by Lisa Lieberman

I used to teach a course on French colonialism, from the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century through the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). On the first day of class, we read Jean de Brunhoff's classic children's book, The Story of Babar. De Brunhoff's story can be viewed as “an allegory of French colonization, as seen by the complacent colonizers,” to quote New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik:

the naked African natives, represented by the “good” elephants, are brought to the imperial capital, acculturated, and then sent back to their homeland on a civilizing mission. The elephants that have assimilated to the ways of the metropolis dominate those which have not. The true condition of the animals—to be naked, on all fours, in the jungle—is made shameful to them, while to become an imitation human, dressed and upright, is to be given the right to rule.

Gopnik, I should add, distances himself from such political readings of the book. He sees Babar as both a manifestation of the French national character, circa 1930 (when de Brunhoff's wife first came up with the tale, which she told to the couple's young sons as a bedtime story) and a gentle parody of it, “an affectionate, closeup caricature of an idealized French society.”

I remember enjoying the book as a child, and I've read it to my own children, but for all its charm, I'm not willing to let Babar off the hook quite so easily. The business of the civilizing mission—the “native” elephants adopting the values and behavior of the humans who inhabit the city—is cringe-inducing enough, but what really troubles me is de Brunhoff's ending. Here the fantasies of French nativists come true. The elephants come and immediately assimilate, recognizing the superiority of the mother country, hang around long enough to entertain their hosts with anecdotes about their exotic origins, and then they go home.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

In Spring 2003, as a first year doctoral student at Arizona State University, I took a class on queuing theory. This refers to the science that has its focus on reducing delays, irrespective of where they may be experienced: at a traffic signal; over the phone to speak to a representative (music and ads playing in the background); or, more critically, in a virtual queue of hundreds of patients, each waiting for an organ transplant.

My class required each student to do a hands-on project in a real setting. I chose mine to be the nearest supermarket, a busy metropolitan Safeway store. Broadly speaking, the two big pieces in any queueing study are: (1) how quickly people/requests arrive, and (2) how quickly they are serviced. The interplay of these determines the probability of delays. So for my project at Safeway, I decided to focus primarily on collecting data on customer arrivals and checkout times.

I talked to the store manager, Scott, about my plan. He was a tall, blond man, dressed formally, gentle but with a clear sense of authority. He was immediately worried and didn't get what I was up to. I tried to convince him by suggesting that my data might be useful. Scott was (quite rightly) skeptical, but I got some sort of an affirmation from him. You can't ask customers any questions, he said sternly, and I promised him that.

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by Randolyn Zinn

Meditative Rose by Salvador Dali

Owen

He walks into a millinery shop in Back Bay, looking for a straw Panama.

“Do you have any Persian lamb Papakhas?” he asks, just for the hell of it.

“We don’t work with skins,” the milliner replies, coiling a cloth measuring tape between his fingers. In the back workroom, a hot iron hisses as held by a red-faced girl with chubby arms, who yawns as she presses a piece of striped ribbon.

“Do you know,” Owen says, eager to impress the shopkeeper, “that President Karzai’s Afghan Karacul hat is made from the downy fur of aborted lamb fetuses?”

The milliner sniffs. “Is there something I can help you with, sir?”

Owen tries on every hat in the store. The porkpie is too retro. The Basque beret a bit better, and in the gray Fedora with a white grosgrain ribbon band, he’s a dead ringer for a 1920’s Chicago gunrunner. Not good.

“I’ll take this one in straw,” he says, fingering a Borsalino. “How much?”

“Only in felt, sir. We only deal in felt. And wool.”

Owen’s neck reddens and puffs out like the feathers on a parrot. “How idiotic,” he spits. “Aren’t you a hat store? I want a hat.”

He storms out of the shop and a little bell at the top of the door jangles like an angry fairy when it closes behind him. He knows he’s been unreasonable, but can’t help himself. He’s inconsolable.

Neighbors pushing grocery carts or sitting on benches look up as he passes, the violence of his exit a palpable disturbance to their calm.

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by Michael Lopresto

The idea of objective value has come into disrepute in some quarters. We have an image of the natural world, well defined by physics—a world of mostly empty space filled sparsely with unimaginably tiny objects (an umbrella term for particles, fields and waves) that are governed in law-like ways. Indeed, this world, given precise definition and overwhelming empirical support, is often thought to be radically different to the world we know from experience—the world of vibrant colours and sounds, tastes and smells. The fact that our perception of the world seems to be so profoundly impoverished has led many to despair at the prospects of genuine knowledge of the world. So, this line of reasoning goes, the natural world given to us by physics has absolutely no room for objective values, as pure “atoms in the void” exhaust all of reality.

