by Carl Pierer

Hard-working, dedicated snow plough driver, Nils Dickman (Stellan Skarsgård), is living a peaceful life with his wife Gudrun in a small, rural town in Norway. Just after being named Citizen of the Year, their son is found dead, apparently due to an overdose. The beautiful shots of wintery Norwegian landscapes, Nils' doubts that his son could ever have been an addict and Gudrun's acceptance of this fact seem to set the scene for a sombre Nordic drama. The film shifts gears, however, as Nils starts to investigate his son's death. The rest of the film, reminiscent of the blockbuster “Taken”, sees Nils meticulously eliminating gangsters one after another, thereby incidentally causing a drug war between the Norwegian-Swedish gang, headed by “the Count” (Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen), and the Serbian gang under “Papa” (Bruno Ganz). Rather predictably, it all ends in a final showdown between all the major actors involved. While the plot suggests an action film à la Hollywood, the film playfully escapes confinement to this category.

It is not quite clear to whom the Norwegian title of Hans Petter Moland's new film, “Kraftidioten” (roughly: ‘really dumb person'), is meant to refer. Any of the characters seem to be a suitable candidates. The English title, on the other hand, “In Order of Disappearance” points toward the first central element in the film's comedy: it lets the audience expect, but meets those very expectations only through inversion. For instance, the film flips the standard cast-list in the closing titles. Instead of their order of appearance, a brief obituary is shown as the characters disappear throughout the film. This motif is varied on different levels: the evil boss of the Norwegian drug gang, “the Count”, is indeed a very progressive and forward thinking individual. He is a vegan, gets coffee for his men while they are busy torturing one of their victims, and does not readily give in to his ex-wife's custody battle over their son. In short, a modern business leader. Nils, in contrast, is a calculating, cold-blooded serial killer. He shows no signs of pain nor remorse. Yet, the film challenges the viewer subtly: while “the Count” should be appreciated (and Nils condemned) because of their respective deeds, the audience sympathises with Nils' Nordic Stoicism. Fortunately, this moral dilemma is resolved for the spectator in the second half of the film as “the Count” acts more and more as an evil overlord is supposed to do: shooting his own men, hitting his ex-wife, killing his informants after they delivered their information.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Offspring of wanton wants, they arrive, together, these gods of war and weather, to the beating drums, and sound of thunder, crying out crisis, each September. This century's, Septembers, all arrive back to school, as it were, refreshed from resorts and beaches, in need of replenishing, their depleted coffers, of personal savings, and future job offers.This century's September, as if afraid of endings, arrives as though, unrepentant, its own immortal endless season, of unceasing sameness, an eerie stillness of repeated scripts and finite possibility: War as weather and weather as war. Each September, reminds us, of an, unchanging, unreformed industry, of needs, that guarantees, more spectacular bombs and thunderous storms. Bombs and storms. Lovingly named for eradicated tribes, victims of genocide, and of course women. Apache Helicopters, and Tomahawk missiles, Rita, Katrina, and Ophelia. Do you even remember, come September, as we lurch from one year to the next, all the threats and crisis, these Septembers past have presented as pretexts? And we, the video generation, watching and watched, posting selfies, we need only a video to suspend belief, acquiesce and agree. War is peace! This is a crisis, indeed. These past, two half dozens, and change, Septembers,this same cry of crisis? And we, resolutely unquestioning, of how rules were changed, to protect us, from ourselves. The Patriots Act? Remember? In September 2005 came Katrina, after Rita,and Ophelia: and army boots and troops came out, to act and protect the land, while patriots drowned? Boots on the ground? This ground. Remember Septembers past, and to come. Then, came FISA ‘Protect America Act', in September 2007. Do you remember? (here.) Do you remember the rules, that changed? Rules on how you were to be protected, by being watched and listened to, and put in your place, if needed, by guns and batons, and military courts, and tear gas and bullets and fantastical costumes of robot cops and juggernauts. Do you remember that September? For your own protection, for your own, good, of course. Who elses'? Do you remember, the Financial Crisis, come September in 2008? The rules that changed? And Wall Street won and you lost your gains—and your roof, in its name, and, of course, your good name? And then, came the Gulf spill and by September 2009 British Petroleum, how it threatened, do you remember, the war on life? Or the threat for burning of the Quran, again godsent, then, in September 2010 that almost ushered in the chance on changing the rules on freedom of speech? And in September 2011, the Occupy Movement, which revealed, to us, the extent of our powers, against power, which as it turned out, were: None. That revealed to us, that the police, primarily protects property. That even a movement for rights and freedom, uses the term, Occupy. Are we mystified? And then the storm of Sandy which by September 2012 had made it clear, as it battered and washed away, our water front properties and flooded, Wall Street how powerless the batons, bullets, the tear gas, the shells, the bombs were against, the real threat. That year, they bombed Libya straight to hell. Then, a video of insanity, and that September, the attack at the embassy, in Bengazi? Yes, that was September 2012. Come September 2013, the drums of war turned to a deafening roar—that bloodlust's design, to go bomb Syria, all the way back to Afghanistan and more, Iraq and Libya and even Iran! A video, several, tried to help. Always a video, to make the case, to go bomb and invade, yet another place.That juggernaut denied its chance, by another hegemon, rose again, metamorphosed to fight another day. And come September now today, bombing of Syria, anyway—just the same, for now, lo and behold, there it is, ISIS, proof in hideous videos, for our eyes to suspend disbelief, that lets them there drop their bombs, which they had baked, and ached to drop for years, and almost did, last year. Iraq, has been bombed, for twenty five years! A gift from God, for endless war. Who created this new Goddess? This new crisis, of this ISIS? (here,here,here and here). So here we are, this September, with the headlines developed so far, which we won't remember, this time, next year, which gives us, our latest bed time story, and the newest season of hideous videos galore. No way, not today, will we slash defense spending, cut down weapons, roll back armies as was proposed. Hurray, we are on our way, again to war and endless hay. Hurray, for this new goose, this ISIS, and to the golden eggs, that it lays! And yet another resolution, a rule that claims, the right to kill belongs to only one hegemon, one Military. This, we will have forgotten by next September? Remember? War and weather. Bombs and storms. Rita, Ophelia, Katrina, Gustave, Ike and Sandy. Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, now Syria. And what can we do except this time, too, accept, and: Cry, it is a crisis, store canned food, upgrade the flat screen, consume the news, buy rubber boots and torches and: Cry Isis.

