by Mary Hrovat

When I was growing up, my mother and I would sometimes read or recite poetry to each other. Ours was not a poetic household, and my father would occasionally complain: “If poets have something to say, why don’t they just say it?” But we thought they did say it, albeit indirectly sometimes, and we continued with our Longfellow, a bit more quietly.

My mother had a collection of Longfellow’s works (he was probably her favorite poet). Another book we frequently read from was an anthology called Best Loved Poems: A Treasure-Chest of Favorite Verse for Everyday Enjoyment and Inspiration (edited by Richard Charlton MacKenzie, copyright 1946). Everyday enjoyment, that’s what we were after.

Mom was opposed to what she called moping, and she especially loved Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” (“Let us then be up and doing / With a heart for any fate”) and “The Rainy Day” (“Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; / Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.”). We also found Excelsior very satisfying to read aloud. It was one of the poems that taught me that you don’t need to understand everything about a poem to get the message or to enjoy it. I suspect this was also one of the poems my father found most annoying, because you really want to belt out the repeated word Excelsior, and perhaps raise a fist skyward as you do.

We often read other poems written in a similar spirit of inspiration—for example, “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley and “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth,” by Arthur Hugh Clough. I was comforted by Clough’s words of encouragement to the doubtful and worried; even as a child I was often apprehensive. I can’t remember how I felt about “Invictus,” except that, like “Excelsior,” it was satisfying to recite with great gusto. “In the fell clutch of circumstance / I have not winced nor cried aloud,” we exclaimed. The language seems all out of proportion to the life we lived, but I liked the archaic phrasing (who talks about the fell clutch of anything these days?). Looking back, I see that my struggles became more difficult when I tried to meet them with silent, tearless stoicism. Perhaps I was trying to borrow bravado. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

My friend Ian worked hard all his life. In his seventies, he bought a big house and moved his son’s family in with him. It’s the classic multigenerational setup, and it seems to be working out. Only one thing bothers him—the zombies.

“My son and his kids love the whole zombie thing,” he says. “They watch The Walking Dead and play video games where thousands of zombies come right at ’em, and get blasted to smithereens.”

“Those games can be violent,” I say, as the young waitress pours our coffee.

“It’s not the violence. It’s the zombies. You ever watch a zombie movie?”

“Sure,” I say. “Shaun of the Dead. I love those Edgar Wright-Simon Pegg movies.”

“Did you like it?”

“Nah, I hated it.”

“Why?”

“Zombies,” I shrug. “They’re old people. They’re us.”

The secret message. Ian nods sadly. Ian knows old people. His retirement job is managing a nonprofit apartment complex for the elderly poor. He and I sometimes disagree, but on the subject of zombies, we’re on the same page.

What is a zombie? A stiff-limbed, shuffling figure in out-of-date clothes. They have thin lips, yellow teeth, staring eyes, and gaping mouths.

Sitting a booth at the diner where Ian and I have lunched for many years, I look around and see dozens of people just like that—seated around us or struggling to make their way to the toilet. Read more »

The sun seen through wispy clouds, from my window.

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by David J. Lobina

Firstly: fascism is dead and it is not coming back. By fascism it is meant the historical fascism of the 1920-40s, in particular the primus inter (more-or-less) pares fascism of 1920s Italy – id est, Fascism – and to a lesser extent that of Nazi Germany, notwithstanding the fact that Nazism is different to Fascism in some important respects, as stressed before in these very pages – alas not being the case here, secondes pensées sont (often) les bonnes.

Secondly: this is not our opinion alone, but that of both Umberto Eco, explicitly stated so in his little note on fascism, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the latter saying so-so in a little-known pamphlet by the title of Il fascismo degli antifascisti. For the latter author, historical fascism was the traditional or archaeological kind, an archaic fascism that did not exist any more at the time of writing (circa 1960-1975) and should not be confused with the fascism that 1960-70s kids kept denouncing, and the Owen Joneses of the 2020s keep denouncing, this milieu then and now forming an archaeological antifascism that is rather comfortable, as Pasolini put it then. For the former author, in turn, historical fascism was the original kind, and also dead, but there was a warning therein: an eternal fascism can be unearthed in terms of the fascist ‘way of talking and feeling’ – the linguistic habits of fascism.

Thirdly: what the Eco of the little note was most concerned about was the then contemporary developments in Italian politics that had brought a post-fascist political party into government in 1994. In this note Eco listed a number of features encompassing what may be termed a fascist temperament, a loose connection of features that has received little attention in the scholarship on fascism – the world of the discretus et sapiens – but an outsized interest elsewhere. Eco did not envision this list as a set of necessary or sufficient conditions to define fascism; nothing so unambitious: one single feature sufficed ‘to allow fascism to coagulate around it’, a sentiment widely echoed today.

