At the train station in Bozen, South Tyrol.
The Secret River of One’s Life
by Nils Peterson
One of the easy metaphors, easy because it just feels true, is that life is like a river in its flowing from then to whenever. We are both a leaf floating on it, and the river itself. Boat maybe. Raft more likely. But those who know such things say there is a river beneath the river, the hyporheic flow. “This is the water that moves under the stream, in cobble beds and old sandbars. It edges up the toe slope to the forest, a wide unseen river that flows beneath the eddies and the splash. A deep invisible river, known to its roots and rocks, the water and the land intimate beyond our knowing. It is the hyporheic flow I’m listening for.” The person speaking is Robin Kimmerer, a biologist, professor and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. It’s from her book Braiding Sweetgrass.
I’ve used the river image often enough in my own writing when thinking about my life and the lives of others, but now I’m wondering if what I was really trying to do was to find a way to listen to this deeper river, to get a sense of it as it winds its way to, well, Is there such a thing as the hyporheic sea? There must be and therefore all my sea images really float on that sea beneath the sea. Robin says, “One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.” Well, yes. This is the poet’s understanding too, and I think it is the basic understanding of language, maybe of consciousness.
I’m thinking now of a girl I dated my junior year in college. I had to come back to school a little early because I sang in the choir and there was a special program early that we had been asked to sing for. The football team also came back early for its fall practice. This girl in addition to being a singer was a cheerleader. It worked out that fall that she went out with me every other weekend. A football player took her out the in-between weeks. I was a year younger than my class and very shy. I had just started to do things on the campus, act in plays, write for the newspaper, join the creative writing club, finding out how much I loved literature. I enjoyed talking with her. Maybe we held hands, but the truth was she awed me. I was continually surprised she was out with me. Read more »
Always in the Garden: On Two Recent Films from Paul Schrader
by Derek Neal
There is a scene near the end of First Reformed, the 2017 film directed by Paul Schrader, where the pastor of a successful megachurch says to the pastor of a small, sparsely attended church:
You’re always in the Garden. Jesus wasn’t always in the Garden, on his knees, sweating drops of blood. No, he was on the Mount, in the temple, in the marketplace. But you’re always in the Garden. For you every hour is the darkest hour.
The small-town pastor, played by Ethan Hawke, is in a state of constant suffering and isolation. His son, who he pushed to enlist in the army, has been killed in combat; his wife has left him; his home contains no furniture or decoration; he drinks heavily and writes in a journal; he rejects all those who try to help him; he is dying from cancer. Despite all this, he is a good pastor and cares deeply about the people he serves.
In another recent Paul Schrader film, The Card Counter (2021), the titular character played by Oscar Isaac is another man who is “always in the Garden.” He, too, drinks heavily and keeps a journal; he drives from city to city by himself, playing blackjack at various casinos before moving on to avoid attracting unwanted attention; he stays in budget motels and covers the furniture with sheets; he has no friends and no fixed home. Read more »
Monday, July 17, 2023
Your Rights: Roberts’ Rules Of Order
by Michael Liss
It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary. …[W]e do not mistake this plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement. It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country. —Chief Justice John Roberts, Opinion of the Court, Biden v. Nebraska
Let us not be misled.
Here we go again. Another year, another round of controversial Supreme Court rulings, another set of difficult questions about the behavior of Supreme Court Justices.
This is not a happy group, and the unhappiness is not merely ideological. The personalities are different. In each of the four instances of changing seats since 2016, the Court lost a bit of its temperamental cohesiveness. Beyond the famous friendship between Justices Scalia and Ginsburg, Justice Kennedy was conciliatory and mindful of the Court’s traditions; Justice Breyer was courtly and insisted he was among friends. Now we have Justice Kagan squaring off against the Chief; Justices Thomas and Jackson engaging in what looks to be a very personal argument; and Justice Alito veering from searching for the Dobbs leaker, to accusing his critics of endangering his life, to airing his grievances from the safe space of the WSJ Opinion pages. Let me admit to being surprised that Justice Kavanaugh not only vouches for collegiality, but is also the Justice most in the majority.
