by Bill Benzon

There are people who read rags like Star, Globe, The National Enquirer, and so forth to find out what’s really going on in the world of celebrities and people in the news. What’s the scoop with Madonna? Is Kanye really like that? Did Brad and Angela get another kid?

Why do we do this? It’s one thing to gossip about people in your circle of acquaintances, but why trade in gossip about people who you don’t know, likely will never meet, and who play no direct role in our daily lives?

But they DO play a role, do they not, in our imaginative lives?

The one’s I’ve mentioned – I just grabbed their names out of the air, though I suppose I could have gone to the supermarket and checked the current headlines – are entertainers. They act in movies, or on TV, or they sing, or entertain us in some other way. They are important to us for what they pretend to be. They also live lives we imagine to be impossibly and unapproachably glamorous. And so we’re curious about what they’re really like. Just what that means in a world where Coke’s the real thing, that’s another matter.

Do you think they’re curious about one another? It’s not like they all know one another; there are too many celebrities and others “in the news” for that. Do they read the tabloids? I have no idea.

But let me ask a more specific question: Do you think that Barack Obama, for example, is at all curious about Jerry Seinfeld, for example? Seinfeld, of course, is a very well known entertainer with lots of fans, many of whom must be curious about what his life is really like. Barack Obama is not an entertainer, but, as the current President of the United States, he is certainly very well known. And, as Presidents go, he’s more glamorous than most.

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by Eric Byrd

Maybe I’m inclined to what Nietzsche called “impure thought,” that is to say, a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can’t disentangle them. I feel thought in general, and in particular what is unfortunately called “philosophy,” should lead a sort of clandestine life for a while, just to renew itself. By clandestine I mean concealed in stories, in anecdotes, in numerous forms that are not the form of the treatise. Then thought can biologically renew itself, as it were.

—Roberto Calasso's Paris Review interview

The structure of La Folie Baudelaire, the sixth book of Calasso's project, resembles that of the “brothel-museum” of which Baudelaire dreamt in the early hours of March 13, 1856, a Thursday – a dream interrupted at 5am when his mistress, Jeanne Duval, suddenly shifted a piece of furniture, in another room. In his dream, Baudelaire encountered another poor man of letters and they split a cab; they followed nocturnal versions of their daily routines, calling at editors to submit or solicit reviews, and presenting their books to possible patrons. Baudelaire stopped the cab at a brothel and went in to present his manuscript to the madam (on the surface, the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal was then in preparation).

In a letter to Asselineau, Baudelaire said that the brothel-museum was made of “immense galleries, adjourning, poorly lit” – “like an erotic Piranesi,” Calasso comments – in which girls and clients mingled. Baudelaire was bashful of his bare feet and his penis hanging from his fly, and avoided the crowds to study the pictures on the walls: sketches of Egyptian ruins, ornithological prints with moving, “lively” eyes, and clinical photographs of the deformed children born to prostitutes. He encountered one such “monster born in the house,” “pink and green,” who squatted painfully upon a pedestal, with an elastic, serpentine appendage, starting from his nape and wound around his body. They talked – “he informs about his troubles and pains,” the greatest of which is the humiliation of dining at the same table with the girls, the ropelike coil of his neck-tail at his side. “I awake,” Baudelaire reported, “tired, enfeebled, with aching bones, my back, legs and sides painful. I presume I had been sleeping in the monster's contorted position.”

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by Jalees Rehman

A Belgian Iron 'scolds bridle' or 'branks' mask, with bell, used to publicly humiliate and punish, mainly women, for speaking out against authority, nagging, brawling with neighbors, blaspheming or lying.

Can shame be good for you? We often think of shame as a shackling emotion which thwarts our individuality and creativity. A sense of shame could prevent us from choosing a partner we truly love, speaking out against societal traditions which propagate injustice or pursuing a profession that is deemed unworthy by our peers. But if shame is so detrimental, why did we evolve with this emotion? A team of researchers led by Daniel Sznycer from the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which suggests that shame is an important evolutionary adaptation. According to their research which was conducted in the United States, Israel and India, the sense of shame helps humans avoid engaging in acts that could lead to them being devalued and ostracized by their community.