Fourthly: Fascism, however, is not a way of talking or feeling, or a temperament, let alone an eternal phenomenon, in the same way that there is no eternal communism, or a communist way of talking or feeling; no eternal liberalism, or a liberal way of talking or feeling; no eternal anarchism, or an anarchist way of talking or feeling. The Okhrana is reputed to have dismissed the stereotypically-looking revolutionaries, and rightly so; the same applies, mutatis mutandis, in the state of affairs being surveyed by our telescope. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

The words are fine, and some of the concepts they represent rather appealing, actually. It’s the usages to which they are put that bug me, usages that are by turns deceiving, dishonest, obfuscating, bogus, hokey, and euphemistic. There is a theme binding them all together, one concerning us humans’ exploitation of the wild world. The words pertain to how we use “resources,” which I define as the materials that make up the planet and its life as viewed through a bottomless stomach. These terms are unthinkable without our having domesticated ourselves and our surroundings: I cannot imagine our foraging ancestors in the Pleistocene having need of such words. Only a creature in a broken relationship with its planet needs a special terminology to salve its wound. Such words allow us to entertain feelings of wholesomeness while engaged in plunder.

1. Organic

Originally, pertaining to organisms. That’s the simple root. For a long time, matter associated with organisms was thought to be special because it was alive. Surely a vital force animated such material. Then a chemist name Friedrich Wöhler managed to produce urea — a component of urine — without having to pee in a bottle. He found it could be produced from ordinary, dead matter as well as through the processes of life. Thus began organic chemistry — the study of the properties of the carbon atom. At that moment, the word bifurcated, with continuing absurd consequences.

Among farmers, some pursued the synthetic way initiated by the likes of Wöhler (think Norman Borlaug and industrial agriculture), while others clung to vitalist notions, such as those promulgated by occultist Rudolph Steiner, whereby the products of living systems were privileged, “synthetics” be damned, bringing us the current linguistic mess. Organic food enthusiasts parted ways with the organic chemists around the beginning of the twentieth century, with “organic” gaining positive connotations and “chemical” negative ones.

Today the United States has the government-sanctioned term “organic” to describe a veritable Leviticus of “Allowed” and “Prohibited” substances and practices put into place to ensure that a farm is, well, organic. The term now conflicts with the scientific, chemical definition in just about every way. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Gus Mitchell

The following piece is my own minor contribution to the “Surrealism Centenary.” I begin with a disavowal of the entire “2024 centenary” enterprise, which seems to have added little to our appreciation of the group, and because I would question allowing Andre Breton, great though he sometimes was, to continue to define the wildly heterodox big bang to which he claimed total definition in October 1924.

Let us begin to celebrate the spirit of the surreal again. True to that spirit, let us slough off the burden of officialism and of art history. Let us not be bound to Breton or (heaven help us) Dali any longer.

This year should begin an overhaul of correction to the Anglophone ignorance of the movement’s noblest, most enduring, and still-dangerous representatives, who always were the outcasts, misfits, and weirdos among those proudly self-proclaimed outcasts, misfits, and weirdos.

Of these, a host of obscurer names and out of print-translations can be dug into online.

What I outline here is merely my favourite example.

In the 1910s, a quartet of teenaged artistic comrades in provincial France––Rene Daumal, Robert Gilbert-Lecompte, novelist Roger Vailland and Robert Meyrat––began a drug-fuelled quest into what they termed “experimental metaphysics”. After forming something of an adolescent secret society/artistic movement (which they dubbed Simplisme) this core quartet moved to Paris, made some older acquaintances and formed a short-lived journal: Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game) of which only three issues appeared, between 1928 and 1932. (The essence of this work and an essential English handbook to the group can be found in the English translation Theory of the Great Game, edited by Dennis Duncan, pictured above.) Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

Renowned and respected for her scholarship, her history of authorship of many books on dictatorship and her political experience, is it any wonder that Anne Applebaum’s new book Autocracy, Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World has been so critically received; she is an expert on her subject. This slim volume provides us with an incisive exposition and analysis of how autocrats function in the world today, securing their own personal power and wealth, and in Applebaum’s view, posing a threat to democracies.

