but I only date men so that’s my experience) feel it’s okay to say to a total stranger they’ve been talking with for a few minutes or less. It’s not that I didn’t meet my fair number of boors in bars in my twenties, but that behavior was almost always fueled by alcohol. But this behavior isn’t. And it’s not even the supposed anonymity of the Internet that encourages these people to say and do things that I have to hope they wouldn’t say and do in person – many of them have no problem owning to who they actually are before they launch into their sex talk.

Clearly online dating is far from the only Internet area where vulgarity, bullying and generally boorish behavior seems to be exponentially greater than its in-person counterparts; comments sections on blogs and newspapers (including some of the comments I’ve received on this site over the years) often seem to be utterly lacking in compassion, empathy or any consideration for other people’s feelings.

Cyberbulling and the dehumanizing of the subject matter sometimes gets taken to such extremes as to be almost funny, if it wasn’t so unpleasant; the poor woman whose photo happened to be on the homepage of the health insurance enrollment website was “lambasted by cyberbullies who associated her face with the politically divisive law”. Really? Are people really that stupid and that mean?

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by Eric Byrd

In an ideal library Mark Twain is the author of Around the World with General Grant (1879; handily abridged in 2002). On earth, however, Ulysses Grant commenced his travels before he and Twain were well acquainted, and even if they had been Twain was a famous writer with a schedule of lucrative lectures, not at all what Grant needed and found in the New York Herald's John Russell Young – a pure correspondent, an instrumental journalist whose lively dispatches from the epic world tour (Liverpool to Nagasaki, May 1877 to September 1879) would keep Grant in the domestic eye and impress the American voter (who might be asked to consider an unprecedented third term) with report of the honors European royalty and the picturesque potentates of faraway Asia were showering on the homely ex-president. Young notes that while cruising the Mediterranean aboard an American warship, Grant read and enjoyed Twain's Innocents Abroad.

The Wanderings of Ulysses

In 1877: Philadelphia, Liverpool, London; a detour around Paris, where the Third Republic was in its volatile infancy, and where Victor Hugo had issued a poem denouncing Grant as pro-German and crypto-royalist; Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt, Geneva, Alsace-Lorraine; Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle for a gigantic parade of workingmen's associations, Birmingham; Paris, which would become their European base, then Villefranche, Naples, Palermo, Malta. 1878: Alexandria, Cairo, the Nile to Assiout, Abydos, Karnak, Luxor, Thebes, Aswan, and back to Alexandria; Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Damascus, Beirut, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Venice, Milan, Paris, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Gottenburg, Christiana, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, Munich, Bordeaux, Gibraltar (where a British soldier's daughter young Molly Bloom recalled “the damn guns bursting and booming all over the shop especially the Queens birthday and throwing everything down in all directions if you didn't open the windows when general Ulysses Grant whoever he was or did supposed to be some great fellow landed off the ship”), Vittoria, Madrid, Lisbon. 1879: London, Dublin, Londonderry, Belfast, Marseilles, Alexandria, Suez, Bombay, Agra, Delhi, Rangoon, Penang, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Macao, Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, Nagasaki, Yokohama, Tokyo, San Francisco.

Mother Country

Dominic Lieven has written that the Anglo-American solidarity “crucial to the victory of democracy in the twentieth century” could have been impeded, perhaps prevented, by Confederate independence and British recognition thereof. Even after the destruction of the unrecognized Confederacy, however, relations remained sour. There remained the US government's claims for damages against Great Britain, called the “Alabama claims” after the rebel commerce raider built in a British shipyard and allowed to sail by Prime Minister Palmerston. Senator Charles Sumner, Chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, called for $2.5 billion, a sum he knew the British would reject, and declared that in lieu of the cash, Canada would be acceptable. International arbitrators meeting in Geneva would eventually award the US a far smaller sum – $10 million. Sumner was to be the last of the long line of American politicians to threaten invasion of Canada.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Exile is a state of mind and quite necessary in the kind of critical awareness, imaginative empathy and artistic autonomy that go into a work of excellence, a “global work.” Our lists of poets we consider as “world poets,” assuming that “world poet” is indeed a meaningful category, may vary dramatically but the criteria we are likely to agree upon for such a category, are: an agile imagination, an intuitive bond with humanity, a finely tuned connection with history, and an ability to go beyond merely utilizing language— to reach for the universally unsayable and cast it in a renewed, common language, and above all: an ability to move the spirit in an authentic way.

