by Bill Murray

I.

A hundred years ago two battered and beleaguered old men, one an Italian prisoner, the other taken to wandering Irish bogs, arrived at the same fateful truth: the world around them was collapsing.

Antonio Gramsci, Marxist theorist, imprisoned member of the Italian parliament, wrote from his cell that “the old world is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

William Butler Yeats, a sort of mystic horrified by violence and uncertainty across his Irish homeland, saw the same future. From a cottage in County Galway he wrote “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” What was worse, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

One a political theorist dissecting history’s brutal transitions, the other a poet divining the chaos of human nature, both foresaw the same truth—that societies don’t glide one era to the next. Sufficiently stressed they shatter, and from the wreckage, new orders struggle to emerge. A hundred years on, Gramsci and Yeats’s alarmed realizations read less like prophecy than real time commentary.

Today’s Americans grew up confident that they stood outside history’s cycles of rise and fall. Battered but buoyed by victory in World War II (and recognizing an opportunity), the United States built a powerful international system meant to foster global stability and economic growth while, naturally, serving its own interests. And, in a world laid waste by war, so it did.

For the longest time this system forestalled large-scale conflicts, allowing America and its allies to prosper.

That system has played itself out.

It was easy enough for the mighty and victorious United States to stamp its model on a war-exhausted world. Turns out, maintaining that system indefinitely in a restive world is challenging.

Gramsci speaks outside of time straight to this week that the old is dying. As a new alignment struggles to be born, just as he said: witness the morbid symptoms.

American legend still holds that the US is fundamentally different from and superior to other nations. We call it American Exceptionalism.

Exceptionalism thrived during the fleeting unipolar moment. With the Soviet collapse and the Cold War’s end, the U.S. bestrode the globe—for better and worse. But the hubris and mutations born of that era now blind us to our decline. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by TJ Price

At a certain point, all memory is fiction. What we retain of the past is selective—our brain typically glosses over the finer details—even the substance of it is subject to change. Our past, much like our present and future, is fluid, constantly running, and not even Memory can step in that same river twice. The memoir, however, attempts to fix what is in flux, to render still the dynamic motions of the past. Often, I find that reading memoir comes with a sense of forced progression—a somber plod of narrative, marrying recollections of a life to the dramatic scaffolding of the Hero’s Journey—but lately, I have discovered a wholly new avenue of the telling, and in a surprising place: poetry.

I first heard of The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight, by Naomi Cohn (in a gorgeous paperback publication by Rose Metal Press) by way of a friend, currently researching altered sight for a thesis. Braille is, of course, the writing system of the blind, consisting of little raised dots in a matrix, each arrangement translating to a letter, or sometimes an entire word. What I didn’t know about it, however, as I learned from the excerpt that my friend posted, was that Louis Braille had been accidentally blinded at the tender age of three years old in his father’s workshop, with an awl. Cohn remarks on this, drawing a breathtaking association: “Is it an accident that my tool for making hand-punched braille is so much like an awl?”

It’s a curious book, not easily categorized. As the subtitle outlines, it is a collection of “brief essays,” arranged in the format of an imaginary encyclopedia, with each entry ranging from personal anecdote or recollection to etymology and jargon all the way to scientific fact and even Yiddish. These, more than anything, are poems—some of them are only a few lines, a paragraph—and each entry uses its title as a kind of homing beacon, returning back to it again and again to create a beautiful resonance underneath not only each “essay,” but layers of the same beneath the book in its entirety. The voice guiding the reader is frank, but also wry, and uniquely confessional. In so narrating the personal details and arranging them in this abecedarian manner, it overflows and touches far more stories than just its author’s own. The experiences belong to the writer, but the poetry used to convey them expands past this, and even beyond an inquiry of the visual sense itself, opening new avenues of thought via ontological questions of perceptions and perceiving, and even being perceived. Indeed, even the nature of reading (in all its many forms) is interrogated—how the endless permutations and combinatorics of language can transmogrify in the crucible of the mind.  Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Those first eight thunderous notes—”Oh Fortuna, velut Luna”—delivered by a massive choir of a hundred voices, have become as instantly recognizable as Beethoven’s da-dah-dah-DUM or the opening of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. Since John Boorman first deployed O Fortuna in his 1981 film Excalibur, this choral juggernaut has stampeded through many horror films, parodies, videos, and cartoons—always to soul-chilling effect.

