by Brooks Riley

In or around 1970: It was one of those humid hot nights in New York. At a party on someone’s brownstone roof, I was hawking my theory of how the world would end, to a couple of contemporaries I’d just met. It went like this: We would never be able to save the planet from the multiple disasters of our own making because we are incapable of preventive action, only reaction. When disaster strikes we react. Warned of imminent disaster, we try to react. But warned of a disaster at some indeterminate point in the future, we don’t react at all, we merely furrow our brows sympathetically and continue on with the here and now. It’s built into our genes. Now is everything. Someday has no meaning, except to a squirrel.

“Far out!’ said my interlocutor, if you could call him that. Suddenly I felt uncouth, a reluctant soothsayer with egg on her face, a Cassandra manqué. Was that all that could be said about my pessimistic view of the world? Was there no valid counter-argument brewing under the bushy brows of the young dissident I was talking to–or at, in this case?

It was a sign of the times that my contemporaries were activists, pacifists, and also, like this one, ‘passivists’. ‘Go with the flow ‘ was the motto for my generation, and the flow was anti-establishment, countercultural but also counterproductive. Many yelled their heads off against the war in Vietnam, against the domination of big business, against inequality of all kinds, and against nearly everything their parents stood for. I stayed away from these social gatherings, but I nodded in agreement.

Were we for something? We were for peace (‘Give peace a chance’), but as we’ve since learned, one man’s peace is another man’s compromise: Sooner or later a simmering détente will come to a boil again, it always does, sometime, somewhere.

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by Carl Pierer

Often, people don't do a particular thing. Even if they are supposed to. Tamino didn't talk to Pamina, Kant didn't leave Königsberg and Peter Singer doesn't donate all his money (to the point of marginal utility) to charity. We like to take this not acting as evidence for something more. Tamino's silence for unrequited love. Someone never leaving their hometown as a conservative old bore. Singer's “selfishness” as falsifying his philosophy. While intuitively plausible, this reasoning is flawed. It is the lover's fallacy.

In Act 2, Scene IV, of the magic flute, Pamina hears Tamino playing on his flute and hurries to talk to him. But he, undergoing the second ordeal, is bound to remain silent:

“You're here, Tamino? I heard your flute and ran towards the sound. – But you are sad? Will you not say a word to your Pamina?”
Tamino motions her to go away.
“What? I am to keep away from you? Do you love me no more? Oh, this is worse than an offence – worse than death.”

Pamina, deeply disappointed, reasons: “There are two possibilities, either Tamino doesn't talk to me or he loves me. So, if he loves me, then he talks to me. He doesn't talk, so he doesn't love.”

The fallacy is based off a close link between or and if-then sentences, or disjunctions and conditionals. A truth table will readily illustrate this:

~P is the negation of P, so whenever P is true ~P is false and vice versa. We see that for a conditional to be false we need the antecedent (~P) to be true, while the consequent (Q) is false. Here, this is the case when P is false and Q is false. It is important to notice that if the antecedent is false, the conditional is necessarily true. Now, a disjunction is true as long as at least one of the disjuncts (P or Q) is true. Since the truth table entries for P ∨ Q and ~P → Q are the same, we say they are (logically) equivalent.

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by Charlie Huenemann

Generally, in any conflict between long-held, seemingly obvious beliefs and new research challenging those beliefs, defenders of the old beliefs will find themselves charged with sitting in armchairs. It never is a rocking chair, park bench, hammock, or divan. It is an armchair, the sort of chair one finds in venerable, wood-paneled clubs where stodgy old men opine about the world's events more from preconceived opinions than from any well-grounded knowledge. An armchair represents both laziness and privilege, a luxurious class of opinion-mongers who simply will not bother themselves with actual empirical research – the original La-Z-Boys, as they might be called.

Such armchairs – unfortunately, from my perspective – are often associated with philosophers, for those who argue from the armchairs are arguing from broad, philosophical perspectives. These perspectives are allegedly grounded in a priori truths, but those “truths” are in fact little more than prejudiced opinions born of casual reflection. But of course the world has no obligation to pay any attention to what philosophers take to be obvious, and if we want to know what really happens, then we must rise from our armchairs and take up residency in the sciences.