More Writing by Maniza Naqvi here.

by Thomas Rodham Wells

‘Libertarian paternalism' is how Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein characterise their big idea, redesigning how choices look so that we will be nudged to choose the option in our own best interests. Their proposal has come in for fierce and sustained academic criticism, from both left and right, and from both philosophers and economists. But all the critiques I've read seem misguided in important ways.

Thaler and Sunstein argue that the behavioral economics evidence is quite clear that people do not choose as rationally as standard economic theory (or our folk psychology) suggest. In particular, people's choices are often strongly influenced by what should be irrelevant features of how their choices are framed. People tend to put more food on their plate if the plate they are handed is bigger; most of us go along with whatever the default option is for choices about pension contributions and organ donation; and so on. In many cases it seems that we don't have an existing specific preference over outcomes and are therefore open to having our subjective valuations shaped or induced by how the options are presented.

Libertarian paternalism is the ethical thesis that, since how people make many choices is so influenced by their framing, it is right and proper for governments to try to design the choices people face in a helpful way (paternalism). Yet nothing about designing the presentation of choices forces people to choose what the designers had in mind. People are still as free as ever to choose what they want, if they know what they want (libertarian). (Sunstein went on to try to put some of his ideas into practice as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009-12.)

Now, the critics of this approach have landed a couple of good blows.

First, how do we know what the 'rational' choice is that people should be making? In order to design choice architectures that nudge people to make the 'correct' choice – e.g. about signing up as an organ donor – policymakers must believe that they know the correct answers to these. In other words, government civil servants (no doubt with the assistance of behavioural economics consultants) are supposed to be able to work out what is in the best interests of 'ordinary' people more accurately and reliably than we can.

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by Namit Arora

‘No man ever steps in the same river twice,’ wrote Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, ‘for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’ Some also say this about ‘home’, making it less a place, more a state of mind. Or as Basho, the haiku master, put it, ‘Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.’ Still, in an age of physical migration like ours, one of the most bittersweet experiences in a migrant’s life is revisiting, after a long gap, the hometown where he came of age. More so perhaps if, while he was away, his neighborhood turned to ruin, crumbling and overrun with weeds, as happened in my case.

Last month, I revisited my boyhood home in Gwalior, a city in north central India, with my parents. I had grown up with my two sisters in Birlanagar, an industrial township in Gwalior, until I went away to college at age 17. After graduation, I left for the U.S. in 1989 for post-graduate studies and various jobs in the U.S. and Europe over the next two decades. I continued to think of Gwalior as my hometown until my parents also left in 1995 and I stopped going there during my India visits. By most measures I had a decent boyhood in Gwalior, yet I’m loath to idealize it or look upon it fondly. If it had its joys, it was also full of graceless anxieties, pressures, and confusions.

