by Mike O’Brien

I’ve spent the last month-and-some at my favourite pastoral retreat, a family cottage in eastern Ontario. Sitting among the trees and moss and overlooking a lake, it has many of the elements that might make for the ideal antidote to urban nuisances. Except that, with the increasing suburbanisation and peri-urbanisation of previously quaint quarters, the nuisances come to you. Usually on an overpowered boat or, God help me, rented jet-skis. Still, a province half-full of ill-raised barbarians isn’t enough to completely sap the salving powers of starry nights, intriguing critters and lush forests. While this physical environment does wonders for my mind and mood, better yet are the effects of the psychic environment that I create for myself when I am there. The change of location is an occasion to commit to a change of routine, chiefly a disconnection from the constant flow of digital information that usually attends my day. I read books at the cottage not because I don’t have books at home, but because I don’t read them there; instead I read the latest articles, listen to the latest podcasts, and watch the latest videos from dozens of sources.

I could just as easily continue to follow these patterns of consumption in cottage country. Despite what I like to tell people, I do in fact have internet access there (“I won’t use the internet” is close enough to “I can’t use the internet” to serve as not-too-dishonest explanation for why people should not expect me to know about or do about things during this period). Some years ago, line-of-sight wireless transmitter/receivers were installed around the lake, providing internet access to any household that wished to invest the money and bother required to install their own mast. Our household has not bothered to do so, but we are not embargoed from the world of instant information. Instead, the internet arrives through cellphones and janky assemblages of mobile hot-spots and USB cables. Read more »

Jesus Rafael de Soto. Penetrable, at Olana State Historical Site, New York.

Kinetic sculpture.

More here, here, and here.

by Rebecca Baumgartner

In the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” (2013), two romantic partners, Martha and Ash, move into Ash’s childhood home together. As they’re settling in for their first night in their new home, Ash finds a photo of himself as a little boy, one of the few left out after his mom had removed all the photos of Ash’s dad and brother after their deaths. “She just left this one here,” he says, “her only boy, giving her a fake smile.”

Martha says, “She didn’t know it was fake.”

“Maybe that makes it worse,” Ash says.

This theme – knowing how to tell what’s authentic and what’s not, the ability to understand the difference between performance and reality – is what the episode proceeds to dig into.

As it turns out, Ash dies in a car accident the day following that conversation. Martha is devastated and heartbroken. At his funeral, a friend says to her, “I can sign you up to something that helps…It will let you speak to him.” This turns out to be an AI service that culls data from a deceased person’s online posts to create a chatbot that can interact with users in the voice and style of the deceased person. The more active the deceased had been on social media, the better the data set, and the more true to life the chatbot will be. “The more it has, the more it’s him,” the friend explains. Initially, of course, Martha is horrified and insulted by the idea.

“It won’t be him,” she protests.

“No, it’s not,” her friend admits. “But it helps.” Read more »

by Barry Goldman

This article is the second in a series. The first is here.

Justice delayed is justice denied. Everyone agrees. Lawsuits should be brought in a timely manner. If too much time goes by before a case is adjudicated, witnesses become unavailable, memories fade, evidence is lost, and it becomes harder to reconstruct events. Also, if there is no timeliness requirement, the threat of a lawsuit hangs over the parties indefinitely, and it prevents them from moving on with their lives. Therefore, many systems have a rule.

The Rule in place at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), where I have arbitrated for many years, is 12206. It says this:

(a) Time Limitation on Submission of Claims

No claim shall be eligible for submission to arbitration under the Code where six years have elapsed from the occurrence or event giving rise to the claim.

So far so good. It’s a simple, clear, reasonable, bright line rule. Or so it appears. Let’s see how it works in practice.

Suppose the following: Old Mr. Murphy dies. Mrs. Murphy has never been involved in any decisions having to do with the family finances. She had her hands full managing the household and raising the kids. Now suddenly, without any background, training, education or experience, she finds herself responsible for a substantial sum of money. Though a friend of a friend she is introduced to Jones the Stockbroker.

Jones is an engaging young fellow, and he appears to Mrs. Murphy to be very knowledgeable with regard to stocks and bonds and mutual funds and variable annuities and real estate investment trusts and similar things. He is associated with a large and well-known brokerage firm.

