by James McGirk

James McGirk works as a literary journalist and is a contributing analyst to an online think tank. The following is an imagined itinerary for a tourist vacation twenty years in the future.

Seven days in the PRINTERZONE

June 20, 2033-June 28, 2033

A quick suborbital hop to Iceland courtesy of Virgin Galactic and then it’s all aboard the ScholarShip, a luxurious three-mast schooner powered by that most ecologically palatable of sources: the wind.

Weather-permitting you and twenty of your fellow alumni will set sail for the Printerzone. (The North and Norwegian Seas can be temperamental: in the event of heavy weather we revert to backup biodiesel power.) Our destination has been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site: it is both a glimpse at what our future might become should government regulation of printers come to an end, and a fantasy of life free from credit and ubiquitous surveillance. Together we’ll spend a week immersed in this unique community, on board an oilrig in international waters, using three-dimensional additive printing to meet our every need.

Joining us on this adventure will be Prof. Orianna Braum, an associate professor of Maker Culture at Stanford University; Alan Reasor, a forty-year veteran of the additive printing industry; and a young man who prefers to refer to himself by displaying a small silver plastic snowflake in his palm.

ITINERARY – DAY ONE

Depart Reykjavik.

A colorful day spent traversing the Norwegian and North Seas… sublime marine grays and blues stirred by the bracing sea breeze. Keep your eyes peeled for pods of chirping Minke whales! Many are 100 percent natural.

Breakfast and lunch will be served onboard The ScholarShip by our chef Matthias Spork. Selections include: printed cereals and pastas, catch-of-the-day and a refreshing sorbet spatter-printed by his wife, renowned pastry chef Rebecca Spork.

Prof. Braum and Mr. Reasor will debate: Has Three-Dimensional Printing failed its Promise? Reasor will argue that in most instances economies of scale and the cost of raw materials make conventional manufacturing a more cost-effective solution than 3D printing. Prof. Braum will counter, describing industries that have been radically reshaped by printing—prosthetics and dentistry, bespoke suiting and fashion, at-home robotics and auto-repair—and suggest instead that government safety regulation and restrictive intellectual property licenses have done more to stifle innovation than costs. There will be time for questions afterwards. And then a brief demonstration of piezoelectric substrates: printed materials that respond to the human touch.

Following a hearty and delicious dinner prepared by the Sporks, we invite you for hot toddy and outdoor stargazing with our First Mate. The Arctic winds can be fierce at night, so you have the option of lighting the hearth in your cabin, and viewing a very special Skype broadcast—The Pink Printer’s Naughty Apprentice—which outlines in a most whimsical and titillating way some of the more adult uses of the three-dimensional printer.

(Please note that cabins containing occupants below the age of consent in their country of residence will not receive this broadcast.)

Read more »

by Michael Lopresto

Philosophy is one of the great sciences of reality, as Galen Strawson has said. To this I would add that philosophy is one of the most general of sciences, with the remarkable ability to cross between domains and incorporate both logical and hermeneutical methods. Mathematics and physics have incredible generality, for example, but philosophers will investigate the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of physics. But what does it mean to say that something is a science?

Science is a distinctive strategy whose aim is to uncover truths about the world. This strategy can be distinguished from other human endeavours, such as sophistry, with the pernicious aim of deceiving and manipulating, and art and criticism, with the honourable aim of facilitating aesthetic experience and communication. We distinguish good art from bad art on the grounds that bad art is deceitful and manipulative, and good art that it is, say, honest and morally serious. Equally, we distinguish between good science and bad science. Good science tends to have good philosophical foundations; scientists strive to build theories that are naturalistic, falsifiable, parsimonious, and have continuity with other theories. Bad science tends to be driven by ulterior motives; to confirm or vindicate what is already believed in a particular culture.