A ‘Temple of Modern India’

Many industrial townships similar to Birlanagar had arisen in mid-20th-century India, including at Bhilai, Durgapur, Rourkela, Bokaro, Jamshedpur, and Ranchi. Most were built around public sector enterprises, housing factories that employed thousands. Nehru, the modernizer, called these the ‘temples of modern India’. Birlanagar, where I grew up, was a private township, centered on two textile mills. The Birlas had started building it shortly before independence on land given to them for free by the Scindias, who ruled the then princely state of Gwalior. The older and larger of Birlanagar’s two mills was Jiyajeerao Cotton Mills (JC Mills), named after a member of the dynasty. The other mill, founded around 1950, was Gwalior Rayon (later Grasim), where my father, a textile engineer, worked for 36 years from 1958-94. Under the once famous ‘Gwalior Suiting & Shirting’ brand (watch this ad with Tiger Pataudi and Sharmila Tagore), Gwalior Rayon produced a range of fabrics combining both natural and synthetic fibers—such as cotton, wool, rayon, polyester, acetate, viscose—including some that ‘never tore’ and needed no ironing. Retailers apparently loved these products because their quality required no discounting.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

It sounds a bit ridiculous when you admit your jealousy of inanimate objects. If you confess that you covet the skill with which these lifeless forms navigate their circumstances, you're bound to get some strange looks. So, you keep it to yourself – for the most part. But honestly, there are times when – if you know about the least action principle – it takes all your strength to keep from declaring that you would trade places with a subatomic particle, or a ray of light, or a rubber ball, in a heartbeat. Chances are, if you know about the principle of least action, you know enough science to realize that electrons and photons and rubber balls are not active decision makers, but that doesn't keep you from envying their ability to always follow the optimal route from one point to another. In fact, it almost makes the whole thing worse. These objects are not sentient beings; it's not as if they'd suffer if they took a circuitous route! But somehow, they manage to get it right every time, whereas you – well, you often manage to take what seems like the most complicated possible life path from Point A to Point B.

So what exactly is this mysterious knowledge that subatomic particles seem to possess, and how does one go about acquiring it? We begin by recognizing that these particles aren't furiously calculating their every move, maximizing the effect thereof; they are merely obeying the laws of nature – familiar laws, like those transcribed by Newton. The least action principle offers an approach that enables us to calculate the motion of a classical object, without recourse to conventional mechanics. But this principle should not be thought of as just an alternative to Newton's laws; it is much more powerful and far deeper than that. The chief strength of the least action principle is its flexibility. It is applicable not just within the province of classical mechanics, but can be extended to the realms of optics, electronics, electrodynamics, the theory of relativity and – perhaps most shockingly – even quantum mechanics. In fact, (as is evident in Feynman's path integral formulation) the least action principle is the most logically smooth way to connect classical and quantum physics! Suffice it to say that many well known laws are encapsulated in the elegant statement that “a physical system evolves from a fixed beginning to a fixed end in such a manner that its action is minimized.”

Having drummed up the anticipation, l should at least attempt to explain what the principle is, and give you a glimpse of how it works.

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by Akim Reinhardt

I'm currently circling the nation in a black and orange ‘98 Honda Accord, my rusted chariot. About 7,500 miles in a little over two months. That's the plan. As far north as North Dakota, as far south as New Mexico, and as far west as California before closing the circuit by returning to Maryland. About 26 states in all.

How? Why?

It's a massive research/conference trip. I'm on sabbatical. A full year at half-pay.

A single semester at full pay is the more common sabbatical leave. For a full year sabbatical, the typical approach is to get a research fellowship that makes up the lost salary and provides academic focus.

But I usually end up doing things my own way. I'm not bragging. It's as much a blend of chaos and neurosis as anything else. But in this case the result is, no research fellowship.

Instead, I've rented out my house during the semester, and this past summer I took on a freelance writing project. I co-authored a coffee table book, which will come out next summer.

Bill moved in to my Baltimore rowhome in August. At the end of the month, I bid him a fond farewell and hit the road. And thus the journey begins.
*
The first stop was The Bronx. It seems only fitting to kick off an epic trek by visiting friends and family in my hometown.

Like the rest of the city, more chains are moving into The Bronx. Not at the same rate that sees Manhattan turning into a bland, congested, overpriced version of the rest of America, but it's happening nonetheless. Very depressing. Dunkin' Donuts. Target. Bla bla bla.

The day I see a real New Yorker, not some Midwestern transplant, order Domino's, is the day I turn my back on the city completely. When that day comes, New York's pointlessness will be profound beyond words.

For now, the pizza's still worth it. For now.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Fitzcarraldo: “As true as I am standing here, one day I shall bring grand opera to Iquitos.”

The incredible Sisyphean story of a man who wants to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in the late 19th century is only to be outdone by the crazy outlandishness of the man who decides to re-create the event a hundred years later in film.

