by Bill Murray

It’s raining in Russia. Thunderheads boil up in the afternoon heat over there, behind the limestone block fortress on the other side of the river. Which is not a wide river. You can shout across it.

Here’s how close Russia is: on Victory Day, May ninth, commemorating the Nazi defeat in World War II, Russia points big screen TVs over here toward Narva, Estonia’s easternmost city, to explain the way things really are to all these misguided Estonians.

This year Estonia put on their own concert on the town hall square. This side of the Narva River, May ninth is called Europe Day. Estonia hung a poster on its own castle wall that read “Putin is a war criminal.”

Both riverbanks are park land, well kept, landscaped, trees trimmed as if by respectful neighbors. These dueling castles mark the spot where the Teutonic Order, Swedes, Danes, Poles, Lithuanians, Slavs and local Finno-Ugrics have bumped up against each other since medieval times. This point on the map has been the tip of somebody’s sword since the 13th century.

Everybody in the train spoke Russian, Russians and Estonians both. For the confluence of Vladimir Putin’s “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” with Estonia’s triumph of independence, it’s far more Russophilic out here than I expected.

Thirty-three years after Estonian independence, that’s something to puzzle out. Part of the explanation, I think, is cultural. The other part is that it just takes time to start a new country. Read more »

Sughra Raza. On the Train to Franzensfeste. September, 2024.

Digital photograph.

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by Richard Farr

Even if you are sympathetic to Marx — even if, at any rate, you see him not as an ogre but as an original thinker worth taking seriously — you might be forgiven for feeling that the sign at the East entrance to Highgate Cemetery reflects an excessively narrow view of the political options facing us.

For years I had planned to come here, to his final resting place, and pay my genuine if heavily qualified respects. In the end the visit was almost accidental. My wife and I were walking off vast quantities of melted cheese sandwich that had accosted us in Camden Market, our destination was Hampstead Heath, and Google Maps suggested to us that the detour was slight.

The six quid you pay to get in helps the Cemetery Trust keep most of this beautiful sanctuary neat and trim, with broad main avenues and benches spaced at convenient intervals for rest and contemplation. But much of its appeal lies in a strange duality of character. Large sections are so crowded, so ivied, so root-heaved and broken that I was put in mind of Mayan temples in the Yucatan, reduced to fragments and being digested by the rainforest. Stones pristine and sundered. Inscriptions legible and illegible. Some Victorian pillars standing proud and straight but others leaning against one another like end-of-day commuters slumped shoulder to shoulder on the Northern Line. 

Hopeful sentiment is engraved here over and over: Never Forgotten; Always in our Thoughts. But you look at relentless climbing nature and wonder how long any of this remembering can really last. Two generations? Three? A bit more, for the famous — but the truth is that they too will “fly forgotten as a dream,” as Isaac Watts has it. Even at George Eliot’s grave, tended lovingly by a woman with gloves and garden tools, the name itself has all but evaporated. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

How happy to have discovered the history of other species, as well as our own. How fortunate to be alive during the time when the evolutionary puzzle has been so masterfully worked out, assembling a picture so stunning in its completeness, that mere school children now know more about Darwin’s great idea than even Darwin himself knew.

And yet, how mortifying to be stuck with natural selection as “the mother of beauty,” to crib from the poet Wallace Stevens. (“Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,/ Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/ And our desires.”) Accepting this brute fact of life is a tall order, and I still recoil whenever I contemplate what Darwin called the “sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time.”

The central tenet of life is directionless, indifferent, insensate, implacable natural selection. And yet . . . here we are.

*

We have — or had — five cats. Four are sibs, seven years old now, Girly, Rocky, Pinky, and Scooter. They showed up, mere kittens clustered near their scrawny mother, behind our barn, as my husband Don was recovering from a stroke that occurred the year before. The fifth, Maggie, showed up just last summer, barefoot and pregnant, on our back doorstep. She hated and still hates the others. She eventually gave birth to four kittens of her own, which we judiciously distributed, but we still have to keep her separate from the other cats.

While returning from teaching one day earlier this month, I saw Rocky, our black, tuxedo male, vaulting across the road, his skinny ass stretched out like a black snake as he made it safely to the other side.