Admittedly, this is a slightly unusual way of talking about science and philosophy. There are social and political reasons for supposing a sharp cleavage between science and philosophy, and especially between science and the humanities. It is often said that science is inherently empirical, employing its distinctive quantitative methods; whereas the humanities are inherently perspectival and hermeneutical, employing its distinctive qualitative methods. Of course, the humanities are the most important part of a university education, as Brian Leiter has said, we all leave university to be full human beings, and the humanities are indispensible for this. This is especially important to emphasise in our pernicious culture of economic rationalism, where depressingly, the worth of the humanities needs to be constantly defended. But from another perspective, however, there are very few principled distinctions between the sciences and the humanities. Many of the sciences use rigorous formal methods, but philosophical logic and formal linguistics, for example, are equally rigorous and formal. Applied mathematics engages in abstract reasoning about the world, but equally does analytic metaphysics. Biology and Psychology build theories in their respective domains, but so do the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of psychology.

Read more »

by Gerald Dworkin

I recently watched the latest Claude Lanzmann documentary on the Holocaust called the Last of the Unjust. It is a four hour interview with Benjamin Murmelstein who was the last of the Judenrat in Theresienstadt. These were Jews who were selected to act as advisors to the Nazi administrators who ran the camp. Murmelstein has been the subject of much dispute in terms of the role he played. It is fascinating to listen to Murmelstein, a former rabbi in Vienna and a scholar of mythology, as he details his interactions with Eichmann, his denial that he was aware that camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor were death camps (although he admits there were clues that he should have taken more seriously), and the many moral dilemmas that someone in his role faced. At one point, when pressed by Lanzmann, he says that people in his position should be “condemned but not judged.” I leave it to the reader as an exercise to figure out whether this can be understood in a way that makes sense.

Having watched this film I was led to reflect upon the magnificent Lanzmann documentary Shoah and the questions it raises about the ethics of lying. Kant is notorious for denying that it is ever legitimate to lie –even to the murderous man who comes to your door and demands to know whether a particular person is hiding in your house, whom the man wishes to kill. Alan Wood has recent given the most plausible attempt to defend the Kantian view by arguing that Kant distinguishes between a declaration, which only takes place when one warrants that one is telling the truth, and a falsification which takes place in a context where there is no such warrant. Wood claims that Kant’s theory should say that if our false statement is not a declaration then it is permissible because not a lie. If it is a declaration, but extorted from us, i.e. we are forced to say something as opposed to keeping silent, then that should be permissible. In effect, says Wood, Kant misunderstood his own theory.

I turn away from the thickets of Kant interpretation to the question of what exceptions to the general prohibition against lying we ought to accept, in particular how to respond to Nazis–at the door, or as we shall see, otherwise.

Read more »

Show Moon

look out your window the moon is huge
but not bigger-than-life, smaller than that
though big enough to make life take a look,
to admire its yellow flatness with hint of rouge
upheld in a mosh-pit of trees, their naked limbs
a dark mesh across a field upon a sky of blue-grey steel
which, as long as nights last and days begin,
will be the place this moon plays, stage rear,
then up and front as it climbs a starry scrim
and down again —and life applauds
before it disappears
.

by Jim Culleny
11/16/13

by Leanne Ogasawara

The other day, my beloved and I were wandering around Best Buy looking for refill cartridges for his scanner pen.

Walking in vain up and down the aisles, I thought how we are indeed living in an age when consumerism has replaced citizenship. It was somehow really disheartening seeing all the “stuff.”

But then, just as I was going to lodge a complaint, something amazing caught my eye…A McIntosh sound system with exposed tubes on display right in front of my eyes!! Is it possible, I wondered, that McIntosh somehow stayed in business and are still putting old-style systems out? Not surprisingly given the ecstatic look on our faces a sales staff member invited us to try out the system in their special sound room. And there as we sat in the sweet spot listening to Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes felt the soundwaves washing over us.

Nostalgically, I recalled how music used to be something you could feel in your tummy–something that traveled on the air making its way to your ears… My beloved probably would have preferred listening to Mozart on that sound system –but for me, I was transported back to Southern Africa, when a neighbor in Mafeteng used to listen at night to that album on an old record. It was in the early 90s and the sound really traveled…Music was such a part of everyday life there and what was not live singing and playing was on records and old casette tapes.

Uncompressed and amplified.