Like a set of nested Russian dolls–each more mind-bogglingly conceived– the story's central metaphor continuously revolves around the theme of “man against nature.” This is a world where it is dreams that truly matter. And people move mountains in order to pursue their obsessions. So, to build his opera house, the hero, Fitcarraldo, has to employ hundreds of Indians to help pull a 320-ton ship over a muddy hill. But perhaps what is the most incredible part of the story is that Werner Herzog, in the making of his film about the historic ship-pulling, insists on physically re-creating the original challenges by struggling to capture on film the impossible task of having the local Indians pulling a real 320-ton ship over a mountain. His hell-bent will to veracity has made Herzog's film the stuff of legend.

And this is all very unexpected since film has never been an art much concerned with literal truth, being taken up solely by images. Not to mention that if all that matters is the “burden of his dream,” why doesn't Herzog employ the usual Hollywood devices of stage set and miniatures to evoke his story more poetically? Why does he seek to do the impossible and film actual people pulling a real 320-ton ship over a steep and very slippery hill in the most remote part of the Amazon –given the useless burden of doing so?

Why, indeed?

Alongside Herzog's wonderful memoir concerning the making of the film, Conquest of the Useless, I am reading a fascinating book about 17th century science, by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris. Exploring the intellectual compromises in epistemology that were generated by the rise of the “new science,” Baroque Science tells the story of Western philosophy's estrangement from the senses. In particular, it focuses on the inevitable denigrating of human vision and the disappearing observer in natural philosophy.

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By Eric Byrd

Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918

The Belle Époque cosmopolitan, after bidding Rodin adieu at the Gare du Nord the day of the Austrian ultimatum, returned to Germany and donned the feldgrau tunic, to battle for the fortunes of the Reich. The 1914-18 entries of this famous diary can be hard going for those of us unfamiliar with the Eastern Front campaigns or the intrigues of the German High Command – but occasionally Kessler unfolds a comprehensive collage of prewar Modernism – with which he was so intimate – as it continued and changed behind the national parapet. On the day he heard of Rodin's death, after a visit to Grosz's studio, Kessler set down this astonishing vista:

Berlin. November 18, 1917. Sunday. I think Grosz has something demonic in him. This new Berlin art in general, Grosz, Becher, Benn, Wieland Herzfelde, is most curious. Big city art, with a tense density of impressions that appears simultaneous, brutally realistic, and at the same time fairy-tale-like, just like the big city itself, illuminating things harshly and distortedly as with searchlights and then disappearing in the glow. A highly nervous, cerebral, illusionist art, and in this respect reminiscent of the music hall and also of film, or at least of a possible, still unrealized film. An art of flashing lights with a perfume of sin and perversity like every nocturnal street in the big city. The precursors are E.T.A. Hoffmann, Breughel, Mallarmé, Seurat, Lautrec, the futurists: but in the density and organization of the overwhelming abundance of sensation, the brutal reality, the Berliners seem new to me. Perhaps one could also include Stravinsky here (Petrushka). Piled-up ornamentation each of which expresses a trivial reality but which, in their sum and through their relations to each other, has a thoroughly un-trivial impact.

All round the world war rages and in the center is this nervous city in which so much presses and shoves, so many people and streets and lights and colors and interests: politics and music hall, business and yet also art, field gray, privy counselors, chansonettes, and right and left, and up and down, somewhere, very far away, the trenches, regiments storming over to attack, the dying, submarines, zeppelins, airplane squadrons, columns marching on muddy streets, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, victories; Riga, Constantinople, the Isonzo, Flanders, the Russian Revolution, America, the Anzacs and the poilus, the pacifists and the wild newspaper people. And all ending up in the half-darkened Friedrichstrasse, filled with people at night, unconquerable, never to be reached by Cossacks, Gurkhas, Chasseurs d'Afrique, Bersaglieris, and cowboys, still not yet dishonored, despite the prostitutes who pass by. If a revolution were to break out here, a powerful upheaval in this chaos, barricades on the Friedrichstrasse, or the collapse of the distant parapets, what a spark, how the mighty, inextricably complicated organism would crack, how like the Last Judgment! And yet we have experienced, have caused precisely this to happen in Liège, Brussels, Warsaw, Bucharest, even almost in Paris. That's the world war, all right.

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by Josh Yarden

The new year, Rosh HaShana, according to the Hebrew Calendar, arrives this week with the coming of the new moon. As we also reach the end of the annual cycle of Torah readings, I revisited the final words words of Moshe (or Moses*.) The prophet has a curious way of describing his exit from the scene. When he is preparing the people for his own passing and for the transition of leadership (Deuteronomy 31) He tells the Hebrews: “A hundred and twenty years old am I today” and, depending upon which translation you read, he might be saying, “I can no longer… be active” (JPS) “…sally forth and come in,” (Robert Alter) “… go out and come in” (Everett Fox) “I am no longer able to lead you” (King James Version.) In any case, the fact that he is about to die is not exactly at the heart of the sentence.