Mrs. Murphy explains her situation, and young Jones appears to understand perfectly. He’s such a nice young man. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

If you spend enough time around cognitive psychologists, you’re likely to hear at least one of them complain about the notion of individual “learning styles.” Indeed, psychologists consider the concept of learning style — the idea that some students are visual learners, say, as opposed to auditory learners — to be one of the most enduring neuroscientific myths in education. 

In a recent piece for The Conversation, the psychologists Isabel Gauthier and Jason Chow suggest that one reason why the belief in learning styles is so persistent among educators is that “the evidence against the model mostly consists of studies that have failed to find support for it.” Gauthier and Chow go on to suggest that their research disconfirms predictions of the “learning style” hypothesis.

Gauthier and Chow are experts in studying individual differences in perceptual recognitional abilities. Their first studies involved evaluating people’s abilities visually to match or memorize objects from different categories, like birds or planes.

In that earlier work, Gauthier and Chow “found that almost 90% of the differences between people in these tasks were explained by a general ability [they] called ‘o’ for object recognition. [They] found that “o” was distinct from general intelligence, concluding that book smarts may not be enough to excel in domains that rely heavily on visual abilities.”

Of course, these results — given that they are limited to visual recognition — would have no bearing on the learning styles hypothesis. However, Gauthier’s and Chow’s more recent research has involved testing other perceptual modalities: first touch, and, more recently, listening. Read more »

by Jochen Szangolies

It’s no fun being sad. Indeed, great swaths of our culture seem aimed at fencing our little emotional gardens off against the intrusion of sadness, seeding them instead with what we think will germinate into little joys, grand hopes and profound happiness. ‘The pursuit of happiness’, after all, is enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, and happiness economics is being touted as a balm for capitalism’s alienation of the working masses. The Kingdom of Bhutan tailors its governmental policies according to a ‘Gross National Happiness’-index, and yearly rankings of the World Happiness Report prompt breathless articles in the press asking what the Nordic countries do better than the rest of us. Clearly, we should strive for happiness, and where the weeds of sadness grow, uproot them and cast them out.

Yet, throughout my life, I have been drawn to the melancholia of sad songs, to a longing for I know not what, the gravity of overcast skies and rainy days. In a world that lionizes the pursuit of happiness, it’s easy to feel as if the strange comfort that sometimes hitches a ride with the oft-invoked ‘bittersweet’ nature of melancholia signals something deeply wrong with you, some malady that sets you at odds with the multitudes who, you’re given to understand, desire nothing so much as to be freed from the oppression of sadness, to emerge liberated into happiness.

I don’t think that’s right at all. Melancholia, to me, is a certain kind of surrender in the face of the unconquerable vastness of the world, and while that sounds negative at first, it at least holds the virtues of honesty and universality. Honesty, because the world really is vast and unconquerable, and you a spark caught up in its blaze, propelled upwards on the winds towards your eventual extinction. Universality, because so is everybody else. Read more »

Side of a very old railway carriage parked on a siding in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Nils Peterson

On a small paper bag maybe from a bookstore, one side Romeo’s soliloquy, “But soft! What light from yonder window breaks?” On the other side, these words: “Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cook stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three of four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar–except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap-door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder            the small, dark  hole. When Dorothy stood in the doo                 she        nothing but the great gray…”

The open spaces are where an illustration of the feet of the wicked witch sticking out from under the fallen house, intrudes upon the text. 

No wonder Oz looked so green. I read the book when I was a boy. That’s a lot of years ago. I had forgotten how bleak the opening of the book was. This is what you lose when you just remember the movie and not the text. Oh, yes, the opening of the movie was in black and white, but it was not this black and white. There are no farm hands, no Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, or Jack Haley giving Uncle Henry a hand. Of course no running water or plumbing, therefore an outhouse. Dorothy likely is an orphan unless her parents had so many children they couldn’t take care of them all. Also, she was a young girl, not yet a teen. That’s why Judy Garland found the role uncomfortable to play. Her breasts had to be bound.  Read more »

by Derek Neal

I’ve recently started playing pickup basketball again. When I was younger, I played basketball all the time. At two or three years old, we had a toy hoop with a bright orange rim, white backboard, blue pole, and black base. It was, I believe, a “Little Tikes” brand hoop; I’ve just looked it up online, and my research seems to confirm this. In any case, I will now remember it this way—the vague memory I hold has solidified into one canonical version. But it might have been a different brand, the base of the hoop might have been a different color.