I think this line of reasoning is wrong, and shows the desperate need for philosophers to make sense of the natural world as defined by physics, with our place as human beings firmly as part of that natural world. To use a term from Wilfrid Sellars, it's the job of philosophers to navigate the way between the scientific image and the manifest image of the world. The scientific image is the “atoms in the void” picture of reality, where ordinary objects like tables and chairs are really just near-empty lattice like structures of atoms. The manifest image is what is presented to us in experience, where tables and chairs are solid objects, we have rich conscious experiences of music that touches us deeply, and, as I'll be focusing on in the remainder of this essay, objective values that bind on us whether we like it or not.

In his superb book, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (1998), the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson develops some tools for navigating our way between the scientific image and the manifest image.

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by Ben Schreckinger

This past November, they held the sixth annual EPIC Summit in Toledo. As the name implies, it was “a day of career-enhancing training and networking.” Epic!

Use of the word “epic” has exploded in recent years, but the incidence of actual epic things has not. Now, as likely as not, “epic” refers to the quotidian, the small, and the mundane Need proof? Take the actual first result in my Twitter search for #EpicFail: “Just realised I forgot to buy crumpets for breakfast in the morning….so no toasted buttery crumpets for me!! Boo! #epicfail.” Some of my friends work for a company called Epic Systems. It does health care IT. I’ve been eating at a food hall in Dublin that advertises its epic club sandwich. It’s no wonder the top definition of epic on Urban Dictionary calls it “the most overused word ever… Everything is epic now.” Something has gone terribly wrong.

It’s past time to add “epic” to the sad list of words that have come to mean what they don’t mean. The Oxford English Dictionary caused an uproar this summer when the press discovered it had expanded its definition of “literally” to also mean figuratively — because that’s how people now use it. That redefinition was a defeat for language purists in their battle against sloppy usage. But the bastardization of epic signals something far graver: the inescapable malaise of post-industrial existence.

The world of the true epic is one of famine and feast, terrifying monsters and awesome deities. It conveys the mysteries of the wild unknown and the joy of emerging from it to rediscover the comforts of hearth and home. The epic’s grand scale reflects the awe with which its characters view a world whose grandeur they can’t contemplate. In other words, the world of the epic is the opposite of New York City, where the diners stay open 24 hours and the drug dealers deliver. The epic hero is the opposite of the modern knowledge worker, for whom the closest thing to an existential struggle is a battle for market share. After the sack of Troy, Odysseus was lost for 20 years before he returned home to Ithaka. Now we have GPS. It’s hard to imagine The Odyssey with iPhones.

Odysseus: Hey babe, I totally killed the presentation enemy today. Looks like I’ll be home late though. Google Maps is showing some traffic on the Aegean.

Penelope: Pls hurry! These suitors are making me nervous.

Odysseus: Umm, uninstall Tinder? LOL.

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by Carl Pierer

“Yes, I would let the five people die.”

To philosophers, and I mean to include all people interested in philosophical questions, this is a pretty standard response to a pretty well-known thought experiment: The Trolley Problem. But it is not only in philosophy that you get very uncanny scenarios when trying to clarify an idea by applying it theoretically. These thought experiments play an important role in fields as diverse as physics and arts, mathematics and literature, but the most infamous ones are probably to be found in philosophy, and in ethics particularly. Not only are they notorious, but in fact they face two challenges, which easily turn into dangers should we ignore them and base our argument on them.