Reflective and informed people will recognize that this is a poor characterization of philosophers, who usually are very well aware of empirical research. One could not find a more ambitious researcher than Aristotle, who is said to have spent his honeymoon collecting biological samples (and no, that's not a euphemism). Descartes busied himself with experiments and dissections. Leibniz knew all the science known by anyone of his day. Kant offered expert lectures on physics, anthropology, geography, and mineralogy in addition to topics in philosophy. Hegel knew his physics, and even the latest research findings in phrenology. Russell and Cassirer published good books on general relativity, and, in general, the bulk of 20th-century philosophers working on matters connected to science have suffered the requisite pains to know what they are talking about – to a far greater degree (I pridefully add) than have scientists who take it into their heads to write philosophy.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.
Epicurus

Economists pay a lot of attention to productivity, the efficiency with which inputs are translated into outputs. This is quite reasonable since productivity is the source of the wealth of nations. But economists tend to focus on the supply side: the ratio of labour/capital to the final product. They tend to neglect the fact that productivity is also a feature of the other side of the market relationship: consumption. If we could be more efficient in our consumption decisions – if we were better at buying what we actually wanted – then we would be better off just as much as if we could afford to buy more stuff in the first place. We could achieve our present level of utility with a smaller outlay than present (allowing us to work less). Or, if our budget stayed the same, we would be able to get more utility for it than we do now.

The late Gary Becker was an economics genius who made a career out of applying perfectly orthodox economics methods in radically unconventional ways and to unconventional subjects, like crime, discrimination, and fertility. (Unfortunately, his 'economic approach to human behavior' has also led to excesses like Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, where the “Hidden Side of Everything” turns out to be only always about incentives, but that's another issue.) One of Becker's contributions was to point out that consumption itself requires production. For example, if you buy a book for $20 completing that transaction does not mean that the book has now been 'consumed'. In order to consume the book (in the normal way) you still have to read it. In other words, to enjoy your purchase you will have to put several hours of your own labour into producing utility out of it. The same goes for restaurant meals, clothes and so on. (This, by the way, is something to bear in mind when giving gifts. Just how much work are you implicitly imposing on your friends and family if they are to appreciate your present properly?)

If one prices the labour you put into this 'productive consumption' at even minimum wage levels (let alone your actual wage levels), one will often find that the market price of a good is less than it will cost you to actually enjoy it. And this should not be a surprise. The reason we have outsourced so much from the household to the market is that it allows us to access the productivity pay offs from vast economies of scale and divisions of labour. Indeed, there is some further scope for increasing the productivity of consumption with the help of the market. For example, eating at a fast food restaurant like McDonald's is not only quite cheap in price but also in the time it requires of you. There is even specialised capital equipment available to make the household a more efficient factory for turning purchases into utility, like the dishwashers and washer-driers which make meals and clothes cheaper to consume. Yet it must be noted that some kinds of consumption activities, like watching a movie with your friends or reading Jane Austen, stubbornly resist such market efficiencies. That is because the time and attention they require are intrinsic to their enjoyment.

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by Paul Braterman

Science, some say, rejects supernatural explanations on principle; this is called intrinsic methodological naturalism (IMN). In Part I I argued, following the work of Boudry et al. (here, here , and here), that this strategy is misguided. Here I go into more detail, using actual past and present controversies to illustrate the point.

“I have no need of that hypothesis.” So, according to legend, said the great astronomer and mathematician Piere-Simon, marquis de Laplace, when asked by Napoleon why he had not mentioned God in his book. If so, Laplace was not referring to the hypothesis that God exists, but to the much more interesting hypothesis that He intervenes in the material world. And Laplace’s point was not, fundamentally, philosophical or theological, but scientific.

The planets do not move round the Sun in circular orbits, but in elliptical pathways, moving fastest when closest. All this and more Newton had explained using his laws of motion, combined with his inverse square law for gravitational attraction. There is one small problem, however. The planets are attracted, not only to the Sun, but to each other, perturbing each other’s pathways away from a perfect ellipse. These perturbations are not trivial, and in fact it was the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus that would lead to the discovery of Neptune. Newton himself surmised that they could, eventually, render the entire system unstable so that God would need, from time to time, to intervene and correct it. Laplace devoted much of his career to developing the mathematical tools for estimating the size of the perturbations, and concluded that the Solar System was in fact stable. So Newton’s hypothesis of divine intervention was redundant, and it was this hypothesis that Laplace was supposedly referring to.

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Hummingbird Acetylene

The turquoise flame of a hummingbird’s head
is a blazing torch of acetylene

burning, as when my father put a welding tip to steel
joining parts of his world with the bluegreen flame
he held between

this hummingbird burns in afternoon light
at the mouth of a flower in god’s machine

jabbing her tip at a perfect hour
joining her flame to mine
in a darting iridescent sheen
.

by Jim Culleny
5/30/14

by Leanne Ogasawara

A city of heavenly gates, Jerusalem is also a city of ill-fated walls.

