by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

Suppose that you were in charge of a large government agency responsible for dealing with public health emergencies. Suppose furthermore the country is in the midst of just such an emergency, and that there is a particular action that, if a large enough percentage of the public performs that action, will alleviate a significant amount of the ill-effects of the current public health emergency. Let’s say that the large enough percentage of participation is 70%. The action is one that requires ongoing participation: even if a member of the public is currently performing the action, they have to KEEP performing it in order for the benefits to accrue.

Suppose finally that your agency is the only agency with access to accurate information about the participation rate, and your tracking data suggests that the participation rate is at 50%. At a press conference, a reporter asks you a question about the current participation rate. 

So far, this imagined example has none of the farfetched qualities that people associate with philosophical thought-experiments. Indeed, most of the example will involve the sorts of situations that could very plausibly emerge. However, there is one aspect of the example that WILL be fantastical, but not in a way that should affect our judgments about the questions that I want to raise – in fact, this aspect should just serve to sharpen those questions. Read more »

by Derek Neal 

I’m not sure anyone has ever figured out how to write about music. This is a dangerous statement to make, and I’m sure readers will be quick to point out writers who have been able to capture something as intangible as sound via the written word. This would be a happy result of this article, and I welcome any and all suggestions. I should also say that I don’t mean there are no good music writers; there are, and I have certain writers I follow and read. But the question of how to write about music remains a tricky one.

As far as I can tell, most writing about music is built on analogies and cliches. This is understandable; you can’t describe music literally because it wouldn’t give an accurate representation of what it is you’re hearing. What use is it to say that a song is written in the key of A minor, has a tempo of 110 beats per minute, and follows a 4/4 time signature? These facts don’t add up to much. On the other hand, using analogies to describe music is meant, I suppose, not to state the objective facts of a song but to capture the experience of listening to a song and the subjective emotional response created within the listener. Perhaps, in combining technical, factual description of a song with figurative language, a song can be captured via text and the reader can hear the song in their head without ever actually having heard it out loud. This seems to be the goal of most music reviews.

I was put in mind of all this when I read an article in this month’s issue of Harper’s about the transition from the pre-internet world to the digital world of today. The author, Hari Kunzru, was writing about how he would read descriptions of music in magazines and try to imagine what the music sounded like, which does bring up the question: when we can listen to any song instantly, is it even necessary to attempt to put music into words? Perhaps the genre of the music review is simply a historical anomaly that has run its course. This may be true, but the same could be said and has been said for the novel, the essay, and many other forms of traditional composition. And yet here I am, writing these words, so I’ll continue to explore the description of music and attempt to achieve its goal of transmitting sound via written language. Read more »

Trees in Vahrn, South Tyrol, last week.

by Dick Edelstein

I got an incredible break when I was thirteen. We moved to Seattle and I entered public school in the sixth grade, after five years of Catholic education. The impact of the change in fortune was all the greater since I had no particular expectations, a good example of the principle that you can never know when things are about to change for the better. It was not just that my least favorite subject, religion, was no longer on the curriculum–that was the least of it. My new school exuded a different mood, much more open, so different to the reform school atmosphere I had become accustomed to. My life began to feel truly blessed.

My first day in class was unforgettable. At the start of class, the teacher introduced me and asked if they could call me Dick. To my surprise, I answered in the affirmative even though I had always been called Richard. In a single haphazard stroke of unaccustomed boldness, I had named myself. My dad took it with a grain of salt and my mom was appalled.

