—on scanning the news feed this morning:

Stasis—a collateral effect of nuclear power

We face the conundrum of dealing with Tony Soprano.
Tony, you know, will stop at nothing while you,
being disinclined to fire a nuclear warhead
(when Tony has some too)
are left with the fist of cutting off his credit.

This is the truth of modern war and diplomacy:
to take the chance that your enemy
actually cares about something other than himself.
We’re at the threshold of mob rule or Armageddon.
It’s a tough choice for a rational mind
because you understand it may be your last.

It’s a horrendous choice for a president. Hell,
it’s a horrendous choice for anyone who cares about anyone.
But it may not be for Tony. We just don’t know. So now,
maybe that old philosophical question has an answer:
How many choices can dance on the head of a pin,
just one?

Jim Culleny
3/21/22

by Jeroen Bouterse

He had a visceral aversion to war, was strongly in favor of social distancing in times of pandemic, and believed it would be a good thing if the Germans turned down their heaters a notch or two.[1] Of these still sympathetic opinions, the last was admittedly informed by his discomfort with wood stoves. Erasmus did comment on fuel markets once: echoing a friend’s joke, he claimed to be annoyed by heretics for being burned at such a scale that it drove up wood prices.[2]

It was one of the many occasions in which he spoke with dry irony about things that disturbed him deeply. Erasmus found his own way of talking about violence and war, and the other horrors that humans inflict upon each other. At the deepest level, his analysis was that war is bad. He was not, confirms his biographer Sandra Langereis, a very strong political thinker. An individualist rather than a sociologist, he tended to see war as a moral evil, and blame it on the foolishness and wrongheadedness of rulers. The people found cities; the mighty raze them to the ground.

Perhaps this is a good time to read Erasmus. Read more »

Bridget Mullen. Threshold Blues, 2018.

Acrylic and Flashe on linen.

More here and here.

by Varun Gauri

When modern Buddhists and mindfulness practitioners say the ultimate cause of stress and suffering is the craving for permanence, especially the misguided craving for a permanent “self,” which “self” are they talking about?

In his interesting and provocative book Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Evan Thompson explores the possibilities: (1) The pre-reflective self, elemental to consciousness, is related to the fact that we cannot perceive an object without being aware that we are perceiving it. For example, I cannot notice a sunset without the knowledge that I am aware of the sunset. (2) I experience an imagined center of agency and locus of being. This is the sense, and the legal fiction, that someone is in charge in there, a CEO or author of our actions and thoughts. (3) Many of us believe in a non-material essence or soul. (4) I have an awareness of being embodied, the understanding that what happens to my arm also happens to me. (5) There is a social self that exists in relationships to others. I am continually monitoring where I stand in relation to parents, friends, families, colleagues, nations, and others. Am I loved, known, cared for? (6) Cognitive psychologist discuss the generalized ability to reflect on our own experience — the faculty for meta-awareness that is the source of introspection and planning. (7) Following from that capacity for meta-cognition, I am aware of  “an extended self,” which emerges from an historical past and is thrown into time (there was something before me and there will be something after). This self has a kind of gnawing awareness of an unknown future, or rather, a future uncertain but for my certain death. This is the self that has to go places, that has an autobiography and that spins a narrative identity. It is the self that existentialists discuss, the one that establishes a stance —  courageous, fearful, indifferent — toward our impending demise.  Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

For John Duffy (November 5, 1963—March 3, 2022)

…great confusion ensued, and everyone was compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went away—he himself fell asleep, and was awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were either asleep, or had gone away; there remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to them, compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy, and not quite following the argument. And first of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

Anticipating war in Europe, 2022.

Thursday, 13 January

If an attack is imminent, Kyiv’s air raid sirens will alert residents to tune in to emergency service announcements. Cars equipped with loudspeakers will also patrol the streets to announce important information.

The Kyiv City Council has posted an interactive online map, which shows the locations of the roughly 5,000 official locations where residents can shelter from a military attack. Of that number, 514 shelters are purpose-built facilities dating back to the Cold War where people can remain for days on end.

Each citizen should prepare an “emergency suitcase” ahead of time. This should be a backpack with a capacity of at least 25 liters, a little more than 6.5 gallons, containing “clothing, hygiene items, medicines, tools, personal protective equipment, and food.” The service also recommends carrying important documents and cash in the backpack.