That the liberal wing of the Court is discontented is understandable—with a couple of exceptions, it’s getting crushed on the field. Linda Greenhouse, in an article for The New York Times, points out that long-held conservative wishes that had been dammed up behind the pre-Trump-largely-centrist Court have been realized. Abortion, guns, affirmative action, the open embrace of religion, and a heavy SCOTUS hand on those regulatory actions of which conservatives don’t approve—all these trophy wins have been banked, with more to come. Greenhouse ends on what anyone who believes in checks and balances should find chilling: “The Supreme Court now is this country’s ultimate political prize.” Read more »
Oppenheimer VIII: The House of Science
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
This is the eighth in a series of essays on the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer. All the others can be found here.
After his shameful security hearing, many of Oppenheimer’s colleagues thought he was a broken man, “like a wounded animal” as one colleague said. But Freeman Dyson, a young physicist who was as perceptive of human nature as anyone, saw it differently: “As far as we were concerned, he was a better director after the hearing than he was before.”
Director of what? Of the “one, true, platonic heaven”, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a place where the world’s leading thinkers could think and toil in unfettered surroundings. It was here that Oppenheimer entered the fourth and final act of his life, one that was to thrust him on the national and international stages. There is no doubt that the hearing deeply affected him, but instead of dooming him to a life of obscurity and seclusion, it invested him with a new persona, a new role as a public intellectual in which he performed magnificently. Far from being the end of his life, the hearing signaled a new beginning.
It had been an unpromising start. “Princeton is a madhouse”, Oppenheimer had written to his brother Frank in a 1935 letter, “its solipsistic luminaries shining in separate and helpless desolation.” The institute had been set up by funds from a wealthy brother and sister, Louis and Caroline Bamberger who, just before the depression hit, had fortuitously sold their department store to R. H. Macy’s for $11 million. The philanthropic Bambergers wanted to give back to the community and sought the advice of a leading educator, Abraham Flexner, as to how they should put the money to good use. Flexner dissuaded them from starting a medical school in Newark. Instead he had a novel idea. As an educator he knew the importance of pure, curiosity-driven research that may or may not yield practical dividends. Later in 1939 he wrote an influential article for Harper’s Magazine titled “The Usefulness of Useless Research” in which he laid out his vision. Read more »
Monday Poem
How Quantum Models Work
by David Kordahl
The science lab and the theory suite
If you spend any time doing science, you might notice that some things change when you close the door to the lab and walk into the theory suite.
In the laboratory, surprising things happen, no doubt about it. Depending on the type of lab you’re working in, you might see liquid nitrogen boiling out from a container, solutions changing color only near their surfaces, or microorganisms unexpectedly mutating. But once roughly the same thing happens a few times in a row, the conventional scientific attitude is to suppose that you can make sense of these observations. Sure, you can still expect a few outliers that don’t follow the usual trends, but there’s nothing in the laboratory that forces one to take any strong metaphysical positions. The surprises, instead, are of the sort that might lead someone to ask, Can I see that again? What conditions would allow this surprise to reoccur?
Of course, the ideas discussed back in the theory suite are, in some indirect way, just codified responses to old observational surprises. But scientists—at least, young scientists—rarely think in such pragmatic terms. Most young scientists are cradle realists, and start out with the impression that there is quite a cozy relationship between the entities they invoke in the theory suite and the observations they make back in the lab. This can be quite confusing, since connecting theory to observation is rarely so straightforward as simply calculating from first principles.
The types of experiments I’ve had been able to observe most closely involve electron microscopes. For many cases where electron microscopes are involved, workers will use quantum models to describe the observations. I’ve written about quantum models a few times before, but I haven’t discussed much about how quantum physics models differ from their classical physics counterparts. Last summer, I worked out a simple, concrete example in detail, and this column will discuss the upshot of that, leaving out the details. If you’ve ever wondered, how exactly do quantum models work?—or even if you haven’t wondered, but are wondering now that I mention it—well, read on. Read more »
Wordkeys: On ‘Kindness’
by Gus Mitchell
‘Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.’ Henry James apparently spoke these words to his nephew Billy James in 1902. TV personality Mr. Rogers later took it up – with an intriguing preface: ‘There are three ultimate ways to success: the first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.’
There is something revealing about that reformulation, from the beginning, to the second half of the twentieth century, that least ‘kind’ of all centuries. It holds true today as well. Kindness has become one of the indispensable buzz-virtues (or, as I conceive them, ‘word-virtues’) of our moment – see also ‘creativity’, ‘community’, ‘care’, and so on. The ubiquity of these words often masks a troubling lack of useful definition or resonance, not to mention the kind of morality-washing used to justify a great deal of lazy thinking and acting. Words in the place of a meaning. This trend has been helped on its way by an enthusiastically hijacking and hollowing by corporate or political instigators, whose interests are opposed to any genuine realisation of these ideals.