First of all, thought experiments have to be distinguished from metaphors, since they serve different purposes. At first sight it might seem that they are poles apart. However, Dennett writes: “If you look at the history of philosophy, you see that all the great and influential stuff has been technically full of holes but utterly memorable and vivid. They are (…) lovely thought experiments. Like Plato's cave, and Descartes's evil demon, and Hobbes' vision of the state of nature and the social contract, and even Kant's idea of the categorical imperative.” Dennett here conflates a variety of famous philosophical scenarios under the heading “thought experiments”. Yet the structure of Plato's cave is completely different from Descartes's evil demon. In Plato's case there is no new knowledge gained. It is not a hypothetical scenario of how the world might be, but rather a more literary expression of how it actually is. The philosopher's ascent from the cave is figurative and an it does not serve the purpose of drawing some conclusion from this view, but rather to embrace the general idea that this is the philosophers' condition. It is a picture, an illustration of his idea rather than a method to develop a new belief. Descartes, on the other hand, imagines an evil demon who brings about a very sophisticated illusion of reality, making us think that all our experiences are real while they are merely his creations. It is an application of radical scepticism. Once we hypothetically accept this scenario Descartes asks whether any of our pre-demonic knowledge still stands. The difference between Plato's cave and Descartes's demon is that the former is a mere illustration of an idea. The latter, in contrast, serves to provide some new insight. Therefore, I propose to distinguish between thought experiments and metaphors. The purpose of the former has to be a more rigid one than that of the latter. We use thought experiments to test what happens if we apply our theoretical ideas. Its similarity to actual experiments should not be ignored. We peruse those hypothetical results, and only if we can accept them are we ready to accept a theory.

However, more often than not, thought experiments are used the other way round. Hypothetical scenarios are invented in such a way that our theories fail to deliver what is expected of them.

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by Mara Naselli

“A foolish consistency,” Emerson famously wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I memorized this line in high school. It was one of those Emersonian zingers that gave me momentary purchase in my otherwise bewildered adolescent state. Nothing cohered in those days. I didn’t know who I was or where I belonged. Literature might have been a consolation, but reading required a concentration I was often too depleted to muster. But that line—that line I held onto. How delightful the feel of hobgoblin—the labial b, glottal g and l, the nasal n rolling back and forth in the mouth like a marble.

I hadn’t lived long enough to understand what Emerson meant by consistency, nor did I realize hobgoblins were both dreaded and amusing, petty little troublemakers. To my ear it was the sound of imbecility—the perfect word to describe my small suburban world that alternately objectified and ignored me. Though I hardly noticed, that sprite of a line was making light of my seriousness, skipping along with its arms swinging, like a nursery rhyme: “adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

It was once practically an American rite of passage to read Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in high school. Its forcefulness seemed to affirm the abundance around us. We lived in new suburbs, on land that not so long before had been open fields, and before that wooded plains. Subdivisions and gleaming, glassy shopping malls sprang up with the confidence of new money—our twentieth-century Manifest Destiny. Our world was contained within brick facades and putty-colored siding on streets with names like Kensington Cross and Buckingham Place. Bright curbs, smooth black pavement—but no sidewalks, so as not to disturb the “colonial feel.” From my Middle America blossomed entitlement and palliative consumption. Our parents had arrived. A daughter of affluence was expected to display the fruits of her parents’ achievement. Short skirts, school spirit, an absurd accumulation of extracurricular activities—the only appropriate response at the time seemed to be a feminine compliance. A silence, really. I had no language yet with which to reject the dumbing effects of material comfort.

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by Maniza Naqvi

I'm in turmoil when he is there but always sorry when it is time to let him go. And why not, he is after all, such a complicated man; a beautiful man. He would have to be. After all– I have created him. Quintessential: American hero. The one, everyone hates but never quite as much as he hates himself. Still, still—certainly not as much as I, hate him. Love will do that, you know.

So, a beautiful man, my creation: gone. Gone, until, he resurfaces again suddenly. And he always has these past so many decades when the news has been and is all about dictatorships, war and the violence of subverting whole societies and I have traveled for work to places torn by war or about to be. And in this time alongside the work, and witnessing the world and watching BBC and CNN— I have written poetry and fiction. But the time for this has been limited for I am overwhelmed with visits to villages and planning and designing programs to tackle misery and poverty.

So the time I have spent with him can be stacked up as a few short chapters or even dots on the point of a pin—in relation to his and my entire lives and yet in hindsight those moments seemed to be in emotional volume disproportionately more meaningful than all the others. When he leaves, as he always does, he says: Hope to see you at some point. What point might that be? I have always asked. Those points—in the past have been scattered. Each point, in the moment, as is the point of all of this, was all that there was at that point—and breathlessly all that mattered—as in, without full stops and commas, without pauses—the time spent with him, in the margins of moleskins was always, constant and seamless. And in hindsight was always pointless.

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by Dave Maier

Drones seem to be in the news lately, with much negative commentary. Now, I can understand those brought up on classical and pop music wanting harmonic movement in their music, but it's not like drones are a crime against humanity. In any case (Emily Litella to the white courtesy phone) I haven't done any new podcasts in a while, so let's head out to the drone zone for another look.