This all reminded me of a great show Robert Harrison did for entitled opinions with fellow Stanford professor Gabriella Safron on the history of listening.“Generalizations are always problematic,” he said, “but there is one generalization you can make about western civilization that won't get you into any trouble. And that is that Western civilization is one that thorougly philoscopic.” That is to say that Western culture from very ancient times has priledged vision over the other senses. There is no question about this; from Plato's Ideal forms (eidos: visible aspect) to a Proustian vision, it was spiritual vision (and rational in-sights) that were thought to be the means to knowledge.

Read more »

by Matt McKenna

Sometimes careening space debris is simply careening space debris, but other times it is a metaphor for something nearly as catastrophic back on Earth. The debris in Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is, of course, the latter. Cuaron is Mexican, but he clearly takes an interest in American politics because never before has the complexities of a government shutdown been so succinctly dissected via a 3D science-fiction suspense-thriller. It is no surprise then that Gravity's U.S. release date was moved to coincide with the federal government shutdown this past October. Warner Bros. and Cuaron must have strongly felt that the struggles incurred by the characters in the film would inform the political struggle over funding the United States federal government.

The film begins with light banter amongst astronauts performing repairs on the Hubble telescope until–and this isn't a spoiler if you've seen the trailer that plays out the film's inciting incident sans editing–a cloud of debris crashes into the venerable space structure to which the film's protagonists are unfortunately attached.

And so begins the ninety-one minute exploration of the United States' broken government by way of a floating Sandra Bullock and a jetpack-strapped George Clooney. While it is certainly possible to dismiss Gravity as nothing more than an interesting filmic experiment mixing a minimal cast into a vat of computer generated graphics, this interpretation misses Cuaron's carefully placed parallels (presciently laid out years ago) between Gravity's fictional reality up in space and our actual reality down on Earth.

Most obviously, the hurtling debris that serves the role of Gravity's antagonist-with-impeccable-timing represents the legion of discretionary appropriations that Congress failed to handle in a timely fashion. As the speeding space junk threatens every structure and person in the film, so too does America's unfunded discretionary programs threaten the integrity of the United States federal government and the welfare of the people subject to that government. Indeed, just as a solar panel traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour will do irreparable damage the human body it slams into, so too will irreparable damage done to the human body that is unable to acquire adequate nourishment due to a lack of funding provided for discretionary programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.

Read more »

by Eric Byrd

For me the most ominous chapter in Young Pushkin – the first volume of Yury Tynyanov's unfinished “epic on the origins, development and death of our national poet,” serialized in Soviet journals 1937-43 and recently translated by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush, the other Russian-to-English connubial translating team – is the valedictory debauch staged by Pushkin's maternal grandfather, Osip Abramovich Gannibal. The Gannibals – that unlikely Afro-Baltic family of artillerists and siege engineers. The founder, the “dark star of the Enlightenment” (said Voltaire), was emancipated and experimentally educated by Peter the Great, and the sons born to him by a Swedish noblewoman were pillars of Catherine's establishment and heroes of her wars with the Turks. The mingled blood of Cameroon and Sweden, fighting for the Romanovs against the Ottomans – what a world! Peter conferred the surname – for what else would you call a family of African soldiers?

Once a naval officer, Osip Abramovich had “sacrificed everything to his passion” – in the translator's (and presumably Tynyanov's) terse, resonant style that means not simply his passion for the mistress for whose sake he abandoned his family, but his violently sensual nature. When Tynyanov's novel opens, Osip Abramovich is ailing and obese, wheezing out his last days on his dilapidated estate at Mikhailovskoe – where his grandson will later live under house arrest – amid a sloppy harem of barefoot peasant girls. In one scene, which Claire Denis directed in my head, five sweating servants carry him in his chair out to the banya. A few nights later this provincial Sardanapalus decides to end it all:

Masha danced for him without a stitch on. He wanted to get up but couldn't move. Only his lips and fingers trembled like Masha's gyrating hips. The musicians performed his favorite song more and more loudly and rapidly, the servant-boy beat the tambourine without stopping. Masha's feet moved faster and faster.

“Ah, white swan!” the old man groaned.