There are the multiple lives of the glorious city walls, finally re-built by the Sultan of Magnificence in the 16th century; and there is the wailing wall (in my opinion the most beautiful wall on earth) where the Jews go to pray and to remember; and of course there is the new wall, or barrier, built to separate the state from the West Bank. A 26 feet tall concrete monstrosity, it has been attacked by artists and opposed by many international organizations dedicated to conflict resolution, from the Red Cross and the UN to Amnesty International and the World Council of Churches.

When we were in Jerusalem, friends said, “you must visit Bethlehem.” Of course, we wanted to go. To get there from Jerusalem, we boarded Bus #24 from the “Arab Bus Station” outside Damascus Gate. We were told to bring our passports–though this bus drops you within the checkpoint, a bit outside of the town. The ugly Wall dominated the drive into Bethlehem, and I found myself thinking a lot about something I read in book about the history of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that the Church could in many ways serve as a great model for conflict resolution in the region.

This is very funny, of course, to anyone who knows anything about the contentious history of the church! For the history of the church reads more like comedy or sometimes even melodrama than anything else…. Contributing to the tensions leading up to the Crimean war, down to today all rights of use and maintainance are divided between the main players: the Orthodox, the Armenians, the Roman Catholics and the Copts; with the Ethiopians having been pushed up on to the roof, where they still remain languishing (Chart here). Part of the War's conclusion saw the Status Quo Agreement put into effect whereby not one inch of the church can be changed without the agreement of all parties–and this is why, there has remained a ladder on the roof for well over a hundred years.It takes an awful lot to get all the sides to sit down together to talk, much less to agree to anything!

So bad was it that during the Ottoman times, the keys to the church were entrusted to two prominent Muslim families–whose descendents continue to open and shut the doors of the church each day.

Like always, fact is stranger than fiction. And yet, despite the fact that history has seen the religious groups come to blows again and again over the centuries (with vivid scenes of monks pulling out crucifixes and candletsicks to attack and murder each other right next to the Empty Tomb!); still, being there, I had to admit, I'd take the chaotic and crazy AD-HOC style of conflict resolution and mutual existence to that ugly wall anyday! I kind of saw the writer's point, is what I am saying. Indeed, people said again and again that it is in the Old City, where peoples have lived on top of each other for centuries–bickering nastily, but for the most people in mutual existence–that things were better.

It is, as the saying goes, the walls that divide. Even if it is effective in the short-term, over the long haul, all dialogue ends and relations sour when people are divided. Monologue being a symptom of the colonial imagination, I've never really been a fan of short-term performance/ stop-gap measures…

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by Sarah Firisen

Privacy; Do we have it? If we don’t, should we care? With the news today that the NSA is now collection millions of faces from web images and using face recognition software on them, I think the answer to the first question is clearly, no. But of course, the NSA, at least in this instance, is only making use of digital images of ourselves that we’ve allowed to proliferate on the web. For the all the ballyhoo about government spying, most of us are our own worst enemies. Most people in the Western world, me included, have huge digital footprints. Probably bigger than we even realize. I remember the early days of admitting that I regularly Google myself and the titters as if that was a vaguely dirty thing to do. But honestly, anyone who doesn’t regularly check to see what is out there about them is foolish.

And I don’t just mean Google your name, Google your photos and your phone number. It’s amazing how many people discount those last two. I do a fair amount of online dating these days and I usually do some preliminary searches on men that I’m considering meeting – I honestly consider this a very basic safety precaution. And it’s amazing what I can find in about 20 seconds. People tend to use the same photos for multiple purposes, so the photo that cute guy has used on Match.com is often also the same photo he uses on his LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. And what do you know, when I Google that photo and find his Facebook page, I see what a charming couple he and his wife Susan make and how thrilled they are to be celebrating their 10^th wedding anniversary.

People are quick to give their phone numbers away, but many seem not to realize that if they’ve ever posted that number somewhere, on a bulletin board, on EBay, on Twitter, that number is going to link right back to who they are. It never ceases to astound me how easy it is to get some pretty identifying information on people very quickly and easily. It particularly amazes me when these people are clearly trying to cheat on a spouse or are lying about some other aspect of their lives. I cannot tell you how many men contact me online who are using photos of Bollywood actors as their profile photos and passing them off as their own. Yes, Bollywood actors seem to be the fake photos of choice, not sure why. I’m guessing that it’s because they’re usually good looking guys who aren’t well known in the west so men think they’ll get away with the lie. My one exception to this was the “gentleman” of a certain age who used a photo of John Gotti! And if you say that you’re Peter from New York who works in sales and I Google your photo and find it on the online bio of a neurology researcher who lives in California, I’m probably going to get suspicious and decline that friendly glass of wine you’ve offered.