Friday, 14 January

“Sweden, which is not part of NATO, has among other things noticed a number of landing craft from Russia’s northern navy which have been entering the Baltic Sea,” the AP reported. The next day … all three Russian Baltic Fleet Ropucha-class heavy landing ships departed Baltiysk (a port in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad). These can each land 25 armored personnel carriers. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been spending more time in the office than I have since the start of COVID. I work for a technology start-up, and our New York office used to look and feel just as shows like Silicon Valley portrayed such offices: cool furniture, fancy coffee machines, lots of free snacks, gaming systems and board games piled up in a dedicated room, and lots of young people who gave the office a fun, high energy, even if noisy, vibe. But this visit, while the snacks and coffee machines are still there, the office has a rather ghost town-like feel. There’s been no mandate to return to the office, so for the most part, people haven’t. Every day I saw my colleague Andy who lives in a Manhattan apartment that’s too crowded with family and a dog. He escapes to the office for some peace of quiet. Then there was the receptionist and the facilities manager, who had no choice but to be there. But that was it for regulars. The odd person would float in for a bit, have a meeting, then leave. Is this the future of office life?

Some companies have recalled workers to the office, at the least for a few days every week. But many haven’t, and perhaps never will. About seven months into the COVID pandemic, I questioned what the future of work would look like, “employee productivity is up. There have been enormous savings from lack of business travel and reduced real estate costs for many companies. We now know that, for the most part, we do have the technology infrastructure to support remote working at scale. This convergence of technology, employee productivity, and increased profitability for companies means that, for many people, some version of our current home office life will continue indefinitely.” A year and a half later, there’s no doubt that, while people miss some of the social aspects of on-site working, there are lots of things they don’t miss. Read more »

A fruiting hedge at the Soldatenfriedhof in Brixen, South Tyrol. Photo taken in October, 2021.

by William Benzon

Jerry Seinfeld is fond of comparing jokes to machines: Jokes are tiny intricately crafted machines, where all the parts fit neatly and precisely together, moving in precise, if sometimes surprising, fashion. Last summer I decided to pit Seinfeld against the precisest (is that even a word?), most super-modern, and biggest intricate machine I could think of, GPT-3. You may have heard of it, it’s an AI engine. As you may know, AI engines are not at all like automobile engines. They’re not mechanical devices. They’re, well, you know, they live up in the cloud, where all the super-modern high-tech gizmos and gadgets hang out, or whatever it is that they do while secretly plotting to take over the world.

Seinfeld tells a joke

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with something we know, Jerry Seinfeld. Here’s his very first television appearance. It is from 1977 on Celebrity Cabaret, a nationally syndicated show. He’s doing a bit that involves the Roosevelt Island tramway. You know what that is? If you’re familiar with the New York City area you do. Otherwise, it may be something of a mystery.

But first things first. Here’s the video (joke starts at about 0:29):

I’m not sure he’d get away with the word “ghetto” these days, but back in the 1970s it was A-OK. This particular sketchy part of town is the South Bronx which, as my colleague Michael Liss reminded me, was the setting for a 1981 crime drama, Fort Apache, The Bronx. It’s also the setting for the 2016 Netflix series, The Get Down, about the early days of hip-hop. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

We arrived in Berkeley and found it to be a pleasant place to live. I always have a partiality for small university towns that are culturally and politically alive. And yet Berkeley is not far from a thriving major city (San Francisco—“the unfettered city/resounds with hedonistic glee”, as Vikram Seth describes it in his verse-novel The Golden Gate) on the one hand, and from wide-open spaces on the other. Nature in Berkeley itself is quite beautiful, nestled as it is on a leafy hillside and facing an ocean and its bay, with gorgeous sunsets over the Golden Gate Bridge (on days when it is not shrouded by the mysterious fog—which appears almost as a character in San Francisco noir, like in the crime novels of Dashiell Hammett). Once driving in the dense fog in a winding street in the Berkeley hills I missed a turn and lost my way; I fondly remembered that famous scene in Fellini’s semi-autobiographical film Amarcord, where one winter-day in Rimini, his childhood town, the fog shrouds everything, the piazza disappears, and the grandpa loses his way home.