When we moved to a new house at four years old, my parents installed a hoop in the driveway. It could be raised to 10 feet, regulation size, or it could be lowered to 7.5 feet, allowing you to dunk. I played every day. Later my parents discovered that the neighborhood association didn’t allow for the installation of permanent basketball hoops with cement, but at this point it was too late. The basketball hoop is still there. I am 30 years old.

Some years later a full-size court was created along with a small park up the street from my house. We played 2 on 2, 3 on 3, or 5 on 5 full court if the group was big enough. Sometimes we just shot around or played horse. This location became known simply as “the courts,” plural even though there was only ever one. In addition to basketball, it also served other purposes. The park was accessible from two separate bike paths, which connected two different neighborhoods. If I was headed to the courts with the guys from my neighborhood, we could reasonably expect that the girls from the other neighborhood might be there as well. Read more »

by Terese Svoboda

What says grief to you? Probably not a sunlit meadow. What about the scent of too many lilies, a blank stone, netting over the eyes, an all-black outfit? So chic, all that black – but nothing says dead better than pavement. The premier Parisian color, it practically insists Dig Here. On the other hand, sympathy cards declare the overwhelming woodenness of my feelings, folded, with only the lick on the envelope possibly authentic. The thank you cards in response even come pre-printed. Few eulogies are delivered with the stamp of cynicism or irony that might authenticate individual mourning, as distinguished from the above puddle of saccharine responses. To soften the blows of grief, survivors pull linguistic veils over their brains, even unto the word itself, death. “Passing” replaces it, as if life were something given up bowels-first, completely ignoring the visceral start “death” gives the griever, feeling the dead suddenly present, which is instinctual grief,  really just a variation on mouse-  or snake-fear. What can you say back to grief?

You mount the pulpit and look over the heads of the grieving and see a bobbing white form afloat in the ether. Your job as eulogist is to conjure this ghost back to life by retelling the tangle of mishaps and crazy love and signature tics that made up the dead him or her or they. You’re very sad that you can’t go on forever cherishing this singularity because like sea foam, the details quickly disappear. To capture it temporarily, you create a story about the deceased in which good things happen, which will put him in whatever bed by means of your largesse, forgiveness, and perhaps exaggeration. You’re probably mourning yourself at the same time anyway – this could happen to me! That bit of self-administered horror provides a little thrill, mid-sadness, and makes the life of the dead you mourn more poignant. Haunting even.

When my mother died, the officiator said no speeches were allowed either at the funeral or the viewing.  He wanted total control, no messy emotions. No one should get carried away except the dead. The only occasion left for us to say anything was over cookies and milk in the church basement, not conducive to the kind of toasts that might make her sound as difficult as she was. What my dad wanted at his funeral was any rendition of “I’m a Coca Cola Cowboy” played loud and long on the organ. Although his service was held in a Catholic church,  we compromised with “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the tune he liked to sing while marching with his drip pole. Just telling you that cheers me up, signals my grief all over again. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

I’ve been visiting Ontario this month. Which is a wildly non-specific thing to say, since the province of Ontario, though only the second largest of Canada’s constituent divisions, boasts a surface area greater than those of Germany and Ukraine combined. But while I would normally designate as my destination the city in Ontario in which I mean to stay during my annual visit to my home and native land—as for instance Toronto, the provincial capital, where I went to high school and university; or Kingston, once Canada’s Scottish-Gothic capital, where my brother has settled with his family—the particular reason for this year’s sojourn, which began with a brief visit to relatives in Montreal, was my niece’s wedding, on August 12, celebrated at her fiancé’s family home in Frankford, with guests put up in the towns surrounding that hamlet on the River Trent, in Hastings County, the second largest of Ontario’s 22 “upper-tier” administrative divisions. Which all feels to me quite uncannily foreign, not to say unutterably vague. Hence simply: I’ve been visiting Ontario this month.

