by Tim Sommers

In an ordinary classroom at a typical American university, two teams of four students sit across from each other in front of small audience, waiting. A judge stands and says, “The first question will be based on Case 15 which is concerned with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” (better known as SNAP).

The gist of the case is this. “Some people have advocated reforming the SNAP program to prevent these funds from being used to purchase unhealthy food. One proposal, for instance, is to stop people from purchasing soda with their benefits. Soda is not a necessary part of a healthy diet and is linked to obesity.” The more specific question the judges are asking this round is, “Is it morally permissible for the government to forbid people from buying soda and candy with SNAP funds.”

The presenting team says, “We believe it is ethically permissible to do so, but we would oppose it. Yes, obesity is a problem. And yes, there is a restriction now on alcohol. But alcohol is a very different case. And there are other ways to address obesity. It is infantilizing to treat people as unable to make their own choices simply because they are currently relying on assistance. While the government has the right to put limits on the assistance they provide, that does not mean they should. SNAP beneficiaries are rational actors as much as anyone. However, they often live in food deserts. Soda is sometimes cheaper than water. And there is nothing wrong with buying candy, for your children for example, sometimes.”

Later the other team will ask them a whole slew of questions about their case. It will ask them to justify their claim that alcohol is a very different case, for example. They will also say that for at least fifteen years now, “nudging” – using insights from behavioral science to subtly influence people’s choices and guide them toward certain decisions – has been widely advocated and aimed, not just at people financially struggling, but everyone. How is this different? Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

When I first met Liara (name changed to protect privacy), my fourteen-year-old daughter’s friend, she was snatching her iPhone from her mother’s hands and furiously typing my daughter’s number into it. Her backpack dangled off one shoulder, her wild hair tumbled to her waist, and she spoke so quickly that my middle-aged brain could barely keep up.

As we drove home from school, my daughter told me that Liara had spent the entire camp talking about thermodynamics and her dream of designing better ways to store solar energy for developing countries. I was only half-listening until she asked, almost hesitantly, “Mom, am I still going to be allowed to wash my hair on Thursdays?”

“What?” I said.

“Liara told me Hindus aren’t supposed to wash their hair on Thursdays. It’s some kind of tradition.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. Liara — the aspiring energy engineer, the daughter of a chemistry teacher — believed in such a thing? Didn’t education, or even basic scientific reasoning, nullify such superstitions? Apparently not. And Liara and her family are far from unusual.

There’s the in-house nurse who tends to my ailing mother and forbids her niece from entering the kitchen while menstruating because she is considered “impure.” There’s Asha (name again changed to protect privacy), an entrepreneur I know, who refused to rent a perfectly located office because its bathroom was near the entrance as she’s a devout follower of Vaastu Shastra, the ancient Indian architectural system that warns such placement can “flush away prosperity.” And there’s that business executive who delayed his relocation to Europe for three months because astrologers advised that the stars were unfavorable. The risk of displeasing the planets, it seemed, outweighed the risk of losing his job.

Across India, such stories are not rare; they are routine. Read more »

Digital photograph.

With permission.

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by Sherman J. Clark

In earlier essays, I argued that beauty can orient our desires and help us thrive in an age of algorithmic manipulation (Beatrice 2.0) and explored how our habits of mind help or hinder us in the effort to seek and see beauty (Aesthetic Phronesis). But even those most capable of wonder can be thwarted by the structures around them. A child who grows up without access to parks or music, a worker whose every moment is colonized by productivity: these are not failures of individual vision but failures of justice.

We face a peculiar injustice when it comes to beauty: it is both hoarded and dismissed as superfluous. These problems intertwine and reinforce each other. Because beauty resists the metrics of productivity that dominate our culture, we fail to recognize it as essential. And because we don’t recognize it as essential, we tolerate its radical maldistribution.

Some will say: in a world where people lack food, housing, or medical care, isn’t it elitist, even indecent, to talk about beauty? I think the opposite is true. What is elitist is the assumption that only elites deserve the things that make life meaningful. What is elitist is the implicit assumption that only wealthy children should have a guide like Beatrice, while everyone else should focus on becoming efficient units of production. To insist that beauty belongs to all is not to indulge in luxury but to refuse a cruel double standard—the belief that nourishment for the soul is optional for some and essential only for others.