He waved his hand, grasped a big fistful of air, closed his fingers tightly and burst into tears. His hand fell down, his head dangled. Tears were rolling down his face onto his thick lower lip and he swallowed them slowly.

He then orders half his wine distributed to the serfs, the other half mixed with oats in a giant tub and fed to the horses he's set loose.

Read more »

by Grace Boey

What does the brain have to do with mental illness? The answer is – perhaps – a lot. Psychiatric drugs that affect brain chemistry have met with increasing success and acceptance over the past few decades, giving credence to the idea that fixing the brain might fix our mental problems. Growing amounts of research also suggest that many psychiatric conditions are linked to the brain. Though nothing as dramatic as a single “depressive switch” has been found, independent studies suggest that dysregulation of the cortical-limbic system plays a large role in major depression. It’s also been hypothesized that schizophrenia is a misconnection syndrome, or an underlying problem in the ability of different brain regions to send messages back and forth efficiently and accurately.

Yet, overly brain-based approaches to mental disorder face large amounts of backlash. For one, studies like the ones above are far from conclusive. Also, history has given us good reason to be suspicious of brain-based psychiatric theories and treatments (lobotomy, anyone?). Psychoactive drugs alone are often inadequate for treating mental illness, and most patients respond best to a combination of medication and psychotherapy.

Perhaps the biggest setback to neurobiological views of psychiatry is the following intuition: that we aren’t just our brains. A person can’t simply be reduced or equated to her brain, and to do so would dehumanize the patient. Viewing clinical psychiatry as a brain-fixing exercise ignores the fact that patients are people with feelings, stories and personal problems that have brought them to the doctor’s office in the first place. We can't just pump patients full of drugs, and then tell them to go home. The importance of this seems to be confirmed in the superior efficacy, in so many cases, of psychotherapy over drugs.

So, what are we supposed to do with all this neuropsychiatric research? It hardly seems that we should just ignore it. At the same time, we want to recognize that a patient can’t – and shouldn’t – be treated as just a brain. Lots of lip service is paid to how neuroscience and psychology are supposed to “work together hand in hand”, yet tugging intuitions on mental illness make it hard to articulate just why or how this harmony is supposed to occur. The current patchwork, “whatever works best” approach to psychiatric treatment betrays a widespread lack of grounding principles for the concept of mental disorder. As Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) puts it, “Patients with mental disorders deserve better.”

Read more »

by Josh Yarden

Living north of the Ben Franklin Parkway, we regularly walk through Logan Square, often stopping to look around at the profound beauty—and the confounded beast—which our city has become. Standing at the Swann Fountain, I am struck by the juxtaposition of the people and the place.

I see The Franklin Institute to my left, The Free Library and Family Court through the spray, the Cathedral Basilica to my right, just beyond Sister Cities Park, in the heart of the City of Brotherly Love—all these powers of a great society at a glance.

Cars zoom through the square. People drive by easily ignoring the widow and the orphan, the broken and the powerless. Hunger and humanity are somehow invisible against the backdrop of these proud buildings. I think about the folks on the square—not the tourists with their cameras, and not the transients like me walking through on our way, but the people who always seem to be there: my brothers lying on the grass next to their possessions, my sisters under the plastic tarp in the rain, the people on line at the public library waiting for the public bathrooms to open each morning, the public waiting for the food distributions—these no-truer residents of the Logan Square Neighborhood.

I am a daydreamer, given to imagining new worlds in the very brief moment of time it takes to sense the thin whisper of a still voice. Look—

These neighbors of mine

all stand in the square

listening to the music

the orchestra is performing

on the steps of the cathedral

A Fanfare for the Common Man

The trumpets call

the faithful to prayer

at this open air mass

Parkway drivers stop

park on their way

in the middle of the road

Everyone listens in rapt attention

the rhythm changes

the orchestra is joined by a rock band

two separate-not-so-separate entities

collide and adapt in musical conversation

there is an uncommon energy in the air

Read more »

by Akeel Bilgrami

Arthur Danto has just died.