“I just saw Rocky sprinting across the road in front of me,” I said to Don. “Prepare yourself. We’re going to lose that cat.” I sometimes actually believe that articulating a fear helps to diminish it . . . Read more »

‘Tis The Little Things

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by Gary Borjesson

Become who you are, having learned what that is. -Pindar
Become who you are. —Nietzsche

I want to be authentic and so probably do you. It’s a virtue fostered by philosophic and therapeutic inquiries. In popular culture, “authenticity” is broadly used to mean being true to oneself—often with an emphasis on not caring what others think. Thus its critics see authenticity as encouraging a culture of narcissism, since it appears to focus on self-actualization at the expense of other ideals, including healthy relationships and communities, and the social values such as honesty, fairness, and justice that support these. Here I offer a philosophically informed definition of authenticity, drawing attention to why, despite popular usage, it is a prosocial, ethical ideal.

Authenticity may indeed be the virtue of being true to oneself, but what does that mean? To some it means being the creator of one’s own truth and value, and living solely according to these. Imagine a bright, rebellious teenager who’s read a little Nietzsche. They decide that the first step to becoming authentic is to take up their philosophic hammer and use it to smash all external claims and constraints —those truths, values, and beliefs that come from family, religion, community, customs, traditions, even from nature herself. This apparently asocial or even antisocial tendency is partly how authenticity gets associated with nihilism and moral decline, rather than being the virtue I suggest it is.

As many have pointed out, including Allan Bloom in Closing of the American Mind, this narcissistic-fantasy version of authenticity stems from a philosophy of “cheerful nihilism,” a memorable phrase borrowed from Donald Barthelme. It’s cheerful because it’s about freedom from responsibility, rather than being freedom with responsibility. The roots of this nihilism can be traced to reductive materialism in the sciences and postmodernism in the humanities—ideologies that find fertile ground in individualistic capitalist societies, where everyone competes to get the most they can. These days one can see this “ethic” prominently displayed among politicians and tech billionaires, but this is not authenticity. (Philosopher Charles Taylor’s short book The Ethics of Authenticity offers a good account of the history and future of authenticity.)

The ethical definition of authenticity includes the observable fact that we own our lives and truth in the world. Specifically, becoming authentic concerns taking our place in the world—even if it’s the place of a rebel. For where else but in a world do we learn who we are, and actualize ourselves? Our very power of living, thinking, and speaking owes its development to others. Thus, a free spirit or rebel or Libertarian may imagine they are powered by their truth alone. But without a world, there’s nothing to rebel against, and nothing from which to liberate the spirit. Read more »

by Mark R. DeLong

Once a real irritant and frustration, the routine has become a slap-stick show staged in our living room. Today, it’s only slightly tinged with impatience. Someone wants to watch a movie, which is a challenge itself, since that means having to find one worth watching. But there are lists, online reviews, thumbs-up (and down) from friends, and Rotten Tomatoes flung (or not) and Metacritic. You make a guess. You land on a title, and that’s when you engage The Bureaucracy. From that point on, your smartphone’s glass screen no longer stays your own. The flat and wide display across the room becomes possessed by something else—just as you agreed would be the case back when you clicked “I agree” on the annoying “End User License Agreement.” You never read it. You’re in good company; no one reads the “EULA.” The run-up to the show is, well, a ping-pong of passwords, a inchoate suspicion or hope that the app you’re using will actually connect to … to … something that will “cast” your movie to the display.

“Cast” is a word loaded with magical innuendo, word of spells and the luck of fishing.

I like to think that the rituals of my devices somehow unite a community—in my case, I guess, a community of Android phone users who dangle Google-provided services through a Chromecast dongle that hangs limply from the edge of an ancient plasma flat-screen. But unlike ritual’s usual rigidity, the technological rituals mystify with nuance; they follow subtly different paths, so you never really learn the trail by heart. (And, it’s not just Google in the priestly robes waving the thurible.)

Half of the adventure of watching a movie at home is just getting to sound and picture. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Rich and powerful people commit a vast amount of crime. According to Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime, by law professor Jennifer Taub:

White collar crime in America, such as fraud and embezzlement, costs victims an estimated $300 billion to $800 billion per year. Yet street-level “property” crimes including burglary, larceny, and theft, cost us far less – around $16 billion annually, according to the FBI.