There’s no denying O Fortuna’s raw power. The chanting choir, the pounding drums, the ascending shrillness of the voices: it creates the unsettling sensation that an army of insane monks is closing in on you from the dark corners of a satanic cathedral. It is the musical embodiment of the Burkean sublime: an encounter with vast, uncontrollable, and terrifying forces.

This two-minute masterpiece by German composer Carl Orff, which opens and closes his 1936 “scenic cantata” Carmina Burana, has made the entire 60-minute work into one of the more frequently performed pieces of classical music worldwide. Dozens of professional, academic, and community music groups across America will stage it this year—no small feat considering the orchestra size and number of singers required. For symphony orchestras and concert halls, Carmina Burana has become a reliable cash cow, more valuable than many other popular favorites because it attracts that rarest and most coveted entity in the classical music world: the under age-65 audience. Read more »

Monica Rezman. After Dark. 2023. (“this is what it’s like to live in the tropics”)

Canvas, acrylic, thread.

With permission of the artist after a studio visit in Merida, Mexico (thank you Victoria Sharp!).

More here and here.

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by Richard Farr

As everyone knows, the word philosopher comes from two Greek words — philo, a rich, buttery pastry and by extension a person with a weakness for any self-indulgence, and sofa, a couch. Hence: a person who’d love to find a comfortable chair.

If you are a plumber or a tax attorney, or maybe an epidemiologist specializing in tropical blood diseases, most random strangers will understand in a broad way what you do for a living and why it is that someone else is prepared to pay you for doing it. Even if you work in a university and teach poetry, or the extinct fauna of the Oligocene, no great mystery. Even people who think it’s a complete waste of time will understand roughly why other people don’t.

Philosophy, on the other hand.

I was in my late twenties, Ph.D. still fresh-baked and steaming. Not yet accustomed to being addressed as Professor, I sat on the bus next to a complete stranger one day and had a conversation with him that went something like this: 

“A philosopher, eh? Really! So what’s your philosophy then?”

Uh-oh! How to begin? How to navigate the truly remarkable fact that in our culture it’s typical even for highly educated people to signal thus that they have never encountered this once-central thread in our civilization’s story? That they have literally no idea what the subject / field / discipline called “philosophy” is? 

I choose a poor way to begin. “I specialize mainly in modern political ideas. And ethics.”

“You teach politicians to be ethical?”

“No no! That would not be — well, I supposed it would be logically possible, even nomologically possible. But — anyway, no. That’s not it.”

“So tell me more about what you do.”

“I spend a lot of time on normative ethics.”

“Eh?” Read more »

by David J. Lobina

It can be lonely being a football player, especially when the ball is rolling.

I live on the wing, my natural habitat. As close to the touch line as possible, old-fashioned. No-one really understands me. I think my teammates live in a completely different world to my own. I can track the movements of the strikers and even anticipate what they’ll do with the ball when they get hold of it, but it is all foreign to me. I can track the central midfielders better and more closely, as these are the people who make sure the ball reaches me ever so often, but their general motivations are equally inscrutable. The goalkeeper and the defenders are even more of a mystery; I’m not sure throwing your body to the ground like they do is always necessary, but I am sure that I cannot do it quite like that myself. The other winger is the closest thing to having a twin, but one that is the exact opposite in every way. Every player is their own person here, with movements and motivations unlike those of the others. We are a team in name only; more like a collection of 11 inlets.

It always all starts in the midfield with the opening kick. I am on the wing and do not expect to see the ball for a good few minutes. The strikers get things going by kicking the ball backwards to the midfielders, and then mechanically field towards the goal without a worry, so eager are they to reach their own natural habitat – away from it, and they look lost. The midfielders start their routine of not wanting to have any kind of responsibility by getting rid of the ball as soon as they receive it, lest they make any mistake that might need the attention of the defenders or even the keeper. Defenders patiently wait for these mistakes; they would wish them into being from time to time if they could, in fact. Goalkeepers would wish defenders’ mistakes into being, in turn; the more the merrier, in fact. One striker tends to be more artistic than the other and ventures into the midfield on occasion in order to try out things for art’s sake and with only aesthetic objectives in mind, in a trial-and-error kind of fashion; success or fail matters not, it just needs to always look pretty. Read more »

Rapprochement:

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by Derek Neal

Close-Up, a 1990 Iranian film directed by Abbas Kiarostami, is one of the rare films where the viewing experience is enhanced by knowing certain details beforehand.