Picture two public schools, five miles apart. In one, students walk past gardens and murals, learn music and theater, take field trips to museums. In the other, students pass through metal detectors; the art teacher’s position has gone unfilled for three years; “enrichment” means test prep. Both sets of children are equally capable of awe. Yet only some are invited into beauty, while others are taught—by architecture, by curriculum, by omission—that beauty is not for them.

What these two schools reveal is not just inequality of resources but inequality of invitation. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

The full title of Charles Dickens’ 1843 classic is “A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story for Christmas.”  Inspired by a report on child labor, Dickens originally intended to write a pamphlet titled “An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.” But this  project took a life of its own and mutated into the classic story about Ebenezer Scrooge that virtually all of us think we know. It’s an exaggeration to say that Dickens invented Christmas, but no exaggeration to say that Dickens’ story has become in our culture an inseparable fixture of that holiday.

Some take the story as a mere entertainment or a simple allegory to inspire Christmas cheer. But it poses a heavy question: is it possible for someone who has lived a long, narrow, nasty, obsessive, compulsive, solitary and essentially meaningless life to still live a fulfilling, worthwhile, and meaningful one? Dickens’ answer, with humor, pathos and gripping storytelling, was yes, which offers hope and direction for the rest of us however bad or sad our lives have become by our own doing. In the unfolding of his story Dickens also provides a societal critique that unfortunately still rings true today.

It is perhaps for these reasons that so many of different backgrounds and differing beliefs have claimed A Christmas Carol as their own. Read more »

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by Azadeh Amirsadri

In my current line of work as a therapist, when I see teenagers, at first they usually present with generalized anxiety disorder, or depression, or both. Parents bring a child in to tell me about all the things not going well, from bad grades and a messy room, to general disrespect and rudeness. This is usually not cause for concern from my point of view and I usually tell them I am not a behaviorist, but can help them get closer to their child and see what else is going on. Most parents, but not all, want a change in their child’s behavior. “He doesn’t turn in his work in school, she eats in her room and leaves the dishes there, etc.” When I meet with parents, I do a general intake and get a picture of how this family functions and communicates with each member to get a better snapshot of what is going on. That is if the parents are open with me. Many times, I get one version of how the family functions and come to find out rather quickly that the narrative shared with me is not exactly how things are.
 
June (not her real name) is 16 and a half years old and a junior in high school. I have been seeing her on and off, since she was 14 years old, when her father and grandmother brought her in. She has been on ADHD medication since she was in elementary school and because of her moodiness, her grandmother and father were wondering about anti-depression medication. June had a psychiatrist who was seeing her every three months for medication consultation.

When I first met her father and grandmother, the mother and her son could not tolerate to be in the same room at the same time, and the tension between them was palpable. I thought what it must be like for June to live in a house with these two people who barely spoke or looked at each other. Two parental figures, separated in the same house yet tied together for life. I realized quickly that I had to speak to them separately to see what issues they were bringing in and what goals and results they were hoping for. Both said they wanted June to communicate more with them, spend less time in her room and participate in school, both academically and socially. Her grandmother spoke about June’s mother, in rather vague terms and said she didn’t have a relationship with her. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

In South India, they’re worried. For following some stated national priorities, for performing well at them in comparison to the North, the states of the South might be punished: They stand to lose a certain quantum of political power.

India’s 1971 Census counted about 548 million Indians. Primarily based on that number, the Lok Sabha – our Lower House of Parliament – has 543 elected seats, a number that hasn’t changed since 1977. So at the time, each Member of Parliament represented about 1 million Indians. This also means that each individual state elected MPs to the Lok Sabha broadly in proportion to its population. Tamil Nadu, home to about 41 million people in 1971, has 39 seats. Uttar Pradesh, with about 88 million in 1971, has 85 seats. (When the state of Uttarakhand was hived off from UP in 2000, it got 5 of those 85 – for convenience, I’m clubbing the two here.)

And so on.

The idea was that this seat allocation would be periodically reviewed, and these numbers revised accordingly. That’s what happened in the first few decades of Indian independence. The Lok Sabha had 489 seats in India’s first election, in 1951. That increased to 494, then 520, and finally 543. All of which might make you wonder: if we had that gradual increase in our first 30 years, why have we had no change in the next 45?

Ah, but in wondering that, you’re getting into Southern worry territory.