I recently had the luxury of conversing with Fady Joudah and Anis Shivani— two writers I admire for their range and gift for innovation. Their approach to literature, as reflected in their poetry and prose, betrays traits of the contemporary “global writer” I’m interested in—traits that ultimately cast the larger literary moment in their art. In other words, the shared and conflicted global histories they address, the deftness with which they assemble disparate cultural perspectives, and the richness of their positions—political and aesthetic—illuminate the present, and in a sense, the future, of an increasing and an increasingly globalized readership.

My conversation with these authors was centered on the idea of our literary moment, mainly keeping Fady Joudah’s book Textu and Anis Shivani’s My Tranquil War in mind.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Why We Argue (And How We Should) is centrally concerned to elucidate the concept of a dialectical fallacy. This concept deserves comment. “Fallacy” is the name given to especially common and attractive failures of reasoning. Works in logic and critical thinking typically distinguish between formal and informal fallacies.

Formal fallacies are pervasive errors of formal inferences. Consider the argument:

If Bill is a carpenter, then Bill is handy.

Bill is handy.

Therefore, Bill is a carpenter.

This argument fails because the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion: the first premise states that being a carpenter is sufficient for being handy; it does not claim that all and only handy people are carpenters. After all, Bill could be a handy car mechanic who has never cut a piece of wood. We call this error the fallacy of affirming the consequent. This error gets its own name because we are especially prone to this kind of mistake. Once one is trained to spot it, one will find that this fallacy is committed frequently.

By contrast, informal fallacies are pervasive errors in informalinferences. Informal inferences differ from formal ones in that the latter propose to demonstrate the truth of their conclusions whereas the former aspire only to show that their conclusions are most likely true. A familiar informal fallacy is the ad populum fallacy. Consider:

Most people think that Joe is guilty.

Therefore, Joe is guilty.

This argument fails because it appeals simply to what “most people” think, without any regard for questions concerning the level to which “most people” are informed of the relevant facts of Joe's case. The mere fact that “most people” agree about some claim is no evidence at all for its truth.

The important thing about fallacies is that they are attractive and so pervasive errors of reasoning. Part of what accounts for their popularity is the way in which they mimic or ride piggyback on proper inferences. The fallacy of affirming the consequent is a mimic of the obviously successful inference known as modus ponens:

If Bill is a carpenter, then Bill is handy.

Bill is a carpenter.

Therefore, Bill is handy.

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by Jalees Rehman

The Autocomplete function of Google Search is both annoying and fascinating. When you start typing in the first letters or words of your search into the Google search box, Autocomplete takes a guess at what you are looking for and “completes” the search phrase by offering you multiple query phrases. The queries offered by Autocomplete are “a reflection of the search activity of users and the content of web pages indexed by Google“. Considering the fact that more than five billion Google searches are conducted on an average day, the Google Autocomplete function has a huge database of search information that it can reference. This also means that the Autocomplete suggestions are quite dynamic and can vary over time. A popular new song lyric, the name of a viral video or a recent movie quote can catapult itself to the top of the Autocomplete suggestion list within a matter of hours or days if millions of users start search for that specific phrase. Autocomplete may also take a user's browsing history or location into account, which explains why it may offer a varying set of suggestions to different users.

Autocomplete can be quite annoying because the suggested lists of queries are based on their web popularity and can thus consist of bizarre combinations which are not at all related to one's intended searches. On the other hand, Autocomplete is also a fascinating tool to provide a window into the Zeitgeist of web users, revealing what kinds of phrases are most commonly used on the web, and by inference, what contemporary ideas are currently associated with the entered keywords. The Google Zeitgeist website reveals the most widely searched terms to help identify cultural trends – based on the frequency of Google search engine queries – during any given year.

The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) recently used the Google Search Autocomplete function in an ad campaign to highlight the extent of misogyny on the web. Searching for “women should…” or “women need to…” was autocompleted to phrases such as “women should be slaves” or “women need to be put in their place”. The fact that Autocomplete suggested these phrases means that probably hundreds of thousands of internet users have used these phrases in their search queries or on web pages indexed by Google – a reminder of how much gender injustice still exists in our world.

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