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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by TJ Price

Saying “I don’t know” is one of the great joys of my adult life. I revel in the phrase. I freely and openly admit honest ignorance, in the service of learning more, hungrily, with an avid—and, perhaps, slightly obsessive—need. It was not always this way.

For most of my early life, in fact, I was uncomfortable saying it. It was as if I would be admitting to a lack of some critical function, for which I could be judged and dismissed—or, worse, taught—accordingly. Confronted with the new or unfamiliar, I might fake familiarity, bluffing my way through or fleeing from proof of my ignorance, but the dread of challenge to my knowledge dogged my every step. This was perhaps the first flickers of so-called “imposter syndrome”—I was terrified that every moment could prove the moment when everyone discovered I was a fraud, all along. That I wasn’t as smart as they thought I was, which would then prove to me that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.

Idyll:

Despite this fear of inadequacy, I have secretly always wanted to be a professional student. I had dreams of vaulted ceilings and cloistered libraries. Of chalkboards and dust and long hours turning pages. The actual schools I did attend held no real value to me—I had ideals of education, from the very beginning, which eluded me and continue to elude, I think, most in this country. These ideals may have been touched by a young romanticism, but the core of them remains the same— 

Credo:

I believe education should not be a gauntlet, should not be cheerless. It should be gentle, inquisitive. It should be sets of questions to which answers are hard-won, but not in the way of contest or grade. I still, to this day, believe fully that one of the great evils in the world is that there is something that every single person is curious about, and that—often enough, for one reason or another—they just don’t get to follow that thread. Instead of being encouraging, there is a rigor involved, a stern hand-slap, a sharp return to inculcation by rote.

Hypothesis:

Education is less an instilling of foreign elements, treating knowledge as immigrant to our brain, but more a revealing—a guided perambulation via neuronal paths—lighting associations one by one as we go.  Read more »

Approaching the Cold Solstice
with J. Kepler

we’re falling deeply in
—in as deeply as we get
before we spin again along an ellipse’s rim
to a more congenial spot for blood and breath

what the astronomical survival odds
(our outer limits) are, who knows?
but time is short by late report

listening now to ersatz jazz
I shift Pandora’s voice,
I move on, linking new music to my
thinking by simply clicking
thanks to all the tricks our technos know
which is obviously permanent
and, like serious snow, is sticking

in this marvelous, magnetic, angular hour
when sun and earth seek a new relation,
and we anticipate the warm benefits
that will return in little over half a year,
as they will not be then for globe-mates
in our southern hemisphere—

Yes, there will be foxglove and hydrangea when
Kepler’s laws provide sun’s heat again.

by Jim Culleny
12/21/14

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by Bonnie McCune

To me, the most surprising fact of old age life so far has been the decline in my own condition. Physical and mental. There is no way I can reach the heights I used to, i.e., even jogging a mile or two. It’s sufficient to WALK a mile or two. I’ll never be able to jog like that again. Or perhaps I’m just being chicken because I’m afraid of falling down.

This shouldn’t have come as a shock. After all I’ve lived for years with friends and family who have gone through the process of getting old, but we’re so accustomed to gradually getting better when we practice an activity, I was taken aback when I realized this. Whether it’s learning the times-tables in third grade, or how to function at a cocktail party with its wealth of unwritten, unspoken social rules, we’re accustomed to getting familiar, comfortable, and more successful with each venture.

Not slower, confused, and achy. Not when we hit old age. Instead, one day we try to recall the name of a neighbor and come up blank. Or we start to leap out of bed, only to pause semi-paralyzed on the edge because a muscle has seized up. These are the harbingers. This is reality.

There are compensations. As we age, we can face with equanimity talk about serious illnesses because we don’t have the potential to live long any way. Given the diagnosis of a life span of one to three years for a serious illness, a friend of mine didn’t even blink. At 83, he only has so much life expectancy. He’s learning to live in the moment all the time. Great practice for meditation, by the way, where we’re urged to aim toward this mental attitude. Read more »

by Laurie Sheck

1.
In the summer of 1977 in New York City—summer of the famous city-wide blackout, its fires and looting—my parents stole a street sign. The sign marked the location of my father’s housewares store which overnight had been turned into a hollow shell of blackened ash and charred brick. Looted and burned. 

The sign was a remembrance of a place they had loved.

The store was in the South Bronx, which at that time was the highest crime district of NYC. 149 St. and Prospect Ave. From earliest childhood, I spent many hours there dusting shelves, sticking price tags onto merchandise, and performing a variety of other minor tasks. The store and the neighborhood were a large part of my childhood world, of my introduction to what a world even is. My father and his older brother left school in the 9th and 10th grades to support their family. His brother had died young. Now, with the blackout of July 13, overnight the neighborhood was decimated. The store was gone.

2.
Even before the blackout, the South Bronx was notorious for its empty lots and abandoned buildings, its street gangs and drugs. Of course back then, as a child, I was unaware of the statistics. I didn’t know that roughly 20 percent of the buildings stood empty, abandoned by landlords unwilling or unable to maintain them. Unemployment was nearly double the rate of the city as a whole. Fewer than half of heads of households were said to be employed. The median income was $4,600, substantially below the median for the city. One study showed the median household size as 5.0, whereas the median household size for the city overall was 2.2. Families were crowded into tiny spaces. About half of the households were headed by women.