Also part of our early years was widespread concern about our increasing population. “Family planning” was a phrase familiar to us who grew up in a still-young India. A government firm, Hindustan Latex, manufactured and sold Nirodh, the first brand of condoms sold widely in the country. The slogan Do ya teen bas (“two or three is enough”) appeared on walls and the sides of buses, was used in songs and became a pop culture meme. That slogan has mutated over the years into Hum do, hamare do (“We two and our two”) and even “We two, ours one”, suggesting that concern over a growing population has never abated. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

I do not remember whether one of our cats had killed it or whether I had run over it with the lawn mower, but I do remember peeling the poor milk snake’s corpse off the grass and walking across the yard with it dangling from my fingertips, en route to the manure pile near the barn where I intended to stow it. When I walked in front of the screen door of the little cottage in the dooryard, I was startled by a sudden “EWW! Take that thing away!” I did as she wished; and when I returned, E. D. (as she was called) was still at the door, shaking her head. Claude had joined her there, laughing. He said to me, “Was that your good buddy?”

“That’s his good buddy, all right,” E. D. repeated. I took this to mean something like its opposite, similar to how the statement, “Well, bless his heart,” an expression my uncle in Kentucky frequently used, meant something like “F— him!” It meant my “good buddy” was anything but good.

E. D. from South Carolina was the second wife of Claude from Tennessee, co-owner of the property in Maine along with his sister, Zelma Bryant, where I have lived with my other half for forty years now. The snake episode happened back in the late eighties or early nineties; it’s hard to remember when events in the distant past actually happened; but it was back when they were both still well enough to drive up from Rock Hill to visit, and when the guest cottage my partner had built for them was so new the unpainted pine clapboards and trim were still bright yellow in color.

“You don’t have to worry about the snakes in Maine,” I think I said. “They’re nothing like the ones you’ve got down south.”

“Ah don’t care. A snake’s a snake!”

And farm life is farm life, North or South. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

Every now and again, I go through my bookshelves to see if there’s anything that I can donate to the Friends of the Library bookstore. I like to think that books are forever, but I live in a small house. Sometimes I find things on the shelves that I not only forgot I ever had but can’t imagine why I ever bought.

Late this summer, I went through a set of bookshelves containing fiction. For some reason I decided to begin this process just before bed. I was able to identify a small stack of books that I was willing to part with. As I drifted off to sleep, I was thinking that in the morning I’d add the paperback Hitchhiker’s Guide books by Douglas Adams to the stack. Although I have fond memories of reading these books, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d opened any of them, or even removed them from the shelves. I couldn’t see a good reason to keep them.

In the morning, I pulled them down and leafed through them. I smiled as I read bits of them. The cover of one of the books was damaged by water at some point, back when my children were very young. In fact, my life was very different when I bought these books, and they conjured up that earlier time.

I remembered the way that I was introduced to the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. I used to listen to a quiz show called My Word every Saturday morning on the local NPR station. One day I turned on the radio a little early for My Word and caught the end of an episode of the radio adaptation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. I was baffled by what I was hearing (who is this Zaphod Beeblebrox person?), so the next week I turned the radio on in time to hear the whole episode and try to get my bearings.

Memories like that are not a good reason to hold onto books. It doesn’t seem as if the memories should depend on their presence. If that younger self exists in my mind, she’s still there. But I put them back on the shelf, next to Little Women (Adams, Alcott, Austen…). They connected me to my past in a way I didn’t want to lose. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Prologue
Most people visit the James A. Garfield Memorial to admire its Victorian splendor, or to pay respects to a forgotten president. I go for another reason: my great-great-grandfather carved some of its stone. If Garfield had lived out his term, the man might never have come to Cleveland, never met the woman who became my great-great-grandmother, and I—and a whole thicket of brothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts—would never have arrived on this earth. Absurd as it sounds, my existence is one more ripple in the long aftermath of a presidential assassination. Before getting to that family tale, it’s worth recalling who Garfield was, and why his loss mattered far beyond my own accidental genealogy.

James A. Garfield was the most qualified man ever to be elected president of the United States. He was a fine physical specimen: six foot, 185 pounds, born in a log cabin, and good with his fists. He had a towering intellect, led a frontier college, taught the classics, and could write in Latin with one hand, Greek with the other. People liked him, even his political enemies. He’d greet you with a bear hug on his way to the lectern or pulpit to deliver a thoughtful speech or sermon (he was an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ church). A fervent abolitionist and Civil War hero, he served nine terms in Congress and knew how to work the levers of government.

