by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Every civilization eventually reaches the edge of its own understanding. The Enlightenment, which was basically a grand project of faith in reason, sought to replace the mysteries of revelation with the lucidity of thought. It promised that disciplined rationality could illuminate every corner of existence. It was thought that that through observation, experiment, and the methodical accumulation of knowledge, humanity could build a transparent world where nothing remained obscure. Knowledge would rise like light refracted through a cathedral of glass, cleansing superstition and disorder. Yet this grand confidence carried within it the seed of its undoing. The very tools of reason that once liberated humankind also revealed the boundaries of comprehension. The Enlightenment’s most profound legacy was perhaps not infinite clarity but the realization that even reason has horizons it cannot cross. By the twentieth century, the dream of total understanding had hardened into the austere project of formalized mathematics, symbolic logic, and mechanical computation. It finally fell crumbling down. It was a quest to capture truth in the language of machines, and in doing so, to continue the Enlightenment by other means.

Let us begin with Leibniz, who envisioned a future in which every disagreement could be settled through calculation. “Let us compute,” he declared, envisioning a characteristica universalis, a universal language in which thought itself could be reduced to algebraic precision. For him, reason was not merely a human faculty but an architecture of truth. It was a divine syntax underlying the cosmos. Through rational analysis, Leibniz believed, everything from theology to mechanics could be rendered transparent. This was the audacious spirit of the Enlightenment i.e., the conviction that the world, properly translated into the language of reason, would yield its secrets without remainder. Immanuel Kant inherited this dream and showed that reason, while vast, is not infinite, that it generates its own horizon. The limits of reason, Kant wrote, are not defects but conditions of possibility. He thought that we can never know the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich). This is because knowledge is not a mirror but a creative act, shaping the appearances it seeks to understand. Where Leibniz saw the universe as a divine calculus, Kant saw it as a theater of understanding. The world was ordered by this understanding not by the world as it is, but by the mind that apprehends it. Rousseau afterwards even questioned whether the march of reason brought progress or alienation, warning that civilization’s rational order might enslave rather than liberate.

Enlightenment’s faith endured in science and in the dream that the human mind, through the right method, might still one day comprehend the whole. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

The question of the day on everyone’s minds is whether AI is a boom or a bust. But if we lift our eyes ever so slightly from the question of the day and look at the bigger picture, two bigger questions come into view.

One: Will AI take our jobs? This debate seems to happen for all new technologies, but has been especially salient for AI. This makes sense. (Putting aside questions of per-unit economics and market distorting preferences), if you define AGI as something that can do anything humans can do, then by definition, you have also defined yourself out of any jobs remaining.

Two: Is dropping fertility a crisis? Fertility has been dropping precipitously in developed countries for years, first in East Asia, then Western Europe, and now in practically all countries. Immigration has been the solution, but sometime in this century, the global population as a whole will peak and start shrinking. Many economists, such as Robin Hanson, are deeply worried about this. This again makes sense. Innovation is closely linked to the number of people around to come up with innovations and shifting demographics will turn existing social security systems upside down.

However, a positive, bigger picture reading would be that these two effects might cancel each other out, or at least partly offset each other. The effects of both are of course highly uncertain, but from what we can best tell, these will largely overlap in timing, and could potentially have counteracting effects. By the middle of the century, one potential world is certainly one where AI has replaced humans in many jobs, but the number of working-age humans has gone down, so there are fewer humans that need employment. Or a world where a machine-to-machine economy fills government coffers with more than enough revenue to support the costs of the larger number of non-working age humans in need of pension and healthcare. It seems almost too good to be true that these two massive macro-level trends would coincide in time during the same century. Why is it that, just as the groundwork is laid for creating artificial intelligences that might be able to replace humans for many tasks, improvements in healthcare and economic pressures mean that families start having fewer children in most of the world? Read more »

by Eric Schenck

In Arabic, the word kahwa means coffee. At least that’s how I learned it. The Egyptian dialect doesn’t seem to care about the letter qoff, and will leave the sound off just about every word it appears in. The result? 