In 1977, the Women’s City Club of New York City issued an extensive report on the area, With Love and Affection: A Study of Building Abandonment. In addition to gathering numerous statistics, the report described the relentless deterioration of the neighborhood dating back to the late 1960’s. The blackout intensified what was already there: “block after block of empty buildings, some open and vandalized, some sealed, standing among rubble-strewn lots on which other buildings have already been demolished. In the midst of this desolation there is an occasional building where people are still trying to live.” It went on, “The streets and sidewalks…are littered with rubbish, with shattered glass out of the gaping doors and windows.” A New York Times article from 1975 bore the headline “To Most Americans, The South Bronx Would be Another Country.”

And yet, even as my memories resonate with much of what the WCC report described, I also remember bustling streets, restaurants, families. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Wars have never been the concern only of their combatants. Other states pay close attention to the geo-political implications and opportunities created by armed conflict, and interfere directly or indirectly when their cynical calculations suggest that would advance their interests.  For example, various countries – the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Qatar – have been involving themselves in Sudan’s ghastly civil war, apparently looking to pick up geopolitical advantages – especially gaining access to Red Sea ports that would allow them to threaten international shipping via the Suez Canal, or to prevent other states from doing so. When extended to material support to favoured factions this increases the resources of the combatants, increasing the ambition of their respective war goals and so extending the war by reducing the scope for a mutually acceptable peace deal.

Such amoral realpolitik in international relations is as old as war itself, together with its unfortunate consequences for human lives. What is somewhat more recent is the rise of international moral concern for the lives of civilians threatened by war, expressed through the increased influence of civil society. At least since the Greeks’ 1820s war of independence, states have also been interfering in other people’s wars out of humanitarian concerns to reduce civilian suffering.

The problem is that although each individual humanitarian intervention may be sincerely morally motivated – and even sometimes succeed in its goal of reducing suffering – the practise of morally motivated interference would seem actually to increase the amount of civilian suffering due to war. It makes civil wars more likely to start and harder to end, while incentivising crimes against civilians. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The mornings have become dark. These weeks are always strange, the end of October, just before the clock falls back and the mornings brighten again. For now I get ready in a sort of hinterland; it’s not night, but it’s not day either. The sky is a sheet of gray. I back out of the driveway, turn onto the main road. In the fog, the streetlights appear as beacons. Their brightness shocks me, and I remember a Monet painting I saw once in New York, a scene not of waterlilies or his garden, but the sun as a bright orange disk in the London fog. The wall text mentioned how Monet thought London was beautiful because of the fog, not despite it. This morning, the fog acts as a filter, casting a dull grayness everywhere but allowing the greens and reds of the streetlights to pass through. The road is relatively empty, I slip through a yellow light, leave the other cars behind, and I’m out on the open road, cruising downhill as the lights glow ahead of me.

I love driving. I was looking through my fiction writing recently—not much, just a page or two here and there—and I was surprised to see that much of it has to do with driving, or, if not driving, with the movement of the human body through space and time at an accelerated rate (ice skating and biking also feature). We are not made to move at such speeds, and when we do, something happens to our consciousness. Life feels different. Not every time, of course, but sometimes, and when it does, writing from a fictional viewpoint rather than in the style of an article seems the only way to transfer that phenomenological experience to the page.

The first thing I ever wrote that was any good falls into this category. I was in university, in a class for writing tutors, and we were tasked with writing a personal essay. I didn’t know how to write a personal essay—I didn’t know how to write about something meaningful to me without it coming off as trite and clichéd to others—so instead I submitted a short passage about diving into a lake I’d spontaneously written one summer day. I knew it was good because I’d written it while life felt different and I’d somehow managed to capture that experience in language. The essay was chosen as an example for the class. Then we had to expand our pieces into a longer story, but I couldn’t do it. I tried to re-enter the headspace that I’d inhabited while writing about diving, swimming, and floating, but no matter how hard I tried, nothing clicked. I wrote something and my teacher told me that she couldn’t follow it—it didn’t make sense. Read more »

Just something I saw in a children’s playground in Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Philip Graham

When William K Gillespie was a student in one of my fiction writing workshops at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s, he turned in a brilliant, 36-page (single spaced!) story. A story absolutely typical of his talent and ambition. In the following years William went on to study under and impress a stellar cast of mentors, among them David Foster Wallace, Robert Coover, Brian Evenson, and Carole Maso. He was granted one of the first MFAs in Electronic Writing (from Brown University), and he established his own cutting edge press, Spineless Books. Since then he has written in every imaginable form, and is now organizing his diverse and interwoven oeuvre into a vast digital warren on the Web. We spoke recently about this project’s past, present, and future.

Philip Graham: The home page of your new and expanded author’s website, Collected Writings of William K Gillespie and Friends, lists and features the daunting range of genres in which you’ve written, and some of which you’ve probably invented: besides fiction, journalism, songwriting, sound collage and radio theater, there’s also “the longest literary palindrome ever written,” and “newspoetry,” to name just a small portion of your various literary explorations. Yet your career, seen in this perspective, rather than seeming scattered instead seems like solid evidence of a unified, voracious imagination.

William K Gillespie: Thank you. I’m inspired by Harry Mathews, Julio Cortázar, and Italo Calvino, who produced books so singular that each seemed to be by a different author. Visual art, music, and literature have a lot to learn from one another, and transposing ideas from one to the other is great fun.

PG: This transposition of ideas from one art form to another is certainly a hallmark of your website, and yes, your spider-like orchestration of it all is impressive. Can you say more about its architecture?

WG: In addition to preserving old works from moldy word processor files and decrepit websites, the Webwork — my new site — has hidden tools to help me compose complicated fictions spread across multiple books, forms, and media. There’s only a hint of this functionality visible now: at the bottom of the site you see an incomplete list of characters in my work. Eventually this will allow the assiduous reader to track characters between works and learn secret backstories. Read more »

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 »