Chuang Tzu’s Butterfly

“Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.” —Chinese poet/philosopher, 4^th century BC

Chuang Tzu’s Butterfly

the other night when I was sleeping
gone so far the moonlight leaping
through my window, past the curtain,
instantly I knew for certain
that I was a butterfly

I went flitting flower to flower,
I grew freer by the hour,
no concern for job or romance,
through the night I just
danced and I danced

but when the morning light was breaking,
the sun, the sun, the moon forsaken,
I got up threw back the covers,
instantly I was another
knew I was a man again

between that butterfly and me
I must make some kind of line,
can’t have a common destiny

between me and this lungful of air that I breathe
I must make some kind of line
something solid my reason can squeeze

Jim Culleny
(Written as a song in 1975)

by Thomas R. Wells

Environmentalists are always complaining that governments are obsessed with GDP and economic growth, and that this is a bad thing because economic growth is bad for the environment. They are partly right but mostly wrong. First, while governments talk about GDP a lot, that does not mean that they actually prioritise economic growth. Second, properly understood  economic growth is a great and wonderful thing that we should want more of.

Governments around the world – of every ideology – are in favour of economic growth all else being equal. Economic growth increases the wealth of a population and hence improves their options and those of the government that rules them. This is extremely politically convenient as it allows governments to serve all their various constituencies without having to make hard choices between them, and so keep them happy enough that they get to stay in power. Honest politicians can provide more public services to those who demand them, while keeping the tax rate the same. Corrupt politicians can get away with funneling money to themselves and their cronies without risking revolution. More money means fewer and easier political problems.

However, just because someone values a certain outcome, does not mean that they value it enough to take the necessary painful steps to achieve it. (Or else everyone would get A’s in all their exams and keep the waist size they had in high-school.) It turns out that the policies governments need to implement (or stop implementing) in order for their societies to get richer are often more politically costly than they are worth. Take for example governments’ responsibility for the housing crisis across the rich world, in which the price of housing rises faster than incomes. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Untitled. April 1, 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Ada Bronowski 

There is something bewildering about life in Paris under Nazi occupation: theatres, cinemas, cabarets and cafés in full swing, swarming with Nazi officials mingling with the locals, when, all the while, people are arrested in broad daylight, dragged out of their apartments, tracked, tortured and killed for being Jewish or communist, active in the resistance, gay or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the midst of food shortages and curfews, the champagne galas, dinners at Maxim’s, lobster at the Etoile de Kleber, the thirst for entertainment and the possibilities for quenching it multiplied. A newly published French book by the writer, producer and playwright Pierre Laville, La Guerre Les Avait Jetés Là (literally translated: The war threw them there, Robert Laffont, 2023), delves with compassion and understanding into the ambiguities of living in Nazi-invaded Paris focusing on the ins and outs of one of the most important theatrical institutions in France, the Comédie-Française. Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

A Conversation

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” –Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1791

“Many others … say that it is dangerous and absurd to base modern public safety on the 1700s and 1800s when a gun can be built with a 3-D printer and plans shared on the internet.” – Shawn Hubler, The New York Times, March 16, 2023

“The Republicans have turned the Second Amendment into a Golem. They’ve animated it, weaponized it, and unleashed it upon their enemies. It is killing children. It is time to hit this monstrosity in its clay feet.” –Elie Mystal, The Nation, August 7, 2019

“We only receive what we demand, and if we want hell, then hell’s what we’ll have.” –Jack Johnson, “Cookie Jar”

“Not doing anything about this is an insane dereliction of our collective humanity.” –Stephen Colbert

“_________________________________” –The 3,263 American children killed by guns since 2014 (as of March 30, 2023)

Two Axioms 

1. The life of a single child is worth more than the Second Amendment. If we are incapable of protecting both simultaneously, then we must choose to prioritize the life of the child. 
2. If you refuse to prioritize the life of the child above the Second Amendment, then you are no longer participating in the shared enterprise of creating a functional society. 

These are not political stances. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

One of the strange juxtapositions appearing in the past few weeks was the publication of Ibram X. Kendi’s essay, “The Crisis of the Intellectuals” in The Atlantic, followed – a day or so later – by Marty Baron’s essay, “We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too?” in the Washington Post.

Kendi’s essay is focused on pushing back against the traditional framing of the intellectual “as measured, objective, ideologically neutral, and apolitical” – a framing that Kendi finds crippling and, indeed, life-destroying. In contrast, Baron’s essay is focused on defending the ideal of objectivity from its detractors – including, although he is not mentioned by name, Kendi.

The authors themselves also offer a marked contrast. Although now undoubtedly an academic superstar and public intellectual, Kendi himself describes his ascension as unlikely, given that he “came from a non-elite academic pedigree, emerged proudly from a historically Black university, [and] earned a doctorate in African American Studies.” In contrast, Baron enjoyed a more predictable pathway to the pinnacle of his profession. He earned his B.A. and M.B.A. degrees in four years from Lehigh University, began his journalistic career at the Miami Herald, and then progressed quickly from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times, and then – now as executive editor – back to the Herald, after which he became executive editor of the Boston Globe (immortalized in the movie Spotlight), and finally the executive editor of the Washington Post. Kendi is 40; Baron, a generation older, is 68. Read more »

At the train station in Freienfeld, South Tyrol.

by Derek Neal

According to my father, David Mamet once said that his scripts are about “men in confined space.” I have been unable to verify this quote, but if you look on the internet, there’s an awful lot of writing about Mamet and “confined space.” In particular, I suspect the origin of this apocryphal statement may be a review of American Buffalo by Roger Ebert, in which he mentions that Mamet’s play succeeds where the film fails because, on stage, the characters are “trapped in space and time,” while on the screen they seem “less confined.” It goes without saying that a film allows for greater movement of its characters than a play, but a movie can trap its characters if it chooses to, and this choice can be all the more effective because it’s a conscious one, not something imposed by circumstances. One film that makes this choice is Living, which I saw this past weekend.