Most attractively, when he was nominated for the presidency as a compromise candidate in a deadlocked 1880 Republican convention, he didn’t want the job. Seriously. His long seniority in the House gave him power and influence he was reluctant to sacrifice.

But once this superb human being, this fine farmer, husband, and father of five surviving children, moved into the White House in 1881, he never got the chance to fulfill his promise or address the great issues of his day—reconstruction, national infrastructure, justice for Native Americans—or set a moral direction for America’s growing wealth and international presence. Instead, he spent almost every minute of his scant 120 days in office wrestling with the squalid business of political patronage—battling the corrupt rascals of his own party who were desperate to preserve their petty prerogatives in the distribution of remunerative public offices.

He had only just scored a solid victory in this effort, humiliating his chief enemy, the villainous Senator Roscoe Conkling, and was eagerly preparing to take on the real work of the presidency when he was shot in the back by a perfect fool, and killed—after two agonizing months—by inept doctors who probed his wound with dirty fingers.

Six months as president. That was all he got. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

Like the Thomson’s gazelle of Part I, the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) evolved an ability to communicate with predators. Not by stotting but by flagging the white underside of their tail.

Why is this considered communication? Communication requires intention, distinguishing a cue from a signal. To a deer, a predator’s smell coming from upwind is a cue. By marking their territory, deer leave signals to others. Cues emerge from simple correlation, association of one signal (odor) with another (the presence of a predator). Over evolutionary time, cues can become signals. After detecting a predator, a deer might turn to flee. Predators constantly evaluate whether to pursue a chase, paying close attention to cues of early detection and fitness. Once predators use these cues to abort the chase, deer might evolve increasingly conspicuous displays, like flagging a highly contrasted tail, simply to advertise this cue to the predator. At this point, the fleeting readiness cue evolves into a fleeting readiness signal.

To be relevant the signal should not be only about detection but also about the ability to outrun predators. As predicted, faster deer are observed to be more likely to wag their tails and the proportion of time the tail stands erect increases with flight speed (Caro et al., 1995). While it may seem surprising that slower deer would not try to bluff their way out of a hunt, a signal is only as efficient as it is honest. If tail wagging were used every time regardless of flight capabilities, it would make the signal meaningless. After all, signals are built from correlations that are of interest to both the sender and the receiver. Break the correlation, break the signal, and everybody loses.

To better understand this behavior, a comparison with mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) proves insightful. Read more »

Leaves on the ground in Brixen, South Tyrol, which looked like spilled treasure to me.

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by Peter Topolewski

On a stage in London, and another in New York City, is a play called Punch.

It tells the story of young man from a scuffed up section of Nottingham who, at the end of a pub crawl, throws a single punch at an unsuspecting 28-year-old named James. A paramedic in training, James was at the pub with his dad following a cricket match. The punch from Jacob felled James. Days later he was dead.

The play is only tangentially about what led to Jacob throwing that punch. And it but briefly covers the 14 months he served in prison for manslaughter. It is mainly about what followed his release, especially the relationship that formed between Jacob—nineteen years old when he killed James—and James’ grieving parents Joan and David.

What do we do with suffering? the singer and novelist Nick Cave asks. Transform it to keep it from spreading? Or transmit it, allowing it to continue to do its damage? To not transform our suffering, he writes, and instead transmit our pain to others, in the form of abuse, torture, hatred, misanthropy, cynicism, blaming and victimhood, compounds the world’s suffering.

In the months after James’ death, his parents realize their grief is transforming them into something James would not like. Frightened, maybe a bit disgusted with where they are heading, searching for a way forward, they accept an invitation to explore restorative justice. Simple in concept, restorative justice could look like Mount Everest to parents suffering through the death of their son. It is a structured, mediated dialogue between people hurt by a crime and the perpetrator of that crime.