I found the people here also somewhat more laid back than in the intense cities of the east-coast. (Once a friend from New York visiting Berkeley told me that when a shop-assistant at the end of the transaction gave him a smile and said ‘have a nice day’, his first instinct with his New-Yorker neurosis was: ‘what? what did she mean?’) The cafes, restaurants, book shops, music stores and cinemas just outside the campus hummed with lively people. Strolling through the Sproul Plaza in the campus you sometimes get an experience associated with the soap-box speakers at Hyde Park in London or the performers in Latin Quarter in Paris: at one corner a religious preacher with Bible in hand is sternly telling us that the wages of sin is death, while a group of non-believers is busy mocking him; at another gathering some group is loudly bashing Israel for oppressing Palestinians while some Hillel International students are protesting; at another place five women are silently standing each exposing one breast, pointing toward donations for research on breast cancer; at another some Punjabi men and women are doing a vigorous bhangra dance;  at another a group of PETA women for animal rights is protesting the abuse of those rights in university labs; at another a stand-up comic is entertaining a large crowd; in a quiet corner you see a man covered with gold dust standing perfectly still like a golden statue, and so on. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

The “Crito” by Plato opens with Socrates in prison (circa 399 B.C.E.) awaiting execution, having been unjustly convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and teaching false gods. When his friend Crito assures him that he can get him out, no problem, that “some people only need to be given a little silver”, Socrates has a surprising response. Suppose Athens were to say to me, he says, “Socrates, did we not agree on this, we and you, to honor the decisions the city makes?” Because the city has basically given birth to me by marrying my father and my mother so they could conceive me. And Athens made me who I am, educating me in the arts and gymnastics and so much more. And I could have left any time. But I stayed. How can I now, having been duly, even if not justly, convicted, leave and put myself above the law?

This may be the earliest extant example of a social contract argument.

Flash forward to 1651. Thomas Hobbes was the first modern philosopher to offer a social contract justification for the state. In “Leviathan” which John Rawls called, “Surely, the greatest work of political philosophy ever written in English,” Hobbes argued that the “state of nature” is “a war of all against all”, and that, in that state, there are “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” (Voltaire is alleged to have quipped, that it was not life in a state of nature, but Hobbes himself, that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (which is demonstrably false since Hobbes was over six feet tall)).

In any case, Hobbes argued that life in the state of nature is so bad that we ought to be willing to agree to almost any sovereign power, in fact, that we need the terror inspired by a Leviathan of absolute power to enforce the law. Hence, absolute monarchy. (And yet, perhaps, there was some small, sly subversion in suggesting that it was not the divine right of kings, but the consent of the governed that the power of the monarch must rest on.) Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In 1969, the mathematician Hans Freudenthal proposed a seemingly unsolvable puzzle:

Abbas says to Sally and Penelope: I have two whole numbers between 1 and 100 which are not equal and whose sum is not more than 100. Abbas tells the sum of these numbers to Sally only, and their product to Penelope only. These communications remain secret. You must figure out the pair of numbers. The only other thing you know is that once Abbas spoke to Sally and Penelope, you overheard the following conversation:

1. Penelope says, “I know them not.”
2. Sally says, “I already knew that.”
3. Penelope says, “Now I know them.”
4. Sally says, “Now I know them, too.”

Amazingly, even though it seems you know hardly anything and the conversation between Sally and Penelope seems useless, it is in fact possible to determine the two numbers! Possible, but not easy! When Martin Gardner wrote about this puzzle in Scientific American, he called it the Impossible Puzzle. For a discussion of the Impossible Puzzle (including a solution!) and several similar brain-teasers, see John Berkhardt’s webpage.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia seems to put us in a new Cold War. Certainly, it’s destroyed several decades of uneasy trust between NATO and Russia. This brought to mind a clever bit of mathematics that can be helpful when you don’t trust someone: zero-knowledge proofs. They are in the same spirit as the Impossible Puzzle, but are rather different creatures. Read more »

Hung Liu. Migrant Child  Kitty. 2017.

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

by Paul Braterman

Disaster has been averted at Imperial. But much damage has been done, the group appointed to implement the decisions taken faces an impossible task, and the process has aggravated the very problem that it was meant to address.

For months, as I described here earlier,  Imperial College has been contemplating the possibility of dis-honouring T. H.  Huxley, one of its founders, on the basis of early remarks that we would now condemn as racist, but did no more than express the general assumptions of his time and place.  This despite the fact that Huxley was a lifelong opponent of all forms of discrimination, a fierce opponent of slavery at a time when many cultivated Englishmen were sympathetic to the Confederate cause, and clearly changed his views about race over time.