Ahwa.

It still means coffee, but the word takes on a much bigger meaning in Egyptian culture. That’s because the word also means “café.” And not a Western style café like Starbucks, where you sit inside with air conditioning and sip on fancy drinks. No – this is something much, much different. 

The ahwa, as I will come to find out, is the “café of the people.” 

And I love it.

*

Egyptian ahwas are a funny place. They start out intimidating. It’s 2015, I’ve just moved to Cairo, and I don’t quite know what to make of the thousands of outdoor cafés that seem to be everywhere.  They are almost constantly full of people. Loud, fast-paced, and covered in a slight haze of shisha smoke, ahwas are a shock to your senses. They give me a sort of anxiety I never knew I had. 

But they quickly become one of my favorite things about Egypt. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self-portrait in Temple, Jogjakarta, Indonesia, October 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Barry Goldman

It was more than 50 years ago that Mike and I invented Corn Mush Latke Pie. We were living in a flat on Margaret Street near 7 Mile and Woodward in Detroit. We paid 110 bucks a month for the place. It had white walls, white drapes, red carpeting and the kind of bathroom sink that has the hot water coming out of one faucet and the cold out of another. For furniture we had two lawn chairs and a big brass ashtray. We were “in school.”

One night it got to be time to eat and neither of us had any money so we had to look in the cupboard. Naturally, there was nothing in there you could just eat. Stuff you could just eat we had long since eaten. The stuff that was still in the cupboard you had to cook. It was left over from the first week we moved in when we said we would stop eating in restaurants all the time and save money.

What we came up with was some potatoes with giant tubers growing out of them and some Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. We snapped off the tubers and grated the potatoes, mixed the corn muffin mix with some water and garlic powder and hot pepper flakes, and put the whole thing in a cast iron skillet and put it in the oven. We called it Corn Mush Latke Pie because we didn’t know what else to call it and because latke is Yiddish for potato pancake and potato pancakes are traditional on Hanukkah and it was roughly Hanukkah as near as we could figure.

It was awful, as you might have guessed. Read more »

Rear View

In reflection, the world’s not just a shifty place,
but odd really, the unexpectedness of it, it’s
sudden winds & wild humans shifting as I’ve aged,
sliding from simply familiar to things with
torn edges, never fully knowable, open-ended,
dangerous, yet held together tentatively by
threads of love and unexpected revelations
of beauty until, in entirety, it’s become
not just odd, but
odder still.

Jim Culleny, 11/9/25

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by Eric Feigenbaum

From a corner room in Singapore’s Peninsula hotel, I spent many nights staring out the windows, watch sparks fly silently from the nearby construction sites. Up on the 18^th or 14^th or 20^th floors, Singapore looked still and calm at midnight or 1am. Unlike many big metropolitans, Singapore streets – even in the city center – become quiet at night, especially a weeknight. There was an other-worldly quality watching Singapore’s downtown sleep at night.

My very first visit to Singapore was in February 2004. As business had it, by the end of the year, I was going frequently and for increasingly long stretches – sometimes for seven to ten days at a time, until I rented a condo in March 2025.

But 2004 was filled with nights looking out at the big, fast-moving clouds, giant sky, ships anchored offshore and ever-growing skyline. And sparks. Always sparks coming from below.

It took me a visit or two to realize the new National Library building being built just a couple of blocks away was under construction seemingly 24 hours a day. Which meant from visit to visit – even if it was just a few weeks between – the building grew rapidly. In fact, the 16-story, 338 foot tall, 121,675 square foot site with a gross floor area of 632,918 square feet was completed in less than 18 months. An amazing accomplishment.

As a comparison point, a recently very similar sized project in San Francisco – the 5M Office Tower at 415 Natoma Street took began in mid-2019, taking two years and nine months. Its cost – $158 million – is only $3 million more than the National Library’s – and ironically, the building received a development loan of $393 million from Singapore’s United Overseas Bank.

