by Martin Butler

Fewer than half the population in the UK believe in God according to the latest surveys, even though religious belief is growing globally and the heady days when the ‘new atheists’ were in full flight are now behind us. The internet has given those on opposite sides of the fence the opportunity to lock horns continually, each side determined to show the irrationality if not downright stupidity of their opponents. I wouldn’t expect the level of debate to be particularly high, but what I do find slightly depressing is the complete absence of anything but the crudest understanding of what belief in God and religious belief in general actually  means. Both sides mostly embrace the ‘God of the gaps’ theory – science cannot explain everything, runs the argument, and God serves as a kind of backstop to account for the unexplained.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of the 20^th century can, I think, help us to develop a more sophisticated conception of religious belief.[1] Despite never producing anything close to a philosophy of religion, the religious point of view was clearly important to him throughout his life: ‘I am not a religious man but I can’t help but seeing every problem from a religious point of view’ (RW p79). Although, Elizabeth Anscombe, a devout Catholic and one of his most famous pupils, once declared that ‘nobody understood Wittgenstein’s views on religion.’[2]

Wittgenstein famously produced two quite distinct approaches to philosophy, the first in the only book he published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the second in the Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously; although there have been many other publications over the years of his extensive notebooks and conversations. Towards the end of the Tractatus several important remarks set the stage for his approach to religious belief through both periods of his philosophy. ‘We feel,’ he says, ‘that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain untouched’ (TLP 6.52).

It is with these ‘Lebensprobelme’, which cannot be ‘solved’ through science, that religious belief is concerned. The problems of life cannot be stated as genuine questions since if they could, factual answers describable by science could be given: ‘If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it’ (TLP 6.5), whereas the problems of life are concerned with what cannot be said – what he refers to elsewhere as the mystical. Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

What does the election of Trump mean for risks to society from advanced AI? Given the wide spectrum of risks from advanced AI, the answer will depend very much on which AI risks one is most concerned about.

The AI risk spectrum can be drawn from the near-term, high-certainty risks such as bias and discrimination to longer-term, more speculative risks such as loss of control over agentic AIs. In between those endpoints, there is a range of risks where we believe advanced AI will have an impact, but it is hard to know how much and how soon. This includes everything from AI enabling terrorists to create more deadly weapons, more persuasive AI-enabled disinformation as well as AI-driven disruptions of the labor market. The impact of Trump v2 will likely very greatly between the different points in this spectrum.

Foreseeing the impact of Trump on AI is hard. Four years is an eternity in AI land. AI looks nothing like what it did four years ago. The first Trump administration had inherent high levels of uncertainty. And many different factors will influence the Trump administration over the coming years. But there seems to be some fundamental elements that will likely significantly impact the Trump administration’s actions on AI. Read more »

Song Behind a Rear-Tined Tiller

They believed consciousness resided in the heart,

Aristotle believed this, and the Egyptians
who scooped out dead pharaoh’s brain
through his nose with a spoon
and stuffed his skull with rags assuring
that he would not be thinking in the other world
to which he’d travel by long boat
being wrapped in cloth, speechless, in gold, supine,
embarked with a breathless retinue of slaves
through the hole at the end of the earth
to a place far in imagination.

Here and now sunlight climbs a trellis of trees
along a rail line on which, at irregular intervals,
a freight comes dragging coal behind three engines
or hauls boxcars labeled J.B. Hunt,
or pulls chains of steel cubes and chemical tanks
heavy with inventions of consciousness,
some inscribed with graffiti sprayed by
a deft hand in bold letters, in colors
set with a master’s touch
tuned to the tones of both heart and brain
while the smell of blue-grey diesel
sparks a synapse between beats
and one step follows another
behind a rear-tined tiller
as I urge a throttle.

Who knows who sings
through what instrument
—did Aristotle?

Jim Culleny
from Odder Still
Leana’s Basement Press, 2015

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by Dick Edelstein

Catalan jazzman Ignasi Terraza and his trio lit up Barcelona with eight sets in October at Jamboree, a cutting edge Gothic Quarter club in the neoclassically-styled Plaça Reial, once an historic crossroads of the Camino de Santiago with the Roman Via Augusta, now a nexus of Barcelona night life and the local jazz scene. The series marks the 25^th anniversary of the first Jazz a les Fosques concert that the blind pianist performed in darkness, letting listeners share his sensory experience and gain insight into his musical sensibility.