In a (no doubt vain) attempt to not be judged by some as callous or psychotic in this essay, let me preface everything to follow: the inherent qualities, the real virtues enshrined in words such as these, are ones I cherish. I’m not attempting to persuade anyone not to ‘be kind’, as you commonly understand it. Instead, I hope that by illuminating the fuzzy blubber gathering around these word-virtues – a blubber enshrined in the mimetic mindlessness of the internet – might help one see more clearly that, by them, we are selling ourselves short. Read more »
Perceptions
Maria Berrio. From the series “In A Time of Drought”.Headline
by Akim Reinhardt
The Lede: Wombats ate five children at a drive thru restaurant in Omegosh, Texas last week.
The Body: A wisdom of wombats, on the run from massive fires in their Australian homelands, surrounded five children at a Checkers drive thru and lectured them on the disproportionate impact of the U.S. carbon footprint, before devouring them sans cutlery. Normally herbivores, the marsupials said later that they were eating young American child meat to make an ironic statement about climate change. Afterwards they were taken into custody and assigned a public defender. When reached for comment, their lawyer said the wombats were planning a hunger strike while in prison.
Ending: Does Jesus want us forgive the wombats, or blame the children? Perhaps we can do both.
*
The Lede: There’s someone in California who might like you.
The Body: California is home to nearly 40,000,000 people. One of them may like you. Like, really like you. That’s according to Cletus Nerdtoster, professor of probability statistics at California Polytechinc State University, who says chances are there’s someone in the Golden State who has the hots for you.
“Can’t rule it out. There’s just so many goddamned people here.”
But what to do about it? Nerdtoster has fewer insights into how to actually meet that person.
“I met my wife at the library. But if you’re not here in California, I guess that wouldn’t work.”
Nerdtoster says he is unfamiliar with how dating apps work.
Ending: Do you even want to be liked? Read more »
RF Kuang’s Novel Yellowface and Diversity in US Publishing
by Leanne Ogasawara
1.
Does the title of the novel make you cringe or what?
In RF Kuang’s latest novel Yellowface, the setup is simple: within pages of the book’s opening, two frenemies –who met at an elite university–are having dinner together. Athena, who is Asian-American, has seen tremendous success in her work. The other woman June is white and has been anything but successful. Not surprisingly, June is envious of Athena’s career….Could it be because Athena is a drop-dead gorgeous person of color? Could it be because of her sexy British accent and tall ballerina-like figure?
Or maybe it’s because she is an incredible writer and knows what she’s doing?
June can only keep wondering…. Until, suddenly during Athena chokes on a pandan pancake and dies.
And yes, you guessed it: June steals Athena’s manuscript-in-progress… Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
The Goody Goody Diner
by R. Passov
Sometimes, you find yourself thinking about why something happened and get nowhere. For example, a year ago this October, my (ex)wife and daughter and I were visiting my son in his second year at a prestigious college where tuition exceeds the average income for a family of four. We had landed in St. Louis with the plan of stopping at a diner that my wife knew from an earlier drive out to Colorado. She and a friend had driven their dogs from our homes in suburban New York out to Telluride. They diner-hopped along the way and one stop was the Goody Goody Diner.
We arrived mid-morning on a Sunday and drove on wide, sparse streets – a seemingly random store or gas station surrounded by empty lots or abandon structures. After many turns and red lights we saw a small white brick building with an upside down neon sign.
After entering we found ourselves in a long line. Sunday brunch is popular. It didn’t take long to notice every diner on that morning was a person of color. I and my family are suburban white.
Maybe we showed concern, hopefully not that we were scared but rather that perhaps we’d stumbled into someone’s party. While silently working our contingencies, the couple in front turned our way. Ron, about 6’4”, built for business and his wife, Tanecia, also taller than me, were dressed in what looked to be their Sunday Church clothes.
Hi, Ron said, you guys visiting? Yes.
We exchanged pleasantries and I mumbled that we were visiting our son at the local, amazingly over-done college which happened to be smack in the middle of Ferguson. We felt so enormously self conscious to be visiting so soon after the riots. Read more »
A-Ha!
by Rafaël Newman
“D — — , I presume, is not altogether a fool, and, if not, must have anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of course.”
“Not altogether a fool,” said G., “but then he is a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.”