For their first experiment, the researchers enrolled participants in the USA (118 participants completed the study; mean age of 36; 53% were female) and India (155 participants completed the study, mean age of 31, 38% were female) using the online Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform as well as 165 participants from a university in Israel (mean age of 23; 81% female). The participants were randomly assigned to two groups and presented with 29 scenarios: The “shame group” participants were asked to rate how much shame they would experience if they lived through any given scenario and whereas the “audience group” participants were asked how negatively they would rate a third-party person of the same age and gender as the participants in an analogous scenario.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

On a Friday night two weeks ago the US Supreme Court quietly announced they wouldn't hear a challenge to a lower court's order that North Carolina should redraw it's congressional districts. There wasn't much point in hearing the case. With Scalia gone the Court was widely expected to vote 4-4 on the case and ties go to whomever won the previous round. The case revolved around North Carolina's Districts 1 and 12. The lower court ruled that they were gerrymandered to pack more black voters into these districts. While gerrymandering is now a worldwide sensation, the US invented it and are true masters of the art.

Even a glance at NC District 12 makes it obvious that some fishy business is at work. A bow-legged cowboy could walk the length of NC 12 without touching either side:

From Wikipedia.

North Carolina is hardly the only offender. Illinois District 4 is sometimes called The Earmuffs thanks to its bizarre shape.

It's one thing to eyeball a district and guess that the ghost of Governor Elbridge Gerry was at work, but I'd rather quantify somehow that a district is overly gnarled. As I pondered this last week I noticed that, in contrast to a nice, compact geometric shape like a circle or square, the long, twisted shape of NC 12 and IL 4 has a lot of perimeter for the given area. A reasonable measure of the disfigurement of a shape is the ratio of perimeter to area. In fact, for reasons we'll discuss in a moment, we want the ratio of the square of the perimeter to the area. Let's call this the distortion of the shape [1]. In formula form distortion is given by:

The reason we use the square of perimeter is that we want distortion to be what a geometer would call “unitless”. We want the distortion of a shape to be the same regardless of which units we use when measuring. Meters, miles, furlongs, and light years should all be equally good when calculating distortion.

To put it another way, we want distortion to measure an intrinsic quality of our shape and not depend on the scale we use. It shouldn't matter if we draw a square big or small when we calculate its distortion. Indeed, a square with side length x has perimeter 4x and area x². The ratio of these two would be 4/x and would get ever smaller as the square grows in size. It would also vary if were to switch from meters to centimeters to millimeters. On the other hand, the distortion of every single square in the world is 16.

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A Revolution of Tenderness

The pope suggests love in his
“Revolution of Tenderness and Love,”
and though popes have been on the wrong side of love,
this one, this Francis, is right

But a revolution of tenderness
which goes against the zeitgeist grain
to be rapacious is the Marianas Trench
of dashed hopes and, therefore,
the drowning place of dreams.
This is what the dark side says

The light side’s take is that tenderness
can be a fierce ally in our duel
with death
.

Jim Culleny
12/2/15
.
.

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

William James's classic essay, “The Will to Believe” purports to be a “justification of faith.” James's argument is driven by an analogy between, on the one hand, the activities of making friends and pursuing love interests and, on the other hand, that of sustaining religious commitment. The acceptability of James's analyses of the former is supposed to show that religious commitment is also acceptable. James's essay is notoriously convoluted, and thus widely criticized. The most frequent challenges to James's line of reasoning have fixed on the appropriateness of his leading analogy. The critic often accepts James's analysis of how to win friends and lovers, but then asks: How are friendships and romances at all like faith? Perhaps to the religiously committed the analogy is obviously too thin? We wouldn't know. So we propose a criticism that instead challenges James's account of how to form friendships and woo potential lovers. In a nutshell, James argues that religious commitment is justified even in the absence of decisive proof of the existence of a deity for the very same reason that, when trying to form a friendship or attract a lover, it is to one's benefit to assume that one's efforts toward achieving those ends will be successful. Your believing that the person you'd like as your friend or lover already likes you (or finds you attractive) can help to bring it about that you, indeed, are liked or found attractive. So James thinks it is with religious commitment: “faith in the fact can help create the fact,” he says. It is our contention that this line of reasoning yields a particularly noxious sense of entitlement in those who accept James's account; for this reason, James's views about friendships and romances are unacceptable. If these views are indeed analogues with religious commitment, it, too, is unacceptable.

James's argument draws on the observation that there are cases of what we may call doxastic efficacy, cases where it does seem that belief in advance of the requisite justification is instrumentally efficacious in making the belief true. When one adopts a belief for the sake of making that belief true, one thereby commits an act of assumption: one self-reflectively endorses holding a belief with the plan being that in holding the belief, one has reason to expect that one will behave in a way that will contribute to making the belief true.