In a similar time-period as the construction of the Singapore National Library, my alma mater, the University of Washington, built a new Business School building – PACCAR Hall – on nice flat land in exactly two years from 2008 to 2010. Despite it being five stories and 133,000 square feet of total floor area – almost one fifth of the National Library’s – it still took six months longer to construct.

Obviously, 24-hour a day construction gives Singapore an advantage in construction time. But doesn’t that create around-the-clock noise that disturbs the city? Isn’t it inordinately expensive? Aren’t labor unions protesting? Read more »

by Charles Siegel

There can have been very few musicians who played such key roles, in so many different bands in so many different genres, as Danny Thompson.  When he died at 86 in September, music lost one of its great connectors.

I first learned of Thompson as a freshman in college, when my roommate introduced me to Pentangle. There had never been a band like Pentangle, and there really hasn’t been one quite like them since either. They were an utterly unique melding of folk and jazz. The band’s guitarists, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, were two of the leading English folk guitarists of the day when Pentangle was founded in 1967. Terry Cox was an established jazz drummer, and Jacqui McShee was an up-and-coming folk singer.

At the center of it all was Danny Thompson on bass. By 1967 he’d already had a wide variety of musical experience, not to mention a turbulent life.

Born in Devon, he never knew his father, a miner who joined the Royal Navy at the start of World War II and was killed in a U-boat attack.  His sister died not long after, and he and his mother moved to Battersea, then a rough area of London yet to be gentrified.

He was a good soccer player — good enough to play for Chelsea’s youth teams. And he was a good boxer, winning 22 of 23 fights. But already, music was becoming his consuming passion. By the time he was a young teenager he had tried guitar, mandolin, trumpet and trombone. He told an interviewer that one reason he gave up trombone was his boxing, “because a smack in the chops is not very good for that.”

After all of those instruments, he settled on the double bass. Like pretty much every young musician in England in the 1950s, he started out playing in skiffle bands, and like everyone from Paul McCartney to Jimmy Page, he was inspired by Lonnie Donegan.

From there, he played in strip clubs in Soho and on American military bases. In keeping with his already ornery personality, in 1957 he was arrested for failure to report for national service.  Three days before he was sent to prison, he married his girlfriend, and then was posted to Malaysia for two years, where he took up the trombone again in an army band. Read more »

by Akim Reinahrdt

Language: Ooh, a talkie!
Strong Language: No shit
Disturbing Images: Worse than a mirror?
Nudity: Promises, promises
Sexual Content: Awkward birds & bees talk?
Sex: That’s not sex
Substance Abuse: That’s not abuse
Alcohol Use: Shots!
Smoking: With what cigarettes cost nowadays?
Product Placement: Good reminder not to buy any of it
Violence: You talkin’ to me?
Child Abuse References: I could use a good spanking
Birth: The horror!
Graphic Medical Procedures: Democracy’s autopsy?
Flashing Lights: Bamp-Bamp-Bamp da-da-da-da
Suicide: Spoilers, people!

Gore: Lesley, Frank or Vidal, I’m good. Al or Tipper I’d like a heads up.

[SCENE]

There’s a voice that says The following is intended for mature audiences only. Viewer discretion is advised and I want to slit its throat so that all the blood drains from its veins, for only then can I be sure it will never chide me again.

There is something wrong with me, to be sure.  But there is also something wrong with the show or movie I’m about to watch.  That’s what the voice is telling me.  Be discreet.  Think twice before letting others know you have watched it.  Will you watch it?  Are watching it.  Are you watching it?  Be careful.

What is wrong with you?  Why would you watch this show we made for you?  We’ve warned you.  There’s something wrong with it.

Maturity is required.  Are you mature enough to hear the alkaline truth?  There’s something wrong with you.  You’re trying to hide away what everyone else already sees.  You’re thin skinned and have a fragile ego.