Through the machinations of restorative justice, Joan and David connect with Jacob to learn more about what happened that night, and why. Along the way they struggle with the idea of forgiving Jacob for what he’s done. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

Many scholars of the hard sciences have recently descended into an understandable panic over the anti-intellectual actions of the current destructive regime in the White House. The Trump administration has begun to dismantle the federal funding system that benefited academia since the Cold War. Many critics see this as an unprecedented and aggressive intervention by the state into academia in order to curtail academic freedom, a standard expectation of the modern university system. The establishment of facts about the world via testable and repeatable hypothesis helped shape western society for centuries now.

Over the course of the 20th century, scientific research incubated in academia became a key driver of many changes (good and bad) in our society. Academia became the linchpin of a network of public-private partnerships that led to these improvements, especially during the Cold War. Without university-level research it seems unlikely that we’d have our regime of vaccinations that has saved millions of lives. Nor would we have the modern computing industry. From the point of view of many academic scientists, it took only a single, massively destructive administration to send the whole network into a death spiral. How could the work of building a system of knowledge over 150 or so years come tumbling down over a handful of years? The reality is that the process of undermining the academy is not just a byproduct of the Trump era. It did not begin with this current attack on science. Rather, the center and far right have long targeted the the humanities and social (or soft) sciences.

In recent years, education has been shifting towards centering STEM fields which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Sometimes this includes the social sciences and humanities but that’s hotly debated. The term gained traction in 1990s. Placing STEM at the center of education became a rallying cry among those wanting to keep a university education inline with a changing economy after the Cold War. Put differently, they sought to refocus sciences to better serve the needs of capital in the neoliberal economy. By that time, the computing industry was growing and computer science departments were expanding to accommodate the need. Other fields such as engineering and other technologies got a boost as well. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by David J. Lobina

Having lived in Madrid through much of my teen years, I remember the “20-N” rather well –  November the 20^th being the date Francisco Franco, the last of the far-right European dictators, died in his bed, and a date that is commemorated ever since by the far-right in Spain. The 20-N was always a tricky day in Madrid in the 1990s, my decade (but apparently it was much worse in the 80s): during the day the old guard would be out in the usual squares with their songs and salutes, but at night there were plenty of youth out “hunting”, including many who came from overseas, especially from Germany and Italy (there were also antagonist groups on the look-out for “neo-Nazis”, as skinheads were invariably called then; I was of course nowhere near any of the action).

The far-right crowd also commemorate the death of José Antonio Primo de Rivera on the 20-N, the founder of Falange Española (Spanish Phalanx), a party that was created after the model of Italian Fascism (actual fascism!), but which eventually Franco brought under the control of the Movimiento Nacional party, diluting its fascist character somewhat. Primo de Rivera died early on during the Spanish Civil War, on November the 20^th, 1936 (the war started in July 1936), and under circumstances that suggest Franco did little to save him (they were in fact rivals at the time, both vying for leadership of the nationalist side in the war, as discussed in Paul Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War).

This very week happens to be the 50^th anniversary of Franco’s death, and so there’ll be celebrations and remembrances of various kinds – by Franco admirers, on the one hand, and by people celebrating democracy instead, on the other. There’ll also be plenty of critical retrospectives and condemnations – again, of Franco and his regime (call it Francoism), on the one hand, and no doubt of Spanish democracy too. It is also the 50^th anniversary of the restoration of the monarchy in Spain, and naturally now the so-called emeritus King of Spain (defenestrated as he was in 2014, after one too many scandals) has had the brilliant idea of publishing his memoirs about his time in power (in French only, so far), a publication where he shows genuine affection for Franco – Juan Carlos I de Borbón, for it is he!, was made King of Spain by Franco, after all. Not this post, though, which shall fall squarely on the side of a critical appraisal of Francoism, and quite the laser-focused one at that. Read more »

Nick Brandt. Zaina, Laila and Haroub, Jordan, 2024. From The Echo of Our Voices – The Day May Break.

“… THE ECHO OF OUR VOICES is the fourth Chapter of The Day May Break. It was photographed in Jordan, which is considered the second most water-scarce country in the world. The photographs feature refugee families, who fled the war in Syria, now living in Jordan. Living lives of continuous displacement largely due to climate change, they are forced to move their homes up to several times a year in search of agricultural work, moving to wherever there has been sufficient rainfall to enable crops to grow.

The stacks of boxes that the families sit and stand together on aim skyward — a verticality implying more sense of strength or defiance — and provide pedestals for those that in our society are typically unseen and unheard….”

More here, here, and here.

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