That which Moses will no longer be able to do is somehow bound up in leadership and particularly in the process of transition. He relocated and transformed his state of mind several times throughout the Exodus narrative. Within the first few verses, he comes into the world, gets put into a basket, placed in the river, drawn into the hands of Pharaoh's daughter, put back into the hands of his mother, and then taken into the palace. When we next meet him as a young adult, he gets into an argument, goes into a murderous rage, into exile in the desert, into Median and into the family of the local high priest. He then enters a marriage, fatherhood, a trance and eventually, he's on his way back into Egypt.

The rest is history. (… or maybe it isn't, but that's not even slightly important to the theme of the narrative.) He eventually goes back into the desert for 40 years, and now, we learn that this next stage of his life will be his last transition. If he is about to die, and if “going out and coming in” is actually what he will no longer be able to do, then the process of personal transformation is the essential meaning of life.

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by Bill Benzon

In The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age I argued that digital criticism was the most important development in contemporary literary studies because it is the only line of investigation that presents us with new objects of thought. I’m continuing that argument in this post, where I consider some of the new conceptual objects in Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (2013).

Jockers undertakes a variety of inquiries into a corpus of 3346 19th Century Novels from America, Britain, Ireland, and Scotland, examining style, theme, and influence. Though he considers the possibility that literary culture evolves in a manner similar to that of life forms, he rejects the idea (pp. 171-172). Not only do I think Jockers is mistaken on that point, but I think that his analytic and descriptive work provides strong evidence not only for conceptualizing literary history as an evolutionary process, but that that process is directional (at least for the corpus Jockers examines). The purpose of this essay is to sketch out that case by reinterpreting some of Jockers’ results.

Note however that I do not intend to provide the required evolutionary model, though I do have some thoughts on how to do so (see the suggested readings at the end). I’ve only explained why I believe such an account is necessary.

Caveat: This is an unusually long post, so you might want have coffee or wine, your pleasure, readily at hand. Also, the argument is basically mathematical, though informally expressed, and mostly through diagrams, which are central to digital criticsm.

Does Culture Evolve?

Let me set the stage by quoting a passage from Tim Lewens’ excellent review of cultural evolution in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014):

The prima-facie case for cultural evolutionary theories is irresistible. Members of our own species are able to survive and reproduce in part because of habits, know-how and technology that are not only maintained by learning from others, they are initially generated as part of a cumulative project that builds on discoveries made by others. And our own species also contains sub-groups with different habits, know-how and technologies, which are once again generated and maintained through social learning. The question is not so much whether cultural evolution is important, but how theories of cultural evolution should be fashioned, and how they should be related to more traditional understandings of organic evolution.

The alternative, Lewens suggests later on, is that “cultural change, and the influence of cultural change on other aspects of the human species, are best understood through a series of individual narratives.” Lewens rejects that notion, and so do I – and I’ll address that specific alternative, individual narratives, a bit later.

Before going on, however, I want to dispose of the most common objection to the idea of cultural evolution:

The explanatory point of evolutionary dynamics is that it gives us design without a designer, without intention. But isn’t culture consciously and deliberately designed and created?

Cultural artifacts (whether physical things, such as books or drawings, or events, such as rituals or musical performances) are deliberately designed and created by human agents and thus are not the result of a blind evolutionary process. That is true. But whether or not any of those artifacts are retained in a group’s repertoire is a matter beyond the will and design of individual creators. The process of cultural selection is independent from that of artifact creation.

Those many 19th Century novels that are now forgotten were created with as much deliberation and intentional design as those few that we still read and used as the basis for other cultural products, such as movies and, e.g. zombified parodies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Whatever it is that distinguishes the novels with lasting cultural salience from the more ephemeral ones, it isn’t the mere fact of deliberation and design.

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by Matt McKenna

I didn't see the first Dolphin Tale movie starring Harry Connick Jr., Morgan Freeman, and a couple kids who look as if were custom built at the Disney Channel Research Lab, but allow me to synopsize the synopsis from Wikipedia: a wild bottlenose dolphin faces death when she loses her tail in a nasty crab trap accident. Fortunately, the hapless creature is rescued by a few plucky humans, christened “Winter,” and given a prosthetic tail that enables her to swim around in her pool and so forth. In a sense, the original movie sounds a bit like a damp, G-rated Robocop with less murder and more playful splashing. Regardless, the synopsis provides the necessary background to understand Dolphin Tale 2, a film about what happens after you strap a plastic flipper to a proud animal and roll credits. Now, it wouldn't be accurate to say Dolphin Tale 2 is a dark film in the way the Christopher Nolan's second Batman film is dark or even how Irvin Kershner's second Star Wars film is dark, but it is certainly not to be taken lightly. I mean, sure, there's a goofy, hardcase pelican who falls in love with a sea turtle, but that doesn't mean the movie doesn't hit upon some weighty subjects. If the viewer can get past the half of the movie that consists mainly of adolescents giggling as they watch animals goof around, they'll experience a film that lays bare the emerging issue of technological innovation begetting technological dependence.