Anyone who can walk in someone else’s shoes is either a saint or a specially sensitive individual, so when Terraza joked that being sighted is overrated, the audience caught the irony, insanely proud of his accomplishment as the leading exponent of Catalan jazz. His compatriot Tete Montoliu once burnished Catalunya’s image, like cellist-composer Pau Casals, whose Cant dels ocells is broadcast worldwide from Camp Nou football matches to mark a moment of silence for departed socis. Four decades ago in San Francisco, when I told a local jazz musician that I was moving to Barcelona, he replied “That’s in Catalunya—that’s where Tete Montoliu lives”.

In a darkened room, listeners tune in to the way a sightless pianist apprehends music synesthetically, as a cymbal crash becomes a circular pyrotechnic light-burst. Drummer Esteve Pi plays with a clarity that is melodic, architectural, economical, calibrated and precise, limning the structure of his discourse, not just in solos, also in ensemble parts. The trio’s limpid playing is framed by Swiss-Greek bassist Giorgos Antoniou’s supple bass lines and subtle styling; and on opening night, guest singer Laura Simó surprised listeners with a crystalline enunciation of English syllables that added an attractive twist to her interpretation of  Billy Strayhorn’s romantic recitative ballad “Lush Life”, a jazz standard whose stock goes up with each new generation. Other nights, rising-star trumpet player Joan Mar Sauqué and Australian clarinet-flautist Adrian Cunningham created unexpected sounds with their instruments, formless textures that eventually resolved into structure. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

Professor Paul Heyne practiced what he preached.

I had the good fortune of having Professor Heyne’s Microeconomics class in my very first quarter at the University of Washington. He may have been tenured faculty whose own textbook we used, but he was a natural instructor who engaged students effortlessly. Which is no small feat when speaking to 400 mostly freshmen students in the university’s largest lecture hall.

Professor Heyne understood the “sage on the stage” model of education came with challenges at best. Still, that’s what the university demanded, and it was his job to make it work. So, he followed his own beliefs and teachings and offered students incentives for valuable participation – in the form of muffins and cookies.

Before every class, Professor Heyne picked up a dozen baked items from the café in the next building. He had Teaching Assistants running around the lecture hall with wireless microphones, getting them to students with raised hands. When someone offered a correct answer or insightful comment, they might hear, “Give that woman [or man] a cookie!” And he or she was rewarded like a dog getting a Milk Bone.

Everyone knew there was a limited supply of treats – so they were not only coveted, but reserved for high quality participation. Moreover, in true Pavlovian fashion, the opportunity to get a treat had most of what could easily have been a large, passive audience perked up and participating at 9:30 am.

Professor Heyne had an amazing way of teaching Microeconomics in a narrative, easy to understand way. He most consistently pointed out we are all making economic decisions every day, all the time – because economics isn’t about money, it’s about trade-offs, resources and maximizing our utility which could just as easily be sunshine and water as dollars and labor. Unsurprisingly, his book was called The Economic Way of Thinking. Read more »

by William Benzon

A couple of weeks ago The New York Times ran an op-ed in which Drew Lictenberg, who is the artistic producer at Shakespeare Theatre Company, pointed out that there has been a drop in Shakespeare productions recently:

American Theatre magazine, which collects data from more than 500 theaters, publishes a list of the most performed plays each season. In 2023-24, there were 40 productions of Shakespeare’s plays. There were 52 in 2022-23 and 96 in 2018-19. Over the past five years, Shakespeare’s presence on American stages has fallen a staggering 58 percent. At many formerly Shakespeare-only theaters, the production of the Bard’s plays has dropped to as low as less than 20 percent of the repertory.

Why might American theaters be running away from Shakespeare?

After pointing out that Shakespeare productions can be costly, a problem exacerbated by Covid-19, Lictenberg points to political and cultural polarization:

Given contemporary political divisions, when issues such as a woman’s right to control her own body, the legacy of colonialism and anti-Black racism dominate headlines, theater producers may well be repeating historical patterns. There have been notably few productions in recent years of plays such as “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Tempest” or “Othello.” They may well hit too close to home.

Why be concerned about this drop? Things change. If and when the polarization lessens, Shakespeare will come back. Won’t he? What if the polarization persists? Is it possible that Shakespeare will never come back? What would that mean?

I warn you, however, that I do not intend to answer those questions. I don’t see how that’s possible. Rather, I present them as a way to begin thinking about the position that Shakespeare occupies in the imagination of well, you know, us, a bunch of people oriented toward Western culture. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

Last Saturday, November 2, 2024, at a collective atelier in Zurich’s Wiedikon neighborhood, I attended the launch of a new periodical. TETI Journal, available both online and in print form, is a publication presenting academic and artistic work in line with the aims of TETI Group, an “interdisciplinary research platform to investigate the changing materialities and imaginaries of our global societies.”