There was more. The school year was already in progress and this was election day. Every month a new class president was elected. Owing solely to the fleeting popularity of being a new boy, I was elected. The other candidate had expected to win but took it with good grace. His name was Ike like the former US president. That very day he began to initiate me into his world. One of his chief interests was electronics. Since this field of knowledge was not covered in the curriculum at this early age, I was able to glean what I needed to know about it from magazines and the public library. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

The interest of both Masahiko Aoki and Gérard Roland in institutional economics easily shaded into comparative analysis of economic systems, including different varieties of capitalism and socialism. Since my student days I have been acutely interested in comparative systems and their political economy. In this context like Aoki and Roland I have closely followed developments in China. When I was growing up in Kolkata the leftists around me used to say that the Chinese were better socialists than us, now in the last three decades I have heard in all quarters that the Chinese are better capitalists than us. To reconcile the two I sometimes tell people that if the Chinese are better capitalists now this is partly because they were better socialists then. This is not an entirely flippant comment. By the end of the Mao regime in middle 1970’s, before Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms started, Chinese performance indicators in basic health, education and rural electrification showed levels unattained by India even by two decades later. This gave China a head start in providing the basis of capitalist industrialization.

The two largest countries of the world with ancient agrarian civilizations, with many centuries of dominance in the world economy in the past (up to about 1800) and with impressive economic growth achievements in recent decades though with different political and economic systems, draw obvious comparison, but since 1990 the Chinese economic performance has been far superior. My first piece of comparative study of Chinese and Indian agriculture came out in the Journal of Asian Studies in 1970. Fifty years later, I was still at it, with my piece on a comparison of the economic governance systems of the two countries coming out in China Economic Review in 2020. Meanwhile in 2011 I published a book titled Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India. One abiding theme in my recent work has been that China-India comparison is not a simple matter of authoritarianism vs. democracy. While there are some undoubtedly positive features of the Chinese governance system, authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for those features. On the other hand, there are some ugly features of the Chinese system that are inherent in authoritarianism. Read more »

[This is the eighteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

Early in the story of The Walking Dead — the enormously popular, post-apocalyptic, television series — sharpshooting everyman, Rick Grimes, finds himself cast as leader to a group of beleaguered survivors, who must navigate the malignant chaos of a world suddenly overtaken by zombies. Every comfort, convenience, and civic structure of modern American life has collapsed. The threat of death lurks beyond every hillock or behind any tree. Ordinary people are left to fend for themselves against overwhelming forces, with nothing but guns (and the odd pickaxe or crossbow) for aid. And sentimental attachments to other people only leave individuals more vulnerable to attack. In this world that has slipped the grip of civilization, Grimes works to keep a strain of justice and mercy aloft within his desperate band.

But torn away from the cogency of his ordinary, 21st-century life, and cast into unrelenting danger and uncertainty, even Grimes’s kinder impulses are slowly ground away by his unabating experiences of horror and loss. His moral compass spins erratically. By the fifth season of The Walking Dead, the line separating Grimes from the threats he’s fought for years to hold at bay has worn distressingly thin. In fact, much before this, the show’s storylines and characters have already notably shifted their attention from the horrors of the zombies to the horrors of relying upon one’s fellow dislocated human beings for refuge and assistance in an ongoing crisis. Confronting the atrocities committed by the living profoundly changes Grimes and every member of his crew, as they also become more adept killers. Yet, uncannily, the social world they inhabit together doesn’t change much at all.¹ Read more »

War & Weekends

I’m writing from a list of prompts
in an exercise for loosening the tight grip
of uncertainty of mind in an effort
to knock the chocks from under its
big wheels to let the thing roll

yesterday’s was war, which I skipped,
never having been there but in books
and other vicarious means, safe
for the time being in my bubble—
yet there it is today, in news, on screen, its horror,
its devastation, its grief, its incendiary reality,
its cyclical road to nowhere
lined with corpses —immediate.

but today the prompt is: weekends,
two days arbitrarily set aside
as if they were, literally, the end of weeks
which themselves are inventions,
yet we love them so, respite as they are
from the famous dictum of Eden
at the moment of our eviction that: we
shall, henceforth, labor by sweat of brow

—at least until robots are conceived
further down the road and AI comes along
to relieve us from the ache of work
and thought, and knowing— and,

we shall sweat in sorrow, no less—

which brings us back to war and other
misapprehensions and monkey-wrenches
of thought and mind concocted by beings
who wage war and write poems

.Jim Culleny, 4/23/22

by Rafaël Newman

You’ve heard the story before. The poet Orpheus, celebrated for the enchanting quality of his voice, is grieving the sudden death of his young wife Eurydice. In his despair he resolves to harrow the Underworld, where he so impresses the god Hades with his singing that he is permitted to retrieve the shade of his bride and return with her, newly embodied, into the light—on one condition: that he not look back at Eurydice until they have attained the realm of the living. All is proceeding according to plan, and the pair have nearly made it to the world above, when Orpheus, overcome by the suspicion that he has been swindled, turns to assure himself that his silent wife is still following him—only to see her flee away, this time forever, back into the shadows.