Ontario at large, small-town Ontario, Ontario beyond “the six,” Toronto without its vast suburbs, so-called for its prestigious area code, feels foreign to me because it first came to my attention, when I was around eight years old, as a vast, unknowable hinterland, the beginning of Canada proper, somewhere to the west of the province of Quebec, whence my entire immediate family hales—more to the point, to the west of the city of Montreal, where I was born, and which seemed to me, in my early years, the only real place in the country: Montreal, with its distinctive rows of duplexes, its outdoor staircases, its smoked meat sandwiches, its bagels, its maple-sugar holidays and its antiquated French dialect. “Ontario,” generally, had no culture, no flavor, no flair; it was too Anglo, too American, too goyish. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Untitled, July 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Jeroen Bouterse

The cover of Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals (2023) shows a humpback whale breaching: a magnificent sight, intended to evoke both respect for the animal’s dignity, and interest in its particular forms of behavior. Here is a creature which has moral standing, without being a direct mirror of our human selves.

It is more than mere illustration of the argument. Nussbaum consciously relies on pathos as well as on philosophical reasoning: she announces from the outset that she seeks to awaken wonder and compassion in us with respect to our fellow animals, and productive outrage about how we treat them (9). No objection so far; our treatment of animals is, in many contexts (factory farming in particular), not at heart a philosophical issue, in the sense that there are no tenable metaphysical, anthropological, or ethical theories that can take a serious shot at justifying it. It is an issue that requires attention more than it requires deep or subtle thought.

This notwithstanding, Nussbaum also believes she has something to contribute on the theoretical side: several chapters of Justice for Animals are devoted to the case that her Capabilities Approach (CA) is more suitable than several alternatives in clarifying why and in what sense animals deserve moral consideration. The three alternatives she rejects are:

1. That animals matter because they are like us (and to the extent that they are like us);
2. the utilitarian perspective, that animals can experience suffering and pleasure, and this always counts (i.e. utilitarianism);
3. the Kantian perspective, that animals, in pursuing goods, reveal themselves to be sources of value.

Of these three, she says the third (represented by Christine Korsgaard) is the closest to her own position, and her qualms about it are more metaphysical than ethical. The CA she herself defends is “about giving striving creatures a chance to flourish” (81). A theory originally centered around the capabilities of humans, it applies to animals because they are striving creatures, too. Though they strive for different things and this needs to be considered, there happen to be a lot of similarities: humans and other animals all strive for life, for instance, and for health, bodily integrity, and the use of our senses.

Is this indeed better than utilitarianism? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Gus Mitchell

The idea for this essay came not just from Thoreau, but from a conversation between Professors Robert Pogue Harrison and Andrea Nightingale of Stanford University. That conversation can be heard here. I gratefully recommend it to everyone.

1. Sometime “early in ‘46” Henry David Thoreau sets out to measure the depth of a pond. He is at the end of his first year at the cabin in the woods. 

2. Winter ice still covers the water. Thoreau uses only a “compass and chain and sounding line” to make his investigations. Walden – “that truly illusive medium” – is said to have no bottom. Perhaps it reaches clean through the centre of the earth to the other side; some Concordians have lie on its bank, fancying the source of the Styx opening from below.

3. “Be it life or death”, he writes early in Walden, “we crave only reality.” And morality, philosophy, imagination itself are all seeded and cultivated in observation and participation of the natural world, the true face of which is “wildness.”

4. The incuriosity of his fellow Concordians bothers Thoreau. He does what nobody else has thought to do with Walden Pond: “taking the trouble to sound it.” It’s done “easily, with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half.” Being able to “tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me.” He ends up measuring the depth of the pond, “a reasonably tight bottom, at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth,” as 102 feet (adjusted to 107 feet once the water-level rises in Spring).

5. These experiments generate a host of hypotheses. Thoreau maps carefully, putting down soundings – “more than a hundred in all.” He wonders about larger, universal laws through which the depth of bodies of water might be inducted. He finds the intersecting lengthwise and breadthwise lines on his map meet at exactly the point of greatest depth in the map’s centre. From this, he moves to speculation on “the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle.” And might these rules apply to the height of mountains, as well as to the depth of valleys?

6. This is the concluding set piece Walden – a book made of set pieces – each one illustrating some aspect of the “truth” of which Thoreau has become “convinced.” He is a man both deeply practical and deeply extravagant. Read more »

Self-portrait by reflection in the window of a restaurant in Brixen, South Tyrol.