The movie opens with a scene in a taxi. A journalist is in the front seat while two armed military police officers sit in the back. The journalist explains to the driver that they are on their way to arrest a man who has been impersonating the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. So far, so good. But what you don’t realize, unless you’re familiar with the film, is that most of these people are not actors. The journalist is a journalist and the police officers are police officers. So the director is going for realism, eschewing the use of professional actors in the manner of Bresson? Not quite. Makhmalbaf is a real Iranian director, and someone really did impersonate him—this is a true story, and many of the people in the film play themselves. The journalist is the real journalist who broke the story, which brought it to the attention of Kiarostami, leading him to make the movie. The officers are the real officers who arrested the impersonator. They are on their way to the real house of the family whom the impersonator conned, and the family as well as the impersonator play themselves, too. Everything in the film really happened—this is real life, close up. Or is it? Does filming something change it? Does a reenactment alter the original act? Can a copy replace the original? What is real and what is make believe, and can we cross back and forth between the two realms? Can one exist without the other? These are the questions the film presents to its viewers.

In the taxi on the way to the Ahankhah residence, where the impersonator will be arrested, the journalist asks the taxi driver if he knows the director Makhmalbaf, to which he responds, “I don’t have time for movies. I’m too busy with life!” Later, when Kiarostami tells the judge who will preside over the case that he would like to film the trial, the judge tells him, “I took a look at this case, and I don’t see anything worth filming.” The judge and the taxi driver insist on the difference between movies and real life, or more broadly, art and reality. Kiarostami seems to have something else in mind.

In the former scene, the scene in the taxi, the journalist Farazmand is playing himself whereas the taxi driver is portrayed by an actor (at least, he’s not listed as playing himself in the opening credits). This conversation, then, may not have really occurred, although the drive to the Ahankhah residence certainly did. Kiarostami has presumably inserted this dialogue to make the viewer question what is presented on the screen. Is it a movie, or is it life? The scene with the judge is also a reenactment, although this time all the characters play themselves. The judge is the real judge and Kiarostami, off camera, asks him questions. We are inclined to believe that this dialogue did take place, that the judge did question the worth of filming such a simple trial. But did he? There’s no way to know, and attempting to find out the truth only leads to more questions, as I discovered while researching the movie.

The film itself, contrary to the opinion of the taxi driver or the judge, proposes that something becomes worth filming when it is filmed; in other words, the act of representation itself makes its subject worthy of representation. No external explanation is needed other than the resulting piece of art, which, once it has been created, becomes a part of real life. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

It’s Christmas of 2013. In my family we usually have some kind of white elephant gift exchange, and this year the theme is “Bizarre of the Bazaar.” The weirder the better.

All the presents lay stacked on a table, ready to be unwrapped. We play with dice and booze. Around and around they go, and I end up with a miniature treasure chest. 

I don’t know what’s inside, but it’s my turn to open it up. I unlock the chest, and there, staring back at me, in all his glory…

Is an 18-inch long clown. His face is white, his cheeks and nose cherry red. He wears an eternal smile.

The game proceeds, but I’m drawn to him. I know which present I want. 20 minutes later, after countless laughs and a few stiff drinks, the clown is mine.

We sit around the table and brainstorm names. His happiness seems to hide something. This clown looks jolly, but to us, he knows more than he lets on. There is a certain sense of melancholy. He looks at you, and as you look back, you realize just how much those little eyes have seen.

It takes a while, but we finally settle on what to call him. A name to match the melancholy. Something that says “I’ll laugh at your jokes, but the pointless nature of existence is always in the back of my mind.”

We have a new member of the family…

And his name is Floyd.

*

To call this “weird” doesn’t do it justice. Adding an 18-inch clown to our family tree is strange. So much so, that I dare not share it with anybody outside of my immediate family.