Boy meets girl.
Boy loses girl.
Boy finds girl.
Boy loses girl again.
Boy founds enduring aesthetic tradition.

For the theme of the beautiful, irretrievable, now permanently dead woman and her endlessly grieving, magically gifted male lover, who nobly commemorates her in works of art, has been recycled time and again in the millennia since its mythical origins, in story, song, and the visual media, from the Roman elegists through the earliest Venetian opera pioneers to the Romantic poets, from the painters of the Renaissance through the Pre-Raphaelites to the Surrealists. Read more »

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Out of Egypt. 2021

Patchwork.

More here, here, and here.

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

I

Russia’s war on Ukraine is realigning geopolitics everywhere you look. The Germans and French want the conflict to end immediately. Others won’t be heartbroken to see fighting continue to degrade Russian capabilities. The UK, Poles and Balts come to mind here. An idea is settling in that the US, too, doesn’t entirely mind fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian. There’s no denying the war is less painful from forty five hundred miles away.

Look north and if Finland and Sweden join NATO, overnight the Baltic Sea becomes the beating heart of European security. The shallow, enclosed Baltic hasn’t played such a heady role since the days of Napoleon. Vilnius and Riga never dreamed of such proximity to power.

In 2019 Mikhail Saakashvili, a previous victim of Russian aggression, predicted Russia’s next attack would come against Finland or Sweden. He was wrong, but he might not be wrong forever. That’s the fear that fuels an astonishing rush toward strategic realignment around the Baltic Sea.

Finnish President Sauli Niinistö is two years shy of wrapping up his second six year term. The 73 year old son of a newspaperman and a nurse from Finland’s southwest coast, Niinistö consistently polls as the country’s most revered figure.

He was in Washington a week and a day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, already working to insure the American administration’s blessing for Finland’s accession to NATO. The Finns hold their president in such regard that his backing of Finland’s coming NATO application should insure the peoples’ approval.

Niinistö put it this way: “Sufficient security is where Finns can feel that there is no emergency and there won’t be one.” Joining NATO, he said, would be “most sufficient.”  Read more »

After Steve Jobs hit his VP of development on the forehead, called him a stupid fuck, then stormed out of a meeting that had been set up to see George’s invention, everything changed.

Read more »

Street scene in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Photo taken two weeks ago.

by Bill Benzon

What is the blues? It is a mood, a feeling, a sensibility. Feeling blue. Feeling blue?

It is a musical form, existing in its own tradition, but also as a form within the jazz tradition. The latter is what this series article is about, the blues as it functions within the evolving context of jazz.

The blues is also an object of wonder, fascination, and mystery. Back in the middle of the 20th century some curious and well-meaning white folks went looking for the blues. Marybeth Hamilton wrote a book about their quest, In Search of the Blues:

Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton-we are all familiar with the story of the Delta blues. Fierce, raw voices; tormented drifters; deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight.

In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the Delta blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. The idea of something called Delta blues only emerged in the mid-twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music.

Hamilton shows that the Delta blues was effectively invented by white pilgrims, seekers, and propagandists who headed deep into America’s south in search of an authentic black voice of rage and redemption. In their quest, and in the immense popularity of the music they championed, we confront America’s ongoing love affair with racial difference.

That’s from the publisher’s blurb. It sounds about right, though I’ve not read the book. I’ve read other books. I know a thing or two. In 1966 a man named Charlie Keil published Urban Blues. It blew the doors off that myth. Read more »