For Applebaum, autocratic regimes clearly pose a threat to democracies, but about which states is she referring? The number of autocrats is, according to her, extensive and includes communists, monarchists, nationalists and theocrats. On Applebaum’s ‘list’ of autocracies are, predictably, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea – the well-known adversaries of the West – amongst many others. ‘Softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies’ such as Turkey, Singapore and India also come under her purview. It appears that autocracies and ‘softer autocracies’ outnumber the democracies in the world today and most of the world’s population lives under such regimes, and that is the problem for Applebaum.

We learn from Applebaum that the ‘art’ of autocracy in the modern world is very much up to speed, taking advantage of a globalised world, involving sophisticated networks of ‘financial structures, a complex of security services – military, paramilitary, police – and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda and disinformation’. The apparatus deployed by autocrats to achieve their political and financial objectives are probably used by most states across the globe; it is the purpose for which they are used that irks Applebaum. In her view a ‘ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power’ drives the autocrats in the world today. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Along The Sidewalk On A Late Afternoon, October 2024.

Composite, digital photographs.

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by Richard Farr

For several weeks I’ve had an article by the excellent Rick Perlstein squatting unread in my Ought-To-Read list. The title is Everything You Wanted to Know About World War III but Were Afraid to Ask. I am afraid to ask: although I ought to want to know, right now I don’t. “The world is too much with us”: unlike Wordsworth, but like you perhaps, I read the latest every day about Gaza, the Ukraine, South Sudan, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and another poll reminding me that tens of millions of my fellow citizens think a poisonous thug with a criminal record will make America great again. Sometimes you just have to switch off and leave the world behind. Even if you’d feel guilty being reminded that you haven’t been paying attention to Syria, Venezuela, the Rohingya, the Uyghurs, the women of Afghanistan, the children working in cobalt mines in the DRC, or the disturbing fact that people are actually out there buying Boris Johnson’s memoirs. 

I was thinking about this reality-fatigue recently while struggling to finish a different book. Look on the bright side: I’m not going to bore you with an account of the experience, which I have fairly often, of picking up a novel that has been declared “plangent” and “luminous” (or, that champion among meaningless back cover standbys, “fiercely original”) and  feeling embarrassed that I don’t get what the fuss is about. No, I’m going to address something more important than that: the experience of trying to read an excellent book, and feeling embarrassed that I barely had the moral fortitude to work through its contents.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs. You have to get a long way in before you uncover the source of the title, but it’s worth the wait. The subject is 9/11, tangentially. But really the subject is our crimes, our brutalities, our layer cake of madnesses and delusions in the wake of 9/11. The battalion upon red-smeared gray battalion of ugly details we either chose not to learn, or chose to forget, or chose to swallow our government’s lies about. All that — and it’s about the uses and abuses, especially in the Land of Liberty, of virtually limitless surveillance.

Not to be outdone by her own title, Kerry Howley has invented in this book what as far as I can see is an entirely original style of writing in the genre of investigative journalism. We think we know what this kind of thing is supposed to sound like, and it’s not supposed to sound like someone responding to a bad hangover by having a panic attack and then swallowing a handful of amphetamines. But Howley’s sometimes hallucinatory style is a revelation: finally, here’s a voice that suits and perfectly illuminates the material. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Every time I read or watch anything about the election I hear some variant of the phrase “margin of error.”  My mathematically attuned ears perk up, but usually it’s just a slightly pretentious way of saying the election is very close or else that it’s not very close. Schmargin of error might be a better name for metaphorical uses of the phrase.

To be fair, the phrase is often supplemented with precise numbers (plus or minus 1.5%, for example) that purport to quantify exactly how tight the race is (or isn’t).  Unfortunately these numbers are not as reliable as they might seem. The problem is that an enabling condition for this precision is that a random sample of voters be polled and the larger it is, the better.

A few technical remarks on the meaning of the margin of error in the next three paragraphs, which can be skimmed or skipped.

The basic qualitative idea: If we imagine many random samples of voters being taken, the sample percentages supporting a candidate will vary from sample to sample, of course, but these sample percentages will naturally cluster around the true percentage, P, of voters supporting the candidate in the whole population.

Importantly, this clustering of the sample probabilities can be described more quantitatively if we’re dealing with random samples of voters. In fact, if we assume that p is the percentage of voters supporting candidate A in a random sample and n is the number of voters in the sample, then we can get a good estimate of P, which is what we really want to know.

Specifically, the interval ranging from -2√[p(1-p)/n] to +2√[p(1-p)/n] will encompass, P, the percentage of voters in the whole population supporting candidate A, about  95% of the time.