TETI Group, whose acronym stands for Textures and Experiences of Trans-Industriality, was founded in 2011 by the art historian Gabriel N. Gee, and is currently “animated” by Jose Caceres Mardones, Philippe Desarzens, Anne-Laure Franchette, Lori M. Gibbs, Stéphanie Gygax, Monica Ursina Jäger, Petra Koehle, Maria João Matos, Cora Piantoni, Bérénice Serra, Jan Van Oort, Caroline Wiedmer, and Gee himself. It includes TETI Press.

Gee coined the term trans-industriality in his 2008 doctoral dissertation, which examined the art scenes of industrialized northern England during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, in the wake of deindustrialization. As Gee writes in the introduction to the first issue of this new, spinoff vehicle, he was “intrigued by the social, but also cultural and political alternates that emerged to replace the former order, and by what appeared to be vivid connections to the industrial foundations of the modern age including the complex array of global entanglements associated with the dark side of modernity.” A complex array indeed, since for Gee, “the movement from industriality to post-industriality is not understood as being linear and synchronised, but rather, as multidirectional, ambiguous, leaning sideways and even backwards, in a constant metabolising process.” Read more »

In the woods, near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Jeroen Bouterse

In 1919, Otto Neurath was on trial for high treason, for his role in the short-lived Munich soviet republic. One of the witnesses for the defense was the famous scholar Max Weber.

Neurath was a capable scholar with good ideas, a newspaper recorded Weber as saying; but recently he seemed to have somewhat lost his grip on reality.[1] That judgment would refer to Neurath’s economic thinking. In particular, his belief that a planned economy was viable, to an extent that the entire money economy could be abolished. This conviction, the seeds of which were planted by the economic thought of his father, and which was strengthened by his study and experience of war economies during the 1910s, would in fact be lifelong; Neurath would always be thinking of concrete ways to make co-operation and planning a reality.

His position as head of the ‘Central Economic Administration’ of Bavaria (to which, importantly, he had been installed before the communist coup) had given him an opportunity to realize his ambitious and radical ideas for economic “socialization”. In spite of warnings from his friends and his wife, he showed no inclination to let that slip just because he was now working for Bolsheviks. After the case, Weber would tell Neurath in a private letter that for all his good intentions he had lent his service to tyrants, and that his utterly frivolous and irresponsible plans risked discrediting socialism for a century.[2]

Neurath is now most famous not for this radical experiment, but for his role in the Vienna Circle and the unity of science movement. He also shares with Theseus the honor of having a philosophical parable named after him involving the piecemeal reconstruction of a boat. I myself started reading about him because of my hobby horse: perspectives on the distinction between sciences and humanities. This essay will in the end try to fit in his ideas on that with the rest of his thought, but all the other stuff is so interesting that it is hard to focus. Perhaps it is fitting in that regard to recount what historian of antiquity Eduard Meyer said about Neurath’s dissertation on ancient economic thought: very good yes, but rendered less appealing “by unnecessary deviations from the substance matter, by an inability to suppress any little idea”.[3] It happens to the best of us. But back to the main topic. Read more »

by David Winner

I’m writing on Halloween, but by the time this is published the election will have passed, and we may even know the identity of our next president. Whether she’s won or lost, I wanted to suggest something that I think could have helped Kamala.

But first a little background. In the Charlottesville, Virginia, of my growing up (the 1970s) everyone appeared to be coded as either white or Black. I didn’t really understand distinctions between Jamaicans, Jews, Bengalis, Asians, Mexicans, Italians, West Africans. All I grasped was that basic racial binary.

While in later years I began to see my peculiar parents’ peculiar brand of racism, they did not express what I understood to be racist sentiments when I was a child. A fellow white kid at summer camp somewhere else in Virginia thought I was “liberal” because I did not hate Black people, but the first real prejudice I became aware of back home in Charlottesville was a pseudo beach club in high school at an artificial lake outside of town that would not admit “poofs.”

In my progressive hippie-dippy private high school, most students were white like me, and most came from middle-class or upper middle-class backgrounds: the children of professors, lawyers, businesspeople. Most of us did not have heavy southern accents or real southern identities. Every member of my core group of friends, my clique as it were, were from those similar backgrounds.