Is it abnormal? Yes. But somehow, it fits. Some families have secrets they can’t possibly share. Some families have dark boxes they’d rather not open.

We have Floyd. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

I was 20-something and fresh out of law school in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected. Like the rest of my demographic, I was morbidly depressed about it. So it was meaningful for me when I saw the Weavers’ movie Wasn’t That a Time and heard the great Lee Hays say:

We have a thought for the year. We’ve been around long enough to tell you: Be of good cheer. This too will pass. I’ve had kidney stones and I know.

The Weavers had been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted by the industry. Hays was an alcoholic, a diabetic double amputee, and he would die within months. Kids like me were all bent out of shape about the Reagan ascendency. But old hands like Hays had seen far worse. He wasn’t going to let a simple-minded B-actor like Reagan freak him out. I aspired to that kind of equanimity.

Around the same time, I sat in on a political science lecture by a professor who had been a foreign service officer. He must have been significantly younger than I am now, but he seemed grizzled to me at the time. He said all revolutionary movements are essentially utopian. The central idea is that there is a madman at the wheel. If we could just knock out the madman and grab the wheel, we could steer to safety. He said, sadly, this is a juvenile fantasy. The bitter truth, he told us, is there is no madman. And there is no wheel.

The world is much more complicated than the slogans of the revolutionaries would have it. There are no simple solutions. There are not even any simple problems.

Worse, the idea that there are simple solutions leads inevitably to fanaticism. The notion that there is a simple truth, we know it, and that guy over there is preventing us from reaching it, leads us to excuse pushing that guy out of the way. Read more »

Time to put my winter boots away. They have served me well.

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by Kevin Lively

In the six weeks since taking office, the Trump administration has moved with an alacrity boarding on mania, pursuing the tactical doctrine of Steve Bannon: flooding the zone. In a head spinning few weeks, the effort to reshape the federal government (i.e. make it small enough to drown in a bathtub), spearheaded by Elon Musk have done the following: stop all federal hiring, put all federal diversity equity and inclusion staff on leave, attempted to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funding, offered two million federal workers the option of being paid without working until September – then being fired, installed Elon loyalists inside the highly sensitive treasury payments system (Clinton’s secretary of labor was unamused), moved to cut 90% of USAID’s budget, moved to shut down the consumer financial protection bureau, et cetera, et cetera.

While many of these moves have been challenged by the courts, the sheer scale of this attempt to effectively destroy broad swathes of the federal government is nonetheless shocking. Surely such a broad based attack can’t really be in the interests of Trump’s voters and financial backers? For example, Veterans Affairs doctors are among the 2 million employees who received the offer to quit, and what is really to be gained by cutting funding for HIV medication for South Africa? If the goal was really to save money to address, say, the debt, then you would want to increase IRS resources not fire 6700 members of its staff. This raises the obvious question: “Whose interest is this actually in?”

As I discussed in my previous column, there is a rich history from which the Trump administration came, and the logic of these actions is no exception. In fact proposals to eliminate or reduce many of the functions of government have been widely discussed with varying degrees of enthusiasm among both conservative and liberal policy planners for decades. Albeit none have been able to act with as much zeal as we are now seeing. Most obviously we can look to Reagan as the first real fruition of this spirit. During the 1980 presidential debates he said quite plainly that he wanted to introduce tax cuts in order to reduce government spending. In his eight years, he reduced the top marginal tax rate from 73% to 28%, and cut the highest personal income tax bracket from 70% to 38.5%. This was an insufficiently enthusiastic attack for Pat Robertson. In Robertson’s 1988 presidential bid he promised to cut the budget by $100 billion while eliminating every single Carter holdover from among the 100,000 federal employees who could be terminated at will.

Clinton, although coming from the less enthusiastic side, still passed a substantial welfare cut in 1996 pushed on him by Newt Gingrich. This reform introduced work requirements and devolved the program down to the states as the scandal wracked TANF program. The effects were a rapid drop off in recipients of welfare and medicare: participation dropped by as much as 53% as early as 1998. Needless to say the Bush tax cuts continued the streak, and despite facing the worst financial and deficit crisis in modern memory, Obama made no moves to plug the massive hole in the federal budget from the previous decades of tax cuts on the wealthy. Biden, a hold over from the waning days of the New Deal, appeared to be a last gasp attempt to reverse this trend. Now Trump has shifted into an unrestrained overdrive of the most conservative elements.