The conflict in Dolphin Tale 2 revolves around finding an aquarium-mate for Winter when her previous geriatric dolphin buddy, Panama, passes away after having lived a long, rewarding life of confined bliss that in no way resembles Blackfish. Adding urgency to the quest to find Winter a dolphin bestie is pressure arriving on two fronts: 1) the USDA will snatch Winter from her Clearwater Marine Aquarium (CMA) residence and deliver her to some hell hole in Texas if a regulation-mandated pal isn't found and 2) the investment firm that put money into the CMA is annoyed that a lonely, depressed Winter can't be shown to the throngs of thong-sandaled families that paid good money to experience the miracle of a disabled dolphin making do.

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by Gerald Dworkin

By some strange coincidence, the Chancellors of the two Universities at which I spent the longest periods of my career– University of California and University of Illinois–have turned into poster children for current administrative cant about free speech and its limits.

Chancellor Wise and the Salaita decision were the subject of my blog piece last week. Since then the Board of Trustees at UIUC has affirmed her decision by a vote of 8 to 1. Salaita's only recourse now is a law-suit or accepting the inevitable settlement offer of the University. For our sake, I would hope that there is a lawsuit which would enable his lawyers to uncover more about donor pressures which were certainly focused on his viewpoint and not just their mode of expression. For his sake, I would hope for a suitably large settlement which not only would, to some extent, mitigate his losses but might convince the business-oriented administrators of our universities that it is too expensive to treat faculty in this fashion.

In mitten drinnen, as my people would say, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, of the University of California Berkeley (where I got my Ph.d in 1966) issued a statement about academic civility to mark the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Although I was in London writing my thesis when FSM occurred I was an active participant in the various protests which led up to it — including the famous May 1960 San Francisco City Hall anti-House Un-American Activities Committee protests which ended in mass arrests.

For those of you who do not know much about FSM this is informative.

This is the text of the Chancellor's remarks:

Dear Campus Community,

This Fall marks the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, which made the right to free expression of ideas a signature issue for our campus, and indeed for universities around the world. Free speech is the cornerstone of our nation and society – which is precisely why the founders of the country made it the First Amendment to the Constitution. For a half century now, our University has been a symbol and embodiment of that ideal

As we honor this turning point in our history, it is important that we recognize the broader social context required in order for free speech to thrive. For free speech to have meaning it must not just be tolerated, it must also be heard, listened to, engaged and debated. Yet this is easier said than done, for the boundaries between protected and unprotected speech, between free speech and political advocacy, between the campus and the classroom, between debate and demagoguery, between freedom and responsibility, have never been fully settled. As a consequence, when issues are inherently divisive, controversial and capable of arousing strong feelings, the commitment to free speech and expression can lead to division and divisiveness that undermine a community's foundation. This fall, like every fall, there will be no shortage of issues to animate and engage us all. Our capacity to maintain that delicate balance between communal interests and free expression, between openness of thought and the requirements and disciplines of academic knowledge, will be tested anew.

Specifically, we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility. Simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas. In this sense, free speech and civility are two sides of a single coin – the coin of open, democratic society.

Insofar as we wish to honor the ideal of Free Speech, therefore, we should do so by exercising it graciously. This is true not just of political speech on Sproul Plaza, but also in our everyday interactions with each other – in the classroom, in the office, and in the lab.

This is not a completely idiotic statement but it contains enough mistakes and confusions to throw into doubt the rather hopeful outlook of many Berkeley faculty when they heard of his appointment. The most egregious sentence is this one:

…for the boundaries between protected and unprotected speech, between free speech and political advocacy, between the campus and the classroom, between debate and demagoguery, between freedom and responsibility, have never been fully settled.

His claim is true with respect to “protected and unprotected speech”, nonsensical with respect to “free speech and political advocacy”, infelicitous with respect to “campus and the classroom”, irrelevant with respect to “debate and demagoguery,” and confused with respect to “freedom and responsibility”.

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by Jon Kujawa

Emmanuel Candes of Stanford University was a plenary speaker at the recent International Congress of Mathematicians. By chance I saw Candes speak several years ago at an American Mathematical Society meeting. Truthfully, Candes work is miles away from my own and I might not have seen him speak if it weren't for the wine reception scheduled immediately after his talk! That was my great fortune: Candes is an excellent speaker and is doing truly remarkable mathematics.

