by Thomas R. Wells

Americans dominate global (social) media and one result of this is that the rest of the world is overexposed to Americans’ ideas, and also to their ideas about themselves. One such idea that is more or less endlessly repeated is that even middle-class Americans are actually poor these days.

I accept that many Americans are perfectly sincere in this belief but that doesn’t make it true, whether one defines poverty in terms of meeting basic needs, or as a relative decline between generations or between America and other nations. Yes – some Americans are poor, really poor by any reasonable standard. But not most Americans, or the average (median) American, which is the claim I see constantly.

The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. They are objectively some of the luckiest people in world history. On the one hand all this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty is mildly annoying for the rest of the world to have to listen to. On the other hand, it reflects shared delusions about individual entitlements and America’s economic decline that are driving a toxic ‘doom politics’ of cynicism and resentment, while also neglecting the needs of actually poor Americans.

Two misunderstandings in particular seem to drive the mistake: that everything is more expensive these days, and that the rich took all the money. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

When I was a little boy my parents had a book that convulsed me with giggles. It was a collection of cartoons by Abner Dean called What Am I Doing Here? I couldn’t read, and I didn’t understand what was happening in the pictures, but the people in the cartoons were naked! You could see their tushies! It just cracked me up.

One day the book disappeared. I think my friend Neal from down the street boosted it, but in any case I forgot about it for many years. Then one afternoon when I was about 20 I came across it again in a used book store. I remember the feeling distinctly. The drawings were strangely familiar, and they were deep. Some of them made me shiver with the shiver of cosmic deepness. Readers who were once 20-year-old pot smokers will know what I mean. But the man wanted $12 or some such impossible sum, and I had to leave it in the store.

I was in another used book store 25 years later, and I came across it again. I recognized the cover and eagerly paged through the cartoons. This time they struck me as silly. “Sophomoric” was the word that came to mind. I didn’t see any reason to buy it.

Another 25 years has gone by, and there was an ad for a re-issue of What Am I Doing Here? in the New York Review of Books. It said:

With an inimitable mixture of wit, earnestness, and enigmatic surrealism, Dean uses this most ephemeral of forms to explore the deepest mysteries of human existence.

I ordered a copy. (Drumroll, please.) Nothing. Not funny, not deep, not clever. Nothing. An entirely forgettable book of entirely forgettable cartoons.

So which is true? Is it wet-your-pants funny, chillingly deep, or just silly? The question, as the Buddha used to say, “is not rightly put.” I experienced the book in all of those ways, and all of my experiences were perfectly valid. “But what is it really?” is not a proper question. I wasn’t wrong when I thought it was hysterically funny, and I’m not wrong now that I think it’s silly. The category of correctness or incorrectness doesn’t apply. Read more »

A painting at the Löwenhof Hotel in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

by Raji Jayaraman

Vijay was the smartest kid in class. It was a small class, and we weren’t especially bright, but I don’t mean that he was smart in a big-fish-small-pond sense. I mean it in absolute terms. He was a math genius. Short and slight of build there was nothing remarkable about his appearance, at least not neck-down. Neck-up, it was a different story. He had a massive head and we’re talking Boss Baby proportions. On anyone else, that head would have been fair game for mockery. But perched on Vijay’s shoulders, with a brain that size, it seemed like the only feasible design choice.

The boarding school we attended wasn’t especially prestigious. It wasn’t Mayo or Doon, where blue-blooded Indians waitlisted unborn children who, by accident of birth, were predestined to rule. No, the currency for admission wasn’t pedigree. It was money. There were three groups of students who could afford to attend our school. The first was rich kids, whose parents paid out of pocket. Some belonged to the petty nobility who, despite the half-century old abolition of titles, had managed to retain some ancestral wealth.  Theirs was old money. It was solid, with no need for external trappings. Indeed, their lack of pretension was so flagrant it bordered on deceit. In middle school, for instance, we had to cancel our third and final run of “You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown” because one of the lead actors’ fathers, L.’s dad, died. As the eldest son, L.  had to go home to perform his father’s final rites. Snoopy never returned to school because he was now the Raja of P.