“True,” said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, “although I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”
On the eve of their wedding day, on September 12, 1840, Robert Schumann presented Clara Wieck with a collection of 26 songs of his own composition, settings of poems by Goethe, Byron, Heine, Burns, and others. Arranged in four fascicles, the songs foreground literary works in which the speaking voice seems by turns male and female, at least by conventional codification. The poems’ themes range widely, including typical romantic topoi, such as flowers, the Scottish Highlands, and forbidden love affairs, but also drinking songs, ribaldry, and mock rhetorical argument. The very diversity of the selections suggests some definite, if eclectic and highly personal organizing principle had ordained them. And indeed, Schumann’s Myrthen opus 25, although named innocently enough for the myrtles traditionally carried by brides in the 19th century, was more than simply a Brautgeschenk or “bridal gift,” more than merely a pretty, arbitrarily assembled anthology (a term whose etymological roots are similarly floral), since it also celebrates the couple’s triumph over odds both familial and legal—Clara’s father had been resolutely opposed to the marriage, and she had had to win the right to marry Robert at court—as well as the union of two gifted and epochal musical artists.
Now, there is indeed a possible structural determinant of the selections for the cycle, one that tantalizingly suggests a secret code: for the number of its songs—twenty-six—is of course also the number of letters in the Roman alphabet; and musicologists have undertaken various ingenious attempts to discern an alphanumeric key or cypher in their distribution. Does the third song, for instance, “Der Nussbaum” (The Walnut Tree), in which a young woman dreams of a bridegroom, have some particular significance to the addressee, herself presumably about to see her own dream fulfilled, and whose name—Clara—begins with the third letter of the alphabet? Read more »
Maté: Part Depth Psychology but Part Questionable Quick Fix
by Marie Snyder
He received the Order of Canada, profoundly helped many people with addiction on the streets of Vancouver, and is much loved and admired, but some of Dr. Gabor Maté’s claims feel like they don’t hold water. And some claims might actually be dangerous if blindly accepted.
I’ve encountered Maté in a few courses I’m taking, and have been strongly encouraged to watch his newest film and read his book several times now; I opted for the former. One follower was excited to tell me, with great confidence, that ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) is caused by a specific trauma and that everyone is carrying unresolved trauma which, if resolved, can heal physical ailments like cancer.
I’m dubious. I have some reservations that I’ve kept to myself until seeing so many in academia wholeheartedly promoting some poorly substantiated claims.
While Maté has some excellent techniques in the work he does, the way he presents and explains the material provokes me to look up research studies to try to corroborate many of his ideas.
I gobbled up his books twenty years ago, and there are some useful analogies and treatments in there, but even then there were parts that gave me pause. Read more »
Monday Photo
Rain streaking on the window of an Icelandair Boeing 737 aircraft on its takeoff roll for a flight from Reykjavic to Boston about a month ago.
Black, White, and Blues: Notes on Music in America
When European colonists and used West African tribesmen and their descendants as slaves, they had no intention of learning anything from them or of adopting their ways. Their intention was simply to secure a source of cheap and tractable labor. But they were struck by the musicality of their slaves. And that musicality was to have a profound influence on their descendents and, in time, on peoples around the world. Let’s take a quick look at some moments in this centuries-long process of miscegenation, mutation, and cultural transmogrification.
Ecstatic Religion
Early in the seventeenth century, at about the same time Jamestown was being settled, Richard Jobson, an English sea captain, went to Africa and subsequently wrote that “no people on the earth [are] more naturally affected to the sound of musicke than these people.” A century and a half later, the Rev. Samuel Davies heard slaves in Virginia and remarked that the “Negroes above all the Human Species that I ever knew have an Ear for Musick, and a kind of extatic Delight in Psalmody.”
Published in 1640, The Bay Psalm Book was the first full-length book published in the English-speaking colonies, thus illustrating the importance that religious song had for the colonists. Singing schools—a 3 or 4 month series of meetings in which people learned to sing hymns—were held throughout the colonies. Meanwhile, as the slaves grew in number, they held festivals grounded in African custom, such as the ‘Lection Day festivals held in New England during which the slaves elected their own governors or kings, and the legendary Congo Square meetings in New Orleans. Read more »
On the Road: The World’s Greatest Travel Destination
by Bill Murray
In my exuberance after a spring trip to Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, I proclaimed Africa the world’s greatest travel destination. It’s only fair to defend my thesis, for surely others will disagree.