The President and the Provost have both been urging a whitewashing (if I can use this term) of the College’s history by such measures as removing Huxley’s name and bust from one of Imperial’s most prominent buildings.  As I explained earlier, they attempted to accomplish this using a deeply flawed process.  A History Group lacking in any higher level expertise in Huxley’s own areas of biology and palaeontology was set up, with the College archivist restricted to a consultative role, as was the Imperial faculty member best qualified to comment on historical matters. Two outside historians were consulted, but their areas of expertise did not really include Huxley.¹ Adrian Desmond, Huxley’s biographer, was consulted but as I documented in my earlier article, his unambiguous vindication of Huxley was completely ignored. In October (revised version November), the History Group’s report recommended that Huxley’s name be removed from the Huxley Building, and his bust on display there relegated to a museum. Read more »

by Nicola Sayers

I am a modern-day scrapbooker. Which is to say that, like scrapbookers and notebook keepers across the ages, I am incessantly recording: things I have read, things I want to read, ideas I have come across or had, ways I want to be or to look, memorabilia from places I have been or want to go, inspiring or thought-provoking words, song lyrics, images, film clips, you name it. Like those who went before me, I record things in physical notebooks, but – and this is the new thing – my canvas is far larger than this original form. Digital photo albums, the iPhone ‘notes’ pad, emails to self, Pinterest, Instagram (but not Facebook, which lacks Instagram’s curatorial function): these are all avenues through which a fanatical need to record is fed. 

There are similarities between us twenty-first century scrapbookers and our forerunners. Walter Benjamin viewed the collector — and what is the scrapbooker if not a collector of memories, ideas, images? — as a kind of revolutionary. By taking things out of their old contexts, and repurposing them according to a new, personal, logic, the collector achieves a kind of renewal of the old world. But there is nonetheless an anxiety underlying the scrapbooker’s work. As Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project, the collector is ‘struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things of the world are found.’ Like our predecessors, we digital scrapbookers, are driven – in our desire to record and to organize – by a kind of existential urgency: an impossible desire to capture the ephemeral, to articulate the ineffable. And like them, we too cling to the touchingly grandiose sense that somehow, via our paltry efforts, existence itself might be single-handedly sewn together into a meaningful pattern. The underlying fear of all scrapbookers, though, is not only the disorder and transience of existence, but the disorder and transience of the self. The unspoken mantra: I record, therefore I am.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Ethan Seavey

I used to sit in class with songs in my head, loud enough to feel their beat in my fingertips. I used to blare Adele instead of listening to my teacher. I would sing voicelessly with Hozier while my classmates read a paragraph out loud. Passenger, P!nk, The Lumineers, Steven Sondheim. Billie Eilish, too, though not openly as it’s not cool to like anything that’s cool.

I would fixate on one song all day, hear it bouncing around my head like a gnat trying to escape a glass box; or I would press the mental play button and enjoy every song of an album in order. Sometimes I could only hear one song and would grow very tired of it, and sometimes I would frustrate myself trying to recall a rapidly vanishing melody.

Often it wouldn’t distract too much from class but when the song reaches its crux, it’s nearly impossible to keep your pen focused on mitosis. It flies into the margins, it tears up the lyrics, it thinks it will finally achieve the ecstasy in your heart with a hasty font, a lyric that feels so much larger in your head. Of course you’ll look back upon it through the lens of failure. It will be sloppy instead of emotionally hasty. Read more »

by Peter Wells

Daniel Everett’s 2008 book Don’t Sleep: There are Snakes tells two stories of loss. First, it tells how the young missionary linguist, who had been trained to analyse languages at the Summer Institute (now SIL), found that the system promulgated by his hero, Noam Chomsky, was unable to cope with many features of the language of the Amazonian tribe he had been sent to. He calls them Pirahã (pronounced something like ‘pidahañ’), though they apparently call themselves the Hi’aiti’ihi (or ‘Straight Ones’). I reviewed this story in a previous essay.

However, Everett lost not one, but two faiths in Brazil, because his experiences among the Pirahãs led him to question, and then to reject, the evangelical Christianity that he had embraced so enthusiastically in his teens. The consequences of this change of heart were much more significant than his loss of faith in Chomsky. His disagreements with the great linguistic philosopher led him eventually (after some emotional turmoil) to distinguished professorships in Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology, but his abandonment of Christianity broke his marriage, and tore his family apart. Read more »