The new money was different. They had generous monthly allowances and wore designer clothes with fancy French names I couldn’t pronounce: Es-spirit, Die-ore, Gukki. Many of these kids belonged to families who, by hook or crook, had secured state monopolies in key industries of India’s post-independence “licence-Raj”. Others were expatriates whose parents worked in Indian joint ventures, or belonged to well heeled families from neighbouring countries. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

There was an old man who so loved his son,
His day was only properly begun
Once he had hugged his darling to his breast
And kissed his tender cheek. Nor could he rest
At night until the boy was put to bed;
And still he’d stand by him, and stroke his head.
Or let’s just say: he liked him well enough,
Could bear his cries, and was not over-rough
When scolding him, begrudged him not his meat,
And saw that he had leather on his feet.
No, it was worse: in truth, he hated him,
Became a father on a drunken whim
And now was bound by duty, not by joy,
To spend his dotage tending to the boy.

The point is—love, or loathe, or suffer him,
That man prepared to carve him limb from limb
In answer to the urging of a voice
Within his head, which offered him a choice:
Prove your compliance with a sacrifice,
Or be excluded from my paradise.

It didn’t come to that, of course. The child
Was spared—not by his father, who was wild
To do the will of his delirium,
But by the very same mysterium
That had decreed the awful liturgy,
Which very act proved it a deity:
Inscrutable, contrarian, perverse—
A fitting ruler of the universe. Read more »

by Gus Mitchell

(Read Pt. 1)

If there has been a decline in many parts of our culture in the last several years, and if we are increasingly bored by the infinitude of content offered us in exchange, then the blurring of art and content has a lot to do with it.

Increasingly, both societally and culturally, we can process only information, or as Mark Zuckerberg put it, via “information flow.” In the world of culture, this translates to awards, lists and listings, rankings, ratings, returns, engagement, traffic, clicks, likes, shares, subscriptions, metrics, algorithms, data, numbers. Mass culture is now nothing other than the content we feed into this nexus of informational processing.

But only imagination can transfigure information, reify it, make us feel it, make it mean or do something.

To return to that etymological ramble from last time, content in adjectival form is a feeling of a “fullness”, that feeling which Shakespeare associated with the “heart’s content.” But content, in this sense, and capitalism, are incompatible. In Capitalism and Desire, Todd McGowan writes that “those who are not continually seeking new objects of desire”, or those who “content themselves with outmoded objects and recognize the satisfaction embodied in the object’s failure to realize their desire…are not good consumers or producers” of the commodities that capitalism produces to fill the sense of emptiness it inculcates. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Breaking Point.

Digital photograph February 2022.

by Brooks Riley

by David Winner

“Forget skyscrapers, ice water, drinks, stockmakers, New York, half chewed cigars, and statues of liberty.  Think of camel bells, cyclamen and the last lions,” wrote Bill Barker, the commander of the northern province of mandate Palestine to his lover, my great Aunt Dorle in 1934, trying to encourage her to move from New York to the Middle East.  Dorle was entrenched in the New York music world by that point, working with the New York Philharmonic, but she had grown up a poor little rich girl from New York inspired by the tales of Scheherazade.  The Middle East was an enchanted place and Islam its enchanted religion.

But when I think of her travels in the Arab world in the twenties and thirties, it is nineteenth century composer and part time Orientalist Gioachino Rossini who comes to mind: his operas about traveling from the east to the west and visa-versa: Un Italiano in Algeria, Un Turco in Italia.   What would he have called Dorle, Una Fanciulla (young girl) Hebraica in Arabia?

Certainly, Dorle’s vision of The Orient had not progressed far beyond Rossini’s.  Georges Asfar, another lover in her prolific thirties (a Syrian Christian) encouraged her to think of him as her Muslim master.  Like Barker, he littered his letters with Arabic, the magical language of magical places.

I’ve carried something of that flame myself the few times I’ve traveled in the Arab world, but worse than my muted Orientalism, I’ve sometimes fallen prey to an even more dangerous trope, represented by Claire Danes as Carrie from Homeland, her blond hair disguised by a hijab, walking purposefully through devious Muslim spaces.

However sophisticated and well-traveled I see myself, I’ve fallen into sinkholes of fear and prejudice while traveling in what Dorle would have called the Orient. Read more »

The raging waters of the Eisack river flowing through Franzensfeste at twilight.

by William Benzon

I’ve now seen Maestro twice, spread out over four, maybe five, sittings. I suppose the fact that I haven’t watched it straight through in a single sitting might be taken as an indication that I didn’t find it…Didn’t find it what? Good, compelling, interesting, satisfying? If one or some combination of those is true, then why did I watch it twice? Maybe I found it disturbing and wanted to figure out what was bugging me? If it was disturbing, the disturbance was unconscious.

[That I didn’t watch the whole film in a single sitting is certainly an indication of the fact that I watched the film at home, in front of a small screen, instead of in a theater and with a large audience.]