Earlier posts in this series: here, here, here, and see also here (scroll down).

Our first set is another time capsule, mostly from the glorious 1970s.

1. Heldon – Virgin Swedish Blues (Heldon III)

Heldon is guitarist and synthesist Richard Pinhas with occasional help from others, the Continental counterpart to Robert Fripp's King Crimson. This track, from 1975 or so (check the hairstyles on the cover if there is any doubt of this), is an overt hommage to Fripp & Eno, but that distinctive guitar tells us who it really is. Some early Heldon is a bit raw for effective spatial journeying, but this one is right out there. Some of you may know Pinhas from that bizarre Lingua Franca article in which we hear how Pinhas so freaked out Philip K. Dick that the latter was moved to alert the FBI. True story!

2. Tonto's Expanding Headband – Riversong (Zero Time)

Not that Tonto (which interestingly enough means “stupid” in Italian), but TONTO: The Original New Timbral Orchestra, a titanic bank of electronics assembled by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. They – and it – are best known for their work with Stevie Wonder on a string of classic 1970s albums (e.g. Talking Book and Innervisions), but they put out some music of their own as well. I'm not convinced by some of the compositions, but this track is a stunner. Incidentally, Tonto has a new home.

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by Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis

Golberg and Meis

David V. Johnson recently wrote an essay for 3 Quarks Daily titled “A Refutation of the Undergraduate Atheists.” In the essay, he accuses the New Atheists of making a simplistic and ultimately unfalsifiable claim—namely, that “humanity would be better off without religion.” It is, as Johnson points out, rather difficult to prove this kind of broad counterfactual. The New Atheists (or the Undergraduate Atheists, as Johnson calls them, including the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris) “claim to know something that cannot, in fact, be known and must be accepted on faith.”

Interestingly, Johnson is himself an atheist. But he wonders whether humanity might actually be better off with religion, even if there is no God and religion has no basis in truth. “Consider,” Johnson writes, “the tremendous boon in happiness for all of them in knowing, in the way a believer knows, that their lives and the universe are imbued with meaning, that there is a cosmic destiny in which they play a part, that they do not suffer in vain, that their death is not final but merely a transition to a better existence. This mental state is, I submit, so important to human happiness that people are willing to suffer and die for it, and do so gladly.”

Though they disagree about the purpose of religion, as atheists, Johnson and the New Atheists come from roughly the same position. They are non-believers looking out upon the vast sea of believing human beings and trying to figure out whether these false beliefs are detrimental or beneficial. In playing with the idea that false beliefs could be beneficial, Johnson brings up the work of Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), the Spanish writer whose essays and novels made him one of the most important thinkers of his time, though he isn’t read so widely today.

Johnson discusses one story in particular, “San Manuel Bueno, Martyr.” It is a powerful story, beautifully written. It is about a village priest who secretly harbors many doubts about his faith. But he throws himself into his work as a priest. The priest does such good work with the people that a young atheist from the city (Lazaro), who comes back to the village to “enlighten” the villagers, ends up becoming an “unbelieving” Catholic, just like San Manuel. Here’s how Johnson explains the story:

Like Lazaro, San Manuel doesn't believe the articles of faith. (“I believe in one God, the Father and Almighty, Creator of heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen …”) What he believes in, rather, is administering to the needs of the villagers, in putting on such a convincing performance of dedication to Christ that they all believe he is a saint and have their faith in the Church and in life everlasting sustained. Lazaro's “conversion,” then, is one consistent with atheism. He becomes a lay-minister of sorts under San Manuel and eventually dies a Catholic.

The moral of the story, according to Johnson: Religion is false, but the people need it because it makes them happy. The only problem with this reading of the story is that Unamuno thought no such thing. Unamuno was, in fact, contemptuous of the idea of “blind faith.” But Unamuno was also a practicing Christian when he wrote the story. There’s something funny going on here, you might think. In a sense, you’d be right.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

There are some questions we just can't shake; the nature of space and time, or the identity of the building blocks of the universe; they pester us until we answer them, and then, as if on cue, the Universe proceeds to demonstrate the inadequacy of our proposed solutions. One such question, the asking and answering of which has spurred on the progress of science for millennia, is that of the vacuum. Almost universally, the human race seems to find the concept of complete emptiness fascinating. We have fantasized about this gaping void and spoken of it often, in science, philosophy and folklore, but while in principle it is possible to postulate a complete void – the physical equivalent of the mathematical concept of zero – in practice, this perfect nothingness eludes us.