If this argument holds, then it appears that there has been some tacit bipartisan consensus which has predominated over the last 40 years or so. Clearly this is a nuanced phenomena with many disagreements. However in broad strokes it seems clear that both parties seemed mostly content to let the government budget and its social programs erode. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

The Paris AI Summit the other week might have been the end of a 10-year run for AI safety as Azeem Azhar, the creator of Exponential View, put it. The concept of AI safety, which can be said to have started in earnest with Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence, had a 10-year run, in which it grew in understanding and acceptance among the public and decisionmakers. Subsequent books, like Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 and Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible, further established the field. High-level AI safety principles were declared in Asilomar in 2017, at that time by all notable AI scientists and leaders.

Further, this was already of course before AI was even actually any good at anything but very narrow tasks. When AI capabilities actually caught up with the hypothetical concerns, with GPT-3 in 2020 and came into the eye of the public in a broad way with ChatGPT in 2022, it led to AI senate hearings, the UK Bletchley Park summit, the Biden Executive Order, the voluntary commitments on the AI labs, the attempted bill SB-1047 in California and the addition of general-purpose models to the EU AI Act.

That 10-year run now seems to be largely over, or at least severely weakened. We had already seen the Trump administration repealing Biden’s Executive Order on AI, removing the ability for the US government to test AI developers’ models for safety. Then, at the Paris AI Action Summit, it became abundantly clear that the world has turned away from AI safety. The main summit had banners stating “Science, not Science Fiction”, the speech from J.D. Vance was very clear that the focus would be only on AI opportunities, Macron focused on investments – the announcement of a new French data center – not mentioning any downsides (“plug, baby, plug”). The voluntary AI developer commitments – the Frontier Safety Frameworks – that had been a focus of earlier UK and Korea summits were glossed over completely. Perhaps most significantly, the formidable State of the Science report led by Yoshua Bengio, the IPCC-style report which was commissioned at the earlier summits and completed for this one, was not mentioned at all in the main event. This report, which was meant to establish a common basis for discussion, was in fact relegated to a side event the week before, at a university two hours outside of Paris. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Ada sits alone at a table contemplating whether she should drink the liquid from the glass in front of her.  She’s been promised that the result of doing so will be an immediate revision to her set of beliefs.  If she drinks from the glass, she will believe only things that are true.  She won’t become omniscient; she won’t know everything.  The liquid will simply replace all false beliefs she has with corresponding true ones.  Ada likes to think that she is intellectually humble.  She likes to believe that she generally acts in accordance with reliable processes for forming beliefs.  Most importantly, Ada believes that she values truth.  Nevertheless, she can’t shake the feeling that drinking from the glass would be a kind of suicide.

In The Sources of Normativity, philosopher Christine Korsgaard argues that reasons for action spring from what she calls our “practical identities.”  These practical identities are ways of conceiving of ourselves that we value and hold dear. For example, I may view myself as a friend, a mother, a lover, etc., and the reasons I have for behaving in various ways are picked out by what those identities permit or forbid.  The identities that provide us with overriding reasons are those we’d rather die than give up.  As Korsgaard says, “The only thing that could be as bad or worse than death is something that for us amounts to death—not being ourselves anymore.”

Harry Frankfurt makes a similar argument in his book, Reasons of Love. He argues that the things we care about are the sources of our reasons and the things that we love create what he calls “volitional necessities”—they generate reasons for action that can’t fail to motivate us, at least to a degree.  The things we love and care about define who we are and what we’re willing to do.

Ada bonds with her sister over their shared love of music.  They enjoy the work of one particular artist above all others.  In particular, they admire this artist’s skill and creativity.  They also share her values.  If Ada were to learn that this artist actually didn’t write her own music, it would not only impact her perception of the artist, it might also impact her relationship with her sister.  If she were to learn that the artist was actually cruel, manipulative, or abusive, she might find her new assessment of the artist’s character at odds with her sister’s assessment. What would happen then? Read more »

Nandipha Mntambo. (Unknown title) 2008.

Cowhide and resin.

More here, here, and here.

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