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by Eric Byrd

Have you ever seen Sherman? It is necessary to see him in order to realize the Norse make-up of the man – the hauteur, noble, yet democratic: a hauteur I have always hoped I, too, might possess. (Whitman)

Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman are the conspicuous figures in the revolutionary re-founding of the United States. The victory of which they were the grand strategists and the most acclaimed media actors seemed to decide some of the fundamental questions the Founders had left to ambiguous laws and a faith in future compromise; a victory that eased, though it did not resolve, the existentially divisive “Negro Question” James Madison noted at the Constitutional Convention of 1787: “the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not having slaves. [Difference] did not lie between the large and small States: it lay between the Northern and Southern.”

In his essential orations – the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address – Lincoln is a civic priest or poet, rhetorical guardian, keeper of ideals whose phrasemaking points to a transcendental order. He promised Americans that though their republic had collapsed in an orgy of violence, their ideals were imperishable, and waited be reborn from the bloody struggle. Grant, ancestor of all our taciturn gunslingers and laconic detectives, is the heroic everyman, the homely knight, the General-in-Chief who wore a private’s blouse in the field and appeared apolitical, ambitious of nothing beyond speedy victory, and so able to allay Americans’ traditional republican fear that a powerful general is a potential dictator.

Sherman is the scourge, the eccentric terror. The harsh style of his widely reprinted reports and official letters provided the public with a “vocabulary of the drastic,” wrote Charles Royster, and ensured that to many Unionists “his public character embodied the severity needed for the crushing of the rebellion.” He embodies that severity still, reduced to a now nearly anonymous aphorism (“War is Hell”), to the cinematic image of Atlanta in flames, and to the famous Matthew Brady portrait that made Evan S. Connell think of a “vulture with scrofula.” Of course Sherman, like Lincoln and Grant, is far more than his image, and a deeper study of the man is essential for the student of America’s consolidation and expansion. Sherman is one member of the late nineteenth century power elite who will tell you how the sausages were made, and in prose of nervous vehemence, half despairing, half gloating, with that note of philosophic detachment that creeps into discussions of the inevitable. He could also wax lyrical; the Mississippi River was to him a national Tree of Life, and he reminded a New Orleans correspondent that the city was

the root of a tree whose branches reach the beautiful fields of western New York, and the majestic cañons of the Yellowstone, and that with every draught of water you take the outflow of the pure lakes of Minnesota and the dripping dews of of the Alleghany and Rocky Mountains.

He was subject to bouts of depression and reread Shakespeare constantly; he ends his memoirs with lines from Jaques’ melancholic soliloquy. He was prominent in the ruin of the rebellious slaveholders and the destruction of the nomadic tribes that hunted on the Great Plains; and for someone perched on the usually euphemistic heights of American power, he was villainously candid about the requisite violence and terror, and he was full of personal paradoxes.

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by Bill Benzon

Over the past few years I’ve spent a great deal of time photographing graffiti in Jersey City, which is on the West bank of the Hudson River across from lower Manhattan. Most of that time I’ve photographed a handful of sites, over and over again, week after week, month after month. What I’ve seen is that things change. Of course the graffiti is eroded by the weather; in some cases it may also be “buffed” (eradicated) by the authorities. More likely, though, is that it will become over-written by other graffiti writers – that’s what they call themselves, by the way, writers, for their art is grounded in letters.

Even this piece, which looks like a green triceratops, is a name: “Joe”, shortened from “Japan Joe”, the nom de guerre of the writer:

It’s large; about 18 feet wide and seven feet high. Here you see a train going by:

Think of Japan Joe in that spot, working for several hours, surrounded by greenery, but also the large freight trains rumbling by. The trains and the greenery travel into his mind where they fuse into the image of a large green animal, the triceratops.

That’s the spirit of the place.

And, in time, Japan Joe’s triceratops had been degraded by the weather to the point that Kemos and Jnub could go over it without insulting Joe:

Life goes on.

Thus I have come to understand the graffiti site as more than a physical place. It IS that, but the physical place is to be understood, perhaps, provisionally, as a resource accessed by the graffiti, and thus by the graffiti writer. The site is a confluence of physical, social, and aesthetic energy.