But rich and powerful people do not go to prison. There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States. None of them are members of the Sackler family, despite Purdue Pharma being responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Sacklers have had to pay out billions of dollars for pushing OxyContin, but they have been able to keep billions more. And none of them has done any time.

This week Martin Winterkorn, formerly the head of Volkswagen and Germany’s highest-paid executive, went on trial. He led the company when it manufactured 9 million vehicles designed to cheat on emissions tests. Readers will recall that the cars and trucks were equipped with “defeat devices” that switched on pollution controls only when the vehicles were being tested. When they were out on the road the vehicles spewed many times the allowable amounts of pollutants and caused unknown damage to public health around the world. Winterkorn’s trial is starting nine years after he resigned from Volkswagen. He is not expected to serve any prison time.

None of the greedy bastards actually responsible for the 2008 financial crisis went to prison. According to the New York Times:

the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression resulted in the jailing of a single investment banker — one who happened to be several rungs from the corporate suite at a second-tier financial institution.

If you pay any attention to the news you can supply your own examples of this pattern. Wells Fargo and ExxonMobil come immediately to mind, but the list is very long. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

Though there are stories about people trading their souls with the devil in exchange for power and knowledge before, it was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 play that firmly entrenched that variety of character in the literary imagination. Incidentally there was a real Johann Faust in the sixteenth century, a German wizard of whom little certain is known, but the similarly dissolute figure of Marlowe was who granted that mysterious figure a variety of immortality. Drawing inspiration from anonymous pamphlets about Faust, Marlowe crafted one of the most chilling tales about how the insatiable thirst for power can lead to damnation when we’re willing to trade our very soul. Notorious at the time, both for the author’s reputation for heresy and sodomy as well as for claims that the script itself was capable of conjuring demons, it was said that Satan himself was in attendance at the premier to evaluate how accurately he’d been depicted. “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d,” said the play’s infamous demon Mephistopheles, “where we are is hell,/And where hell is, there must we ever be.” A despairing vision born in Marlowe’s own life, the second most celebrated Elizabethan playwright after Shakespeare who was rightly valorized for the genius of his “mighty line,” ultimately stabbed to death in a tavern fight at the age of 29.

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Marlowe may have been the one to make the diabolical contract a mainstay of European literature, but it was the nineteenth century German poet and polymath Johann Goethe who elevated the story into the canon of eternal works. A genius who dabbled in everything from botany to anatomy, Goethe is nonetheless most celebrated for his brilliant writings responsible for the inauguration of the passionate and emotional literary movement of Romanticism. His Faust, written in two voluminous parts respectively published in 1790 and 1808, was intended to be a “closet drama,” a type of verse play meant to be read rather than performed. Drawing from the same wellspring of German myth as Marlowe, Goethe nonetheless reinvents the details and purpose of the Faust legend. Fleshing out a love interest for the wizard, Goethe also more importantly reorients the focus of the devilish contract into a wildly expansive philosophical vision, having Faust sell his soul not for power or even knowledge, but rather a very Romantic zeal for unadulterated human experience. Most arrestingly, the Faust of Goethe’s poem finds a salvation denied the magician in Marlowe’s play, though the questions raised about human freedom and depravity along the way remain disturbing, this sense that “Man errs as long as he strives.” Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

Carpets…chairs…shoes…bricks…crockery…anything you like to mention – they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories – well – they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods.

So goes one of the more biting sections in the delightfully mordant 1953 short story by Roald Dahl called The Great Automatic Grammatizator. The story focuses on a man who we’d refer to as a computer scientist today. He’s just finished developing a “great automatic computing engine,” at the request of the government, but he’s unsatisfied. You see, Adolph Knipe has always wanted to be a writer. The only problem is, he’s terrible at it. Publishers keep turning him down, and it’s no surprise when we read that his current novel begins with “The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs…”

However, Knipe has an epiphany one night. He’s already successfully built a computing engine that can solve any calculation by reducing it down to the fundamental operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Why couldn’t he do the same with stories? All he’d have to do is teach the machine English grammar, program the parameters of each major publication’s style, and the machine would write the stories for him!