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by Misha Lepetic

“Facts all come with points of view/
Facts don't do what I want them to.”
~ Talking Heads

What is it with Silicon Valley and the “disruption” of education? Is it just another sector of public life that is moribund and therefore in need of a serious intervention, as if it were ‘that friend’ who used to be fun and successful but is now just depressed and drinking too much? Or do Silicon Valley types have a chip on their shoulder – perhaps they were forced to sit through one too many pointless lectures on Kant or Amazonian tribes or feminist critiques of Florentine art, and now that they’re calling the shots they’re going to fix this giant mess that’s called higher education once and for all? (Trigger warning: the only people mentioned in this post are venture capitalists).

In any case, into the ever-narrowing sweepstakes of who can make the absolutely dumbest assertions about the value of education steps Vinod Khosla, elder statesman and patron saint of tech bros in Silicon Valley and beyond. Khosla, a fabulously successful venture capitalist, has waded into the education wars with a broadside so breathtaking in its myopia that you would be forgiven for thinking that it was lifted from the satirical pages of The Onion. But before getting into Khosla’s piece, let’s set the stage with a look at a fellow-disruptor’s contribution to the debate.

Libertarian investor Peter Thiel, also fabulously successful, has put forward $100,000 scholarships fellowships for “young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom”. Thiel’s mission is to pluck potential John Galts out of the stream of college-bound lemmings and give them the latitude to realize their entrepreneurial potential. He believes that college, as it is currently constituted, leads to stagnant thinking and a narrowing of one’s horizons and potential. Which is odd, considering that most people go to college to have exactly the opposite experience. Be that as it may, anyone under the age of 22 is welcome to apply, which is a fairly dramatic, late-capitalist re-write of the countercultural edict to “not trust anyone over 30.”

I actually don’t have much of a problem with this, because Thiel is not trying to rewire the university system. He is providing more options for a vanishingly small group of people (104 so far since the fellowship’s 2010 inception), and I’ve always been convinced that college – or more specifically, a liberal arts education – is not for everyone. It never has been, and it never will be. That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be available for anyone who wants it. But it is a prime example of overreach when the system screws into people’s heads that “everyone needs a college degree” and that subsequently people waste their money getting a BA in communications, whatever that is. There are certainly people who don’t need to go to college, and I like the fact that Thiel is providing more options, not less.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

At the end of the story, in its final pages, is a queen. Her name is Morayma. Refusing to be erased or memorialized, she is an inexhaustible figure in a book I long finished, a book of poems tracing the history of Al Andalus.

I am in Granada again; after all these years of writing, publishing, and presenting my book, reading to audiences in numerous venues in no less than a dozen cities in America and around the world, I am about to discover why Morayma eludes history, why she haunts my book and casts a shadow on me instead of staying in the story with the other characters.

Morayma appears at the end, when, as I say elsewhere:

Nearly eight hundred years have passed in Al Andalus, Muslim Spain— years turning like great mills, a resplendence of work reflected in books and buildings, cities and institutions, technology and aesthetics, bridging antiquity with modernity, east with west, fissured periodically but sewn back again and again by Iberian Muslims, Jews and Christians.

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by Colin Eatock

“Contemporary classical music?” To some, the phrase may sound like a contradiction in terms. But, believe it or not, classical music aspires to be a happening, up-to-date art form – laying claim to the place at the cultural table next to contemporary art, film and literature.

Unfortunately, for all its bravado, contemporary classical music is in a bad way, and has been for some time now. Its composers and specialist-performers toil in obscurity, its core-audience is tiny, and its visibility within mainstream culture is just about nil. Like a hospital patient kept alive on a life-support system, contemporary classical music is largely maintained by university music departments. Most symphony orchestras and opera companies – knowing only too well where their bread is buttered – perform it only occasionally.

However, with my use of the word “unfortunately,” I don't mean to suggest there's anything especially unjust about contemporary classical music's marginal status. Cultures have always embraced what they like and rejected what they don't – and no amount of quasi-moralistic hectoring about what people ought to like is likely to change that. Also, on a personal note, I don't feel especially inclined to take the world to task on this issue. I believe I can speak for a great many classical music fans when I say that most of the classical music written in the last fifty years deserves an early death in an unmarked grave. Many concert-goers find most contemporary music a painful experience – and, as a music critic, I feel their pain.