First let’s dispense with the ‘Africa is not a country’ technicality by defining the travel to Africa that I have in mind as being, wherever the location, by some measure more raw, or relatively less mediated than a trip to most places in Europe or Asia.
What I have in mind for my ‘Africa’ is a place that affords a frontline opportunity for real experience of real life. Simple as that. In so much of Europe and much of Asia, what you’ve come to see and do is mediated by reservations, ticket punchers, tour guides, maîtres d’ and so on, putting the experiencer at some separation from the experience — the food in sought-after restaurants, the remnants of the Colosseum or Hadrian’s Wall or Stonehenge, cultural events like bullfights in Madrid, Japanese Sumo wrestling or the changing of various guards before various palaces from Beijing to Stockholm to the Kremlin. These are all surely there, but they are presented to you.
The simple elegance of Spanish tapas, the majesty of the Duomo, the magnificence of a Rodin in Paris, a van Gogh in Amsterdam or a David in Florence, come with a visitor’s expectations of a place because of its usually well-deserved reputation. The Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in southern Uganda comes with no such burned-in reputation, and it will utterly amaze you. Read more »
Monday, July 10, 2023
From the Unabomber to Uvalde
by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan
From the late 1960s to the mid 1980s, America was beset by a haunting array of serial killers: the Zodiac Killer, the Son of Sam, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who just recently died in prison. For two dark decades, serial killers stalked the country, eroding our collective sense of safety and casting disturbed shadows over a world that made less and less sense every day.
In the 1990s, serial killers started to give way to mass shooters, who have terrorized Americans with increasing frequency for the past 30 years. Today, instead of protracted investigations that take years to find their targets (and in some cases never do), we have rotating 24-hour news cycles full of AR 15-wielding villains. Killers who used to operate for years, murdering victims in methodical patterns, have been replaced by death-cultists who kill the same number of people (or more) in one bloody event.
Serial killers defy easy understanding. In their horrific acts, they embody human immorality and insanity, but by eluding the authorities for months or even years, they demonstrate patience and discipline. They seem to be both malevolent and (in some ways) civilized.
Somewhere deep inside, we all want to believe that serial killers are impossible. Anyone smart enough to evade capture, write a manifesto, or plan elaborate rituals shouldn’t also be able to commit gruesome, inhuman acts. They remind us that our understanding of humanity is incomplete (at best) and perhaps quite flawed. Read more »
Dennett Deux
by Tim Sommers
I try to keep callbacks to a minimum in my columns here, but this one seems worth it. Be warned, though. It’s well into the weeds we go.
Last month, right here, I posted this piece.
“Are Counterfeit People the Most Dangerous Artifacts in Human History?”
It was a counter to Daniel Dennett’s recent piece in The Atlantic, “The Problem with Counterfeit People.”
As I wrote later in an email to Dennett, “I really only wanted to make two points in the article. (1) I worry that framing the issue as being about ‘counterfeit’ people deflects from the fact that, in my humble opinion, all the real harms [you cite] don’t require anything like ‘real’ AI – and they are mostly already here. (2) Probably, I am wrong (a lot of people seem to think so), but I also thought it was a weird way for you to frame the issue as I thought the intentional stance didn’t leave as much room as more conventional thinking about the mind for there to be a real/fake distinction.”
Much to my surprise our illustrious Webmaster S. Abbas Raza, who is a friend of Dennett’s, passed the piece along to him.
Dennett initially responded by forwarding a few links. I thought, surely, that is worth sharing. So, here they are.
“Two models of AI oversight – and how things could go deeply wrong” by Gary Marcus.
(Marcus features in my previous piece “Artificial General What?”)
He also sent this https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/ai-image-detection/index.html, and this
“Language Evolution and Direct vs Indirect Symbol Grounding,” by Steven Harnad.
Later Dennett wrote, “The main point I should have made in response to your piece…is that LLMs aren’t persons, lacking higher order desires (see ‘conditions of personhood’) and hence are dangerous. There is no reason to trust them for instance but few will be able to resist. They are high tech memes that can evolve independently of any human control.”
I thought it would be fun to have my friend and colleague Farhan Lakhany, who is something of an expert on Dennett’s work and philosophy of mind in general, take an objective look at the exchange. Lakhany just successfully defended his Ph.D, Representing Qualia: An Epistemic Path out of the Hard Problem at the University of Iowa so I thought it would be great to have him agree with me that I am right. He did not. Here’s what he said. Read more »