Thus begins his invention of the Great Automatic Grammatizator, a machine that can produce a story in the style of all the best publications at the press of a button. Knipe works like a madman to build a prototype and goes back to work to show it to his boss. After hearing how the machine works, his boss (a Mr. Bohlen) says, “This is all very interesting, but what’s the point of it?” Knipe explains how it could be used as a money-making tool, but the boss still isn’t convinced, knowing how expensive it would be to make and run such a machine. Knipe spells it out: Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

It is said that money talks, but recent signals from markets, economic indicators, and utterances from monetary policy makers all over the world now display all the comprehensibility of an overly enthusiastic believer speaking in tongues. Things had been hyper-sensitive since the Federal Reserve started raising the key interest rate (Federal Funds rate) from an historic low of 0.25% in early 2022 to 5.5% in August of 2023, but the last several weeks have produced a series of gyrations and blowouts that have been quite unique. Perhaps it is only because of the extraordinary (usually regarding their absurdity) happenings in the world of domestic politics and nothing less than atrocities on the international scene that many have allowed these events to fade from view. But then these developments have their own complicating effects on the same markets.

The most prominent cause of tension in the markets has involved two major forces pulling against each other: a weakness in the US labor market, and signs of increasing or plateauing US inflation. Any significant indication of momentum in either direction induces market players to pile in, reinforcing the trend. If the movement becomes dramatic enough, pressure builds on the monetary authorities to stem the accelerating tide by altering interest rates.

Since early July, poor monthly unemployment reports have resulted in lopsided reactions that have provoked alarm amongst Federal Reserve board members and monetary policy officials worldwide. Officials dropped hints that the first Fed rate cut in 4 years became more or less imminent, slated for the September 18^th, 2024 Fed meeting. At first, few expected more than the usual quarter-percentage point cut. But when the second consecutive subpar report for July came in early August, markets worldwide panicked. US and European markets took significant hits, but the real damage, as is so often the case, was in the Far East and the less-developed world, although four of the most adversely affected markets were powerhouses like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

The first time I hear about couchsurfing is in a political science class. It’s 2013 and I’m a sophomore in college.

Our guest speaker is a guy in his 30’s that’s traveled the world. His secret to doing it on the cheap?

A website called Couchsurfing that lets you sleep in strangers’ homes.

He tells us about all the places he’s been, the people he’s met, and the adventures he’s had. He finishes his presentation and asks if there’s any questions. Nobody raises their hand. I take the bait.

“And all of this is safe?”

He nods his head and laughs.

“Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”

I go home that evening and look it up. Couchsurfing has over 14 million members around the world. Sounds legit to me.

Creating a profile can be stressful. You add some pictures, the countries you’ve been to, and a little bit about yourself. But what to say?

I spend a few hours thinking about it. How do I sound nice without trying too hard? Or trustworthy without being desperate? 

The profiles I look up all sound so much cooler than me. I’m 20 years old and have never left the United States. What interesting things can I possibly offer?

I throw up a few random lines about languages and reading and call it a day. I don’t plan on using it anytime soon. But a few months later, after going back and forth in my head, my time comes.

It’s time to give couchsurfing a shot. Read more »

Clothespins in Spiluck, South Tyrol, with the Dolomites and Brixen in the background.

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

When we look back on some of our most pleasant memories, they often share two things in common: people we love and food. We would be unlikely to describe the origin of our favorite meals as food production. We’d be more likely to describe it as cooking and the cooks we’d describe would, invariably be people. That might not always be true.

Mezli was the first fully robotic restaurant in San Francisco. If you stop by for a meal, you’ll find that your fully customizable order is taken by a machine and the food itself is delivered by robots. The creators of Mezli argue that producing food in this way is a moral good: it involves less space, less of a carbon footprint, and has the potential to make food cheaper because there are not employees to pay.

One need not be up for a night out in order for technology to do the cooking. For those who would like some assistance with cooking at home, there’s the Moley Robotic Kitchen. Those who purchase this technology will have a pair of robot arms installed in their kitchens that will prepare and cook food for them. The robot arms can even be trained to cook in the style of the owner’s favorite five-star chefs.