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by Matt McKenna

Much has been made of whether this summer's Godzilla movie is a pro-environmentalist film or an anti-environmentalist film. While both readings are plausible on a surface level, neither addresses the dominant public policy critique embedded within the biggest monster flick since last year's Pacific Rim. While the lack of an environmental focus in Godzilla will surely rankle those who watch the film in the hopes of affirming their respective worldviews (whatever those may be), less politically motivated moviegoers will be pleased to discover that the film grapples with the more interesting problem of establishing a culture of open, data-driven public policy.

Godzilla begins by showing glimpses of the monster within the jittering frames of 1950s archival footage. We soon learn that those atomic bomb tests performed during the Cold War weren't tests at all–they were attempts to kill a mysterious giant creature known as Godzilla. Flash forward to 1999 when Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) notices strange seismic activity while working at a nuclear power plant in Japan. When the seismic activity increases and the power plant collapses, a multinational governmental organization called Monarch quarantines the area and establishes a cover story about the plant being destroyed by an earthquake. Brody, skeptical of the official report, secretly researches the disaster and finds evidence for an enormous spider-like monster lurking about. Flash-forward once more to the present day where Brody finally has the opportunity to present his research to Monarch only to be interrupted a giant spider monster hatching from its giant spider monster egg. This creature subsequently spends its screen time and the film's budget destroying various American cities in search of the nuclear energy it needs to sustain its rampage. Conveniently for humans, however, Godzilla wakes up, rises from the depths of the ocean, and hunts the enormous spider for what appears to be sport.

With a plot like that, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that the Godzilla has aligned itself with environmentalists–mess with the environment and giant spiders will exterminate your species, it seems to say. At the same time, this message is undercut by the fact that a deus ex machina in the form of Godzilla appears and saves the day with no act of contrition required by humans. Why is Godzilla's environment-related message so muddled? Because there isn't one. When the first half of the film is taken into account, it becomes clear that Godzilla's primary message is actually a plea for policy makers to be less reactionary and more data-oriented.

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by Karen Engelmann

Memoir can be a dangerous choice for a writer; they reveal a slice of themselves that must cut deep in the extraction, but in the best examples, the genre is healing for both author and reader. Maria Chaudhuri's “Beloved Strangers” (Bloomsbury, 2014) is one such healing memoir. The story creates a circle from birth to rebirth, with Miss Chaudhuri's long and arduous journey into adulthood detailed in elegant and, at times, dreamlike prose.

Born to devout Muslin parents in Bangladesh — a newly formed nation still in turmoil from its own difficult birth — Miss Chaudhuri's prologue begins, literally, in the womb. In three brief, powerful passages set in different stages of her young life, the author introduces the theme of separation — a condition that is her greatest challenge and serves as the book's central query. The first passage is a poetic exploration of her own birth in Dhaka, the initial departure from the safety of the mother. The second examines a child's wish to run away, fueled by the wishes of the mother to be alone and free of the burdens of children. The third is a self-imposed displacement to a foreign land — the northeastern U.S and ultimately New York — the author describes as “rancid.” And yet a return to what was home in Bangladesh literally causes a kind of asphyxiation; the prodigal daughter cannot breath the air of her native city. In these first six pages, we enter a world where the author feels estranged from all that she is supposed to hold dear. Chaudhuri addresses this estrangement fearlessly, tackling topics like religion, familial dysfunction, gender roles, sex, depression and obsession with painful candor and surprising lyricism.

The author's questions regarding belonging begin with the family's strong religious traditions. Chaudhuri's innocent inquiries about God are rebuked and punished. She is taught to pray in Arabic — a foreign language that was only memorized and never learned or even translated. The pir sahib, a holy man who makes an annual visit to the family, tells the young Maria that he named her after a beautiful Christian slave that was a gift to the Prophet from the Byzantine Emperor. The pir's explanation is accompanied by a lecherous sexual tension that hints of intended pedophilia, arrested only by the arrival of her parents. Beauty, promiscuity, danger and desire are often connected in the work, a source of confusion and shame. When crowds of the devout arrive at the house to pray with the pir in the evening, the young Chaudhuri runs to the roof of the house to stare at the sky:

My grandmother said it was in the moment between twilight and darkness that all heavenly creatures left their earthly sojourns to fly back up to the heavens. The pink streaks in the sky were Heaven's doorway, flung open for the return of its inhabitants. I was always hunted down before the multi-colored easel of a sky had coagulated into a deep charcoal. (pg. 15)

Escape as a solution to life's problems is a method Chaudhuri dreams about often, inspired (and simultaneously terrified) by her mother's clearly expressed desire to escape the drudgery of home and family to pursue her own thwarted artistic dreams as a singer.

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