But not everyone in school was like us. There were students with southern accents and markedly different tastes. In clothes, in vehicles, in drugs, but most significantly in music. We moved quickly through classic rock (Henrix, The Who) into punk, new wave (The Clash, David Bowie, Gang of Four) whereas they liked more heavy metal and country rock.

I was not a member of the beach club, but my friends and I were not epithet-free. Our epithets involved class and culture rather than race, gender, religion, or sexuality.

We didn’t directly insult people by calling them r*d n*ks to their face, but we used their musical taste to stick that to them. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Michael Liss

The defendants at Nuremberg had a fair and extensive trial. No one can have any sympathy for these Nazi leaders who brought such agony upon the world. —Thomas E. Dewey, Speaking about comments made by his fellow Republican, Robert A. Taft

Last month, I wrote about JFK’s Profiles in Courage and focused on one of the three Giants of the Senate, Daniel Webster, and his controversial and perhaps decisive role in the Compromise of 1850. This month, I want to talk about another of Kennedy’s picks, “Mr. Republican,” Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, who led the conservative movement in the Senate for more than a decade.

The two men, Webster and Taft, couldn’t have been more different. Webster, perhaps the greatest orator in American history (Richard Hofstadter called him “the quasi-official rhapsodist of American nationalism”), had huge appetites, not all of them commendable. Robert Alphonso Taft was precise, restrained, and a stickler. A stickler for his conservative principles, a stickler on process and procedure, a stickler on policy issues such as isolationism (he was for it, comprehensively so) and the New Deal (positively, absolutely, unyieldingly no).

He was also possessed of a serious resume as both theorist and lawmaker in the Senate, a serious bloodline (his father, William Howard Taft, was President and then Chief Justice), and an even more serious ambition—the self-regard to think that he, too, should occupy the White House.

As you might imagine, Taft was not the only politician to think that of himself. It was an era of big challenges (The Great Depression and World War II among them) and big men. The biggest of all, FDR, already lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Taft sought the GOP nomination in 1940 to wrest it from him. Taft was in his prime, a talented legislator and bridge-builder to conservative Democratic Senators, but he was a fierce opponent of American intervention in Europe. Taft wasn’t alone in this—isolationism was closely associated with conservatism in the GOP, and two of his major rivals for the nomination, Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg and New York’s Governor Thomas E. Dewey, also were isolationists. Read more »

by Terese Svoboda

Donald Sutherland was a connoisseur of poetry. In the 80s I knew poetry-quoting doyennes from the glittering parties the Academy of American Poets threw as well as the Sudanese who recited their histories in song, but mostly I knew poets obsessed with competing with dead ones, with an eye toward their next book. Poets generally love poetry the way auto mechanics love cars. They don’t luxuriate in the front seat, or take long winding car trips through the Berkshires, they make sure the ignition catches and go on to the next one. Hearing Sutherland recite poetry you heard the Stanislavski method of poetry-recitation, an oral delivery straight from the mind as well as the mouth. Sutherland said he was manipulated by words, not as a ventriloquist but in the relationship between feeling and meaning. Likewise, after numerous tussles with directors Fellini and Preminger and Bertolucci – he even tried to get Robert Altman fired from M.A.S.H. – he decided he was merely the director’s vehicle. Poetry directed him.

I was newly blonde when I flew out to LA to convince him to be the host of Voices & Visions, a PBS series on American poetry that I was producing. The dye job wasn’t planned. The proto-reality TV show Real People had put up a Free Haircut sign in Soho and like any poet, I was attracted to the Free.  All I had to do for the series was transform from a mousy brown thirty-year-old to a hot blonde punk in a red jumpsuit. No problem. I did a bit of strutting around on the set, and the program was ready for reruns. Unbeknownst to me, the executive director had been working his Canadian connection, the daughter of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who knew Donald Sutherland and his proclivity toward poetry. Lunch had already been scheduled.

Sutherland had the anthology of baseball poetry we’d sent to him on his desk, baseball being his only other passion outside of acting. Veteran of nearly a hundred movies by that time, he’d recently stunned audiences with his performance in Ordinary People. Did I dare to mention my brush with Real People? All I remember of the business part of that first hour was the way he quoted Auden while skating his long fingers over his desk – not as an arpeggio of show-offy emphasis but unconsciously following the cadence. I was impressed. He needn’t have auditioned – if that’s what it was – because we were barely paying scale. He called in his manager, they thought something could be done, and he suggested lunch. After arguing with his manager about what car to take, he appeared outside his office at the wheel of a beautiful white convertible. The manager held the door for me, I got in – and we drove across the street. Ah, Hollywood. Read more »

Whatchamacallit

She’s dead, he said.
So’s he, said she.