Was I bugged? Yes, I was bugged, about the damned prosthetic nose. I kept reading that Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic offended some people. Bernstein’s kids defended it. There I am, watching the film. There’s the second scene where Bernstein is seated, gray hair, red shirt, smoking a cigarette, and talking about his (dead) wife. He had an intense almost vibrant tan, a color looking like it didn’t quite make the cut for Rudolph’s nose. Did he hang out in a tanning booth? That bugged me, a little.

I don’t know whether or not I’d have been bugged about the nose if I hadn’t heard so much about it. I never saw Bernstein live, but I certainly saw him on TV and saw lots of photos. As far as I recall I never gave two thoughts to his nose.

Now my father, he had a nose. We called it a Danish nose because his parents were from Denmark. Which was bigger, my father’s Danish nose, Bernstein’s (Jewish) nose, or Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic version of Bernstein’s (Jewish) nose? This is silly.

I wonder if all this fuss about a schnoz is part of the shadow cast by the awful events of October 7th? Or the resurgence of antisemitism in the country? Did I know that Bernstein was Jewish the first time I became aware of him, perhaps from one of those Young People’s Concerts on TV or perhaps it was a more straightforwardly didactic program? I’m pretty sure I knew Louis Armstrong was black the first time I became aware of him. Couldn’t miss it. The color of his skin was as plain as the four-letter-word on your face. Read more »

by Sauleha Kamal

Narrating Pakistan: An Anthology of Contemporary Creative Writing sets a lofty aim for itself: “to explore the idea of Pakistan through contemporary stories—the term, the country, the nation, the identity…”. There have been a few attempts to anthologize Pakistan in the past few decades. Oxford University Press anthologies like I’ll Find My Way (2014), Muneeza Shamsie’s two collections (which the preface to this book mentions), Granta 112: Pakistan (2011) and, as far as academic explorations of Pakistan go, The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing come to mind. Ultimately, this anthology sets itself apart by telling, not the story of Pakistan but the story of young Pakistan. The characters in these stories are often young people—children, teenagers and young adults—dealing with the trauma of confronting what is, what could have been and what will be. This anthology brings together various writers who write about everything from dreaming of casting off economic shackles—in small villages, giant metropolises and foreign cities that glitter with promise and danger—to confronting isolation—following the Coronavirus pandemic, immigration or a depressive episode. There are stories that explore humanity through the loneliness of the female experience in a patriarchal milieu and the difficulties of conceptualizing Muslim masculinity in post-9/11 America.

A story about young Pakistan today cannot be told without telling the story of leaving Pakistan, as more and more young Pakistanis do every year. Many of the stories in this anthology are about the consequences of leaving and the challenges of diasporic existence. Many of these stories deal with the alienation of being a person of color in places that are not too kind to people with the wrong skin color, to paraphrase the wording of multiple stories. The idea of the wrongness of an “epidermis” crops up in both Syed Kazim Ali Kazmi’s “Trans/Gress” and Saeed Ur Rehman’s “The Sharpness of Grass Blades”. The narrator in Aatif Rashid’s “Brown Mirror” yearns to peel off his brown skin. Read more »

Read more »

by Tim Sommers

(The butter robot realizing the sole purpose of its existence is to pass the butter.)

In the halcyon days of “self-driving cars are six months away,” you probably encountered this argument. “If self-driving cars work, they will be safer than cars driven by humans.” Sure. If, by “they work,” you mean that, among other things, they are safer than cars driven by humans, then, it follows, that they will be safer than cars driven by humans, if they work. That’s called begging the question. Unfortunately, the tech world has more than it’s share of such sophistries. AI, especially.

Exhibit #1

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, in an article linked to on 3 Quarks Daily, Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” tells Joshua Rothman:

“‘People say, [of Large Language Models like ChatGPT that] It’s just glorified autocomplete…Now, let’s analyze that…Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. So, by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete.’ Hinton thinks that ‘large language models,’ such as GPT, which powers OpenAI’s chatbots, can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas.”

This is a morass of terrible reasoning. But before we even get into it, I have to say that thinking that an algorithm that works by calculating the odds of what the next word in a sentence will be “can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas” is a reductio ad absurdum of the rest. (In fairness, Rothman attributes that view to Hinton, but doesn’t quote him as saying that, so maybe that’s not really Rothman’s position. But it seems to be.)

Hinton says “training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand.” There’s no support for the claim that the only way to be good at predicting the next word in a sentence is to understand what is being said. LMMs prove that, they don’t undermine it. Further, if anything, prior experience suggests the opposite. Calculators are not better at math than most people because they “understand” numbers. Read more »