The first scene of the film sees Mr. Wakeling, young and fresh faced, join his new colleagues on the platform of the local train station. They’re heading into London for the day’s work, and they, along with most everyone else on the platform, are dressed in suit, tie, and jacket. It’s 1953. Because it’s Mr. Wakeling’s first day, he’s unsure about what the appropriate etiquette is. He’s not at work yet, and he hasn’t met two of his new colleagues, although he does recognize a third from the interview. Should he go over and introduce himself? Should he avoid them, pretend he hasn’t noticed them standing there? He makes eye contact with the one he recognizes from the interview, who nods almost imperceptibly, granting him permission and entry into their group. Read more »

Kevin Beasley. Reunion.

More here, here, and here.

by R. Passov

My founding partner, Jennifer, is right. Eventually I’ll run out of tricks and have to to start teaching math. Still the tricks are fun and, actually, they do help. The trick I brought to Sonia’s 3rd grade class in North Hampton, MA. is – truth be told – one I found in a math book for kids: I draw strange symbols on the board, get the class to agree to a consistent interpretation for the symbols then arrange the symbols in patterns that, run against the pre-agreed upon interpretations, become sentences in English.

As a group got near to the end of a correct deciphering, their squeals gave them away. What a privilege to watch.

Sonia suggested I arrive at the beginning of the day to watch the class settle. Each of the 22 or so students had a brown paper bag. They scrambled over one another while digging through their bags, all of which contained the same items: something made of dough wrapped in cellophane, that looked like a hot dog and something else, also wrapped in cellophane that I was unable to assign to any particular food category. At least half the students unwrapped packages only to play with the contents.

After breakfast, Sonia brought the students to a carpet at the front of the class. While she sat off to the the side, she began the day’s instructions: “Jayden, it’s your turn to choose the greeting.”

Jayden chose a peace sign. “Ok,” said Sonia, “give your greeting to Drea.”  “Peace,” said Jayden. “Peace and happiness.”  

Sonia turned to Drea: “Give your greeting to Mikel.” And so it went, each student gleefully obeying as Sonia orchestrated one greeting then another. After the greetings, Sonia selected a student to be the crew leader. Mikel, a tall, skinny boy, walked over to artwork hanging on the inside of an open closet door. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

My favorite bookstore closed this month. Well, my favorite bookstore in Zurich, where I live. Also it hasn’t actually closed, it’s only changing hands. But Pile of Books, opened in 2007 by Daniel Nufer and run by him and his wife, Verena Nufer-Huber, until two weeks ago, has been such an expression of Dani’s character that it is hard to imagine the form it will take in his absence.

There have been other bookstores in my life, of greater or lesser importance to me depending on my phase of development. There was for instance the gift shop on Saint Catherine Street, in Montreal, the city of my birth, where my grandparents took me in the mid-1970s to pick out a Passover present (actually my ransom for finding the afikomen), and I, in an early gesture of perversity, chose a glossy album commemorating the Tutankhamun exhibition. Then there was Britnell’s, at Yonge and Bloor in Toronto, the city in which I came of age following our move from Quebec in the wake of the Révolution tranquille—a shop now long gone but in the late 1970s an invitingly Dickensian emporium, and the site of my first agonized Christmas gift-buying with an embryonic disposable income. Later, after my departure from Canada, there was Micawber Books, the explicitly Dickensian shop in Nassau Street, in Princeton, New Jersey, where I had my copy of Time’s Arrow signed by its author, Martin Amis, who was in town to give a coruscating talk on American socio-politics and to reminisce about his childhood on campus when his father lectured at Princeton in the 1950s. Read more »

The day after the parade in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Bill Benzon

I became hooked on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in the Spring of 1969, my last semester as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Three years later “Kubla Khan” had become the standard against which I measured my understanding of the human mind. That is why I am about to tell a story about how my interest in the mind has evolved through “Kubla Khan” to include, most recently, ChatGPT. Strange as it may seem, that poem is the vehicle through which I am coming to terms with this new technology and arriving at a sense of its potential.

There is a sense in which the story of that great poem can be traced back to the 11th century invasion of Britain by the Norman French, for that’s what gave rise to the English language. Some centuries later that story encountered a tale born of an encounter between an Italian merchant, Marco Polo, and a Mongolian warlord, Kubla Khan, which, when enlivened by the East India Company’s trade in opium, set fire to the mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We need not trace that trajectory in any detail. I mention it only to give a sense of the scope of this 54-line poem, which is one of the best-known poems in the English language, and is perhaps unique in the annals of Western literature. It has made its mark on popular culture, from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, where it names Kane’s estate, Xanadu, thereby establishing the matrix for the whole film, to a hit song and film by Olivia Newton-John, Xanadu, and even provided that most vulgar of real-estate barons, Donald Trump, with the name for the nightclub, Xanadu, in his now defunct Atlantic City casino. Read more »