Half of the above interval, which will vary a bit depending on p in the particular sample taken, is the margin of error. Since n appears in the denominator, the larger the sample is, the narrower the interval encompassing P. Read more »

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by Alexandre Gefen and Philippe Huneman

Philosophical reflection on artificial intelligence (AI) has been a feature of the early days of cybernetics, with Alan Turing’s famous proposals on the notion of intelligence in the 1950s rearming old philosophical debates on the man-system or man-machine and the possibly mechanistic nature of cognition. However, AI raises questions on spheres of philosophy with the contemporary advent of connectionist artificial intelligence based on deep learning through artificial neural networks and the prodigies of generative foundation models. One of the most prominent examples is the philosophy of mind, which seeks to reflect on the benefits and limits of a computational approach to mind and consciousness. Other spheres of affected philosophies are ethics, which is confronted with original questions on agency and responsibility; political philosophy, which is obliged to think afresh about augmented action and algorithmic governance; the philosophy of language; the notion of aesthetics, which has to take an interest in artistic productions emerging from the latent spaces of AIs and where its traditional categories malfunction; and metaphysics, which has to think afresh about the supposed human exception or the question of finitude.

In this text we want to indicate what are the new frontiers of philosophical speculation about artificial intelligence, now that GPT and other kinds of LLMs went public.

Knowing and Thinking: What Do AIs Tell Us?

If the currently established link between AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind is new, then philosophically questioning artificial intelligence requires us to place many questions in the long term. The project to improve human life by automating cognitive tasks, as radically original as it seems to us since the arrival of ChatGPT, develops one of Aristotle’s old intuitions about automata that would solve our routine tasks and replace our slaves. The milestones are famous automata such as Vaucanson’s duck and the mechanical Turk, right up to the exuberant robots of Boston Dynamics. To take just two examples, the congruences between the pragmatic philosophy of language proposed by Wittgenstein and how Large Language Models (LLMs) synthesize usages to generate thought probabilistically is patent, as is the link between modern cybernetics, which separates software and hardware, and the idea that thought is realizable in multiple ways, a notion formulated in the 1950s by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor (sometimes called functionalism). One of these realizations would be human thought, often located “inside of” the brain, while the other would be a machine-implemented thought. Modern artificial intelligence has its roots in a long history of formalizing thought and logic. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The opening credits of Affliction (1997) feature small, rectangular images that fill only half the screen. You wonder if something is wrong with the aspect ratio, or if the settings have been changed on your television. A succession of images is placed before the viewer: a farmhouse in a snowy field, a trailer with a police cruiser parked in front, the main street of a small, sleepy town, the schoolhouse, the town hall. The last image is a dark, rural road, with a mountain in the distance. Finally the edges of the image expand, fill the screen, and a voice begins to narrate:

This is the story of my older brother’s strange criminal behavior and disappearance. We who loved him no longer speak of Wade. It’s as if he never existed. By telling his story like this, by breaking the silence about him, I tell my own story as well. Everything of importance, that is, everything that gives rise to the telling of this story occurred during a single deer hunting season in a small town in upstate New Hampshire where Wade was raised, and so was I. One night, something changed and my relation to Wade’s story was different from what it had been since childhood. I marked this change by Wade’s tone of voice during a phone call two nights after Halloween. Something I had not heard before. Let us imagine that around eight o’clock on Halloween Eve…

Then the narrator’s voice disappears, and we are in the car with Wade, played by Nick Nolte, and his daughter. We are in the story, we are ready to be swept away, or in the case of this movie, submerged into the depths, but we have been prepared in such a way—starting from outside the story, outside the narrative—that we are aware of the artificiality of what we are seeing. Affliction tells us that it is a movie. The small images, which look like postcards, are presented to us as miniature models of different sets. The farmhouse becomes “THE HOUSE.” The main street becomes “MAIN STREET.” While they will take on specific characteristics within the movie, we know from the prologue that they are eternal, and we will be reminded of this at the end as well.

The voiceover achieves a similar effect. The narrator, played by Willem Defoe, removes tension and drama from the plot by spoiling the ending: Wade becomes a criminal and disappears. He does not even attempt to convince us that the story is real, that it actually happened, because he says, “Let us imagine.” Is this not bad storytelling? It may be appropriate for a children’s story, a fairy tale, but for a mature film like Affliction, a film dealing with murder, paranoia, and male violence?  Shouldn’t a story like this try to convince its audience that it’s real, by building up a wealth of detail and creating realistic, lifelike characters? Perhaps a certain type of story, but not this one. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

You need to take Ken Ham seriously. This entrepreneurial Brisbane high school teacher has put together the world’s largest Young Earth creationist organization, Answers in Genesis (AiG). This has a worldwide presence, publishes its own magazine, Answers, and emails a constant stream of highly repetitive messages to its followers. It has built the Creation Museum in Kentucky, as well as the Ark Encounter, featuring a (very unbiblical) so-called replica of Noah’s Ark, and now plans a replica of the Tower of Babel. Its annual income (June 2022 filing) was over $60 million, its YouTube channel has 667,000 subscribers, and its website claims over a million visits each month.