In two places where Arthur worked for many decades — Columbia’s Philosophy Department and the Journal of Philosophy– there had always been a general feeling among us that much as he loved and laboured here, he found us too confining. This was a source of pride rather than hurt. It is an apt measure of the limits of the academy that we should take pride in the fact that every now and then we had among us someone whose talents and intellectual appetites far surpass the nourishment that a mere department or journal or even a professionalized discipline such as Philosophy, can offer.

The larger space, which Arthur occupied with such relish is, of course, the city of New York. In fact his whole style was so supremely metropolitan that one gets no sense at all of where he was born and bred. One might easily have concluded, looking at the style of the man, and of his speech and writing, that everything about his life had been striking, even his birth which was on New Years day of 1924 –yet we mustn’t forget that it was, after all, in Ann Arbor, Michigan that he was born and in Detroit where he was bred. But like all good New Yorkers and good Columbia men and women, Arthur gave the impression, however wrong, that he really only began to flourish after he came to New York and to Columbia.

Early flourishing took the form of successive books in analytic philosophy, which contained original and substantial ideas on the nature of history and human action, ideas which have been widely discussed and assimilated into the tradition of thought on these subjects. Then there were books with invaluably clear and novel interpretations of the thought of philosophers outside of the mainstream of analytic philosophy, Nietzsche and Sartre in particular, which brought him wider fame and, as he liked to say, a summer home in the Hamptons. But it was not until he began a study of the nature of artworks and artworlds that he poised himself for a major defection, or ‘transfiguration’, to use a word that he had almost made his own.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“A sphinx in search of a riddle.”
~ Truman Capote, on Andy Warhol

About a month ago, following a rather dissatisfying evening, I found myself scurrying to the subway. I was crossing Astor Place in downtown Manhattan when I came across a strange scene. It was about midnight, and parked by the curb on a side street was a rental truck. I was approaching the front of the truck but I could see a small knot of people behind it, and they all seemed rather excited by what was going on. Like any good New Yorker, I'd thought I'd lucked into the chance to buy some nice speakers, 3000-count sheets or some other, umm, severely discounted merchandise. Wallet in hand, I came round the truck and had a gander, and realized I couldn't have been more wrong.

For the interior of the truck had been transformed into a jungle diorama. There were plants and flowers, which looked real, and stony cliffs, which did not. But there was a small waterfall that plashed gently into a pool, and recorded birdsong playing from hidden speakers, as well as the somewhat unnerving sight of insects and butterflies buzzing about the interior. Far in the background were painted a bridge, a sun, a mountain, and a rainbow.

As delighted as I was (because serendipity insists that such a discovery is always partly thanks to me), I still didn't really know what was up. Next to me was an Italian gentleman with an enormous camera, who had just about wet himself with excitement. “It's him! It's him!” he said, giggling like a schoolgirl. “Who?” “Banksy! We've been chasing after this all day.” I don't really know what it means to chase after street art but, once Banksy's name had been floated, I realized that I'd stumbled across one of several dozen Easter eggs the reclusive artist had begun laying all over the city for the month of October.

Read more »

“And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and 'be arrested if necessary', because climate change 'is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence' .”
.
Who'd Ruin That

don't say we can't keep doing this
because we can —until we can't
or won't

nature
slams a door

some things cannot supplant
the essence of that which we adore
or don't

why just tonight,
walking across a vast tar floor,
the inverse moat
around a big box store,
there, not to keep the other out,
but to ease the other in to spending more

just there, and just tonight
a once-in-a-lifetime sky
stopped me cold

clouds relaxed, sprawled, rear-lit,
edged in gold leaf born of an almost by-gone sun
now below the mountain west
but still shattering the grown-old day
in a blazing blue-green mirror of
early light

who'd ruin that?
we might
.

by Jim Culleny
11/7/13

by Quinn O'Neill

It's a typical Thanksgiving. An elegant dining table is decked with Autumn decor, a large turkey, and all the trimmings. Family and friends have gathered round and bow their heads in prayer. Invariably someone will thank God for this lovely meal and I'll bristle like a cat that's been pet the wrong way.