It was a simple advisement, not a searing admonishment, but you couldn’t handle it.  You turned the objective into the subjective.  You were lacking in discretion. Read more »

by Michael Liss

No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic field there is tranquility and contentment, harmonious relations between management and wage earner, freedom from industrial strife, and the highest record of years of prosperity. —Calvin Coolidge’s “Annual Address,” December 4, 1928

“Silent” Calvin Coolidge was a man of few words, but he might have uttered those particular few with a sense of satisfaction. Times were good in America in 1928—not for everyone, not for every industry, but, in the main, there were more jobs that paid a living wage, new industries that had great promise, and less rancor both politically and between the classes.  

The Roaring Twenties had begun with a political earthquake—an electoral realignment. America wanted something different from the status quo, and the status quo was Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s second term was dominated by America’s late entry into the war, debates over the League of Nations (as the country was growing more isolationist), and general domestic unrest.  He was a man of great intellect and serious talent, but, if there was a sunny, optimistic side to Wilson, he hid it well. This was even more so after the serious stroke he suffered in October of 1919, a time in which he essentially sequestered himself from the public and even from most of his Cabinet. It is perhaps a measure of his monumental ego that, post-stroke, he still saw himself as a potent political force, not merely able to discipline his own party, but to convince the public to give him a third term.  

Any rational viewer would have seen that as completely impossible, and a third Wilson campaign never got off the ground, but it was not merely his dyspeptic temperament, but also his policies which more and more of the country doubted or outright rejected. The forces that had given him the White House in the first place now inverted themselves. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt had sought to reclaim the Presidency from his former VP pick, now turned President, William Howard Taft. TR wanted a continuation of his Progressive policies, and Taft was by nature and ideological preference a conservative. Losing the White House to a Democrat (and a Southern one at that) convinced many in the GOP to move further away from the Progressive wing and Progressive values. That shift was echoed by a smaller (but decisive) transition in the views of the electorate.  Read more »

Rowan tree, also known as the mountain ash and its bright treasure of berries. With its yellow-orange leaves, it looks particularly striking at this time of year. Photo taken during a walk last week through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, on a sunny day with beautiful light.

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by Paul Braterman

Throughout most of the UK (Northern Ireland is a partial exception) evolution is regarded as established science, and no politician would make belief in separate creation part of their platform, for fear of ridicule. In the US, this is far from being the case. Although evolution has become more widely accepted over time, one third of Americans still believe that God created humans in their present form. Here I discuss the enormous influence of creationism in US politics and analyse the arguments put forward in its favour, as set out for example by Charlie Kirk, the recently slain leader of Turning Point USA.

Mike Pence, Vice President during Trump’s first term in office, had argued in Congress for creationism, while creationists have been prominent in the various faith councils supporting Trump. At least three members of his present cabinet (Pete Hegseth, Scott Turner at HUD, pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church, Doug Collins at the VA, one-time pastor at Chicopee Baptist Church) are committed creationists, as is Mike Huckabee, another former Southern Baptist pastor, now ambassador to Israel. So is Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who has done pro bono work for Answers in Genesis, now the leading creationist organization. Russell Vought, co-author of Project 2025, whose role at the Office of Management and Budget is pivotal role in the distribution of federal funds, is an elder of a church that explicitly rejects evolution, and sees Satan as “the unholy god of this age.” Vought is also acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and on 28 October 2025, in this capacity, rescinded the rule that, in some States, prevents medical debt from showing up on credit reports.

We can understand the link between creationism and US right-wing politics in terms of the appeal to US conservatives of loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. These all favour absolutist theology, which demands submission to divine authority, loyalty to the community of believers, and the preservation of pure doctrine. With this in mind, we can understand the appeal of Christian Nationalism and Trumpism to creationists. Thus as early as 2015, Answers in Genesis praised Trump, not for any specific policies, but because he spoke, just as Jesus spoke to the Pharisees, as one with authority. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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