So what? Bible Belt lunatic fringe? Unfortunately no. AiG has allies who are close to the center portion of power, and who will be even closer to the center of power should Donald Trump once again become President.

Ken Ham has among his friends Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, whose law firm represented AiG pro bono in a successful attempt to ensure Kentucky State funding for its activities, despite its fundamentally religious nature, which goes so far as to require all employees accept its six-day creationist Statement of Faith. And among the contributors to its magazine is Calvin Beisner, director of the Cornwall Alliance, whose entire purpose is to deny the importance of human-caused climate change. Cornwall in turn has direct links to the Heartland Institute and to the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025.

If you have not studied modern creationism, you may well think that it is a curious aberration, like flat-earthism, regrettable in its denial of whole areas of science, but otherwise (!) harmless. Not so. Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

For a while now, the slogan “Trust the experts” has been a liberal shibboleth meant to imply endorsement of scientific consensus. Despite agreeing, in principle, with what the phrase is meant to signal, I’ve always been bothered by this slogan. Part of it is that as I get older, I realize more and more clearly that everyone is just winging it – even experts. Nobody really knows what they’re doing, at least not to the degree they want you to think they do. Another part of my cynicism about trusting experts is that I’ve personally been let down by them, as we all have to one degree or another. These experiences start to pile up in the course of life, especially if you’ve been unlucky enough to need the services of experts like doctors on a regular basis.

But alongside this cynicism, I recognize that the opposite stance – “Don’t trust the experts” – isn’t tenable either. We have to trust experts if we want to live as active members of society rather than in a bunker full of canned beans wearing tinfoil hats. 

I was finally able to understand my way around this dilemma when I came across “The Trouble with Expertise” in The Philosophers’ Magazine. In it, clinical ethicist Jamie Watson says:

“Medical researchers have exploited people of colour, obstetricians have ignored medical decisions from women in labour, pharmaceutical corporations have conspired to increase addiction, and trans patients are routinely stigmatised or refused care. There are lots of reasons to be sceptical about experts. But it’s important to note that those reasons have nothing to do with expertise. The trouble comes because of the power experts have to put people in compromising positions and to use their positions in ways that harm others.”

This sums up why I find it more helpful to think of trust in terms of the system that an expert operates within rather than in terms of any individual expert. I trust the scientific method and the peer-review process, because while neither is perfect, they have internal rules and norms about finding and correcting errors. An individual expert is only trustworthy to the extent that they live up to the standards imposed on them by their system of expertise. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

The longer you’re in a new country the more it becomes a relationship. It starts out wonderful. You never knew a place could understand you like this. Everything is fun and exciting and “Oh my God just so different!” But then reality sets in. And, with enough time, the things that start out oddly charming begin to irritate you. That’s happened to me twice. I lived in Egypt for three years and Germany for five.

Moving to both countries are the two best decisions I’ve ever made. Bar none. It’s undeniable what they’ve given me. It’s also undeniable that they really pissed me off. Here are ten things about Egypt and Germany, compared side-to-side. Written, of course, with all the love in my heart.

1) The People

Egypt

They never show up on time. That’s clear straight from the beginning. 

This isn’t just me being closed-minded as a Westerner. Egyptians admit to their tardiness with glee. 

Khamis duh-ay bess.

“Only 5 minutes.”

I will hear this thousands of times the three years I live there. I swear I notice the smile in an Egyptians’ voice every time they say it. I know it’s a lie and so do they.

Egyptians also laugh at everything.

Their insistence that everything is probably just fine will charm me to no end. 

Germany

If a German tells you they’re going to do something, they’re going to do it. It’s as simple as that. 

Never have I met a nation as unfailingly trustworthy.

They’re also so punctual that it can get slightly creepy.

“Oh, you need help moving apartments at 7:30 AM on a Tuesday six months from now? It’s in my schedule.”

Six months later, you look out your window on a Tuesday morning, and Hans is waiting there at 7:25. 

Delightful. Read more »