On the surface, the expression of gratitude seems gracious, but it strikes me as logically incoherent and very obviously so. It's as if someone had expressed thanks for the elephant we're about to feast upon. “I think it's actually a turkey,” I might suggest in bewilderment. “I mean, it looks like a turkey, it's definitely a bird, and I'm quite sure it's not an elephant.” Of course no one mistakes the turkey for an elephant, but it seems just as strange to me, given the annual starvation deaths of millions of children around the world, to suppose that a fair and loving God could be to thank for our lavish feast. Are we to believe that God is responsible for the distribution of food in general or just in those communities where people have enough to eat?

Theism means different things to different people, but as I understand it, it is a conception of God as a supernatural agent who's involved in the governance and direction of worldly affairs. The theist God intervenes in earthly events, answers prayers, and blesses us with holiday feasts.

Theism is the norm both worldwide and in North America, and it spawns regular spectacles of absurdity. “Everyone pray that we'll have nice weather for our picnic this weekend!” a friend might suggest, as if a god who presides over the entire universe, with all of our planet's ruinous typhoons and tsunamis, would tweak the weather systems just to dapple our picnic blanket with sunshine.

When it comes to matters of life and death, appeals for divine intervention are common and the motivation understandable. Loved ones may call for prayers for the safe return of a missing child or for the recovery of a gravely ill relative. But why not pray that no child will ever go missing again or for an end to illness entirely? Would this be any less reasonable?

Read more »

By Liam Heneghan

More than 75 years ago Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865 –1953) wrote of the Pied Wagtail roost in Dublin’s O’Connell Street describing it as “undoubtedly the most interesting zoological feature that Dublin has to offer”. The birds moved into the capital’s central thoroughfare in the winter of 1929, settling into the plane trees on the north side of Nelson’s Pillar, a 121 ft. monument commemorating Horatio Nelson, Vice Admiral of the British Navy and hero of Trafalgar. Over the following years their numbers rose to about two thousand. The wagtails survived the bombing of the pillar by former members of the Irish Republican Army in March 1966 (apparently most of the birds would take off for the gardens of the Dublin suburbs by the end of March) and the birds still populated the street when I was a child. They were finally banished from O’Connell Street in the early years of this millennium when the trees were removed to make way for The Monument of Light or the Spire, as it is more commonly called, a 398 ft. stainless steel column commemorating nothing.

In Ireland, Praeger is associated with the botanical investigation of that country’s wildest places. Less attention has been paid to Praeger as a proto-urban ecologist: a naturalist who spent most of his life in the city, who wrote extensively about his garden, and who devoted a chapter of his most renowned book, The Way That I Went, An Irishman in Ireland (1937), to Dublin and its environs. Not only did he write about the famous wagtail roosts in O’Connell Street, but he also provided records on the ferns on Dublin walls, and the plants on North Bull Island, a coastal conservation area in Dublin bay. He and a small team also surveyed and wrote extensively on Lambay Island a couple of miles off the coast, north of the city.

In addition to his urban interests, what appeals to me about Praeger is that though in many ways he was a fairly traditional natural historian whose extensive writings — in all there were 800 papers and twenty-four books — detail the distribution of plants in Ireland, he nonetheless wrote reflectively and lyrically about botanical field work as a pleasure for its own sake. Praeger raised walking to the level of exultation and methodology, and not conveyance merely. After all, his most famous book is The Way That I Went — not Where I Went and What I Found There.

I have been working on a lengthy essay on Praeger in recent months, having spent a week last February rummaging through his archives in the Royal Irish Academy, in Dublin. During this time, the idea occurred to me that not only is there a Praegerian product (all those papers and books) but there is also a Praegerian spirit: a spirit of openness to the world, a type of attentiveness that Praeger insists one can cultivate only on foot. Working on this material, I decided that I would, as a type of sympathetic exercise, embrace Praeger’s peripatetic inclination, but employ it in a strictly urban direction, bringing together two parts of Praeger’s work and interests. I am proposing therefore, over each of the next five years, to walk 1000 miles in the city. I invite you to join me by planning a thousand-mile walk of your own in the city or town in which you live. Before you commit, let me give you a little more information on the great man himself and the significance of the 1000-mile annual walk.

Read more »