Rather, my “unfortunately” was meant, partly, to express my concern about what the ongoing crisis of newness means for the future of classical music as a whole. The lack of a substantial body of well-known and culturally validated new works is, I believe, an existential threat to the entire art form: an artistic culture that immerses itself entirely in its own past will wither into irrelevance. Yet I've noticed that some people in the “mainstream” classical-music world see nothing to worry about here. They seem to think (if they think about the issue at all) that all they need to do is avoid the new stuff and play more Mozart and the problem will simply evaporate. This is head-in-sand thinking.

That said, my “unfortunately” was also meant as a lament for the few living composers whose works, I believe, are beautiful, compelling, culturally engaging and worthy of appreciation on a broad scale. But finding these precious needles in such a large haystack is an arduous business.

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The Milky Way, is destined someday to collide with the next-nearest spiral galaxy,
in the direction of the constellation Andromeda. When they collide, our sun will
likely be flung into a new region of galactic space. But when is that someday?
……………………………………………………………….. —EarthSky.org
.

When Andromeda and the Milky Way Collide
.

the night sky now is both
a starry spray of mother’s milk
and points of light as bright
as your last kiss

in its spray certain densities exist
think of them as knots in space
or mind

in them space (or mind) insists
that nebulae twist and pulses race

in them you may perceive
articulations of another’s face
or of one concealed behind
a veil of starry lace

attitude is key
and so is grace

but when Andromeda
and the Milky way collide things will change
any status quo will not abide
(you can never count on it to stay in place)
so on that day, in terms of hearts,
there could be tears

but you needn’t be concerned for us
since astrophysicists who’ve counted well
tell us this collision will not happen for
four billion years, and that, my love,
is quite a spell
.

Jim Culleny
12/8/14

.

by Paul Braterman

What is now proved was once only imagin’d – William Blake

Really important ideas in science are not the work of a single individual or even a single generation. The idea of an atom, for instance, was developed by ancient Greek philosophers, revived by eighteenth century chemists to make sense of their discoveries about the composition of matter, and used by nineteenth century physicists to explain the effect of temperature and pressure on gases. Our modern idea of molecules, formed with definite shapes by joining atoms together according to definite rules, was developed by chemists studying naturally occurring substances in the late nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, the structure of the atom itself was explained in terms of more fundamental particles, while the last half century has seen advances that make it possible for us to directly sense, and even move around, individual atoms.

Roman fresco, illustrating front cover of R.E. Latham's excellent translation

Atomic theory dates back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Leucippus and Democritus, who wrote and taught more than four hundred years BCE. The works of the pre-Socratics survive only in fragments, and in quotations by later authors. For example, Epicurus, some 130 years later, built this theory into his unified view of the world and morality. The views of Epicurus were beautifully expressed by the Roman poet Lucretius, who lived at the same time as Julius Caesar, in his great work De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe). According to this ancient atomic theory, atoms are eternal and indestructible. All forms of matter are built up from a relatively small number of kinds of atoms.

What led the early atomists to theories so remote from simple appearances? Greek philosophers were greatly puzzled by the phenomena of change and motion. If something is real, how can it be transformed into something that it is not? If something is in one place, how can it move, since that would imply that it was no longer in that place? Besides, how can anything move without displacing something (if only the air) that is already there, in which case which one moves first? There are serious problems here, that were not properly solved until the mathematics of fluid flow and the theory of limits were developed in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries.

One radical approach to the problems posed by change is to say that change itself is an illusion, and that the world of experience, in which we live and act, grow and die, is in some important sense unreal. Plato was influenced by this approach when he compared knowledge gained through the senses to a mere shadow-play on the walls of a cave. Such a view is deeply hostile to science, which relies on observation, and the influence of Plato and his followers was to greatly hinder the development of scientific thinking.

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by Yohan J. John

I. “You realize fun is a new thing, right?”

A few months ago I watched Indian-American comedian Aziz Ansari's new show, Master of None. During the Parents episode, I found myself confronted by a feeling that struck me as rare. I couldn't even tell if it was a good feeling or a bad feeling. It wound its way into me and tickled my soul. It felt vaguely embarrassing. Eventually I realized that it was the feeling of relating.

I imagine many young people felt this way at some point or the other during Master of None. The show manages to nail millennial anxiety and indecision on the head. And yet it's not nearly as dour and bitter as other shows that are praised for their apparent realism — think of Louie, or Mad Men, or The Wire. It's actually optimistic and good-natured; the word 'chipper' comes to mind.