Indeed Candes and his collaborators are doing something very exciting which has immediate practical applications and endless future ones.

Here is the essence of the problem:

Imagine you have an array of data. That is, imagine you have a spreadsheet in which you have a series of rows of numbers with one number per column. Now imagine that some of those numbers are missing. Perhaps the data has been lost or perhaps you never had the data in the first place. Can you recover the missing data?

Put like that, the answer is certainly no. If the numbers are random, then even knowing all but one of them it will be impossible to recover the last missing number. Candes and his collaborators have shown, however, that the real world isn't random and in fact we can often reconstruct the missing data.

Candes creates data from thin air! [1]

Let me give an example where you can see that recovering real world data is sometimes possible. Imagine that you have a huge data set in which each row of numbers is the biometric data for a single person. The first number is their weight, the second their height, the third their age, the fourth their blood cholesterol level, the fifth their shoe size, and so on. If you accidently delete the weight of the 2,381,773rd person in your data set, you can certainly make an accurate estimate of the missing weight by comparing person number 2,381,773 with others who have similar heights, ages, etc.

That was easy, of course, because you have nearly all the data at hand for working out the missing bit. Candes does something much more remarkable, though. He shows that under reasonable assumptions you can actually usually recover the entire array of data even if nearly half of it is missing! Not only this, but he and his collaborators give us the tools to calculate how much data can be missing and how close we can get to a perfect reconstruction.

Does this so far imaginary problem actually occur in real life? You bet! Once you start you'll find it everywhere you look. Let me mention a couple of examples.

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Add 30 Seconds

add 30 seconds to anytime,
what’s that interval?

hell, double it
what’s that?

have you ever had a day that lasts three
or one that goes so fast it’s past —instantly?

are those durations short or long,
if hours mean anything?

subtract 5 hours from anytime
do we really think we’ve minced minutes?
as we tick them off are they really not there?

there’s a continuum called now
outside of which is guesswork
because our instruments only work here
slice it anyway you want
it remains still,
whole
our clocks do not
affect it

now is never what it was before
because things change
and will change again, now,
not yesterday or tomorrow
it only happens now

now is the only thing we have to work with
now only knocks now

.
.
by Jim Culleny
9/5/14

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

The case for God's existence is unsuccessful. Theistic arguments either beg the question, or involve deductive fallacies, or don't really prove what they promised to. Furthermore, the atheistic arguments all seem decisive – there's no morally acceptable solution to the problem of evil, and there is no need for God in a naturalistic universe. Current theistic replies are mostly rear-guard actions in reaction to the atheist – more apology than apologetics. The evidence overwhelmingly supports the thesis that God doesn't exist. And this is good news, too. God is just a cosmic bully. Such a being might provide the universe with meaning, but in so doing, makes it all pointless, especially human autonomy — which, by hypothesis, would have to resolve itself into God's will. God's existence would be a moral tragedy, so good riddance to bad rubbish.

Call the view expressed above Positive Evidential Atheism (PEA). It is the two-part thesis composed of an evidential claim and a positive assessment: (1) our overall available evidence supports belief that there is no God and (2) God's non-existence is a good thing. We endorse PEA. Paul Moser challenges PEA in his book The Severity of God (2013). Moser argues that if God exists, He would be silent; moreover, He would be particularly silent to those who accept PEA. This “divine hiddenness” explains why PEA's advocates think they have no evidence for God's existence. Given that God hides, the evidence is misleading. In response to Moser, we defend PEA along two lines: (1) PEA needn't be undercut in the fashion Moser takes it to be, and (2) divine hiding can be rendered as supporting PEA.

Let's begin by considering the divine hiddenness view in a little more detail. It runs like this: Even though the problem of evil may seem unanswerable, we humans are not in a position to know that God would not allow severe evils in the world. Moreover, we do not know if God intervenes in this universe with individuals engaged in proper relationships with Him. Access to evidence of God is not a matter of looking and seeing, but a matter of searching, yearning, and then being transformed. God, in fact, wants relationships with us, not just our assent to claims of His existence. And so He hides from us until we are ready for His presence.

Notice that the divine hiddenness view reconciles the fact of widespread disbelief with God's capacity and goodness. God is silent until we are ready to hear. Were He to reveal himself when we are not ready, the relationship He desires and we need would be perverted. God's ways, in short, are not our ways; to expect otherwise is nothing short of idolatry. Divine hiding, so the reasoning goes, is something we should positively expect of a God truly worthy of worship.