The argument can be traced back at least to (circa) 500 B.C, when Parmenides declared that a vacuum – i.e. a region of space completely devoid of matter – simply could not exist. The Greek natural philosophers debated this possibility for decades, some declaring the void to be indispensable, others finding it repugnant, until a hundred or so years later, Aristotle issued the now famous dictum ‘horror vacui', or, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum'.

Two thousand years later, when experimental science had advanced sufficiently for abstract ideas to be put to the test, the vacuum was duly investigated. Scientists like Galileo, Pascal, von Guericke and Boyle devised mechanisms to pump the air out of glass vessels, creating vacua in order that their properties could be studied, and some rather striking demonstrations ensued. There were, for instance, the Magdeburg hemispheres designed by von Guericke in 1656.

These large copper hemispheres were joined together their rims sealed with grease, and the air within pumped out so that a vacuum was created within. The hemispheres could then no longer be pulled apart, even by thirty horses, until a valve was opened and air let back in. The incredible strength with which the metal globe clung together was attributable to atmospheric pressure; in other words, the ‘weight' of air – a force we feel all the time and yet are insensible of, because in most situations, the push and pull balances each other out. A vessel devoid of air, however, exerts no outward force – it only feels the air outside bearing down on it from all sides, holding it in an invisible vice.

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by Matt McKenna

The 2014 Academy Award nominees have yet to be announced, but it is a safe bet that Peter Segal's Grudge Match won't be taking home any hardware this year. And that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has seen the film since it isn't very good. However, there are films that are bad by accident, and then there are films that are bad by design. Grudge Match is among the latter set. Why would a filmmaker go through the trouble of purposefully creating a movie they know will be universally panned by critics in addition to not making its money back? In the case of Grudge Match, it was utterly critical for the jokes to fall flat, the plot to be predictable, and the boxing sequences to languish in order for the film to express its critique of polarized partisan politics in the United States. Through both its content and its form, Grudge Match dissects the deleterious relationship between politics, the media, and a credulous population.

Grudge Match follows the time-tested Hollywood strategy of taking a genre film concept, casting the leads as older folks, and calling the whole thing a comedy (e.g. Space Cowboys, Last Vegas, Wild Hogs, etc). Specifically, Grudge Match belongs to the boxing film genre, the leads are played by 70-year-old Robert De Niro and 67-year-old Sylvester Stallone, and the film is littered with what appear to be jokes indicating the film is intended to be viewed as a comedy. Based solely on the description above, you can probably guess the film's plot: having grown old and pathetic, two retired rival boxers with convoluted, intertwined histories are lured into one last bout by a goofball promoter preying on each character's desperate need for pride and money.

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by Bill Benzon

Tracing things back to the beginning is always a bit arbitrary. There is always something that came before, and even before that. For example, just how is it that Charlie Keil, winner of the 22nd Annual Koizumi Fumio Prize for ethnomusicology, ended up playing tuba in front of the Vermont Statehouse in the Fall of 2012? I suppose it isn't much of a stretch to get from ethnomusicology to the tuba, as both have to do with music, but the Vermont Statehouse?

It's time we take a short tour through a long story. Just for sake of perspective, let's start the tour sometime in the late early 20th Century, with the band of John Philip Sousa, the March King. He was the highest paid member of that band, which had been touring America for years. His bass drummer during the 1920s was a man named August Helmecke. Helmecke was also the highest paid member of the band.

Why, you might ask, was the bass drummer the highest paid member of the band? Simple, really. He maintained the pulse. Without the pulse, the music had no life. Helmecke was the heart of the band.

And he was Charlie Keil's first percussion teacher. Helmecke gave group lessons on Saturday mornings at Darien High School in Connecticut in the late 1940s. Every Saturday morning he'd teach the kids to hold their arms high and then down stroke vigorously, getting the whole ar and trunk into the motion. And though it would be years before Charlie would know this, many of the jazz drummers he came to admire – Papa Jo Jones, Sid Catlett, Chick Webb and others – would go hear Sousa's band just so they could bear witness to Helmecke's mighty drumming.

That's the start. Charlie went on to learn the snare drum, orchestral percussion, and the traps set. And while he's played professionally from time to time, he ended up studying anthropology in graduate school at the University of Chicago. That's when he did a master's thesis that he published in 1966 as Urban Blues.

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