The process of creating food can be time consuming. It can be difficult to find the time and attention every day to craft three healthy and delicious meals for oneself and one’s family. This may be an area in which people could use a little help. On the other hand, we might think that cooking is an art; it’s an aesthetic experience. It is also a fundamental way in which we show love and care to the people in our lives.

AI is already being used to craft recipes; in the future we may not even need to be creative anymore—AI may provide us with more food combinations than we ever considered. It will be able to learn any food tradition and style and will be able to create beautiful and seamless fusions of ingredients. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

Once again, I found myself torn in several directions trying to choose a topic for this piece. I try not to be too current, but also not too esoteric. I considered writing about A.I. generated video games, end-of-life care for pets (unfortunately quite topical in our house), and the overly formal and stylistic definitions of fascism in the popular press. Overwhelmed, I reached to the bookshelf for something less ad hoc, something that could afford some comforting distance from the present moment, while also enhancing perception through a parallax view. (I have been partial to optical analogies ever since taking an exceptionally good course on pre-modern theories of optics by Dr. Stephen Menn at McGill. Holding MA and PhD degrees in both philosophy and mathematics, with a command of ancient languages and a gift for exegetical reading, I am still impressed by his teaching some twenty years later.)

I landed on Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction”. It mostly recommended itself by its brevity; the titular essay runs only fifty pages in its slim Penguin Classics edition. I first became aware of Benjamin through Giorgio Agamben’s writing during my late 2000’s edgy political theory days, when theology, linguistics and theatrical criticism blended together in a haze of intriguingly oblique but often flatly ridiculous text (insert “Verso monograph ” joke here). The title of this work promised some strikingly prescient anticipations of the current debates over the role of generative A.I. in art and culture. It was not to be, insofar as Benjamin’s concern with art’s impact on audiences does not speak so readily to concerns about the impact of A.I. art on artists or its use for automated forgeries. It did, rather unexpectedly, lend itself more readily to questions about the differences between film and video games, and to the topic of aesthetic vs substantive critiques of fascism. (Benjamin, as a writer, a Marxist, and a Jew, found fascism inescapable in its ubiquity and in its enmity towards his identities. He killed himself in 1940, five years after the essay’s publication, when he was captured in Spain while trying to flee to America via Portugal, believing that he would be deported to France and handed over to the Nazis.) Read more »

by Derek Neal

I was in Toronto the other day to see Paul Schrader’s newest film, Oh, Canada, which was screening at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). This was my first time seeing a movie at a festival, and the experience was quite different from seeing a movie at a cinema: we had to line up in advance, the location was not a cinema but a theatre (in this case, the Princess of Wales Theater, a beautiful venue with orchestra seating, a balcony, and plush red carpeting), and there was a buzz in the air, as everyone in attendance had made a special effort to see a movie they wouldn’t be able to see elsewhere. As I stood in line with the other ticket holders, I noticed that there was a clear difference between the type of person in my line, for those with advance tickets, and the rush line, for those without tickets and who would be allowed in only in the case of no shows: in my line, the attendees were older, often in couples, and had the air of Money and Culture about them; in the rush line, the hopeful attendees were younger, often male, and solitary. In other words, those in the rush line, the ones who couldn’t get their shit together to buy a ticket in time, could have been typical Schrader protagonists: a man in a room, trying, yet frequently failing, to live a meaningful life, to keep it together, to be the type of person who buys a ticket in advance, and invites his wife, too. Yet there I was, in the advance ticket line: a man, relatively young, and someone who spends a good deal of time by himself. I’d invited my partner of 10 years, but she didn’t come because she doesn’t like Paul Schrader films, and who can blame her? They’re not for everyone. Perhaps my presence in the advance ticket line, but my understanding of and identification with those in the other line, helps explain my deep attraction to Schrader’s films: I know his characters, and in the right circumstances, I could become one of his characters.

We made our way into the theatre and found our seats. I’d put some thought into my choice of assigned seat. It was one of the cheapest seats, but it was also the final row of the dress circle, just below the balcony, and it was almost at the end of the aisle. I thought this would give me a good view of the screen while also allowing for easy entry to and exit from my seat, avoiding the need to stand up to let people pass while also removing the need for me to squeeze by people in my row. However, as the usher showed me to my seat, I realized I had not, in fact, made a good choice. Read more »