Kicked the bucket, he said.
Bought the farm, said she.

Under the clover, he said.
Crossed over, said she.

Iced with a heater, he said.
Sleeps with the fishes, said she.

Taken for a little ride, he said.
Gone to the other side, said she.

Flat-lined, he said.
Out of mind, said she.

To a better place, he said.
By heaven’s grace, said she.

Under the sod, he said.
To be with God, said she.

To Paradise? he said.
Would be nice, said she.

Could it be? he said.
Could it not? said she.

***

Jim Culleny; June 14, 2007
from Odder Still
Leana’s Basement Press, 2015

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by Ben Orlin

There is something reassuring about teaching math. On the eve of a pivotal election, as my colleagues in U.S. history grapple with their subject’s urgent and terrible relevance, I can console myself that math is rarely urgent, and (as we tend to teach it) almost never relevant.

Or so it would seem. But math has a guilty secret: its longstanding role in American statecraft.

I’m not referring to math’s technocratic applications, or the pious calls for better STEM education. Rather, math has long inspired our country’s leaders for precisely the same reason that it befuddles our students: its willingness to wrangle with abstraction.

Math is the science of unifying laws. As such, it has served as a model for our messy republic’s perpetual efforts to live up to the “United” in its name.

I scarcely exaggerate when I say that we are the people of the equals sign.

Thomas Jefferson was an avid mathematician. He described calculus as “a delicious luxury,” and trigonometry as “most valuable to every man,” adding, “there is scarcely a day in which he will not resort to it.”

(Sidebar: I spent years teaching trig, and never once heard this sentiment echoed.)

In 1776, when Jefferson penned his famous equation—that all men are created equal—he was not trying to set the U.S. apart. Quite the opposite: the Declaration’s goal, he later wrote, was “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject,” so as to persuade other nations of our cause. Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

It’s a pity that both of them can’t lose. —Henry Kissinger

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. —J.K. Galbraith

I feel as dirty and disgusted as a chance visitor to Jeffrey Epstein’s island. In less than a fortnight I will walk into a voting booth and be forced to come down on one side or the other in perhaps the worst dilemma I have ever faced in my life: voting for Kamala Harris or a third-party candidate for president, which may well contribute towards a Trump victory. I have no idea where I will end up on this; I don’t even want to think about solving the dilemma, because there simply is no solution. This is not an attempt to influence how anyone votes. It is a commentary on a political system that no longer even allows us the cynical option to avoid it altogether. Whatever happens will almost certainly make life worse in significant ways for vast numbers of people. I sometimes think the only appropriate thing to do is to smuggle poison into the booth and kill myself after pulling the lever.

To me, voting for Donald Trump is supremely well beyond consideration. Many of his economic, and perhaps all of his environment-affecting ones, remind one of his helpful suggestion to drink bleach as an antidote to Covid. His plans regarding mass deportations may directly affect some of my closest friends. His nonchalance about depriving people of rights that were, not so long ago, even by Trump’s most senior appointments to the judiciary, considered secure in law, and his insistence on mentioning policies as priorities of his next administration that are far less based in statute or judicial decisions stretches the imagination in terms of possible outcomes even in a country that has been so shamelessly co-opted and corrupted as the United States has. His cronyism and criminal tendencies are the stuff of legend. He is a militarist of the first order when he thinks it will serve his purposes. If nothing else, what he has to offer is not even close to worth the risk of what he could conceivably do to our basic way of life, even if a vote against him is seen as a mere gesture of extreme disgust at Democrats who have enjoyed nothing more for the last several months as insulting important parts of the party, like the progressive wing. On Gaza, and the Middle East in general, his promises to allow the war criminal Netanyahu to  “do what you have to do” reveals that Trump may prove to be even worse than “Genocide Joe” Biden, or the bone-headedly silent Harris, on this issue, despite enormous levels of popularity amongst all voters for a permanent cease-fire, as reflected in many polls.

This being the case, it seems almost miraculous that Harris cannot simply obliterate her ridiculous opponent. This is even more the case when one considers the sickening amounts of money that have flowed into her campaign since Harris and Biden performed their little dance of death in July and August. She raised some 500 million dollars in one month after being named Biden’s successor, a disturbing amount of which came from billionaires. And that, to me, brings us to the crux of the case against her. But before I get to that, I will try to provide a brief assessment of her campaign’s main proposals. Read more »