God's motivation to hide is especially pronounced in the case of the positive atheist. As Moser has it, “God typically would hide God's existence from people ill-disposed toward it”; as they are ill-disposed toward God, “their lacking evidence for God's existence is not by itself the basis of a case for atheism”(2013:200). Thus positive atheists should expect that their evidence regarding God's existence is misleading, since they are precisely those for whom God's presence will be elusive. Hence PEA's positive assessment undercuts its evidential claim. Moser calls this the “undermining case” against PEA. Yet, as we will argue, the undermining case is not decisive.

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by Liam Heneghan

It says something about a city, I suppose, when there is heated debate over who first labeled it a dirty place. The phrase “dear dirty Dublin”, used as a badge of defiant honor in Ireland’s capital to this day, is often erroneously attributed to James Joyce. Joyce used the term in Dubliners (1914) a series of linked short stories about that city and its denizens. But the phase goes back at least to early nineteenth century and the literary circle surrounding Irish novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) who remains best known for her novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) which extols the virtues of wild Irish landscapes, and the wild, though naturally dignified, princess who lived there. Compared to the fresh wilderness of the Irish West, Dublin would have seemed dirty indeed.

The city into which I was born more than a century later was still a rough and tumble place. It was also heavily polluted. This was Dublin of the 1970s.

My earliest memories of the city center come from trips I took to my father’s office in Marlborough St, just north of the River Liffey which bisects the city. My father would take an eccentric route into the city, the “back ways” as he would call them, which though not getting us to the destination as promptly as he advertised, had the benefit of bringing us on a short tour of the city and its more unkempt quarters.

My father’s cars themselves were masterpieces of dereliction. Purchased when they were already in an advanced stage of decay, he would nurse them aggressively till their often fairly prompt demise. One car that he was especially proud of, a Volkswagen Type III fastback, which had its engine to the rear, developed transmission problems and its clutch failed. His repair consisted of a chord dangling over his shoulder and crossing the back seat into the engine. A tug at a precisely timed moment would shift the gears. A shoe, attached to the end of the chord and resting on my father’s shoulder, aided the convenient operation of this system. That car, like most the others in those less regulated times, was also a marvel of pollution generation, farting out clouds of blue-black exhaust which added to the billowy haze of leaded fumes issuing from the other disastrously maintained vehicles, all shuddering in and out of the city’s congested center at the beginning at end of each work day.

A route into the city that I especially liked took us west of the city center, and as we approached Christ Church Cathedral I would open the window to smell the roasting of the barley which emanated from the Guinness brewery in Liberties region of the city, down by the Liffey. Very promptly I would wind up the window again as we crossed over the bridge, since the reek of that river was legendarily bad.
The Irish playwright Brendan Behan wrote in his memoir Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965), “Somebody once said that ‘Joyce has made of this river the Ganges of the literary world,’ but sometimes the smell of the Ganges of the literary world is not all that literary.”

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by Tamuira Reid

“My daddy stays in that building? Not a house?”

I'm glad it looks more like an office building and less like a hospital. My son has lived in a city long enough to know what a hospital looks like. This is a slate rectangle, with a line of tinted windows overlooking the parking lot. I imagine faces behind those windows, smashed up against the glass. I imagine his face among them and stop looking at the windows.

Oliver dangles his feet from a carseat in the back. He's nervous. I'm nervous. The Los Angeles evening glitters outside our car.

“It's like Dadland.“

“What?”

“Dadland. Like Disneyland but no rides. Just daddies.”

It has been two years since he's seen his father. He's four. Exactly half of his life has gone by.

We wait for him to come out. When he does, we'll get an hour to play family before we return him to the nurse who will dole out his nightly meds, now open your mouth and lift your tongue, please. Good.

I wonder what he'll be wearing. I've scrubbed Oliver down and we both look nice. New jeans. Clean shoes. Like we're going to church not war.

_____

I share a bed with my sister. Cute when you're ten, but not when you're my age. Oliver doesn't have a room, he has a corner. In front of a closet. It's New York, which means every square inch of our apartment is an experiment in strategic furniture placement. But we are teaching the kid to have grit. To appreciate a minimalist approach. The beauty in paper plates and pirated cable television. The mouse in the kitchen doubling as a first pet.

A mother and an auntie. Two women who love him to death and show up at every open house and music class and playdate in the park. Two women who Instagram every haircut, gummy smile, new pair of glasses. But we are no dad. There's a placeholder where dad should be. An ellipsis. To be continued. It's kind of like watching the weather report – and today with a side of dad.

“He's at the store.”

“He's been there a long time,” I say.

“It's a big store.”

And this is the story he has been telling himself. When his preschool teacher or well-meaning neighbors ask. When his best friend points it out. Where's your daddy?

At the store. Works for me.

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