Not every millennial can relate equally to all the situations portrayed in the show. I recall reading that at least one white fan of the show said she enjoyed every episode except the Parents one — that one she didn't quite 'get'. But it was the Parents episode that really grabbed me. It managed to capture the particular sort of generation gap that emerges between first generation immigrants and their kids. Even though my family is very different from the ones portrayed in the show, as an Indian whose parents moved to America I could appreciate the situation: the older generation has clearly gone through much harder times than their kids, and has struggled quite a bit to create opportunities for their kids to live comfortable and vaguely hedonistic lives. (To obsess over finding the best tacos in New York, for instance.) At one point Ansari's character Dev's father says ” You realize fun is a new thing right?” This is only a slight exaggeration of how many of our parents seem to feel. Fun is secondary, and not something they talked about much with their parents.

The kids — my fellow post-immigration, post-colonial millennials (whew!) — are vaguely aware that they ought to be more appreciative of their parents' sacrifices, but don't quite know how to go about it. This is partly because we have no idea how to go about anything, really: careers, relationships… everything about adulthood all seem impossibly hard to navigate. Master of None explores many of these sources of anxiety, but it was only during the Parents episode that I found myself getting choked up, and wishing I could be a better offspring. I suspect that the friends I was watching the show with — a Pakistani-American and a Chinese-American — were also tearing up a bit, but I was too engrossed (and embarrassed) to check.

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by Carl Pierer

Fig. 1

Part II of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, also known as Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, contains a lengthy treatment of perception. He begins by drawing a distinction:

Two uses of the word “see”.

The one: “What do you see there?” – “I see this” (and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: “I see a likeness between these two faces” – let the man I tell this to be seeing the faces as clearly as I do myself.

The importance is the categorical difference between the two ‘objects' of sight. (PI, p. 193)

The first ‘object' of perception is a something, an entity that is being perceived. It can be reproduced by drawing a picture of it. The second ‘object' is more puzzling. Where is it to be located? What does it mean to see the likeness? It cannot be located within the object of perception (what is seen in the first sense), for it is a different way of seeing. Indeed, it is not something that can be externalised. I cannot show the likeness I see to the interlocutor. Wittgenstein continues:

I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect”. (Ibid.)

This process, where one perception falls into an entirely different one, is not simply a distortion happening in rare scenarios but ubiquitous. For example, when the airplane takes off and I am looking out the window, I can see how the cars and houses get smaller and smaller. At first, they have their normal significance, they look just like cars, like houses. But suddenly, a change happens, and this picture falls into a different one, where cars and houses look unreal. They now look more like toys than the life-sized objects they are. My perspective has changed somehow and I can no longer see the house as one I could enter.

Wittgenstein's own example is that of the “duck-rabbit” (Fig. 1), the familiar picture from Gestalt psychology. We notice distinctly how we move from seeing a duck to seeing a rabbit. This is only part of its paradoxical air, for at the same time we are under no illusion that the picture itself has changed. What changes, when we see the shift from duck to rabbit, is nothing in the picture.The visual input we receive from the picture remains constant, yet the figure is altogether different. We might even exclaim ‘now it's a rabbit', which only furthers the paradox. For we employ such sentences to denote a true, observable perceptual change (for instance, when the picture of a duck is replaced by a picture of a rabbit in a film). Nonetheless, we are also inclined to utter it in this context, where the visual input remains constant. What, if anything, is it then that changes? And why does the change occur?

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Sweet lanky Ethan, have I told you that I love your surfer boy hair? But then there is also that serious academic slouch, and your easy, dimpled smile. I know this might seem a little sudden. I know you are wondering what this is about. But, listen. I thought about this for a few weeks, and I think I'm onto something. My friends think so too. And they usually tell me that I'm imagining things. Not this time around. They told me to wait a few hours before saying something. Listen, I think we have a connection. I know I should be shy, and slow and guarded about this stuff, but my heart skips a beat and a quarter every time it thinks about bumping into you.

So, are you bumping into me tonight? What I mean is, did you get my email? About Joy James' talk on the racialization that constitutes practices of incarceration in the US? I think you'll find it interesting. It's anthropology and critical theory I know, but it's also a philosophical question, you know. We could sit together, and then we could talk about it. Like we talked on the bus last week, when I bumped into you. It's a wonder how much can be implied in a five minute conversation. You dug your elbow into my arm and said something funny. I think you were making fun of me, but I couldn't quite tell; I haven't quite gotten the hang of your accent yet. So I laughed that big laugh of mine meant to indicate that I am a fun girl, and that I get exactly what you mean, but really, I didn't hear a word. Anyway, like I said, we could talk about it.

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